Another explosion. Liyeusse, whose hearing was unaffected, was wheezing into Rhehan’s ear. “Dedication... to... the... arts!” she said between breaths. “Dedication. You.”
Rhehan didn’t have time for Liyeusse’s quirky sense of humor. Just because they couldn’t tell a color wheel from a flywheel didn’t mean they didn’t appreciate market value.
They’d just rounded the corner to the relevant gallery and its delicious gear collages when Rhehan was alerted—too late—by the quickened rhythm of the woman’s footsteps. They inhaled too sharply, coughed at the smoke, and staggered when she caught them in a chokehold. “What—” Rhehan said, and then no words were possible anymore.
RHEHAN WOKE IN a chair, bound. They kept their eyes closed and tested the cords, hoping not to draw attention. The air had a familiar undertone of incense, which was very bad news, but perhaps they were only imagining it. Rhehan had last smelled this particular blend, with its odd metallic top notes, in the ancestral shrines of a childhood home they hadn’t returned to in eight years. They stilled their hands from twitching.
Otherwise, the temperature was warmer than they were accustomed to—Liyeusse liked to keep the ship cool—and a faint hissing suggested an air circulation system not kept in as good shape as it could be. Even more faintly, they heard the distinctive, just-out-of-tune humming of a ship’s drive. Too bad they lacked Liyeusse’s ability to identify the model by listening to the harmonics.
More importantly: how many people were there with them? They didn’t hear anything, but that didn’t mean—
“You might as well open your eyes, Kel Rhehan,” a cool female voice said in a language they had not heard for a long time, confirming Rhehan’s earlier suspicions. They had not fooled her.
Rhehan wondered whether their link to Liyeusse was still working, and if she was all right. “Liyeusse?” they subvocalized. No response. Their heart stuttered.
They opened their eyes: might as well assess the situation, since their captor knew they were awake.
“I don’t have the right to that name any longer,” Rhehan said. They hadn’t been part of the Kel people for eight years, as the Kel reckoned it. But their hands itched with the memory of the Kel gloves they no longer wore. With their hands exposed like this, they felt shamed and vulnerable in front of one of their people.
The woman before them was solidly built, dark, like the silhouette of a tree, and more somber in mien than the highly ornamented agent who had brought Rhehan in. She wore the black and red of the Kel judiciary. A cursory slip of veil obscured part of her face, its translucence doing little to hide her sharp features. The veil should have scared Rhehan more, as it indicated that the woman was a judge-errant, but her black Kel gloves hurt worse. Rhehan’s had been stripped from them and burned when the Kel cast them out.
“I’ve honored the terms of my exile,” Rhehan said desperately. What had they done to deserve the attention of a judge-errant? Granted that they were a thief, but they’d had little choice but to make a living with the skills they had. “What have you done with my partner?”
The judge-errant ignored the question. Nevertheless, the sudden tension around her eyes suggested she knew something. Rhehan had been watching for it. “I am Judge Kel Shiora, and I have been sent because the Kel have need of you,” she said.
“Of course,” Rhehan said, fighting to hide their bitterness. Eight years of silence and adapting to an un-Kel world, and the moment the Kel had need of them, they were supposed to comply.
Shiora regarded them without malice or opprobrium, or anything much resembling feeling. “There are many uses for a jaihanar.”
Jaihanar—what non-Kel called, in their various languages, a haptic chameleon. Someone who was not only so good at imitating patterns of movement that they could scam inattentive people, but even able to fool the machines whose security systems identified their owners’ characteristic movements. How you interacted with your gunnery system, or wandered about your apartment, or smiled at the lover you’d known for the last decade. It wasn’t magic—a jaihanar needed some minimum of data to work from—but the knack often seemed that way.
The Kel produced few jaihanar, and the special forces snapped up those that emerged from the Kel academies. Rhehan had been the most promising jaihanar in the last few generations, before disgracing themselves. The only reason they hadn’t been executed was that the Kel government had foreseen that they would someday be of use again.
“Tell me what you want, then,” Rhehan said. Anything to keep her talking so that eventually she might be willing to say what she’d done with Liyeusse.
“If I undo your bonds, will you hear me out?”
Getting out of confinement would also be good. Their leg had fallen asleep. “I won’t try anything,” Rhehan said. They knew better.
Ordinarily, Rhehan would have felt sorry for anyone who trusted a thief’s word so readily, except they knew the kind of training a judge-errant underwent. Shiora wasn’t the one in danger. They kept silent as she unlocked the restraints.
“I had to be sure,” Shiora said.
Rhehan shrugged. “Talk to me.”
“General Kavarion has gone rogue. We need someone to infiltrate her ship and retrieve a weapon she has stolen.”
“I’m sorry,” Rhehan said after a blank pause. “You just said that General Kavarion has gone rogue? Kavarion, the hero of Split Suns? Kavarion of the Five Splendors? My hearing must be going.”
Shiora gave them an unamused look. “Kel command sent her on contract to guard a weapons research facility,” she said. “Kavarion recently attacked the facility and made off with the research and a prototype. The prototype may be armed.”
“Surely you have any number of loyal Kel who’d be happy to go on this assignment?” Rhehan said. The Kel took betrayal personally. They knew this well.
“You are the nearest jaihanar in this region of the dustways.” Most people reserved the term dustways for particularly lawless segments of the spaceways, but the Kel used the term for anywhere that didn’t fall under the Kel sphere of influence.
“And,” Shiora added, “few of our jaihanar match your skill. You owe the Kel for your training, if nothing else. Besides, it’s not in your interest to live in a world where former Kel are hunted for theft of immensely powerful weapon prototypes.”
Rhehan had to admit she had a point.
“They named it the Incendiary Heart,” Shiora continued. “It initiates an inflationary expansion like the one at the universe’s birth.”
Rhehan swore. “Remote detonation?”
“There’s a timer. It’s up to you to get out of range before it goes off.”
“The radius of effect?”
“Thirty thousand light-years, give or take, in a directed cone. That’s the only thing that makes it possible to use without blowing up the person setting it off.”
Rhehan closed their eyes. That would fry a nontrivial percentage of the galaxy. “And you don’t know if it’s armed.”
“No. The general is running very fast—to what, we don’t know. But she has been attempting to hire mercenary jaihanar. We suspect she is looking for a way to control the device—which may buy us time.”
“I see.” Rhehan rubbed the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other, smile twisting at the judge-errant’s momentary look of revulsion at the touch of skin on skin. Which was why they’d done it, of course, petty as it was. “Can you offer me any insight into her goals?”