“Which station?”
She told, then added, “It’s obvious. Ord’s running for the Core now.”
“He believes Alice,” Xo replied.
The sister watched him, saying nothing in a certain way.
Xo prompted her, asking, “Don’t you believe Alice?”
“That someone managed to make their way into this other universe? Perhaps I do, perhaps I don’t. Whatever’s true, our plans have always left room for that possibility.”
“Nuyens are thorough people,” said Xo.
She went for the bait, saying, “Absolutely,” with a prideful wide smile.
“So what about Ravleen?” He asked it with a careful voice, then added, “That same station might have spotted her, too.”
“Perhaps it did,” the sister allowed. “Twenty minutes later, perhaps.”
Ravleen had escaped in the chaos. She would still be wearing manacles, but not all of them, and given time and ample freedom, they were temporary constraints. And nobody could doubt what the Sanchex wanted.
Xo’s doubts lay closer than space. With the help of simple charm, he mentioned to his companion, “Twenty minutes is a long gap. It’s a shame, really, that Ravleen couldn’t have started her chase sooner.”
The sister nodded, smiling in a distracted fashion.
Using his most powerful talents, Xo reached inside her mind, trying to coax out the secrets, hiding in its bloody corners.
The smile vanished abruptly, and she set a powerful hand to his shoulder. “What do you think you know, brother?”
“With her talents, it should have taken Ravleen two moments to leave the Earth. Not twenty damned minutes.” He didn’t care about punishments or sanctions. “But if we disabled her with the implants set in her brain, then captured and interrogated her…”
The woman couldn’t imagine that she was anything but in control. She thought it was her own iron will that told her to admit, “It took us fifteen minutes to make our decision. And we haven’t regretted it for a greasy moment, brother.”
“Who killed the Earth?” he asked.
Calmly, with a dry, simple voice, she told him, “The Chamberlain, of course. And whoever didn’t notice Ravleen cutting one of her own hands into two hands, then hiding half of it. For eons, probably. And there were a few other miscalculations, too. But nothing you did, and don’t confuse yourself by dwelling on it.”
“I won’t,” Xo lied.
“Good,” she replied.
A little while later, using appropriate formality and the stiffest of smiles, Xo left the gathering and his Family, and moments after that, he abandoned Mars, too, using stolen talents to shp out into space, then dipping past the clean white face of the Earth on his way out of the solar system.
It was as beautiful in death as it ever was in life.
He thought.
And the Core was glorious, and hideous, and he steered straight for it while wiping every flavor of tear from every sort of eye.