“Why do I think there’s more going on here than you’re telling me?” I said out loud.
She shrugged. “Quit now, and you’ll never get the chance to find out.”
I wanted to curse her, but if I randomly cursed out everybody who got on my nerves on a given dia, I never would have been able to exist on a tiny ship with Connla for a decans and a half. Instead, I reached out into the structure of the hull with the Koregoi senso. Make backups, Singer always said. I fiddled with a few things, and left it there.
Best I could do right now.
She said, “What if I told you I had Niyara.”
I stared at her, scoffed. “Niyara is dead. She died while bleeding all over me.”
After cheating all over me, I thought. She’d lied on so many fronts, in so many ways. About big things and little. I could have dealt with being a secondary relationship, if she hadn’t lied to me about not having a primary one. I… well, I probably wouldn’t have been okay with her being a terrorist.
Would I have been?
Farweather turned her head so I could see the corner of her smile. “I’ve got her ayatana. Up to the moment of her death, actually. Safely hidden, so don’t bother ratting through my stuff to find it.”
I probably would have made a derogative comment about the desirability of ratting through pirate bags. Except I’d been doing it for weeks, scavenging her food and equipment.
So I guess she had me there.
On the one hand, if there was any such recording, it would explain a lot about how Farweather knew so much about me. And how she knew about the book. On the other hand, if there wasn’t such a recording, her claim that she’d hidden it outside of her luggage meant I could never actually be sure if it existed or not.
I really had to stop underestimating her. It was going to get my head staved in. And maybe I should look into hiding some information where she wouldn’t find it, just in case the Synarche got their hands and tentacles and whatnot on the Prize and I… hadn’t made it.
“Then you probably know where she got the information you’re so desperate to get back from me,” I challenged.
“Oh, sure,” Farweather said. “She stole it.”
“It’d help if you told me what it was. I might be able to find it.”
“But you wouldn’t tell me what it is if you did know.” She still had her back to me, but she crossed her arms triumphantly.
“I might bargain,” I said. “After all, you have a lot of things that I want.”
She glanced over her shoulder to leer at me, and I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t be boring,” I said.
“Look who’s talking.” But she turned away again. “A Koregoi artifact. She lifted it, and your clademothers managed to decipher the markings.”
“My clademothers?” It burst out of me like I was an unregulated child.
Farweather was lying. She had to be lying.
She didn’t feel like she was lying.
I took a long, calming breath.
She continued, “It was a probe, probably. Small. White space capable. There were plates on it made of inert metal. Inscribed with symbols. Didn’t Terrans used to send out probes like that?”
“This wasn’t Terran, though, I take it?”
“Definitely old,” she answered. “It was spotted near the Core, and declared a heritage site, but the seekers and scientists hadn’t managed to decode it. Niyara and some other Freeporters managed to… liberate it. It turned out it was a marker—a buoy, basically—and what it was there to mark was this thing.” She tapped the deck under her hand. “That’s how we knew where to look for it.”
“You expect me to believe that my clademothers managed to read the message on an ancient artifact that the Core universities couldn’t decipher? And that they were working with pirates? I do not believe it.”
She shrugged. “They were pathological, but pretty good archaeologists, or so I hear. Possibly it’s something to do with being so atavistic their own selves.”
“Ooo, big word,” I said mockingly.
She took it in stride, with a grin and a little shake of her head.
“So if your people found this, and my people decoded it and shared the information with you, why are you so keen on what you think I know?”
Farweather made a grumpy noise, like a disturbed cat. “Because Niyara didn’t share everything with anybody, apparently. She spread her information around. And hid some of it.”
“Why would she do that if she was planning to die?”
Farweather answered me with a question. “Haven’t you always wondered what she was thinking?”
I didn’t answer. She cranked around to check my face, then batted her lashes at me while I resolutely did not move sideways to make eye contact. “Haven’t you ever wondered how she felt about you? If maybe she wanted to give you something of value, that you could bargain with? She’d have to hide something like that even from you, though—because she had to know there would be Recon, and she couldn’t have you handing it over to Judiciary, or to your clade.”
“You know what?” I said. “I really don’t want to know. In fact, I was an ass to let you talk me into this.”
I hadn’t managed to pick my way through her defenses and her unfamiliar tech to find out more about how she was piloting the Prize, if in fact she was piloting the Prize. I hadn’t figured out how much she actually knew about me, about Niyara, about what Niyara had given me or done. And suddenly, I didn’t care anymore at all.
All I had accomplished was giving her another avenue to get under my skin. My skin, which was marked with the stigmata of a murdered Ativahika.
I stripped the rig off and stood. This was a great time to make coffee. Farweather said a few more things at me, but she was talking to my shoulder. I had plenty to occupy my attention and my hands.
Rightminding is a wonderful technology.
I didn’t even think once about busting her nose.
Well, not that dia, anyway.
“The lights are dimming again,” Farweather said, after I gave her her coffee in silence and backed away to sip my own at a safe distance.
It had happened once or twice since the first time. We’d both largely been ignoring it, each of us pretending for the other that we had some idea of what was going on, I surmised—unless she was behind it all, but if she was, or if she wasn’t, I certainly wasn’t going to give away that I was completely flummoxed by asking her.
I wondered what new gambit this was. What strategy had changed her mind.
“Well,” I said, “my little box here isn’t drawing any power from any external system. What do you think might be causing it?”
She glanced over her shoulder at me, and I—having turned toward her a little as well—could just see the edge of her frown. We were like two cats spatting, each refusing to yield turf or acknowledge the existence of the other.
“I just don’t know,” she said.
Well, that was a terrible answer.
I finished the coffee. I turned around and came toward her, looked at her. She rose, and came to look at me. She studied my face; I felt the beginnings of a connection. Some comprehension. A bridge between us.