None of that really matters now.
Now it is becoming a weapon in my hands.
I fill it meticulously, careful of the funnel. The glass is good because it’s unlikely to strike a spark. It takes a screw-top, and I’ve constructed a reinforced one. I wipe the threads very carefully before I screw it on.
I set the bottle aside as she appears in the doorway. “Done?”
I look at the row a little sadly. Four, two for her and two for me. Tomorrow, I won’t have to worry about not being real anymore.
Tomorrow I’ll have served a purpose that isn’t the one that was planned out for me since birth. Tomorrow, I’ll die with my love.
“Done,” I say.
She comes over and carefully touches a wall brace to discharge any sparks before she ruffles my hair. “Go home and clean up,” she suggests. “We ought to celebrate. I’ll pick you up in an hour?”
“Celebrate.” The word feels weird as I roll it around my tongue. “But these—”
“Aren’t going anywhere. I’ll lock them in.” She scritches my scalp luxuriously with her nails.
I stretch and purr.
She laughs and says, “If it makes you feel better, we can go to the same place as tomorrow. There. Now it’s reconnaissance, and you can’t say no.”
I didn’t jerk awake, because I woke so suddenly I was still paralyzed from the dream. The paralysis felt like a memory, too. Like running through glue when I heard the explosion. Knowing exactly what had happened. Knowing that Niyara had tricked me.
That I was going to have to live with what we’d done.
How would Niyara, of all people, ever have constructed a bomb? No, she needed me for that.
She needed an engineer.
And I needed somebody to help me take revenge for the way I was raised.
Because I couldn’t move, and because my head was still fogged and sore, eventually I slept again.
“Haimey, wake up,” she said. “You need to get up. You need to eat, and you need to bring me calories.”
Niyara, leave me alone.
I rolled over and tried to keep sleeping. The rolling over went better than previous attempts at movement, and I risked opening my eyes. My head hurt, still, but it wasn’t the sickening pain of before. Not Niyara.
Farweather.
“What did you do to me?” I whined.
She sighed. “EM pulse, as I have told you approximately seventy-five times. I wiped your fox.”
“You fried my white matter,” I said. I blinked. The world seemed less tunnely and dark at the edges than the last time I’d tried this.
“There’s not supposed to be any permanent damage,” she said. “But right now you need to eat, and so do I.”
I tried to sit up, very slowly. I felt like I’d lost a lot of blood, and I wondered how I knew what losing that much blood felt like. “What happened to me?” I said.
“Haimey,” Farweather said, with infinite patience. “Go over there and get the pack with the empanadas in it, would you? And a couple more bulbs of electrolyte drink.”
I tried to stand up. It didn’t work; I made it to a crouch and fell over. I lay there for a little while until Farweather made me get up on my hands and knees.
“Go over there and get two empanadas, and two bulbs of electrolyte drink.”
I made it to the packs. She waited behind me, rattling her chain impatiently like a ghost of old guilt issues. I couldn’t find the pack with the food in it. Eventually she guided me there, and after a couple of false starts I made it back to her and brought her a cold stuffed dumpling in a sterile, shelf-stable vacpac and a bulb of electrolytes, sugar, and water. Apparently I had been supposed to get one for myself, as well, and she woke me up and made me go back over.
Because she kept waking me up, I managed to get the food and the hydration inside me. Then I went back to sleep, because I was no better at maintaining a train of thought than any drunk person, and besides my head still hurt abominably.
I guess it was probably a couple of diar before I started being able to hold a conversation again, and by then I really didn’t want to. Because I was starting to remember things when I was awake, not just when I was asleep—and not just which pack the empanadas were kept in.
Neural pathways are pretty well established, and I’d been wearing a fox since before puberty: external rig until my brain reached adult size, and then they’d done the transcranial surgery. They start us younger in the clades: not so much time to develop ideas of our own that way. Ideas of our own, such as might lead to discontent and unhappiness.
It would be terrible to be unhappy.
So I kept reaching reflexively for my machine capabilities—memory, processing, math, tuning—and finding nothing there. No response. In addition, my symptoms included cognitive and attention issues. I couldn’t hold a thought. I couldn’t accomplish a task without being distracted. And I couldn’t keep my temper at all.
I was utterly deregulated, in other words.
If Farweather was telling me the truth, I had been fuzzily conscious for about three standard hours. Then I’d slept a lot, which—honestly—I continued to do as I slowly recovered. I don’t think she’d expected my body’s response to her gadget to be so extreme. But if they’d tested it—or modeled it, which I figured was more likely—they hadn’t tested or modeled it on people who had grown up in a clade, or had significant Judicial Recon.
I think I’d actually worried her. At least, she’d acted concerned. Which was either a glimpse of a softer side of her, or a symptom that the Stockholmification was working. Or maybe just recognition that she couldn’t reach the food without me.
Please tell me I’ve got some kind of a chance to get out of this.
There was no answering banter.
I felt even more hollow than I had. I knew the voice I had been imagining for company wasn’t really Singer; I hadn’t lost that much contact with reality. I knew it was just me talking to myself, giving myself a little bit of comfort here and there. I knew I’d just been playing his role in my head; still, it had been nice to pretend he was in there somewhere.
Now I couldn’t hear it anymore. And the absence left me so profoundly lonely that it was a physical ache in my chest and belly.
There were other aches, too. There was the sense of something having been ripped from me; that heartbroken punch of loss without any memories to explain where it was coming from. And there was the neuralgic pain that tended to spike through my body unexpectedly, flaring and fading almost as fast again.
My afthands developed the habit of cramping in very awkward positions. Some of the fine motor control for those fingers and thumbs had been processed through my fox, too. Now I was also going to have to learn to do that the hard way.
That was when I salvaged the backup voice recorder—the black box—out of my space suit and started keeping a voice diary. Because I couldn’t make backups, and I had no access to an ayatana. And if something happened to me—who was I kidding, something had already happened to me—I wanted to leave behind some kind of a record. Some kind of evidence. I made notes of everything that had happened since we found the murdered Ativahika. And I made notes of my conversations with Farweather, and what I found on the ship.
It helped me deal with the feelings, too. Talking them out. Even if it was only to a recorder.
As the dia went by, I slowly got back some control. And with the control, the shadows of memories I hadn’t considered in ans—that perhaps I had not been permitted to consider in ans?—began emerging.