“I didn’t do it to impress you,” she fired back. “I did to save your life.”
“My life is not your concern.” He reset his fingers, taking in a sharp inhale that was barely audible over the cracking of his bones. He pulled the black ring off and slipped it on the opposite finger of his good hand. “I’m grateful to you, but you’re meant to be empress. To unify the galaxy. Your survival takes precedence over my life. It takes precedence, too, over your need to be honorable.”
“I don’t believe that.” Honor, bravery, loyalty—these made up her ma’tan sarili, the three values.
“You’re not old enough to know what to believe,” Dahlen answered as he kneeled down next to Niture. As if he were that much older. Dahlen began searching the sergeant’s neck with one thin hand. For a confused second, Rhee thought he was checking for a pulse. Then she saw he was holding the knife.
“That’s my knife,” she said. Her surprise morphed into dread.
He ignored her. “Do you know where they implant cubes on the Miseu?” He grabbed the sergeant—now horribly deformed—and jerked him up to a sitting position. “Here, at the top of the spine.”
“What are you—?” she began to ask, but had to look away, as Dahlen plunged the tip of the blade into the sergeant’s neck and gouged out the microchip.
“He might know something of value,” Dahlen said simply.
Dahlen cleaned the cube of a sticky white substance she assumed was Miseu blood. “Can’t you just enable playback?” she asked, knowing full well it was impossible. There were mechanisms and fail-safes that prevented forced playback, and in any event the holder had to be conscious.
“There’s a driver embedded in the dashboard just under the console. See what you can find.”
Rhee was glad for the opportunity to turn away from the mangled body of the sergeant. Whatever memories he’d willed would be lost; his family would be devastated. Rhee knew the feeling all too well, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone. She located the driver and inserted the chip into it, angry, hopeless. Rhee wasn’t sure what Dahlen was trying to do. Sergeant Niture’s death would have triggered an automatic wipe of his memory system. Maybe the cube was outfitted with an identification number, so they could access the sergeant’s files—like his military history, or who he might’ve been reporting to.
The console lit up. The prompts and instructions were in Fontisian characters. She tried her best to navigate through the foreign characters using the touchscreen, not sure what she was looking for. She pressed a word that made the whole ship go dark, with hundreds of holograms creating a circle before her. Most of them looked like photographs, moments frozen in time, and she found herself drawn to an image of a smiling Miseu. Rhee lifted her hand up as if to touch her face, and her hand activated something on the hologram—because the woman threw her head back and her laughter filled the ship. Then she reached her arms out toward Rhee as if to hug her before the file cut out. The sergeant’s mother, Rhee realized, feeling sick. There were hundreds of memories in hologram form, piled on top of one another. It was like being in the man’s mind. It was being in his mind.
Which was impossible. Unless . . .
“He’s—he’s still alive?” she asked, horrified. She turned to see Niture, sitting up, his back propped against the wall of vines, his features so horribly melted and disfigured he was unrecognizable.
“I’ll take over from here,” Dahlen said, temporarily distorting the hologram as he walked through it.
“How is this possible?” Rhee asked. She was using technology that wasn’t supposed to exist. It was a crime to look into someone’s cube without permission—it was more than a crime. Cubes stored not just information but memories, feelings, sensations, thought-impressions. “This is wrong. This is illegal. At the G-1K summit—I can’t remember if it was the third or the fourth—but it was clearly forbidden by law—”
“‘Forbidden by law’?” Dahlen tilted his head and looked at her. Through her. “Have you seen what terrible things the laws of men enable?”
No. She believed in the law. She believed in the laws that came out of those summits, certainly. Over the past sixty years, ever since the cube had been invented, the universe’s greatest scientists had gathered at the G-1K to review and regulate the interplanetary laws around its use. They were high-profile individuals, and every planet or territory inevitably plastered their names on a landmark or their faces on a digital credit.
Dahlen sorted through the holograms with his hands, flicking away the ones that didn’t interest him. There was a pattern to it, and Rhee did her best to follow, but couldn’t make sense of another man’s mind. She was curious, ashamed, but most of all, furious.
“Stop this.”