“We’ll have to act before Cheris can interfere further,” Kujen said. “It’s time for the winnowers.”
Fuck, Jedao thought in agony. He had been so careful, had checked all the formations with Hemiola. Yet here was Kujen, manifestly still alive and unaffected by the formations Jedao had set in motion. What had gone wrong?
He could buy a few more minutes and no more. After that, suicide was his only option. “Communications,” Jedao said, struggling to keep his heaviness of heart from his voice, “open a line to Commander Nihara Keru.” And then: “Weapons, have the winnower teams on standby.”
CHERIS DIDN’T BLACK out immediately, which was the one piece of good luck in this whole affair. Her entire body felt as though it had been smashed to pieces, and the smell of smoke mingled unpleasantly with burnt metal. It wouldn’t surprise her if she’d broken one or more ribs. None of that mattered, however, if she couldn’t get the new orders through to the necessary ground troops.
Amazingly, Raika hadn’t dropped the connection, even though she had to have other demands on her attention. “—still there? Ajewen Cheris?”
“I’m alive,” Cheris rasped, and winced at the shooting pains in her jaw, which only made them worse. 1491625, hovering lopsidedly in the air, was digging through the needlemoth’s smashed cockpit for the first aid kit. “I need these orders for”—she concentrated to bring up the units’ numbers despite the execrable pounding in her head—“the following companies implemented immediately.” She rapped out the orders, including painstaking formation diagrams, despite the fact that her vision was swimming. I have to stay conscious long enough—
Brief silence. “You’re asking Company 182-33 to swan-dive right into the middle of the hostiles. It’s a suicide run.”
“They’ll have to hold out as long as possible,” Cheris said, not disagreeing.
For a moment Cheris was afraid that Raika would hang up on her. Then Raika said, “The orders have been given. I’ll buy you what time I can. And I’ve got a team on the way to extract you.”
“Thank you,” Cheris said, and passed out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
JEDAO HAD JUST unwebbed to lunge for Dhanneth’s gun when the entire command center sheened white and silver. Splinters and pale streaking light arced through the walls. Alarms howled.
Kujen-Inhyeng yelped as Jedao pivoted and tackled him, slamming him to the floor. Jedao pinned him there. A strike with the blade of his hand caused Kujen’s head to snap back. The blow didn’t kill. He hadn’t meant it to.
He heard Talaw’s voice and Dhanneth’s, a commotion of panicked Kel. None of the words meant anything. All that mattered was holding Kujen in place so the formation attack, now active, could sever Kujen from his anchor and destroy him forever.
Then it happened. A sudden overbearing weight in his mind. Moths, stars, a surfeit of shadows. Jedao would have screamed if he’d been able to. He couldn’t, though; couldn’t stop his body from releasing Inhyeng’s.
His body stood. His mouth smiled. “Major Dhanneth,” his voice said. “Kneel.”
Dhanneth knelt directly before Jedao in a parody of the exchange of pleasure they’d once known.
“Dhanneth, no—” He knew he was speaking only in the arena of the mind, that only Kujen could hear him. Yet the words tore out of him anyway.
He couldn’t tell whether the ugly swollen triumph that thrilled through him was his or Kujen’s.
“Is this so different from the things you had him do for you in bed?” Kujen said, in a voice that only Jedao could hear.
“Don’t hurt him,” Jedao said. Pleas wouldn’t move Kujen. He tried anyway.
“He never wanted this, you know.”
“What do you mean?” Jedao asked, even though he knew the answer would hurt him.
“I programmed him to be loyal to you,” Kujen said. “I thought you might need a friend. Or a lover, as it turned out. But somewhere in a corner of his mind he remembers who he was, and what’s been done to him, and that he hates you.”
Dhanneth was still kneeling, his eyes hot with mingled fear and desire.
“No,” Jedao whispered.
The Revenant was roaring fit to slaughter stars. Imprisoned in his own body, Jedao heard it more clearly than ever before, and other things besides. The humming of the moons and planets in their orbits, and the litanies of the stars. The songweave of moths and more than moths: other creatures besides, whole ecologies that dwelled in gate-space and intersected with invariant space, where humans lived, only when monstrous engines like the threshold winnower invited them in. Two of the winnowers yet survived Inesser’s assaults: monstrosities crouched near them, waiting.
Kujen’s shadow-of-moths existed simultaneously in gate-space. And it was inside him. Kujen was inside him, manifesting in Jedao’s dreamspace. He appeared as the man he must have been once upon a lifetime. In that place dominated by the carcasses of stars, he rounded on Jedao.
Jedao’s heart split down the middle at how beautiful he was. Jedao had assumed that Inhyeng had been modded into Kujen’s old shape, but whatever the reason, the two men, while both extraordinary, could never have been mistaken for each other. Kujen—the real Kujen—had a dancer’s build, and curly brown hair framing a face of such subtle angles it was almost feminine, and eyes the color of amber, the one point of similarity with Inhyeng.
Everything came to Jedao in double vision. Equations he had once puzzled over revealed themselves to him in lattices of starfire clarity. People diminished to flicker-motes in the tapestry of years. Jedao could have lingered forever, entranced by the world as Kujen saw it; would have given anything to share it forever, except—
Kujen rose in a fury, despite the silver lances piercing him. “How did you do it?” he demanded, except Jedao knew better than to answer. “Submit to me,” he said, “and I may yet forgive a great many things. It’s nothing that can’t be repaired. Your predecessor, too, had a taste for treachery.” Nevertheless, he spoke rapidly; he had to be aware of how little time he had left.
“Fuck you,” Jedao said in the language of moths, even as he yearned toward that vision, the crystalline precision of a mind vaster and older than his.
Kujen heard him. “That could also be arranged,” he said with sweet malice. “If you want to beg for it, if you want to be made so you enjoy begging for it—hell, if you want me to beg for it, I’m flexible. There’s nothing I haven’t seen, and nothing I won’t do.”
The lances brightened; Kujen’s face twisted.
All I have to do is endure, Jedao thought, in agony himself. Was the pain a side-effect, or an echo, of whatever Kujen was feeling from the formation attack? A promising sign if so.
“You won’t have another chance. I can give you what no one else can give you. If you turn me down, if you let me die, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life—”