Nobody ever mentioned terrorism to me.
Nobody ever mentioned bombs.
Maybe they knew I would balk. Maybe my indoctrination hadn’t yet proceeded to that level.
We fought a lot, in retrospect. Constantly.
I didn’t realize it at the time for several reasons. First of all, because I was from a clade, where nobody fought. Second, because I watched a lot of pipeline dramas, where everybody yells at each other all the time because melodrama is interesting. Third, because… well, I’d never been in a relationship before. And because I didn’t have a lot of experience with conflict, I didn’t realize when I was being manipulated into it, or when the conflict itself was being manipulated to direct me in unhealthy ways.
Case in point, the last argument Niyara and I ever had. I remember that one in particular, because it was the last argument we had. And because I underwent enhanced recollection under Judicial supervision, for the trial, and now I can’t forget. Selective memory, it turns out, is a blessing.
Even with the enhanced recollection, I can’t remember exactly how it started, because the conversation was so profoundly trivial. We were on couches in one of Ansara Station’s observation pods, drinking tea and staring out the big bubble ports at the universe scrolling past outside. And I was trying to have, well, what I thought was a serious discussion of my prospects for leaving the clade, whether I should, and my prospects for becoming a pilot.
My prattling trailed off when I noticed Niyara staring at me with incredulity.
“What?” I said it nervously, looking for reassurance. “You don’t think I have what it takes to be a pilot?”
She mouthed one of her refrains. “I can’t believe how naive you are.”
I had been lying sprawled on the couch, my legs kicked over the back. It suddenly felt like far too vulnerable a position to have put myself in. I swung my legs around and sat up, hugging myself. “It can’t be that impossible to get into pilot training. I have good engineering and crisis-response aptitudes.”
“I’m sure,” she said mockingly.
I felt scathed, struck. Disemboweled. I opened my mouth to defend myself, and nothing came out.
She said, “But you’d be giving all your skill and talent to a corrupt system that would exploit you, and not give you anything in return.”
“I don’t think that’s fair—” I started.
She interrupted me with a snort. “Spend your whole life running errands for the Synarche, and what do you get out of it?”
“Stability?” I said. “Adventure? Contributing to the well-being of the commonwealth? Giving back something in exchange for your oxygen ration and livelihood? Feeling useful?”
“ ‘Feeling useful,’ ” she mocked.
The skin on my face felt dry and tight. I was angry, but I didn’t really know what angry was, or what to do with it.
“I think you mean ‘being exploited,’ ” she continued.
“If you say so.”
But the seed of doubt was in me, doing seed-of-doubt things—sending out curling green tendrils and raveling down threadlike roots. I grew up in a clade. What did I really know about whether or not the Synarche exploited its citizens? I was coming to the conclusion that the clades did, which left me deeply uncomfortable and unsettled in my identity and existence.
“But what’s the better system, then?”
She guffawed. “If you have to constantly alter your natural mental state to survive a situation, doesn’t it follow that the situation is toxic?”
“It might follow that your brain chemical balance is maladaptive,” I countered. “We didn’t evolve to live in a galaxy-spanning interdependence. Are you going to argue we should leave psychopaths untuned in order to let them prey on the rest of us because our species somehow evolved to have a certain number of self-eating monsters in it?”
It had felt like firm ground when I started the argument, but Niyara shaking her head and frowning at me made me trail off in insecurity.
“We evolved to be competitive and hierarchal,” she said, pitching her voice so it sounded like she was agreeing with me and felt sorry for me at the same time. “We evolved to excel in order to increase our own status and desirability.” She shrugged. “Denying that doesn’t change it.”
“Indulging it doesn’t make it right!” I shot back.
“Like I said”—she shook her head sadly— “naive. But you’re willing to go do something that is a total betrayal of my feelings?”
“So I should care about your feelings in a way you never cared about mine? It’s my life. I’m the one who has to live it.”
“I care about your feelings. There are lots of things you could do to have adventures, to explore!”
“You give my feelings a lot of lip service,” I admitted. “In between trying to control me.”
I have no idea where I found the spunk to stand up to her. And managing the conflict reasonably was beyond me at that point in my life. I got up, turned around, and walked away from her, because the alternative was starting to shout and throw things, and I was much too thoroughly socialized and programmed against what my linemothers would have called “displays” to create such a scene as that.
Five hours later, when I was lying on my bunk resisting the urge to tune and even more strongly resisting the near compulsion to send her a long, sorrowful mail, she texted me.
I’m sorry. I was a jerk. Meet me for dinner and I’ll make it up to you.
I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I was sure that I felt miserable when we were fighting, so I messaged back: Tell me where.
CHAPTER 12
SO WE WERE ON A date when Niyara blew up.
Actually blew up. Literally on a date.
After the fight, we’d met at a cafe in the outer ring of Ansara Station. That was one of the bigger ones, and there were shops and bars and places to eat or relax and chat with friends—or chat up potential new friends—lining the hull on either side, in between the docking tunnels. She’d picked out a place that did Ethiopian food, which is an old Terran specialty and amazingly delicious—and it was the sort of joint where you had to bring in your own wine if you wanted it.
We hadn’t brought any, so she sent me down the block to pick up a bottle. I was paying for a nice-enough white when the concussion wave hit me and the decomp doors came down. Luckily, I was still standing by the counter, or I could have been severed. Those doors don’t stop if an unlucky sentient is in the way; other lives depend on it.
All I could think of was getting back to her. It was nine long mins before the breach was declared stabilized and I could get out of the wine shop.
I still had the wine in my hand when I reached her. I dropped it. The bottle bounced a couple of times and rolled a little bit away. Then I dropped myself, to my knees beside her, and gathered up the scraps of my lover into my arms.
Her lips shaped a word. Senso picked up her intent and relayed it to me. “See?” she was saying, dying. “I do care about you.”
I had been about to say something comforting. It got stuck in my throat, and while I goggled at her, she bubbled a laugh.
“I sent you out of the blast radius, didn’t I?” she said, and died.
She didn’t have to die. The injuries weren’t severe enough to kill her if she got on life support. But she’d taken time-release poison before she blew the station hatchway. And that was the end of that, for Niyara Omedela, the love of my life, whose entire existence as I understood it was a lie.