She eased the muzzle of the gun into her mouth. It tasted the way metal should taste. She felt nothing. Not relief, not guilt, not triumph. Everything had gone more or less as she had planned. No one had risen to stop her, to tell her she was wrong, to say there was a better way of fighting the heptarchs. But then, the only one who had known about her rebellion was a heptarch himself. Years with the Kel, sharing the cup, and they had never figured it out.
Her finger tightened fractionally on the trigger. Surely the split second of heat and pain would be better than this roaring emptiness.
I am a coward, she thought, lowering the gun. What she had done was unforgivable. But to do it for no purpose was even worse. She couldn’t quit now.
THE SPLINTERS WERE starting to hurt worse and worse, but Cheris couldn’t stop. If she stopped she would lose all courage. Jedao had warned her about Kujen. At the very least she had to find out about him.
She closed her eyes this time, but it didn’t help.
Only later did she remember that Kujen had taken an interest in her mathematical ability.
CHERIS HADN’T ORIGINALLY thought anything much of the refit: perfectly routine, and the Nirai station the swarm had put in at had better amenities than most, not that she was taking advantage of them at the moment. She was in barracks procrastinating on her paperwork for the chief engineer by shuffling a deck of cards that was going to be worn transparent if she kept this up any longer. This particular deck, whose artwork featured anthropomorphic farm animals in the borders, had been a gift from her sister. Nidana had said she’d picked it out because of the geese.
Without any notification, the door whisked open. In a moment Cheris was on her feet, flattened against the wall away from her desk, pistol drawn.
The man who entered was slightly taller than Cheris was, and he paused in the doorway, making a perfect silhouette of himself, the kind of thing you didn’t want to do in front of a former assassin. He wore Nirai colors, black-and-silver, even if the layered brocades and filigree buttons spoke to expensive tastes, and didn’t look terribly practical, either. There was no indication of rank or position, just the silver voidmoth pin. Cheris didn’t relax. The Nirai frequently had odd senses of humor, but it wasn’t usual for them to play pranks on visiting generals who submitted all the proper forms and didn’t push too hard about speedy repairs.
“I’m sorry,” Cheris said, “but what is your authorization for being here?”
“Oh, put that thing down, General Jedao,” the Nirai said, smiling. The man was striking, with a dark, oval face and tousled hair and graceful hands; it was impossible not to appreciate his beauty. Cheris couldn’t help but notice that his tone wasn’t remotely deferential, however. “I’m Nirai Kujen.” He took a step forward.
In academy, one of Cheris’s instructors had said, rather despairingly, that having ninety-sixth percentile reflexes could be just as much of a liability for an assassin as an asset. Cheris hadn’t served as an assassin for years, but the habits of paranoia would not be denied.
She had allowed the Nirai to get too close, but there wasn’t much space in here and she didn’t have time to work through the options. She fired twice into his forehead, then cursed herself for losing her head and wasting a bullet. You’d think Kujen would have reacted when she brought up the pistol anyway, but no.
Kujen fell with an ungraceful thump. Cheris’s pulse was racing. She looked at the fallen body, the lurid splash of blood against the wall, the closing door. She had just committed high treason, even if she could claim that she had reacted to an intruder in barracks.
The bigger problem was that she couldn’t figure out why Nirai Kujen, who had presumably survived the past 500 years by being paranoid himself, had bothered showing up in person.
Four seconds later, the door swished open again. No warning this time, either.
Cheris retreated. Her world narrowed to the doorway.
A shadow fell across the threshold. “Let’s try this again, shall we?” A different man’s voice, deeper, but with the same accent. “Put that thing down. Suffice it to say that I can restore from backups more times than you have bullets, and someone’s going to notice the fuss. I do realize you can probably kill people with your teeth, but it won’t hurt you to hear me out. Besides, I would really rather not have to hop into your body next. No offense, General, but I have other uses for you.”
Fuck. Cheris had known Kujen was immortal. What she hadn’t known was how. She laid the gun down on the floor where Kujen could see it, then backed up. Her gloves felt as though they had turned to ice.
Kujen entered. Cheris saw how carefully he placed his feet, like a dancer, so he wouldn’t get anything on his shoes. This body was also beautiful, but thinner, with a triangular face. Cheris wondered who it had belonged to before Kujen had happened to him.
The door closed, trapping her with him.
“If this is because I tore up my moth’s engines doing that maneuver that last battle I was in,” Cheris said, because at this point bravado was all she had left, “this is overkill, don’t you think? The chief engineer could have just called.”
“Sit down and let’s cut the bullshit.”
Cheris looked at Kujen, then walked over to the desk and sat.
Kujen came over to the side of the desk. “It’s odd for a brigadier general to spend as much time as you do hacking into classified files,” he said. “Don’t you have other things to do, like shooting heretics?”
Cheris picked up her cards and began shuffling them, bringing her half-gloved hands into view. “Funny thing about this uniform,” she said, “but I’m still a Shuos. I like to keep my hand in.”
“You’re adorable,” Kujen said, “but that’s more bullshit. You can’t deny that you recognized my name. There aren’t many people in the heptarchate who can say that.”
She had blown the chance to play innocent rather spectacularly, at that. “How do I know this isn’t a joke?” she said.
When Cheris had first learned that one of the heptarchs was immortal, she had been skeptical. She could see good reasons for such a man to hide behind a false heptarch. But why weren’t the other heptarchs fighting over the technology, then?
Kujen reached over and plucked one of the cards out of the deck. Turned it around so they could both see it: Deuce of Gears.
Cheris was even more worried. Kujen shouldn’t have been able to spot the card.
“I hear you’re a gambler,” Kujen said. “Are you after immortality, too?”
“Maybe later,” Cheris said. The idea repelled her, especially now that she had some idea how it worked, but she couldn’t afford to reject it entirely. “I just want my heptarch’s position. I’m sorry to be such a boring ordinary Shuos, but that’s all there is to it.”
“Lovely story,” Kujen said, “but I’m not buying. I checked your background, General. If you wanted to backstab Khiaz, you should have stayed attached to her office. I mean, from all reports she was very fond of you.” His smile widened when he said that.
Cheris stiffened in spite of herself, even if her recent encounter with Shuos Khiaz was nobody’s secret. Time to change the topic. “All right, Nirai-zho,” she said without emphasizing the honorific, “since I’m apparently so confused about my own motives, you tell me what the hell it is I’m after.”
Kujen’s long fingers picked more cards out of the deck, slow and precise. He laid them in a circle, face-up. Ace through seven from the suit of Doors. “You want to bring down the whole damn calendar,” he said. “Took me a little while to see it. You’re very conscientious about researching all the heretics near your assignments. It looks a lot like duty, doesn’t it? But I think you’re fishing for allies, even if you haven’t found any that meet your criteria, whatever they are. You want to bring the whole damn heptarchate down.”