“I wouldn’t worry about you so much if you wrote more often,” Mother complained.
“Be fair,” Nidana said, “he writes every seven weeks like clockwork. It’s not his fault the censors hold up the mail.”
Jedao had the good sense not to get involved in the ensuing squabble between our mother and Nidana, and instead polished off his salad with no sign that its resemblance to body parts bothered him.
Afterward, Mother went to check on something at the facility. Nidana excused herself because the taste of the salad had inspired her and she had to start a new poem. I loved my sister, but I would never pretend to understand art and artists.
For our part, Jedao and I went out to the flower garden, carrying cups of tea. The garden sported a stone bench with patches of dark moss growing around its base, and was indifferently weeded. No one around here had the time for it. Mother’s idea of growing flowers was to scatter wildflower seeds and order bizarre cocktails of specialized hungry insects to inhibit pests.
Jedao plucked one of the bluebonnets and stuck it behind his ear. It made him look like he was ten all over again.
“I’m glad you’re home safely,” I said, to see if he would flinch.
Jedao set the teacup down on the bench. “It’s nice to run into someone who doesn’t think I have magical powers of survival,” he said. He smiled at me, the tilted smile that he and Nidana and our mother shared, but I didn’t, because he and Nidana and I all had different sires. Shparoi culture didn’t approve of some of Mother’s life choices; Jedao had gotten into his share of fights over it.
I almost believed he was fine. There was nothing wrong with his smile, or the easy, affectionate light in his eyes. As far as I knew, the last time he’d cried was when he was eight, after he’d gotten into a fight and lost. I didn’t know why I was thinking of that.
After an awkward pause, I said, “If they had to rebuild half your face anyway, you could have asked them to make you devastatingly handsome.”
“What, so Mom can nag me about my inadequate love life some more?” Jedao said. He was still smiling. “Hey, they gave me back a face, period. I’m not greedy.”
“I almost can’t tell,” I said. It was true. They hadn’t bothered putting back the scar on his chin from that time he fell out of the tree when he was seven. And his face was more symmetrical than it had been, hard to pin down unless you looked hard at the bone structure, especially around the eyes.
He kicked at an empty overturned flowerpot. “You know, I stared in the mirror for the longest time after all the operations, and it was the strangest thing, like I was looking at someone I’d never met before. Or trying to find one of those especially elusive zits when I was thirteen.”
“How the hell do you take a grenade to the face as a moth commander, anyway?”
Jedao pulled a face. “Technically classified, but since Mom already dragged that much out of me and is obviously talking to you about it... There was a riot on the station where we put in for repairs. Not even heretics, just ordinary disgruntled workers. As far as we can tell, they didn’t have anything against me personally. Anyone in a Kel uniform would have sufficed.”
“A grenade?” I demanded.
“It was practically homebrew. If it’d been the stuff the Kel infantry are issued, I’d be dead.”
“Mother worries about you,” I said.
Jedao cocked an eyebrow at me but generously refrained from accusing me of projecting. “I’ll write home more often if she promises to send fewer of those horrible cookies,” he said. “I can’t fob them off on anyone anymore. All my fellow officers know they’re hard enough to be used as bricks.”
I huffed a laugh. “I can’t do that. She’d make me eat them.”
“You have spawn,” Jedao said unsympathetically. “Feed the cookies to them. They still have some of their baby teeth, they can afford to lose a few.”
I reached over and ruffled his hair the way I used to when he was a kid. He made a humming contented sound. Touching a soldier without invitation wasn’t bright of me, but all I could think of was the boy he’d been.
That wasn’t all. Long ago, during the first break when he’d come home after his first year at Shuos Academy, Jedao had seemed fine, the same cocky teenager who occasionally cut class to play jeng-zai and pattern-stones. (Mother had made him clean a scary amount of glassware after she caught him. More accurately, I’d ratted him out.) Yet every time I watched him, I was convinced he’d been replaced by some hollow marionette: nothing real except negative space.
No one else had noticed anything amiss. I’d spent time with Jedao—chores, tea, board games. He gave a great performance. Once or twice when we were alone together, I almost came out and asked. He was an excellent liar, but I was the one person who’d always been able to tell.
Once again, I almost asked. On the other hand, he was a grown man and a Shuos and a soldier. It was none of my damn business.
“You look tired,” Jedao said. “Sleeping all right?”
“Long shifts at work, that’s all,” I said. And that was that: we talked about my new supervisor, and once again I let the subject slide.
Fourteen years later, when I heard of Hellspin Fortress, I’d discover how badly I’d fucked up by keeping quiet; and then, of course, it was too late to fix anything.
Author’s Note
I originally wrote this as an exercise in first person, and chose Rodao as the viewpoint character because I thought his perspective on Jedao would be interesting. I’d always conceived of him as the annoyingly straitlaced oldest sibling (confession: I was the annoyingly straitlaced older sibling, for which I hope my kid sister has forgiven me), the one who could always catch Jedao out in whatever tall tales he tried to fob off on everyone else. Just imagine if the Shuos had ever taken advantage of that.
Jedao’s genetic father is a violist for the simple reason that I used to play viola, although it’s been years and I lost my instrument to the Louisiana floods of 2016. I have always had a soft spot for the viola, even if I imagine every violist eventually gets sick of that one Telemann concerto. And the detail about Jedao cutting class to play games is stolen from my father’s life (hi, Dad!). Apparently when he was young, he’d cut class to play baduk (go, wei qi—what I’ve chosen to call pattern-stones in the h*archate). It paid off; during my abortive childhood attempts to learn to play chess, Dad needed me to remind him how all the different pieces moved, and he still won every time!
Extracurricular Activities
WHEN SHUOS JEDAO walked into his temporary quarters on Station Muru 5 and spotted the box, he assumed someone was attempting to assassinate him. It had happened before. Considering his first career, there was even a certain justice to it.
He ducked back around the doorway, although even with his reflexes, it would have been too late if it’d been a proper bomb. The air currents in the room would have wafted his biochemical signature to the box and caused it to trigger. Or someone could have set one up to go off as soon as the door opened, regardless of who stepped in. Or something even less sophisticated.
Jedao retreated back down the hallway and waited one minute. Two. Nothing.