She headed into the kitchen to put one of the meat pasties into the refrigerator, then returned to the common area and sank gratefully onto a floor cushion to eat the other. She asked the grid to image her the local news. Maybe that would ground her in reality and keep her from worrying about the state of the galaxy, which wasn’t her concern anymore.
Still, her mind wandered as the news talked about the discovery of a new primitive sea-creature. She thought of Jedao, inevitably. Sometimes I don’t understand you at all, she told the fragments of him that remained. Someone who still mourned the death of a childhood friend, to the extent that he existed to do the mourning at all, yet had been capable of murdering his command staff, people he’d known and relied upon for years.
If Cheris was honest with herself—something she had just enough psychic distance for—Jedao’s feelings for Kel Gized, his chief of staff and the first person he’d murdered, had not been entirely platonic. But Jedao wouldn’t have acted on his subterranean desires, and in any case Gized had never shown any sign of having any interest in romance. She’d been a Kel of the very old school, from the days when the Kel were an autonomous people and some of them took the sword-vow: married to her profession as a soldier, and nothing else.
Cheris had finished her pasty and was in the middle of wiping her mouth, lost in memories that were and weren’t her own, when someone rapped politely at the door. It couldn’t be one of her housemates. They would just have walked in, as the house’s minimal security system recognized them. One of their friends?
Her back prickled. Paranoia, she told herself again; but she could never be sure. “Grid,” she said softly, knowing it would hear her, “who is it?”
The grid showed her an image of her guest: a bedraggled man of middle years, his bangs clinging damply to his forehead. Not smiling, although she knew exactly what his smile looked like, and how it tilted up asymmetrically at the corners. He was panting as though he’d run to her house from—from where? She hadn’t heard the footsteps, although that didn’t mean anything definitive.
He wasn’t in Kel uniform, or Shuos uniform either. That unnerved her. The naked hands were worst of all. In her dreams she always saw them sheathed in the notorious fingerless gloves.
Cheris’s next actions happened in what she later remembered as a single seamless flow, without calculation to guide them. The gun that she had hidden for the past two years snapped into her hands as she strode to the door. She touched the selector with her finger and emptied the magazine through the unopened door in a single burst. Just as quickly, she flung herself to the side in case of return fire.
No one fired back, but the stink of gunsmoke filled her nostrils. In the sudden ringing stillness afterward, she heard the thud of a body slumping against the door; heard a stifled gasp.
“Please,” the man on the other side of the door said, with a hint of the drawl that she had fought hard to suppress in her own speech. “I’m just here to talk.”
Cheris doubted that, but now that her rational brain had caught up to her ghost-granted reflexes, she recognized the futility of retrieving more ammunition and shooting him again, as satisfying as it would be. She kept the gun in her hand, because Shuos paranoia and Kel training died hard. “Let him in,” she said to the house’s grid.
The door slid open. Jedao stared at her wide-eyed. His sensible brown jacket was marred by holes in the torso where she’d hit him in center mass, to say nothing of the grotesque, sluggish black blood dripping from the wounds where his heart should have been. She glimpsed wormlike tendrils waving feebly from beneath his skin, revealing the truth beneath the human exterior. Jedao gestured apologetically at the blood.
Cheris stood aside to let him in. Given the holes in the door, a little blood wasn’t going to make much difference, even if one of her housemates liked everything very neat.
He still didn’t enter. “Cheris?” he said uncertainly, using a high honorific.
Cheris was forcibly reminded that she’d changed her face, had subtle adjustments made to her voice, courtesy of one of Mikodez’s surgeons. Most days she didn’t think about her new face, with its broad forehead and pronounced nose, the quizzical eyebrows. It would have fooled her own parents—but they were dead, and by her own doing.
The sound of her name—her real name—brought back a sudden and unwelcome wave-crash of longing, especially paired with the familiar Shparoi drawl. Cheris remembered what it had been like when the original Jedao had talked to her, that relentless voice in her head. Looking at this other Jedao was like looking in a broken mirror and putting her hands through the shards: pain that she couldn’t escape.
“It’s me,” Cheris said, her voice harsher than she’d meant it to be. She pointed at the couch. He went over to sit on it, still dripping blood, and she closed the door. How much time did they have before her watchers called for reinforcements? Since it seemed unfruitful to say, Thanks for ruining my life, she settled for, “I’m guessing you’re not here with the hexarch’s permission. Make it quick.”
A trail of that black blood had dripped from the door to the couch, following Jedao like an accusation. He had removed his jacket and was trying ineffectually to staunch the leakage with the wadded-up fabric. “I’m here,” he said, overenunciating, “because you’re the only one who knows the truth about my past.”
There was no point continuing the conversation here, when the Shuos would already be on their way. As much as she’d been chafing at how dull and ordinary her life had been, now that she was about to lose it, a pang of resentment started up in her chest. She doubted she’d be able to go back to her classroom now that Jedao had intruded into her life.
For a moment she considered handing Jedao over to the Shuos. He wasn’t her problem; he was Mikodez’s problem. She could get rid of him and go back to the simple life she’d chosen for herself.
But he’d come to her in search of the answers she’d withheld from him before. She owed them to him, even if she’d been in denial about it.
“Did you bring any weapons?” Cheris asked.
His teeth flashed in a silent laugh. “I am a weapon,” Jedao said. He wasn’t boasting; it was as true as anything else about him. She was grateful that he didn’t say I’m your gun or she would have been tempted to punch him, even if just for the irrational feeling that that was her phrase.
Cheris had walked over to her escritoire in the common room and opened it to reveal a bag. “We’ll have to share,” she said. She kept emergency supplies in the bag in case she had to leave in a hurry: everything from cash in the local currency to ration bars (not Kel, alas), plus a survival knife and a folding tent, all the accoutrements she would need to survive in the wilderness outside the settlement’s protective dome until she could be picked up by allies.
She also retrieved a protective suit and began pulling it on over her clothes. “I have a spare,” she said, “but it’s not going to fit you. Did you bring one, or are we going to have to detour to pick one up for you?” More opportunities to be caught. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t see much alternative.
“I don’t need one,” Jedao said. “The atmosphere outside won’t kill me.” He didn’t explain how he knew this. She was willing to take his word for it, though. She knew how hard he was to kill.
“Come on, then,” Cheris said.
Jedao followed in silence. Cheris looked over her shoulder to verify that he was still there, that he hadn’t dissolved into some phantasm of smoke and bitter memory. Her heart was thumping so hard that she was afraid that it would burst free of her ribcage, making her Jedao’s twin in injury. Would she bleed black, too, now that they were reunited?