Kavarion smiled cuttingly. Rhehan watched her retreating step by step, gun still trained on them. “You don’t approve,” Kavarion remarked.
Rhehan unmasked since there wasn’t any point still pretending to be one of her soldiers. “I’m a thief,” they said. “It’s all one to me.”
“You’re lying, but never mind. I’d better make this quick.” Kavarion smiled at Rhehan with genuine and worrying delight. “You’re the jaihanar we threw out, aren’t you? It figures that Kel Command would drag you out of the dustways instead of hiring some ji-Kel.”
“I’m ji-Kel now, General.”
“It’s a matter of degrees. It doesn’t take much to figure out what Kel Command could offer an exile.” She then offered the gun to Rhehan. “Hold that,” she said. “I’ll get the Incendiary Heart.”
“How do you know I won’t shoot you?” Rhehan demanded.
“Because right now I’m your best friend,” Kavarion said, “and you’re mine. If you shoot me, you’ll never find out why I’m doing this, and a good chunk of the galaxy is doomed.”
Frustrated by the sincerity they read in the set of her shoulders, Rhehan trained the gun on Kavarion’s back and admired her sangfroid. She showed no sign of fear at all.
Kavarion spoke as she pressed her hand against one of the plaques. “They probably told you I blew the research station up after I stole the Incendiary Heart, which is true.” The plaque lifted to reveal a safe. “Did they also mention that someone armed the damned thing before I was able to retrieve it?”
“They weren’t absolutely clear on that point.”
“Well, I suppose even a judge-errant—I assume they sent a judge-errant—can’t get information out of the dead. Anyway, it’s a time bomb, presumably to give its user a chance to escape the area of effect.”
Rhehan’s heart sank. There could only be one reason why Kavarion needed a jaihanar of her own. “It’s going to blow?”
“Unless you can disarm it. One of the few researchers with a sense of self-preservation was making an attempt to do so before he got killed by a piece of shrapnel. I have some video, as much of it as I could scrape before the whole place blew, but I don’t know if it’s enough.” Kavarion removed a box that shimmered a disturbing shade of red-gold-bronze.
The original mission was no good; that much was clear. “All right,” Rhehan said.
Kavarion played back a video of the researcher’s final moments. It looked like it had been recorded by someone involved in a firefight, from the shakiness of the image. Parts of the keycode were obscured by smoke, by flashing lights, by flying shrapnel.
Rhehan made several attempts, then shook their head. “There’s just not enough information, even for me, to reconstruct the sequence.”
Kavarion slumped, suddenly looking haggard.
“How do you know he was really trying to disarm it?” Rhehan said.
“Because he was my lover,” Kavarion said, “and he had asked me for sanctuary. He was the reason I knew exactly how destructive the Incendiary Heart was to begin with.”
Scientists shouldn’t be allowed near weapons design, Rhehan thought. “How long do we have?”
She told them. They blanched.
“Why did you make off with it in the first place?” Rhehan said. They couldn’t help but think that if she’d kept her damn contract, this whole mess could have been avoided in the first place.
“Because the contract-holder was trying to sell the Incendiary Heart to the highest bidder. And at the time I made off with it, the highest bidder looked like it was going to be one of the parties in an extremely messy civil war.” Kavarion scowled. “Not only did I suspect that they’d use it at the first opportunity, I had good reason to believe that they had terrible security—and I doubted anyone stealing it would have any scruples either. Unfortunately, when I swiped the wretched thing, some genius decided it would be better to set it off and deny it to everyone, never mind the casualties.”
Kavarion closed her fist over the Incendiary Heart. It looked like her fist was drenched in a gore of light. “Help me get it out of here, away from where it’ll kill billions.”
“What makes you so confident that I’m your ally, when Kel Command sent me after you?”
She sighed. “It’s true that I can’t offer a better reward than if you bring the accursed thing to them. On the other hand, even if you think I’m lying about the countdown, do you really trust Kel Command with a weapon this dangerous? They’d never let me hand it over to them for safekeeping anyway, not when I broke contract by taking it in the first place.”
“No,” Rhehan said after a moment. “You’re right. That’s not a solution either.”
Kavarion opened her hand and nodded companionably at Rhehan, as though they’d been comrades for years. “I need you to run away with this and get farther from centers of civilization. I can’t do this with a whole fucking Kel fleet. My every movement is being watched, and I’m afraid someone will get us into a fight and stall us in a bad place. But you—a ji-Kel thief, used to darting in and out of the dustways—your chances will be better than mine.”
Rhehan’s breath caught. “You’re already outnumbered,” they said. “Sooner or later, they’ll catch up to you—the Kel, if not everyone else who wants the weapon they think you have. You don’t even have a running start, docked here. They’ll incinerate you.”
“Well, yes,” Kavarion said. “We are Kel. We are the people of fire and ash. It comes with the territory. Are you willing to do this?”
Her equanimity disturbed Rhehan. Clearly, Liyeusse’s way of looking at the world had rubbed off on them more than they’d accounted for, these last eight years. “You’re gambling a lot on my reliability.”
“Am I?” The corners of Kavarion’s mouth tilted up in amusement. “You were one of the most promising Kel cadets that year, and you gave it up because you were concerned about the lives of mannequins who didn’t even know your name. I’d say I’m making a good choice.”
Kavarion pulled her gloves off one by one and held them out to Rhehan. “You are my agent,” she said. “Take the gloves, and take the Incendiary Heart with you. A great many lives depend on it.”
They knew what the gesture meant: You hold my honor. Shaken, they stared at her, stripped of chameleon games. Shiora was unlikely to forgive Rhehan for betraying her to ally with Kavarion. But Kavarion’s logic could not be denied.
“Take them,” Kavarion said tiredly. “And for love of fire and ash, don’t tell me where you’re going. I don’t want to know.”
Rhehan took the gloves and replaced the ones they had been wearing with them. I’m committed now, they thought. They brought their fist up to their chest in the Kel salute, and the general returned it.
THINGS WENT WRONG almost from the moment Rhehan returned to their ship. They’d refused an escort from Kavarion on the grounds that it would arouse Anaz’s suspicions. The general had assured them that no one would interfere with them on the way out, but the sudden blaring of alarms and the scrambling of crew to get to their assigned stations meant that Rhehan had to do a certain amount of dodging. At a guess, the Fortress-imposed cease-fire was no longer in effect. What had triggered hostilities, Rhehan didn’t know and didn’t particularly care. All that mattered was escaping with the Incendiary Heart.