“I only wanted a little,” she said, not quite answering my question. “Enough to take the edge off. I need it. And it’s not like you paid for that flier to begin with.” For an instant I thought she had remembered how I had acquired the flier, unlikely as that seemed. But she continued, “You’ve got enough in that pack to buy ten fliers, and none of it’s yours, it belongs to the Lord of the Radch, doesn’t it? Making me walk like this is just you being pissy.”
I stood, still facing forward, my coat flattened against me in the wind. Stood trying to understand what her words meant, about who or what she thought I was. Why she thought I had troubled myself about her.
“I know what you are,” she said, as I stood silent. “No doubt you wish you could leave me behind, but you can’t, can you? You’ve got orders to bring me back.”
“What am I?” I asked, still without turning. Loud, against the wind.
“Nobody, that’s who.” Seivarden’s voice was scornful. She was standing upright now, just behind my left shoulder. “You tested into military, in the aptitudes, and like a million other nobodies these days, you think that makes you somebody. And you practiced the accent and how to hold your utensils, and knelt your way to Special Missions and now I’m your special mission, you’ve got to bring me home in one piece even though you’d rather not, wouldn’t you? You’ve got a problem with me, at a guess your problem is that try all you like, whoever you kneel to, you’ll never be what I was born to be, and people like you hate that.”
I turned toward her. I’m certain my face was without expression, but when my eyes met hers she flinched—no edge taken off, none at all—and took three quick, reflexive steps backward.
Over the edge of the bridge.
I stepped to the edge, looked down. Seivarden hung six meters below, hands clenched around a complicated swirl of red glass, her eyes wide, mouth open slightly. She looked up at me and said, “You were going to hit me!”
The calculations came easily to me. All my clothes knotted would only reach 5.7 meters. The red glass was connected somewhere under the bridge I couldn’t see, no sign of anything she could climb. The colored glass wasn’t as strong as the bridge itself—I guessed the red spiral would shatter under Seivarden’s weight sometime in the next three to seven seconds. Though that was only a guess. Still, any help I might call would certainly arrive too late. Clouds still veiled the bottom reaches of the chasm. Those tubes were just a few centimeters narrower than my outstretched arms, and were themselves very deep.
“Breq?” Seivarden’s voice was breathy and strained. “Can you do something?” Not, at least, You have to do something.
“Do you trust me?” I asked.
Her eyes widened further, her gasps became a bit more ragged. She didn’t trust me, I knew. She was only still with me because she thought I was official, hence inescapable, and she was important enough for the Radch to send someone after her—underestimating her own importance was never one of Seivarden’s failings—and perhaps because she was tired of running, from the world, from herself. Ready to give up. But I still didn’t understand why I was with her. Of all the officers I’ve served with, she was never one of my favorites.
“I trust you,” she lied.
“When I grab you, raise your armor and put your arms around me.” Fresh alarm flashed across her face, but there was no more time. I extended my armor under my clothes and stepped off the bridge.
The instant my hands touched her shoulders, the red glass shattered, sharp-edged fragments flying out and away, glittering briefly. Seivarden closed her eyes, ducked her head, face into my neck, held me tight enough that if I hadn’t been armored my breathing would have been impeded. Because of the armor I couldn’t feel her panicked breath on my skin, couldn’t feel the air rushing past, though I could hear it. But she didn’t extend her own armor.
If I had been more than just myself, if I had had the numbers I needed, I could have calculated our terminal velocity, and just how long it would take to reach it. Gravity was easy, but the drag of my pack and our heavy coats, whipping up around us, affecting our speed, was beyond me. It would have been much easier to calculate in a vacuum, but we weren’t falling in a vacuum.
But the difference between fifty meters a second and 150 was, at that moment, only large in the abstract. I couldn’t see the bottom yet, the target I was hoping to hit was small, and I didn’t know how much time we’d have to adjust our attitude, if we even could. For the next twenty to forty seconds we had nothing to do but wait, and fall.
“Armor!” I shouted into Seivarden’s ear.
“Sold it,” she answered. Her voice shook slightly, straining against the rushing air. Her face was still pressed hard against my neck.