This was home that had never been home, for me. I had spent my life at annexations, and stations in the process of becoming this sort of place, leaving before they did, to begin the whole process again somewhere else. This was the sort of place my officers came from, and departed to. The sort of place I had never been, and yet it was completely familiar to me. Places like this were, from one point of view, the whole reason for my existence.
“It’s a bit longer walk, this way,” Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat said, “but a dramatic entrance.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“Why all the jackets?” asked Seivarden. “That bothered me last time. Though the last place, anyone in a coat was wearing it knee-length. Here it looks like it’s either jackets or coats down to the floor. And the collars are just wrong.”
“Fashion didn’t trouble you the other places we’ve been,” I said.
“The other places were foreign,” Seivarden answered, irritably. “They weren’t supposed to be home.”
Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat smiled. “I imagine you’ll get used to it eventually. The palace proper is this way.”
We followed her across the concourse, my and Seivarden’s uncivilized clothes and bare hands attracting some curious and disgusted looks, and came to the entrance, marked simply with a bar of black over the doorway.
“I’ll be fine,” said Seivarden, as though I’d spoken. “I’ll catch up with you when I’m done.”
“I’ll wait.”
Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat watched Seivarden go into the palace proper and then said, “Honored Breq, a word, please.”
I acknowledged her with a gesture, and she said, “You’re very concerned about Citizen Seivarden. I understand that, and it speaks well of you. But there’s no reason to worry for her safety. The Radch takes care of its citizens.”
“Tell me, Inspector Supervisor, if Seivarden were some nobody from a nothing house who had left the Radch without permits—and whatever else it was she did, to be honest I don’t know if there was anything else—if she were someone you had never heard of, with a house name you didn’t recognize and know the history of, would she have been met courteously at the dock and given tea and then escorted to the palace proper to make her appeal?”
Her right hand lifted, the barest millimeter, and that small, incongruous gold tag flashed. “She’s not in that position anymore. She’s effectively houseless, and broke.” I said nothing, only looked at her. “No, there’s something in what you say. If I didn’t know who she was I wouldn’t have thought to do anything for her. But surely even in the Gerentate things work that way?”
I made myself smile slightly, hoping for a more pleasant impression than I had likely been making. “They do.”
Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat was silent a moment, watching me, thinking about something, but I couldn’t guess what. Until she said, “Do you intend to offer her clientage?”
That would have been an unspeakably rude question, if I had been Radchaai. But when I had known her Skaaiat Awer had often said things most others left unsaid. “How could I? I’m not Radchaai. And we don’t make that sort of contract in the Gerentate.”
“No, you don’t,” Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat said. Blunt. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to suddenly wake up a thousand years from now having lost my ship in a notorious incident, all my friends dead, my house gone. I might run away too. Seivarden needs to find a way she can belong somewhere. To Radchaai eyes, you look like you’re offering that to her.”
“You’re concerned I’m giving Seivarden false expectations.” I thought of Daos Ceit in the outer office, that beautiful, very expensive pearl-and-platinum pin that wasn’t a token of clientage.
“I don’t know what expectations Citizen Seivarden has. It’s just… you’re acting as though you’re responsible for her. It looks wrong to me.”
“If I were Radchaai, would it still look wrong to you?”
“If you were Radchaai you would behave differently.” The tightness of her jaw argued she was angry but trying to conceal it.
“Whose name is on that pin?” The question, unintended, came out more brusquely than was politic.
“What?” She frowned, puzzled.
“That pin on your right sleeve. It’s different from everything else you’re wearing.” Whose name is on it? I wanted to ask again, and, What have you done for Lieutenant Awn’s sister?
Inspector Supervisor Skaaiat blinked, and shifted slightly backward, almost as though I had struck her. “It’s a memorial for a friend who died.”
“And you’re thinking about her now. You keep shifting your wrist, turning it toward yourself. You’ve been doing it for the past few minutes.”