After a long time Reede came back into the room, his eyes red and swollen and his nose running, and Kedalion began to breathe again. Reede lowered himself onto the couch, moving as if every cell in his body hurt, and stared at the locked door. Kedalion studied the bookshelves with eyes that refused to read a title; he picked one at random and climbed up into a seat with it. He opened it, and found endless pages of hieroglyphic Sandhi characters, as completely incomprehensible to him as everything else had suddenly become.
He looked up, startled, as a chime sounded somewhere in the room. Reede gave a small, raw cry; staggered up from the couch and crossed the room to the laboratory door. The lock seals were green. He hit the access-plate, swearing with the pain of it, and it let him through into the next room.
Kedalion leaped out of the chair and followed him, as he realized what Reede could find, and do, in a well-stocked lab.
Reede was already at the nearest terminal, voice-querying desperately in some unintelligible language or code. His hands called up displays as if it were something he did in his sleep, moving almost by instinct. Locks unsealed on a series of stasis cubicles; the fields blinked off. He stumbled across the lab, began to peer frantically into one cubicle after another, oblivious to Kedalion’s presence. He laughed once, almost hysterically, as he pulled out a container no bigger than his hand. He clawed it open, lifting it to his mouth.
Kedalion swore under his breath. He lunged forward, jerking Reede’s arm down. Heavy, gunmetal-colored liquid spilled onto his hand. Reede spun around, faster than he could think, and caught him; Reede’s knee slammed into the side of his head, sent him reeling halfway across the room to crash into the metal-drawered base of a work table. Kedalion lay where he had fallen, tasting blood, seeing stars as the astrogation implants in the back of his skull struggled to reintegrate. Paralyzed by pain, he watched Reede gulp down the rest of the silver-gray liquid.
Reede flung the bottle away with trembling hands. Kedalion closed his eyes as Reede looked in his direction suddenly, and started toward him. He felt Reede’s hands take hold of his coveralls, jerking him forward through a haze of red, shaking him. “Look at me, you bastard!” Kedalion opened his eyes to Reede’s hate-filled stare. “If you ever try to do that to me again, I’ll kill you, you motherfucker. I’ll break your fucking neck.” He caught Kedalion’s jaw, jerked it sharply, painfully to one side. “You hear me—? I’ll kill you!” He let go. Kedalion fell back against the metal drawers.
Reede turned away from him, swaying suddenly, and staggered back across the open space to the storage shelves. He caught hold of the counter edge, sagged against |(. sank to his knees; hanging on, as if his life depended on it. He murmured words <n a language that sounded like Sandhi.
Kedalion stayed where he was, dazed and still in too much pain to move He watched Reede with uncomprehending eyes. If you. ever do that again … How many times could a man poison himself and die? Unless it wasn’t poison he’d been after. Not poison, but something he desperately needed … In a moment of sudden, sickening insight, Kedalion understood the meaning of everything he had witnessed here today, and more.
Across the room Reede hauled himself to his feet again, shaking his head. He sucked in a deep, ragged breath, looking around him as if he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. He looked down at his hands, one burn-marked, one empty; closed the empty one, opened it again, and swore softly. He got down on his knees, running his hands over the floor, searching for something. He gave a small cry as he found it, and picked it up. He kissed it, sitting on the floor. Bowing his head as he held it against him, he began to rock silently forward and back, like a mourner, his body shaken with hard, uncontrollable spasms.
Kedalion stared, as he realized that Reede was weeping. He watched, completely forgotten, as Reede mourned some incomprehensible loss. At last Reede climbed to his feet again, moving unsteadily past Kedalion to the incinerator chute. He stopped before it, opening his hand; stood looking down at whatever he held there, while tears ran silently down his face.
Kedalion turned, driven by compulsion and pity, pushing himself up until he could see what lay in Reede’s hand. What he saw made no sense at all to his eyes: a dark, unidentifiable lump, like a snapped-off piece of stick, circled by a ring of bright metal. A ring. Kedalion saw something flash in the light, the eerie brilliance of soliis. A ring … a finger, from a dark-skinned human hand. Kedalion slid back and down, choking on disgust. He had seen a ring like that before, a ring exactly like that; seen it every single day now for nearly a year. Reede wore it on his own thumb He was wearing it now…. Mundilfoere.
He turned back, watching again, hating himself but unable to stop, as Reede gently removed the ring from the severed thumb, his hands trembling so badly that he could barely manage to work it free. He kissed the bloody fragment of his dead wife again, and tossed it into the chute’s beam. It went up in flash of light, and was gone.
Reede reached up, caught the chain that held the solii pendant dangling againsi his chest, and snapped it. The pendant dropped into his branded palm; he looked at it, with the same kind of raw hatred that had been in his eyes when Kedalion had spilled his drugs.
In a fever haze of memory, Kedalion saw that pendant where it lay shimmering in the dust of a Razuma back street, saw it shining at the throats of a group of sudden strangers with his death written in their eyes … saw it at Mundilfoere’s throat. Mundilfoere, dressed like a man, unveiled, watching as Reede turned those death-filled eyes away from him… .
Reede’s hand closed over the pendant, his fist jerked with rage or pain as it began an arc toward the incinerator … stopped, before the fingers opened, and pulled it back. Slowly, clumsily, he put the pendant onto its chair again; the ring followed, clinking silverly as they met. He knotted the chain around his neck, dry-eyed now.
He lifted his head, and his gaze found Kedalion, still silently witnessing. He came back across the room, moving more steadily, his eyes like a desert. Kedalion tried to get his feet under him; couldn’t. Reede bent down beside him and touched his face, looking stupefied. Kedalion saw fresh blood, his own, on Reede’s fingertips as they came away again. Reede stared at the blood, almost incredulously, and wiped his hand on his coveralls. He turned away, dropping to his knees, sagging forward, as the fractured glass of his self-control fell apart under the pressure of Kedalion’s gaze. He covered his head with his arms. “Oh gods … no, no… .” The desolation of a man who had been utterly, unspeakably violated laid a blackness between the words as vast as the void between the stars.
Kedalion leaned forward, shaken; his hands made fists as he fought the urge to reach out. “Reede—” he whispered, and broke off, not knowing how to reach a man who had always been impossible to reach, even to touch … like quicksilver, shining and deadly. Not knowing how to catch a man who had always walked a frayed tightrope of sanity above a pit of oblivion, now that his line had been cut, and he was falling … “Reede,” Kedalion spoke his name again, the only word that entered his mind which did not seem as hopelessly inadequate as an obscenity; proving to the man gone fetal beside him on the floor that Reede Kullervo still existed, and was not utterly alone in the hands of his enemies. He repeated the word again, uncertainly.