“You should,” Jedao agreed, “but they’re trying to minimize the number of officers contaminated by close contact with me, and for a swarm this size you can make do with the moth’s staff.” There went that. “Anyway, I can’t work the monitors, but if you automate some flags, I can wake you if anything exciting happens. I also can’t read more than one thing at a time, but I can keep track of more graphics than a human could. And I don’t mind being an alarm clock.” He laughed at her dismayed expression. “Sorry, I wasn’t trying to shock you.”
Cheris didn’t want to sleep under his watch, and yet she couldn’t stay awake indefinitely. If she’d known that this would be the setup, she would have had serious second thoughts about waking Jedao up. “Ah – where am I to sleep?” she asked in a neutral voice.
“Go out the way we came, and it’s probably been set up for you already.”
He was right. The room looked more ordinary now, despite the mirrors. The room was also much larger than anything she’d ever slept in.
Cheris looked at the reflection. Jedao was smiling mockingly at her. She gritted her teeth and glared back at him.
“Good,” Jedao said, unfazed, and she wished immediately that she had been less obvious. “You’ll need that in the days to come.” She decided it was best not to answer.
Her possessions from the Burning Leaf were on a table. She checked: they hadn’t forgotten the raven luckstone. Then she looked through the other things, her uniforms and her civilian clothes, her weapons. She was especially glad to see the calendrical sword, although who knew if she’d have a chance to indulge in any dueling. And it wasn’t – she had looked it up earlier, while Jedao remained disarmingly silent – going to offer her any protection against revenants.
The Orientation Packet had assured her that she had nothing to fear from him while sleeping, but she didn’t believe it. Not to mention that it was awkward to have her commanding officer around continually.
“Sleep,” Jedao said. “We’ll see if there’s additional intelligence in the morning.”
She made herself undress as usual, hesitating only when she reached her gloves. Ordinarily she would have taken them off to sleep, but she didn’t like the thought of Jedao seeing her hands naked. In public, the Kel ungloved only for suicide missions. He had already seen her hands. She did not feel easy about that.
“I won’t be offended if you keep them on,” Jedao said. “I almost never took mine off, either.”
If only he hadn’t said anything, she might have overcome her reluctance and ungloved and turned out the lights. The image flashed in her head, her altered reflection in the mirror: Jedao wearing a Kel uniform, Jedao with his hands in the half-gloves that now meant betrayal. “Did you wear yours the day of the massacre?” Cheris said acerbically.
“Yes,” he said. “They showed me the videos.”
“You don’t remember?” she said incredulously.
“Not all of it, and not in order.”
“You haven’t shown any sign of guilt,” Cheris said, getting the words out like the beats of a drum. “Those were real people you killed. People who trusted you to lead them. I don’t understand why Kel Command preserved you instead of roasting you dead in the nearest sun. The Kel have never lacked for good generals.”
“Look at my record again,” Jedao said. He sounded grim, not boastful. “I assume you did that before unfreezing me.”
Cheris knew the high points. They had studied some of his battles in academy.
He told her anyway. “From the time I was a major onward, I never lost. I was thirty-two when I was promoted to brigadier general, and forty-five when I died. Frankly, they sent me to die, over and over. Because I was good enough to be useful, but I was Shuos so Kel Command didn’t care if I didn’t make it out of horrible crazed no-win situations if there was a Kel general they could spare instead. And you know what? I took every enemy they pointed me at and obliterated them.
“Kel Command didn’t salvage me because they cared about me, Cheris. The piece you’re missing, because it’s all classified, is that I haven’t lost any of the battles they’ve sent me to fight after they executed me, either. If they ever figure out how to extract what makes me good at my job without the part where I’m crazy, they’ll take it out and put it in someone else. It’s why they keep sending me out, to see if they’ve gotten it right yet. And then, when they have it after all, they’ll execute me for real.”
“How does any of that excuse what you did?” Cheris demanded.
“It doesn’t,” he said. He was polite, but not apologetic. The fact that his voice came so close to unconcern made her back prickle. “I could pretend guilt, but those people are centuries dead. It wouldn’t help them. The only thing left for me to do now is to serve the system they died serving, that I was sworn to serve myself. It’s not amends, but it’s what I have left.”
He was almost convincing. Too bad she didn’t know what his game was. She padded over to the bed and tucked herself in. He didn’t say anything further, but it was impossible not to be aware of his presence, of the candle eyes in the darkness.
Eventually sleep came. She dreamt of a forest full of foxes with brilliant yellow eyes. Every time she took a step, the nearest fox was revealed as a paper cutout and burned up, leaving nothing but a dazzle of smoke and sparks. When she woke, she was half-convinced that her shadow would be consumed by fire. But there it was, nine-eyed and imperturbable.
Cheris was hungry, but the grid reminded her that today was a remembrance: the Day of Serpent Fire. Someone had delivered the meditation focus while she slept, a green candle in the shape of a snake slit open, the elongated right lung pulled out and slit crosswise. In the hexarchate’s settlements, the Vidona ritually tortured criminals or heretics on remembrance days, although voidmoths were exempt from this practice. Cheris didn’t like the remembrances. Most people didn’t. However, consensus mechanics meant the high calendar’s exotic technologies would only work if everyone observed the remembrances and adhered to the social order that the Rahal had designed.
“I don’t recognize this one,” Jedao said in an unreadable voice as she lit the candle. “Who were the heretics this time? Were they burned to death?”
“They called themselves the Serpentines,” she said, “which is what you might expect. They had some sort of religious heresy involving a belief in reincarnation.”
“Interesting,” he said, still unreadable. “Well, I won’t interrupt your observance, then.”
He didn’t say anything about observing the remembrance himself. Cheris wondered if a ghost’s observances even had any effect on consensus mechanics. Still, the fact that he didn’t seem to care for remembrances made her like him better in spite of herself.
After the required thirty-nine minutes of meditation, Cheris did her morning exercises. She began with stretches, then a series of forms progressing in difficulty. Her body didn’t want to obey her. More than once she had to recover from the conviction that her legs should be longer, her balance higher. Regretfully, she decided not to attempt the sword forms.
“They say you were excellent at hand-to-hand and firearms,” Cheris said finally, feeling she ought to speak to Jedao, especially after their prickly exchange last night. After all, it was technically her fault that they were working together.
“You have to be in order to keep up with the Kel,” Jedao said, conciliatory in turn. “There’s a chance you inherited what I knew. Whether you do anything with it is up to you, but I imagine it’s work readjusting everything when it’s configured for the wrong body.”