He closed his eyes and turned his head to the side, as if that would make a difference.
The cabinets surrounded her and Jedao, forming the vertices of a hexagon. She ignited them one by one. They formed a perimeter of silver light. The gears began to grind against each other.
It wasn’t a carrion bomb. Cheris didn’t have any clue what a carrion bomb itself looked like, even though she had survived having one deployed against her, and that only because the original Jedao had died shielding her. The cabinets, according to Kujen’s notes, generated a field that acted like a weakened variant of the carrion bomb. It wouldn’t turn her or Jedao into pillars of corpse-glass; but it would enable her to divest herself of the glass she’d already ingested, once upon a massacre.
Even forewarned, the nausea struck Cheris as though her stomach had been perforated and was being turned inside out. She doubled over. She was accustomed to pain and the memory of pain, but she didn’t have anything to prove. There was something to be said for surrendering to the overwhelming tide of misery.
Then she began to vomit.
Cheris had not, as Kel cadets went, been particularly adventurous. She’d honored her curfew, shown up for classes, tutored other cadets in math—gotten used to being asked why she hadn’t applied to join the Nirai, gotten even more used to smiling and offering non-answers. She’d known not to discuss her Mwennin heritage.
She’d gotten drunk once or twice on leave, but never very drunk, and never badly enough to invite a hangover. Besides, every cadet knew where to obtain anti-intoxicants. Cheris had one distinct memory of steadying Ruo while he puked his guts out after—
No, wait, that had been Jedao, not her.
She couldn’t wait to purge herself of Jedao’s memories, except the process was revolting. And painful. She vomited up hot acidic liquid that solidified into glass like obsidian, noxious black.
“Cheris?” That was Jedao, although she could scarcely hear him through the static in her head as he was ripped out of her. “Cheris! What’s going on?”
Maybe I should have told him about carrion glass, she thought in between heaves. She was guessing that Kujen hadn’t. It might have given him notions. She opened her mouth to gasp out an explanation, only to be interrupted by another surge of bilious fluid.
An eternity later, she was done. She felt as though someone had scrubbed her skull out with a scouring pad and stir-fried her brains. For a long time it was difficult to breathe, or think, past the gut-wrenching cramps.
“Cheris!” Jedao’s eyes were wide. He strained against the shackles. “Do you need help?”
“No,” she said, and contradicted herself by almost falling over. Something was wrong with her center of mass—
Oh. Right. She’d almost forgotten how it had been when Jedao was first anchored to her, the discomfort of being infused with the physical responses of a body that was taller, that had faster reflexes, that was male.
Now all of that had been ripped away.
I can stand, Cheris told herself, although that was optimistic. Tottering, she stood and caught herself against a table. Fortunately, it was substantial enough to take her weight.
Jedao’s face had an unhealthy pallor. Admittedly, that might be illusory; she knew he didn’t have ordinary red blood like a human. He was staring in astonishment at the carrion glass she had vomited up.
Images flickered in the glass like ghosts. From time to time it made a subliminal whispering. If she tried to discern the words, it dwindled to a malicious hiss.
“What the hell is that?” Jedao demanded.
Cheris discovered that, while she didn’t have him inside her anymore, she remembered fragments. She could read the suppressed terror in his voice. But it was less visceral. Even the worst moments of Jedao’s life, which had once cut her on a daily basis, had dulled to scars. It was the difference between living a battle in the moment, with suppressive fire aimed straight at your position, and reading about one while curled up in your bunk, with a nice hot cup of tea and some snacks. While she’d known Kel who enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a fight, the suicide hawk flirtation with death, she’d never been one of them. She’d taken pride in doing her duty well; no less and no more.
“Those,” Cheris said, not too exhausted to be amused by his reaction, “are your memories. Which we’re going to install in you so that someone else doesn’t make off with them and make another you to terrorize the galaxy with.”
Jedao looked as though he wasn’t sure about her sanity. She couldn’t blame him. “If you had to, to eject them to get rid of them...”
“That’s right.” Cheris bared her teeth at him. “If you want them, I’ll feed them to you.”
Jedao sucked in his breath. “We can’t just lock them up somewhere safe?”
“Where would that be?” Cheris asked pointedly.
“No,” he said after a moment, “you’re right.”
She was still prepared to destroy him if necessary. He’d craved death so badly, after all the things he’d done, the people he’d killed, the worlds he’d shattered. That was one thing Cheris would never forget about him.
She’d miss him, in a way; but she also missed being herself.
“Do it,” Jedao said.
The carrion glass broke easily, in long lancing splinters. Jedao obediently opened his mouth, and she shoved the first piece in. He swallowed it whole; it distended his throat on the way down. Then she fed him the next piece, and the next.
At first she wasn’t sure it was working.
Then his eyes rolled back and he screamed.
“I can stop,” Cheris said when he had run out of breath. She was lying.
“Don’t stop,” Jedao said in scarcely a whisper. “Don’t stop until they’re all gone.”
He screamed for a long time. Cheris sang to drown out the noise, Mwennin songs she had learned at the settlement. It didn’t work. She figured out too late that his unnatural healing meant that he couldn’t scream himself hoarse.
At last all the glass was gone. Jedao lay limp, spent, breathing shallowly, like a doll with broken limbs. His eyes were shut, his mouth slack.
Cheris didn’t make the mistake of approaching him, tempted as she was to kiss him on the brow in one final benediction. She wasn’t sure he deserved it, but they had seen many things together. She had a hard time convincing herself that this was how everything would end.
{What have you done, Kujen?} he demanded, wild with a grief she didn’t understand. {There’s no one here!}
His face hadn’t moved. He’d spoken in her head.
Cheris realized that the complications had only begun.
JEDAO HAD A cavalier attitude toward physical pain, partly because his muddled existence had abounded in it. After getting shot in the head by multiple people and surviving, there was no point making a fuss about it anymore. No one was going to care. Dhanneth had pretended to, but that had been a lie, and Jedao had deserved it anyway. Kujen was dead at his hand, and as for Cheris, who accompanied him now—well. Cheris had killed him twice and it wouldn’t surprise him if she planned on doing it again.
The splinters hurt. He had expected them to. Except he had been prepared for physical pain rather than emotional puncture. He’d thought that receiving his memories would be like watching dramas, or reading a historian’s account, as though they belonged to someone else. Because he had a difficult time conceiving of General Shuos Jedao, Immolation Fox, arch-traitor as being him, even now.