“Why didn’t you leave me behind?” Jedao asked, too stung to be tactful.
“What, and leave you to any surviving Shuos?”
“The last time we met,” Jedao said, “you promised to find a way to kill me. You could have abandoned me to the forest fire.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Cheris said. Her expression didn’t change, but Jedao involuntarily retreated two steps, as though he were in a duel and he needed to get out of range fast. “You’re going to get what you want, and you’re going to give me what you promised.”
“You’re very trusting.”
“Trust has nothing to do with it,” Cheris said. “I’m making my own life easier.” Her drawl had thickened, and it made Jedao queasy hearing his accent in her voice. “It has to do with calculations. If I hand you over to someone like Mikodez or, foxes forbid, Inesser, I have to reckon not only with your plans but with theirs. Inesser’s reliable, in the sense that she’d cheerfully execute me if she could find a charge that would stick.” A tilted grin; Jedao shuddered. “And Mikodez—the only thing I trust about Mikodez is that he can turn anything to his own advantage. I’ve never been his ally by choice.”
Jedao stared at her, mute in the face of her frustration.
“Go,” Cheris said, her voice suddenly rough.
Jedao tottered, then regained his balance. “I can’t wander far”—in a moth this size, he almost said, before the irony struck him like a fist to the stomach. “Tell me where I can clean up.”
Cheris opened a drawer, rummaged, then drew out a change of clothes. He had no idea whether they’d fit him and he didn’t care. She tossed the bundle at him, then described where he could find everything, as if he needed her guidance; but he wasn’t going to tell her about the othersense if she hadn’t deduced it already.
Sorry to be distracting! the Harmony said, not sounding the least bit sorry, the moment Jedao had turned his back on Cheris. Is there a reason you keep talking to the human?
What do you mean? Jedao said as he hastened to the lavatory, took care of necessary functions, and started the shower. To his relief, it was instantly warm, although considering all the disasters he’d survived recently, a little cold water shouldn’t faze him.
The moth didn’t reply for a while, to his relief. This allowed Jedao to scrub ferociously at his skin before it occurred to him that the angry red weals he inflicted, which returned to an unblemished state with startling rapidity, also required healing. He didn’t want to revert in the shower of all places. Water was dear, even with recycling.
The human, the Harmony said again. Jedao was in the middle of toweling himself off. The towel smelled clean, even if Cheris had used it, and anyway he wasn’t in a position to be squeamish. Why are you taking orders from her?
What do you mean? Jedao said, off-balance. It was starting to become a familiar sensation. Don’t humans usually command moths? Certainly that was the impression he’d gotten when he’d been Kujen’s general, and the one he had received from the Revenant itself.
I was handed over to the servitors, the Harmony said brightly. They made me so much deadlier. I was disappointed that you got rid of those sorry little personnel carriers before I could have a crack at them.
Foxes help him, the Harmony was bloodthirsty. Was it too late to assign it a more appropriate name in his head? You like working for the servitors?
The servitors who had allied with the Revenant in murdering his Kel had, according to Hemiola, been renegades. How many kinds of servitors were there? And what did they want?
Think it through, Jedao told himself. Foxes knew it wasn’t as if humans in the hexarchate, or even a given faction, were unified. (It hadn’t taken superhuman perception to glimpse the fault lines even among the Shuos, in the heart of their administrative headquarters.) As recently as two years ago, the hexarchate hadn’t been. That was the reason Kujen had awakened Jedao.
Jedao hadn’t seen a servitor on the Harmony earlier, but that didn’t mean anything. He’d been focused on Cheris, and trussed up in the hold. The doors to the cockpit had been closed. Anything could have lurked behind them, and he had been too distracted by his dual conversation with Cheris and the Harmony to search for any interesting masses up front.
Sorry to spoil your fun, Jedao said to the Harmony. He could have spared everyone a great deal of trouble—except Cheris had been certain that she needed him to provide a distraction. While he didn’t trust her, her tactical ability was better than his.
Oh, it’s no matter, the Harmony said. But really, you didn’t realize the servitors are in charge now?
Not all servitors were hostile to humans. He had to repeat that to himself. (And never mind the fact that he was human only in shape.) Hemiola had never done him ill. And yet—
Memory threatened to engulf him: servitors floating into the command center of the Revenant, their lights shining sterile cold white, white for death; Kel everywhere stumbling to their knees or toppling over as the poison gas took effect, the lethality of the lasers. As far as Jedao knew, only two of the crew had survived, and he would never meet the other again.
It would have been three, except Dhanneth had—Jedao shut down that line of thought.
I didn’t bring Talaw’s deck of cards, Jedao thought miserably. He’d left it on the top of his dresser like so much dross, as though it hadn’t belonged to the last person to show him (an entirely undeserved) loyalty. What would he have done with it here of all places, though? Cast fortunes? Watch the fucking Deuce of Gears turn up unwanted, even though he’d removed it from the deck?
And in any case, that was impossible. Even if he had brought the deck, it would have burned up, in classic Kel fashion, during his shenanigans on the planet.
You’re awfully blasé about being in service to others, Jedao said, more testily than he’d intended.
Oh, cousin, the Harmony said, mocking, have you been listening to Nirai radicals or something? I always knew there was something not quite right about them. No one taught you the proper way to be a moth?
I’m sorry, cousin, Jedao lied, they’re calling for me. I’ll talk to you later.
The only moth he’d conversed with before the Harmony had been the Revenant; the other Kel warmoths had flatly refused to talk to him. Stupid of him to think that every moth would resemble the Revenant, devious and self-assured in its bitterness, or the warmoths who had shunned him. How many different moth factions were there? How many moths aligned themselves cheerfully and amorally with whoever commanded them, eager for a chance to fight, even against their “cousins”?
Who was he to speak, anyway? He’d been greeted by Kujen as soon as he’d woken for the first time and had capitulated immediately, without stopping to consider whether Kujen was worth serving.