“Foxfucking hounds,” Meng slurred as they sat down heavily, “you. Is that really you, Jedao?”
“You know each other?” the priest said.
Jedao ignored her question, although he kept her in his peripheral vision in case he needed to kill her or knock her out. “You graduated from Shuos Academy with high marks,” Jedao said. “You even married rich, the way you always talked about. Four beautiful kids. Why, Meng? Was it nothing more than a cover story?”
Meng reached for a fork. Jedao’s trigger finger shifted. Meng withdrew their hand.
“The Gwa-an paid stupendously well,” Meng said quietly. “It mattered a lot more, once. Of course, hiding the money was getting harder and harder. What good is money if you can’t spend it? And the Shuos were about to catch on anyway. So I had to run.”
“And your crew?”
Meng’s mouth twisted, but they met Jedao’s eyes steadfastly. “I didn’t want things to end the way they did.”
“Cold comfort to their families.”
“It’s done now,” Meng said, resigned. They looked at the largest platter of meat with sudden loathing. Jedao tensed, wondering if it was going to be flung at him, but all Meng did was shove it away from them. Some gravy slopped over the side.
Jedao smiled sardonically. “If you come home, you might at least get a decent bowl of rice instead of this weird bread stuff.”
“Jedao, if I come home, they’ll torture me for high treason, unless our heptarch’s policies have changed drastically. You can’t stop me from killing myself.”
“Rather than going home?” Jedao shrugged. Meng probably did have a suicide failsafe, although if they were serious they’d have used it already. He couldn’t imagine the Gwa-an would have neglected to provide them with one if the Shuos hadn’t.
Still, he wasn’t done. “If you do something so crass, I’m going to visit each one of your children personally. I’m going to take them out to a nice dinner with actual food that you eat with actual chopsticks and spoons. And I’m going to explain to them in exquisite technicolor detail how their Shuos parent is a traitor.”
Meng bit their lip.
More softly, Jedao said, “When did the happy family stop being a story and start being real?”
“I don’t know,” Meng said, wretched. “I can’t—do you know how my spouses would look at me if they found out that I’d been lying to them all this time? I wasn’t even particularly interested in other people’s kids when all this began. But watching them grow up—” They fell silent.
“I have to bring you back,” Jedao said. He remembered the staticky voice of the unnamed woman playing in Essier’s office, Meng’s crew, who’d tried and failed to get a warning out. She and her comrades deserved justice. But he also remembered all the gifts he’d sent to Meng’s children down the years, the occasional awkwardly written thank-you note. It wasn’t as if any good would be achieved by telling them the awful truth. “But I can pull a few strings. Make sure your family never finds out.”
Meng hesitated for a long moment. Then they nodded. “It’s fair. Better than fair.”
To the priest, Jedao said, “You’d better take us to the Moonsweet Blossom, assuming you haven’t disassembled it already.”
The priest’s mouth twisted. “You’re in luck.”
DU STATION HAD ensconced the Moonsweet Blossom in a bay on Level 62. The Gwa-an they passed gawped at them. The priest sailed past without giving any explanation. Jedao wondered whether the issue was his hair or some other inexplicable Gwa-an cultural foible.
“I hope you can pilot while drunk,” Jedao said to Meng.
Meng drew themself up to their full height. “I didn’t drink that much.”
Jedao had his doubts, but he would take his chances. “Get in.”
The priest’s sudden tension alerted him that she was about to try something. Jedao shoved Meng toward the trademoth, then grabbed the priest in an armlock. What was the point of putting a priest in charge of security if the priest couldn’t fight?
Jedao said to her, “You’re going to instruct your underlings to get the hell out of our way and open the airlock so we can leave.”
“And why would I do that?” the priest said.
He reached up and snatched out half her hairpins. Too bad he didn’t have a third hand; his grip on the gun was precarious enough as it stood. She growled, which he interpreted as “fuck you and all your little foxes.”
“I could get creative,” Jedao said.
“I was warned that the heptarchate was full of barbarians,” the priest said.
At least the incomprehensible Gwa-an fixation on hairstyles meant that he didn’t have to resort to more disagreeable threats, like shooting her subordinates in front of her. Given her reaction when he had knocked out the sentinel, he wasn’t convinced that would faze her anyway. He adjusted his grip and forced her to the floor.
“Give the order,” he said. “If you don’t play any tricks, you’ll even get the hairpins back without my shoving them through your eardrums.” They were very nice hairpins, despite the creepiness of the elongated humanoid figures, and he bet they were real gold.
Since he had her facing the floor, the priest couldn’t glare at him. The venom in her voice was unmistakable, however. “As you require.” She started speaking in Tlen Gwa.
The workers in the area hurried to comply. Jedao had familiarized himself with the control systems of the airlock and was satisfied they weren’t doing anything underhanded. “Thank you,” he said, to which the priest hissed something venomous. He flung the hairpins away from him and let her go. She cried out at the sound of their clattering and scrambled after them with a devotion he reserved for weapons. Perhaps, to a Gwa-an priest, they were equivalent.
One of the workers, braver or more foolish than the others, reached for her own gun. Jedao shot her in the hand on the way up the hatch. It bought him enough time to get the rest of the way up the ramp and slam the hatch shut after him. Surely Meng couldn’t accuse him of showing off if they hadn’t seen the feat of marksmanship; and he hoped the worker would appreciate that he could just as easily have put a hole in her head.
The telltale rumble of the Blossom’s maneuver drive assured him that Meng, at least, was following directions. This boded well for their health. Jedao hurried forward, wondering how many more rounds the Gwa-an handgun contained, and started webbing himself into the gunner’s seat.
“You wouldn’t consider putting that thing away, would you?” Meng said. “It’s hard for me to think when I’m ready to piss myself.”
“If you think I’m the scariest person in your future, Meng, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“One, I don’t think you know yourself very well, and two, I liked you much better when we were on the same side.”
“I’m going to let you meditate on that second bit some other time. In the meantime, let’s get out of here.”
Meng swallowed. “They’ll shoot us down the moment we get clear of the doors, you know.”
“Just go, Meng. I’ve got friends. Or did you think I teleported onto this station?”
“At this point I wouldn’t put anything past you. Okay, you’re webbed in, I’m webbed in, here goes nothing.”
The maneuver drive grumbled as the Moonsweet Blossom blasted its way out of the bay. No one attempted to close the first set of doors on them. Jedao wondered if the priest was still scrabbling after her hairpins, or if it had to do with the more pragmatic desire to avoid costly repairs to the station.