“He was my friend,” Jedao said. He bit his lip and averted his gaze. The bullet wounds in his torso had mostly closed up except for a few stray tendrils wriggling aimlessly, like exposed worms. He took no notice of them, although Cheris found them distracting.
“Ruo always did like to take risks,” Cheris said, both fond and resigned. “But that was one he should have avoided.”
Jedao swung at her. She blocked the blow, segued without thinking into a joint lock that was supposed to deter further struggling by inflicting pain. Which was stupid, because someone who didn’t blink at multiple gunshot wounds wasn’t going to be slowed down by a pressure point.
Nevertheless, Jedao went limp. Cheris remained alert in case it was a trick—was it ever not a trick, with Jedao?—but he remained still, and after several moments she let go. He took one step backward, head bowed.
“I’m sorry,” Jedao said. He scrubbed his eyes with the back of one hand. “I only found out a couple weeks ago. It was like waking up without him all over again.”
“You didn’t come all this way to get in a fight with me over this,” Cheris said. “Or did you?” It could have been worse. He was a Shuos with fragmentary memories of being the hexarchate’s most notorious madman. He could have diverted some of the planetary weather-eaters and crashed them into the settlement, or something even more destructive, with whatever grid-diving skills had gotten him this far.
Jedao tipped his chin up. “I want my memories back,” he said. The drawl that they shared was stronger than ever. “How am I supposed to know what to do with my life when I can’t remember most of it?”
Cheris’s stomach suddenly revolted. It was all she could do to keep from gagging. She’d eaten Jedao’s memories, crunched down the carrion glass and felt it pierce her on the way down. They were part of her now, sharded through her in ways that she couldn’t explain in ordinary human terms. But that didn’t mean they had to belong to her forever.
For over a decade she’d carried Jedao inside her, put him on and off like a mask. Some nights she dreamed his dreams: running from geese who were almost as tall as she was, when she’d been a boy; learning to use her first gun, a lovingly maintained rifle that had been in the Garach family for a couple of generations; shuffling a jeng-zai deck that dripped blood, and blood, and blood. She would have given a lot to be free of those dreams; would have been lost without them.
She’d given up on getting rid of Jedao. There was a way, but—
Jedao’s eyes were intent upon her face. “You know a way,” he breathed.
Of course. They knew each other. Her body language had been overwritten by Jedao’s; he could read her the way she could read him.
“It will require travel,” Cheris said, “but we would have to do that anyway, to get away from the Shuos.” She imagined Jedao as an outlaw, and couldn’t. Even if he had the skills for mercenary work—not that Brezan or Inesser or Mikodez would thank her for making the suggestion—his appearance would always pose a problem. “Why couldn’t you have gotten your face changed on the way?”
“I tried,” he said with an undertone of pain. “I tried scarring myself. It’s how my body regenerates. It always regenerates in the same shape.”
Interesting. Presumably this had limits, or he wouldn’t be able to form new memories, or learn new skills. But a fixed overall appearance—that was something she could see Kujen engineering into his creation.
“Kujen experimented with methods of memory transfer,” Cheris said, “besides the known one where he hijacked a stranger’s body wholesale. I have some of his notes. He had more than one base; he believed in redundancy. I didn’t tell Mikodez about some of the others.”
“I imagine he knows anyway,” Jedao said.
“About some of them, not all of them,” Cheris said. She didn’t tell Jedao how she knew this. The servitors of Pyrehawk Enclave, with whom she was aligned, had been monitoring Kujen’s bases on the grounds that they’d rather know about any traps he’d left behind before they went off. Whether they’d had run-ins with Mikodez’s people was not something they had divulged to her.
The transmitter vibrated once. Cheris glanced down and interpreted the code, which was based on Mwen-dal. “Pickup in thirty-seven minutes,” she said. She wondered how the needlemoth planned to get through the trees. Then again, its pilot was better than she was, and the needlemoth itself had not insignificant armaments for a vessel its size. As long as the moth didn’t shoot her while clearing itself a landing site, she didn’t care. (She wasn’t worried about Jedao.)
“Giving you Jedao’s memories—the first Jedao’s memories—will mean giving them to you,” Cheris said. She was starting to sweat, although it wasn’t particularly warm, even in the suit. “It’s not like copying a drama onto another data solid. If my understanding of Kujen’s research is correct, all that I’ll have left is a shadow of those four hundred years.”
Jedao wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Why didn’t you get rid of them earlier?”
“Because as long as they’re in me,” Cheris said, “I can keep them safe.” She’d thought about expelling them earlier; couldn’t deny that she’d been tempted. But when it came right down to it, she didn’t trust anyone else in the hexarchate with Jedao’s remnants.
Cheris had complex emotions about housing the mind of the hexarchate’s most notorious mass murderer. She’d ingested Jedao’s memories eleven years ago, in the wake of the Siege of Scattered Needles and the destruction of her swarm, because it had been a matter of survival. There had been no other way to obtain the information she needed to prevail in the hexarchs’ game—or Jedao’s, for that matter.
If the situation hadn’t reached that crisis point, she wouldn’t have done it. She knew herself that well. Jedao himself had endured unwritten trauma. She remembered how much it had pierced her when she discovered the old tragedy of Ruo’s suicide, which had driven Jedao to vengeance against the heptarchate. The effect on the Jedao in front of her had to have been similar. Except he had experienced the shock at a remove, by reading whatever records he’d unearthed, rather than having the memory spearing directly into his mind.
Jedao’s experience had kept her alive. Cheris had missed him in those early days after his death. She would not have expected to grow attached to someone with his reputation. But they’d depended on each other, toward the end, even if they’d never precisely achieved friendship.
She couldn’t entirely explain her dislike of this other, inhuman Jedao and his obnoxious habit of surviving fatal gunshot wounds. Oh, she’d known that Kujen could have manufactured himself a thousand Jedao-alikes if he’d been so inclined, in appearance if nothing else. Kujen had thought nothing of “disciplining” unlucky Nirai for incompetence or insubordination: resculpting their bodies to make them uncannily beautiful, reprogramming their minds to make them pleasing bed-companions or servants. On occasion he’d also appropriated prisoners of war, heretics, condemned criminals. And the hexarchate had let him, because nobody cared what happened to those people, and Kujen offered such excellent gifts of technology.
Even now it was hard to conceal how she felt about this hawkfucking Jedao-other. (What was she supposed to call him? His name tasted sour in her mouth.) The unpleasant shock that ran through her every time she saw his face would never go away. It was almost, but not quite, the face she had seen in the mirror while the original Jedao had been anchored to her; left and right reversed, so subtle that she doubted anyone else would have been able to tell the difference.