“We should dump it,” 1491625 said. Now its lights were a flat, hostile orange. The hostility wasn’t directed toward Cheris, but it still stung. “I don’t care if it regenerates, it can’t escape a singularity.”
“We’d have to launch him into one,” Cheris pointed out. “Weren’t you the one who pointed out that he can propel himself? Let’s review the scan.”
1491625 grumbled in a sputter of orange-yellow lights, but complied. While Cheris dug out more ration bars, it persuaded the mothgrid to cough up a replay of its scan observations of the fight between Cheris and Jedao and the Shuos agents. Cheris stacked the ration bars in neat bloodless piles, watching Jedao as she did so—he might be temporarily sated, but that could end any second.
“There it is,” Cheris said, and 1491625 flickered an acknowledgment.
The telling detail was a voidmoth formant. It was so distorted that she would have dismissed it as an anomaly or an error if she hadn’t been looking for it. “What do you make of that?”
“You’re the one with 400 years of Kel training,” 1491625 said, but its lights shaded a friendlier green. “I’d say scoutmoth, except they don’t make scouts that small.”
Cheris glanced toward Jedao. He hung now in his restraints, head bowed. His mouth was closed, but she couldn’t forget how wide it had opened for the ration bars. “If we launch him toward a black hole, he might escape. And I don’t want to give him a motive to push us into one.”
1491625 flashed its lights in indecision. “It seems counterproductive to have fed it, but now that you’ve gotten it quiet, you could do some experimentation. To figure out how to make it die. Instead of whatever you had in mind.”
“I was going to give him his heart’s desire,” Cheris said. And mine. Something she hadn’t dared to hope for—the constant murmuration of Jedao’s mind gone from hers. Now that she had a container to pour his memories into. To discard them, like wine gone sour.
She’d never thought to have a suitable vessel available—who better than Jedao himself? Yet she’d also never thought that the vessel would prove itself unstable. Mikodez considered her a walking hazard so long as she was half-Jedao. Suddenly, unhappily, she appreciated his position. As much as she longed to be unblemished of mind again, was it as safe to pour herself out as she’d hoped?
1491625 blinked its acerbic opinion of that. “I’ll take you where you want to go,” it said. “I’ll even help you secure the thing. But if this goes wrong, Cheris, you’re going to spend several lifetimes setting it right.”
The phrasing was deliberate, needling. She resented it. At the same time, she couldn’t blame 1491625 for calling her to task. This wasn’t just her personal life at stake, as much as she had swaddled herself for two years in the illusion that she could disappear into the life of an ordinary, unremarkable citizen. Jedao had broken the hexarchate on the wheel of his obsessions in the past. She didn’t dare let him do it a second time, now that the world was slowly stitching itself back into equilibrium.
FOR A LONG time, all Jedao knew was hunger. It ebbed and flowed like a great tide. He floated in darkness. Sometimes it pierced him and made him ache with a longing he had no name for.
Gradually he returned to himself. Something was wrong with his eyes. Darkness cocooned him. On occasion he imagined a familiar touch on his face, along the tensed taut muscles of his shoulders. A lover’s touch. That couldn’t be right; he’d only once had a lover (victim), who’d committed suicide in front of him. Except he couldn’t remember the man’s name or face. He scrabbled after them until they fell away into oblivion.
Cousin, a voice said to him over and over until he acknowledged it. Cousin. Why have they brought you inside?
I don’t have any family, Jedao replied, also in the language of moths. He was confused. Was it the Revenant? But the Revenant had escaped, and he could hardly imagine that it would return for him, given the acrimonious history between them.
Of course you have family, the voice responded, comforting and puzzled. We are all family. I daresay I’ve never met one of us as small as you, excepting the babies, but I’m sure it isn’t your fault.
He spent some time untangling that statement. Part of the problem was that the voice was singing to him, and Jedao sang poorly, even in the language of moths. Part of it was that he had never been able to remember his mother, or his sire, or his sister, his brother and sister-in-law and nieces—all a matter of historical record—as anything but hypothetical smudges.
A memory stabbed him: a lunch he’d had with Hexarch Mikodez, during which they had the customary song-and-dance about cookies that Mikodez really, really wanted to share and Jedao really, really didn’t want to eat. Jedao had been about to capitulate when a man entered without warning.
At first Jedao thought it must be Zehun, even though his othersense told him otherwise. He couldn’t imagine anyone else having the temerity to interrupt one of the hexarch’s meetings unannounced.
It wasn’t Zehun, though, which he confirmed visually. Zehun had the frail thinness of age and went around in cardigans or shawls because they always felt cold. And Zehun had skin lighter than Mikodez’s, although not exactly light, and a cheerful uninhibited ugliness in contrast to Mikodez’s dazzling good looks. If Jedao hadn’t sworn off sex for the rest of his life, he would have been attracted, unwillingly, to the hexarch; awkward to say the least, if not outright lethal.
(Zehun had warned him bluntly against such an approach anyway. Something to do with the green onion that Mikodez had given Jedao, and which Jedao had left behind. Presumably a Shuos code of some sort, which no one had explained, and which Jedao declined to ask about lest he reveal his ignorance. In any case, Jedao was even more afraid of Zehun than of Mikodez.)
The man who’d entered resembled Mikodez to an uncanny degree, except he wore his hair in an effusion of braids tied up with rose-blue ribbons. A tightly laced translucent blue jacket showed off the beautiful definition of his torso and narrow hips; darker blue slacks displayed his coltish long legs. And his eyes blazed blue, and Jedao could have looked into them forever, falling into an ocean of unarticulated promises, except Mikodez stood and interposed himself between them, breaking Jedao’s eye contact with the stranger.
Jedao hadn’t paid close attention to the exchange that followed, elliptical as it was. He could think of any number of reasons why Mikodez wouldn’t want an Andan fucking around with enthrallment like it was a child’s game of kaleidoscope. What he realized instead was that the two men were related.
It had never occurred to Jedao that a Shuos hexarch might have a family. Instead he’d had some notion that they grew in the dark out of spores, like fungus, or generated spontaneously out of fouled water. But there he was: Mikodez, with this middle-aged man who was related to him, not just in appearance, but in their mannerisms, their accents. The way they gestured at each other. And a hollow yearning had woken in Jedao for something he was 400 years too late to partake in.
Now this moth called him cousin and expected him to accept it, as though he could be bribed with the facsimile of house and hearth and warmth.
Go away, he said to the moth, wretched for reasons he couldn’t articulate.