Ilich cleared the room so they would be alone. The technicians left, trying not to be obvious in the ways they stared at Teresa. She saw the curiosity in their faces. What was the high consul’s daughter doing there? What did it mean? The weight of their interest was like a hand on her shoulders, pressing down.
When they were alone, Ilich put her on a technician’s stool and brought a data storage core over. She recognized it from Timothy’s cave, though she hadn’t thought about it much at the time. Ilich synced a monitor, pulled up a file directory, and stepped back, gesturing to it as if to say, Go ahead. Look.
Teresa found she didn’t want to.
“Start with the notes files,” Ilich said. “Let’s see how much Timothy was your friend.”
The notes were dates and times. At first, she didn’t see any pattern in them, but the notations with the entries had a security note from the forensic tech. When she opened it, Timothy’s entries matched the security logs for those dates. He’d been watching the State Building’s guards. Working out their patterns and habits. Looking for a hole. And he’d been tracking James Holden. Those records were more scattered, because Holden had less of a pattern. He’d drifted through the buildings and gardens as he saw fit, and Timothy—Amos, his name was Amos—had marked every time Holden came in sight of his watching post on the mountain.
Once she’d gotten through the notes file, she didn’t stop. She opened a tactical maps file and recognized the architecture of the city, of the State Building. A series of files showed blast radii of a small nuclear device. If it were planted at the wall. If it were set off in the city. If it had been smuggled into the State Building. Each one had notes speculating on deaths, on infrastructure degraded. She opened a file called “evacuation protocol.” Topographical maps showed a primary evac site close to where she’d met him the first time and a secondary a day’s hike away, with notes Timothy—Amos—had added about what parts of the visible defense grid would have to be taken out for each site to be practical.
Here is how he would have killed us. Here is how he would have left. Here is the man he came to save, here are the people he came to destroy. She waited for the rage to come back. She expected it. Instead, she thought of James Holden. If he said he was your friend, then he was.
“Do you see now?” Ilich said. “Do you see what he was?”
All these plans to kill her and her father. To slaughter them all. You should lie down on the floor there. Flat as you can. Put your hands over your ears, okay? Were those the words you said to someone you wanted to kill?
“I understand,” she lied. “I do.”
Ilich shut off the monitor. “Then we’re done here.”
He took her arm again and led her away. She hadn’t seen him order up food, but when they got back to her rooms, it was waiting for her. A thick, white protein slurry like they fed to sick people. A steak of vat-grown meat seared black at the surface and warm pink in the center. Eggs. Cheese and fruit. Sweet rice with flakes of dried fish. It was all on a metal tray with a fork and dull knife. Muskrat trotted in, but caught the sense that something was wrong. When Ilich held his hand out, offering to scratch her ears, she ignored him and went to sit on Teresa’s feet instead.
“Now then,” Ilich said. “Eat your meal. Get some rest tonight. Tomorrow, you will be on time for your lesson. We will be in the east garden where everyone on staff can see us, and you will act as if everything were normal. Do you understand?”
“I don’t want to eat this. I’m not hungry.”
“I don’t care. You’re going to eat now.”
She looked at the food in front of her. Reluctantly, she picked up the fork. She remembered something from an old film she’d seen about a girl in Sol system. On Earth. “I don’t have to do this. Body autonomy is written into the constitution.”
“Not ours it isn’t,” Ilich said. “You will eat this now, while I sit here and watch you. Then we will sit for another hour while you digest it. Or else I will call in Dr. Cortázar with a funnel and tube, and we force you. Am I understood?”
Teresa took a forkful of the steak and put it in her mouth. Intellectually, she knew it tasted good. When she swallowed, Ilich nodded.
“Again,” he said.
After he left, Teresa didn’t move. She just sat on her couch, feeling the weight in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten a meal that large in weeks, and it left her feeling bloated and wrong. Muskrat sensed that something was off, and put her wide, furry head on Teresa’s lap, looking up at her with complex brown eyes.
Teresa put on a feed. The same one she’d watched as a child. The nameless Martian girl and the fairy named Pinsleep. Familiar images washed over her, bringing something close to comfort. A sense of predictability, at least. She knew that at the end, the nameless girl would escape fairyland. That she’d go back to Innis Deep and her family. That in the last scene, she’d pack away all her girlhood toys and leave for upper university and an adult life. That was the sign that she’d won. She was free to make any life she wanted, and not be a prisoner of the elves.
She lay down on the couch, resting her head on a pillow. The girl was taken in by Pinsleep again, and ran, and fought to escape. And escaped. Teresa started it again from the beginning.
Prisoners and their dilemmas. She let the images play and took up her handheld. In her notes, she found Ilich’s old diagram.
TERESA
COOPERATES
JASON
COOPERATES
JASON
DEFECTS
T3, J3
T4, J0
TERESA
DEFECTS
T0, J4
T2, J2
She ran her fingers over it. She’d forgotten that Ilich’s first name was Jason. She’d forgotten a lot of things.
The puzzle—the unsolvable part—was that no matter what she did, it was better for the others to defect. If she was good, they should take advantage of her. If she was bad, they still should. And the same logic applied to her, except she hadn’t done it. Everyone else had defected, and when she didn’t cooperate, they forced her to. Even though the thing that made sense was to defect.
Pinsleep discovered that the girl wasn’t in her cell and screamed. Thin fairy fingers balled in stylized fists. Muskrat snored deeply, her fuzzy body pressed close to Teresa. She put her own hand down and scratched the old dog. Black with gray in her muzzle and at the tips of her ears. The thing she hadn’t wanted to know pressed at her throat, welling up like a bubble rising from the bottom of the ocean. She felt like she could watch it come, and she knew that when it reached the surface, nothing about her life would be the same. Everything would have to change, because she’d changed.
And it happened, not with a scream, but with an exhalation. She leaned down, her lips almost against Muskrat’s floppy ear. When she spoke, she whispered.
“This isn’t my home anymore. I can’t stay here. I have to leave.”
Muskrat looked up and licked Teresa’s cheek, agreeing.
Chapter Forty-One: Naomi
The Freehold gate, like all the gates, was stationary with respect to its local sun. That it didn’t fall into its distant star was just one of its many mysteries, but since they couldn’t hook a chain between it and the Roci and hang from it, they did not benefit from its gravity-defying properties. Instead, Alex parked the Roci close to it with the Epstein drive on a gentle burn to balance the pull of the sun.
The flight out to the ring gate had been eerie. The Rocinante had been her home longer than anyplace else. She’d slept more of her nights in these crash couches, and eaten more of her meals in the galley. She had breathed the air that passed through the ducts and filters more times than she could calculate. Being inside the ship now, she felt the presence of the others. Her memories of them. What surprised her most was that it didn’t hurt.
She’d left the Roci not long after Amos took his covert assignment to Laconia. Alex was going to join Bobbie on the Storm. Naomi, they had all thought, would hire on a temporary crew for the Rocinante and keep her flying. Only she hadn’t. At the time, she’d barely been able to explain why. She could still remember some of the rationalizations she’d used—A gunship is harder to hide than one person and The Rocinante has symbolic value as a prize that ups the risk of using her and The underground on Freehold will be able to use her if the need for defense arises.