Until now. And for such a stupid reason. Above me clouds hid the unreachable sky, the future I no longer had, the goal I was now incapable of accomplishing. Failed.
I closed my eyes against tears not brought on by physical pain. If I failed, it would not be because I had ever, at any time, given up. Seivarden had left somehow. I would find her. I would rest a moment, recollect myself, find the strength to pull out the handheld I kept in my coat and call for help, or discover some other way to leave here, and if it meant I dragged myself out on the bloody, useless remains of my limbs, I would do that, pain or no pain, or I would die trying.
14
One of the three Mianaais did not even arrive at the Var deck, but transmitted the code for my central access deck. Invalid access, I thought, receiving it, but stopped the lift on that level and opened the door anyway. That Mianaai made her way to my main console, gestured up records, scanned quickly through a century of log headings. Stopped, frowned, at a point in the list that would have been made in the five years surrounding that last visit, that I had concealed from her.
The other two of her stowed their bags in quarters, and went to the newly lit and slowly warming Var decade room. Both of her sat at the table, the silent colored-glass Valskaayan saint smiling mildly down. Without speaking aloud she requested information from me—a random sample of memories from that five-year span that had so attracted her attention, above on the central access deck. Silent, expressionless—unreal, in a sense, since I could only see her exteriors—she watched as my memories played out before her visions, in her ears. I began to doubt the truth of my memory of that other visit. There seemed to be no trace of it in the information Anaander Mianaai was accessing, nothing during that time but routine operations.
But something had attracted her attention to that stretch of time. And there was that Invalid access to account for—none of Anaander Mianaai’s accesses were ever invalid, never could be. And why had I opened to an invalid access? And when one Anaander, in the Var decade room, frowned and said, “No, nothing,” and the Lord of the Radch turned her attention to more recent memories, I found myself tremendously relieved.
In the meantime my captain and all my other officers went about the routine business of the day—training, exercising, eating, talking—completely unaware that the Lord of the Radch was aboard. The whole thing was wrong.
The Lord of the Radch watched my Esk lieutenants fencing over breakfast. Three times. With no visible change of expression. One Var set tea at the elbow of each of the two identical black-clad bodies in the Var decade room.
“Lieutenant Awn,” said one Anaander. “Has she been out of your presence at all since the incident?” She hadn’t specified which incident she meant, but she could only have meant the business in the temple of Ikkt.
“She has not, my lord,” I said, using One Var’s mouth.
On my central access deck, the Lord of the Radch keyed accesses and overrides that would allow her to change nearly anything about my mind she wished. Invalid, invalid, invalid. One after another. But each time I flashed acknowledgment, confirmed access she didn’t actually have. I felt something like nausea, beginning to realize what must have happened, but having no accessible memory of it to confirm my suspicions, to make the matter clear and unambiguous to me.
“Has she at any time discussed this incident with anyone?”
This much was clear—Anaander Mianaai was acting against herself. Secretly. She was divided in two—at least two. I could only see traces of the other Anaander, the one who had changed the accesses, the accesses she thought she was only now changing to favor herself.
“Has she at any time discussed this incident with anyone?”
“Briefly, my lord,” I said. Truly frightened for the first time in my long life. “With Lieutenant Skaaiat of Justice of Ente.” How could my voice—One Var—speak so calmly? How could I even know what words to say, what answer to make, when the whole basis for all my actions—even my reason for existence—was thrown into doubt?