Cheris rapped on the door. “I know you’re done in there,” she called out. “Unless you’re masturbating.”
Heat rushed to his cheeks. Hastily, Jedao pulled on the clothes she’d provided, which were baggy and comfortable and not in the least flattering. Given that he was half a head taller than Cheris, they weren’t tailored to her. Maybe she’d had them printed to his approximate measurements. Very approximate.
When he emerged, Cheris was idly chewing on one of the ration bars. Jedao was sure he turned green. How could she eat those things so casually? From a ration bar fort?
“Where are we going?” Jedao asked, to distract himself from the awful mingled smell of all the different flavors. Why couldn’t Cheris have an uncontrollable fondness for something less smelly, like rice crackers?
“I need some of Kujen’s equipment to do what you asked for,” Cheris said. “We’re on our way to retrieve it.”
Jedao was distracted by something other than the question of Kujen’s equipment, or Kujen’s research, or Kujen’s secret bases. Cheris’s voice had flexed minutely on Kujen’s name. “You miss him,” Jedao breathed. She missed him, and Jedao had killed him.
“Don’t be absurd,” Cheris said, a half-beat too late to be convincing. “I don’t know that he, of all people, is strictly dead.”
Jedao wasn’t interested in irrelevancies. He knew Kujen was gone; nothing else mattered. “Kujen made me his general,” Jedao said. “His pet. What the hell were the two of you to each other?”
“I’m not discussing this with—”
He needled her, even though a rational consideration of the situation suggested that antagonizing the one person who could help him, and who knew their destination, was a terrible idea. “You were lovers, weren’t you?” he said, his drawl thickening with disdain. “You were lovers and you turned on him and he made me instead.”
“That’s enough.” Cheris bit each word off as if she could pulp it between her teeth.
Jedao was afraid; but fear was never a reason to freeze up. What had older-Jedao and Kujen shared? What else was Cheris keeping from him? After all, she’d lied to him once already, about the one thing he remembered from his past life, the one person he’d remembered and cared about.
“You have no idea,” Cheris said, still icy, “what the stakes were. You don’t remember, because you can’t. You are going to shut up and never mention this again.”
Before she had finished the sentence, Jedao crouched and threw a punch.
She dodged, rushed past him even in the confined space. Jedao stumbled into the fort of ration bars and knocked them over. He landed poorly, banging his elbows and one knee. Would have vomited into the tempting terrible pile; dry-heaved instead.
Cheris’s shadow fell over him, flayed him like a knife made of mirror-glass. She was standing over him. She spoke now in a dry, conversational voice; it, too, cut him. “In case you were wondering,” she said, “you fucked Kujen during your first life, after the two of you agreed to betray the heptarchate. He was always beautiful, and you hadn’t had a lover or prostitute in two years, had never trusted one because you planned to turn coat. He touched you inside and out, and you begged and begged and begged.”
Jedao swallowed convulsively. Stared up into Cheris’s merciless cold eyes.
“I,” Cheris said, “remember every time you and Kujen fucked. Every time you lay there gasping in bed, you knew that Kujen was living in a body stolen from someone he’d picked for their wit, or their wisdom. Or their beauty, sometimes, although he could make his anchors beautiful if they fulfilled his other wormfucking criteria. Not difficult, when you’re the Nirai fucking hexarch and you can do whatever you please.”
Her eyes blazed with contempt. Jedao couldn’t move.
“And you,” she said, “you let him install you in pretty people who used to have lives of their own. Scientists and heretics, prisoners of war and experimental subjects who had outlived their usefulness. You lived in the skin of whatever person Kujen thought was attractive and convenient and you let Kujen fuck them by fucking you, and when he was sated and sent you back into the black cradle, those people were executed so they wouldn’t tell tales.”
At that moment, Jedao was convinced that the sheer force of her loathing would kill him, regeneration notwithstanding.
And what could he say? “I didn’t know”? They both knew he’d had no idea. It wasn’t an excuse.
Now, more than ever, it hammered home the importance of knowing what he’d done so he could take responsibility for it.
Cheris pivoted on her heel and disappeared into the cockpit. Jedao glimpsed orange lights, correlated them with the compact mass of a servitor. This must be the one that the Harmony had mentioned. He would rather think about it, and about tactical options and sight lines and weapons, than all the things that Cheris had revealed.
For the rest of the day, Cheris didn’t speak to him. Jedao could have conversed with the Harmony, but he kept silent. What could it offer him at this point, after all?
The moth had two bunks, both neatly made, identical in every way. He picked one at random and curled up uncomfortably under the blanket with its absurd cheerful quilted patterns of interlaced blue rectangles. For a long time he occupied himself tracing the patterns with his hand, up and down, back and forth.
That night, when Jedao eventually slept, he dreamt of Kujen kissing him long and deep, of the woodsmoke-apple-musk of Kujen’s perfume. In the dream he yielded; and after that everything dissolved into an inchoate tangle of wanted-unwanted desires. Later, when he started awake in the considerate darkness, he turned his face to the wall and wept.
CHERIS WAS TEMPTED to leave Jedao to stew in an uncomfortable silence. Instead, she dragged him awake the next day and forced him to eat a ration bar. He let her pick; she had the distinct impression that he found all the flavors equally disgusting.
As he took tiny, precise, and unenthusiastic bites, chewing with the maddening thoroughness of a cow, Cheris said, “How did you escape from the Citadel of Eyes, anyway?” The question had been bothering her.
A fleeting expression flashed over his face: gratitude that she was talking to him. “I bribed someone to help me get out,” Jedao said.
Cheris lifted an eyebrow. “No, really.”
“Not everyone in the Citadel of Eyes is loyal to Hexarch Mikodez.”
“I believe that,” Cheris said, “but what in the name of fire and ash do you have to offer one of Mikodez’s staff?”
The slight pause told her he was about to lie to her.
“Don’t bother,” Cheris said just as he opened his mouth. “If you’re not going to tell me, fine.”
Jedao drew a shuddering breath. “People find playing certain games with someone who has my face very entertaining.”
She went still. Was he implying—? “What kinds of games?” she asked, careful to keep her tone neutral.
“They felt sorry for me after,” he said. “They told me that the hexarch’s assistant wanted me destroyed, so they helped me get off the Citadel.”
“And?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Cheris dropped the subject—for now. Mikodez’s security problems weren’t under her purview. But it might be nice to extract the information from Jedao at a later point, just in case.