A lie. Manifestly a lie. “Your apartment, on Dras Annia Station. It’s untouched. Just as you left it, so far as I could tell.”
Every one of Strigan’s motions became deliberate, just slightly slowed—blinks, breaths. The hand carefully brushing dust from her coat sleeve. “That a fact.”
“It cost me a great deal to get in.”
“Where did a corpse soldier get all that money anyway?” Strigan asked, still tense, still concealing it. But genuinely curious. Always that.
“Work,” I said.
“Lucrative work.”
“And dangerous.” I had risked my life to get that money.
“The icon?”
“Not unrelated.” But I didn’t want to talk about that. “What do I need to do, to convince you? Is the money insufficient?” I had more, elsewhere, but saying so would be foolish.
“What did you see in my apartment?” Strigan asked, curiosity and anger in her voice.
“A puzzle. With pieces missing.” I had deduced the existence and nature of those pieces correctly, I must have, because here I was, and here was Arilesperas Strigan.
Strigan laughed again. “Like you. Listen.” She leaned forward, hands on her thighs. “You can’t kill Anaander Mianaai. I wish to all that’s good it were possible, but it’s not. Even with… even if I had what you think I have you couldn’t do it. You told me that twenty-five of these guns were insufficient…”
“Twenty-four,” I corrected.
She waved that away. “Were insufficient to keep the Radchaai away from Garsedd. Why do you think one would be anything more than a minor irritant?”
She knew better, or she wouldn’t have run. Wouldn’t have asked the local toughs to take care of me before I got to her.
“And why are you so determined to do such a ridiculous thing? Everyone outside the Radch hates Anaander Mianaai. If by some miracle he died, the celebrations would last a hundred years. But it won’t happen. It certainly won’t happen because of one idiot with a gun. I’m sure you know that. You probably know it far better than I could.”
“True.”
“Then why?”
Information is power. Information is security. Plans made with imperfect information are fatally flawed, will fail or succeed on the toss of a coin. I had known, when I first knew I would have to find Strigan and obtain the gun from her, that this would be such a moment. If I answered Strigan’s question—if I answered it fully, as she would certainly demand—I would be giving her something she could use against me, a weapon. She would almost certainly hurt herself in the process, but that wasn’t always much of a deterrent, I knew.
“Sometimes,” I began, and then corrected myself. “Quite frequently, someone will learn a little bit about Radchaai religion, and ask, If everything that happens is the will of Amaat, if nothing can happen that is not already designed by God, why bother to do anything?”
“Good question.”
“Not particularly.”
“No? Why bother, then?”
“I am,” I said, “as Anaander Mianaai made me. Anaander Mianaai is as she was made. We will both of us do the things we are made to do. The things that are before us to do.”
“I doubt very much that Anaander Mianaai made you so that you would kill him.”
Any reply would reveal more than I wished, at the moment.
“And I,” continued Strigan, after a second and a half of silence, “am made to demand answers. It’s just God’s will.” She made a gesture with her left hand, not my problem.
“You admit you have the gun.”
“I admit nothing.”
I was left with blind chance, a step into unguessable dark, waiting to live or die on the results of the toss, not knowing what the chances were of any result. My only other choice would be to give up, and how could I give up now? After so long, after so much? And I had risked as much, or more, before now, and gotten this far.
She had to have the gun. Had to. But how could I make her give it to me? What would make her choose to give it to me?
“Tell me,” Strigan said, watching me intently. No doubt seeing my frustration and doubt through her medical implants, fluctuations of my blood pressure and temperature and respiration. “Tell me why.”
I closed my eyes, felt the disorientation of not being able to see through other eyes that I knew I had once had. Opened them again, took a breath to begin, and told her.
10
I had thought that perhaps the morning’s temple attendants would (quite understandably) choose to stay home, but one small flower-bearer, awake before the adults in her household, arrived with a handful of pink-petaled weeds and stopped at the edge of the house, startled to see Anaander Mianaai kneeling in front of our small icon of Amaat.
Lieutenant Awn was dressing, on the upper floor. “I can’t serve today,” she said to me, her voice impassive as her emotions were not. The morning was already warm, and she was sweating.