Kujen would have figured it out, assuming he hadn’t counted on it from the beginning. Whether he had informed Mikodez about this detail was what Jedao was about to find out.
Hemiola’s lights sheened orange when the third subdisplay came up. It featured a background photo of a calico cat napping in a sink. Jedao recognized it as one of Zehun’s pets—specifically the one that, disconcertingly, was named after him.
Jedao started to sweat. The marrow-deep pain was as he remembered it, if finer in scale. The fabric of his uniform—red-and-gold, how he hated the sight of it—clung damply to his back. He wiped his palms on his pants. Two years and he still hadn’t grown accustomed to going everywhere with naked hands, and this despite the fact that he’d never earned the half-gloves, either.
I am a Shuos, he thought. Fourth time; lucky unlucky four. He thought of all the Kel deaths he was responsible for, in this life and in the one he couldn’t remember.
He’d come this far. It would be a shame to let the opportunity slide past. So he set his fingers to the workstation and entered his first query. It would have been safer to do this using his ability to manipulate gravity, but he didn’t enjoy the pain. This would have to do.
What the fuck became of you, Ruo? Jedao wondered as he dug through the filesystem. Did he really want to know what had become of his best friend? The boy he’d played pranks with? Whom he’d pined after but never asked out? (And why hadn’t he? Had there been a falling out?)
Vestenya Ruo, Shuos cadet, tracked as Shuos infantry. Jedao had no idea why even a top-secret record clung to the old euphemism for assassin. He’d asked Mikodez about the term once. Mikodez had shrugged and said, “Habit”—another one of those maddening non-answers.
Ruo had attended Shuos Academy Prime from 826 to—826. The end date hit Jedao like a blow to the stomach. Nausea washed through him as he wondered what had gone wrong.
The first date was right. They’d been first-years together. As sieve-like as his memories were, Jedao knew that much.
But less than a year in academy?
The record didn’t end there. Ruo hadn’t been expelled, which would have been bad enough. Nor had he graduated in a single year, which would have been a miracle.
No—Ruo had died. The record specified, in dry, bloodless detail, that Ruo had run afoul of a visiting Rahal magistrate while playing a heresy game. Ruo had committed suicide rather than be outprocessed and handed over to the Rahal.
And the game had been designed by one Cadet Garach Jedao Shkan.
That can’t be right, Jedao thought, and: I would never.
Tears pricked his eyes. Angrily, he scrubbed them away with the back of his hand. Had he—had he maneuvered Ruo into suicide on purpose? And if so, why?
But the record had no answers for him.
I loved him, Jedao thought, and he’s gone. He’d looked sidelong at Ruo during the classes that they had together, admiring the fineness of his features, longing to run his fingers through the mane of hair that Ruo kept tied back in a ponytail. Imagined the weight of that solid body atop his.
But he’d been convinced that he’d loved Dhanneth, too; and look how that had ended. Was his treatment of Dhanneth part of a pattern that he’d missed because of the amnesia? And if so, how could he make it up to the dead?
I believe he died young, Kel Cheris had said to him. Sparing him the truth. There was no way she hadn’t known.
Jedao didn’t feel spared. He couldn’t see why this information was so deeply classified. Especially when he knew that Mikodez, for all his quixotic moods, did everything for a reason when it came to security.
“Are you all right?” Hemiola asked in worried yellow lights, then flushed pink. “Of course you’re not all right.” It had better vision than humans did, and in most regards, than Jedao himself. It already knew what the record said.
“He would have been dead anyway,” Jedao said, but he wasn’t convincing even himself. He couldn’t bring himself to say Ruo’s name out loud, and not because he was worried about surveillance.
“Is that all you wanted to find out?”
“No,” Jedao said. “Just one more thing.”
He had to dig around to locate what he was looking for. Mikodez named all his files sensible things, which only surprised Jedao a little: as much as Mikodez liked to play at high whimsy, his successor would someday depend on being able to locate important information. And Mikodez cared about his successors; cared that what he built should outlast him.
Not my problem, Jedao told himself. It might even have been true. He opened the latest of the psychological evaluations that Mikodez had ordered his nephew and contact specialist, Andan Niath, to do on Jedao himself.
The file was long and dreary. It took an effort not to skim. He knew already that he was unfit to leave the Citadel and rejoin mainstream society; possibly not fit even to interact with anyone but his carefully selected keepers, including the contact specialist. He didn’t need to be told that.
The occasional odd detail leapt out at him. Displays no phobia of the dark, for instance. Surely such a common trigger would have disqualified him for military service? Granted that they had recovered him from deep space after the Battle of Terebeg two years ago, but a whole section followed on his responses to a test that they had given him, which had involved a series of lurid paintings.
At last he came to Zehun’s summation, which was what interested him the most. Recommendation: subject is no closer to divulging the secret of why Hexarch Kujen’s command moth mutinied at Terebeg. Subject should be terminated.
Jedao’s hand slipped; he almost accidentally deleted the file. Which wasn’t easy, what was he thinking, the system was logging all activity. Stupid of him, especially since he shouldn’t care. Zehun was civil to him, but there was no love lost between the two of them.
“Hemiola,” Jedao said as he logged out and covered his tracks to the extent that they could be covered, which wasn’t very, “I’m going to need more of your help than I realized.”
Hemiola blinked anxiously at him.
“I need passage off the Citadel to—a starport,” Jedao said. “Any starport. I can’t stow away inside a voidmoth here; they’ll catch me. But I might have a chance if I cling to the carapace.”
Strictly speaking, he didn’t need to breathe. He’d tested this in his bathtub, which would have looked either silly or tragic if anyone had walked in on him. (Hemiola had disapproved strongly of this experiment, but he’d successfully argued that drowning was a temporary inconvenience.) All—”all“—he had to do was web himself to the exterior.
Hemiola’s lights went through a veritable rainbow of misgivings. “I see a way,” it said at last. “Follow me.”
SIX MINUTES BEFORE the end of class, and Ajewen Cheris, currently going by the name of Dzannis Paral, wondered who was looking forward to it more: herself, or her sixteen students.
No one had called her “Cheris” since she had moved to the world of Esrala to live as a Mwennin among Mwennin, least of all the children, ranging from ages eight to fourteen, in her class. Cheris’s mother might be dead, and the Mwennin, her mother’s people, scattered and much diminished—Cheris’s own fault, a guilt that ran deep—but here, now, a few survived. Most days she was glad of it, and of the fact that there were children at all.