‘Shut up, Jean. Don’t you dare to speak my ship’s name,’ she says in a thin voice, without turning around. ‘And it’s not some expeditionary force from a civil war, you idiot. It’s the entire Sobornost. It’s your All-Defector, controlling all of them. It has come for the Kaminari jewel. And you have just served the prize on a platter.’
I feel hollow and fragile, as if I was made of glass. Somewhere, I can hear my other self from the Gallery, laughing. We are not that different.
Mieli turns to look at me.
‘Why couldn’t you die with her, you bastard!’
My head spins. The All-Defector. I was wondering what Joséphine’s backup plan was. I remember facing it in the glass cell of the Dilemma Prison. The thing that never cooperates and gets away with it. An anomaly forged in the crucible of endless Dilemma iterations, something the Archons never expected, not so much a gogol as a viral algorithm. It pretended to me, and I trusted it. In a guberniya, it would go through Sobornost minds like a scythe through wheat. And it wants the Kaminari jewel?
My mistake is so deep I can’t even see the bottom.
The Sobornost is going to wipe out Supra City. I took away their only advantage. I remember Sirr, blue and golden, freshly reborn on the Irem Plate. I remember kissing the sisters’ hands, how they smelled of henna and perfume. I betrayed them, again. I broke my promise.
Am I going to destroy everything I touch?
‘No, this not my fault, it must have done something to me, planted an idea about the Wei bound.’ I know it’s nonsense, but the words come out, and I can’t stop. ‘It planned everything, ever since we met in the Prison, I could see it in its eyes, like a thinking mirror, it knew I would try to free you.’
The words bounce and shatter in my head, and for the first time in my life I know what it is like to want for the silence and the black that only truedeath brings.
She slaps me. Even in the Realm, it stings. I lean on the control organ of the ship to keep upright. The knife gleams in her other hand, like a promise.
‘That’s a Realm-knife, Mieli,’ I whisper. ‘It will work even here. It will hurt me. Why don’t you just do it? I deserve it. Come on. It was my fault Perhonen died.’
She drops the knife. It bounces off the crystal of the round observation window and makes a tinkling sound.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It was mine.’
Mieli stares at the thief. He is pale and shaking. There is grief in his eyes, and a death wish. She has seen that look before, in the mirror.
‘I could have stopped all this,’ she says slowly. ‘If I had let you and the pellegrini go ahead.’
‘I doubt it,’ the thief says. ‘And you were right. We need to draw lines somewhere. The jewel was a fake, and I think All-D would have gotten out anyway. You did the only thing you could.’ He sighs. ‘Matjek is here. The child chen gogol from the desert. If we survive this, maybe you’d like to meet him.’
She closes her eyes. ‘Maybe. I only wish I could have been there, with her, in the end.’
The thief takes a faltering step forward. ‘This was the last thing I saw,’ he says. ‘Please don’t kill me yet. She sent you this.’
He kisses her forehead. She sees butterflies, burning, swirling in the form of a face, the ship’s face she only saw in the alinen. Tell her that I love her. Look after her. For me. Promise.
There is a memory of a kiss on her lips. It tastes of fire and ashes. And then there is only black.
It is the first time I see Mieli cry. I don’t dare to touch her. I sit with my hands in my lap.
The abyss in me is still hungry, but at least for a moment, I manage to hang on to its edge.
I summon the cat avatar of the ship and tell it to start decelerating. It’s going to take a while: I’ve engaged the ship’s Hawking drive, and we are already well out of Saturnian space. Then I qupt a self-destruct order to my zoku botnet. It may be too late to form a new war zoku, but it won’t hurt. Finally, I order the cat to start gathering all the sensory data and chatter it can from the ongoing battle around Saturn.
When I’m done, I realise that Mieli is quiet again.
‘We are on our way back,’ I say. ‘And once my signal gets there, the volition system should be coming back online, too. It will take time: I just hope it’s not too late.’ I pause. ‘I guess we both know what she would say about this.’ That we are both fools. And we need to fix the mistakes we have made.
Mieli nods and gets up.
‘Come on,’ I say and offer her my hand. ‘We can’t do anything more right now. I have a fast-time Realm, so we are not in a hurry. And I think we could both use a drink.’
The thief takes Mieli through a silver gate to a Realm that is a ship – a real ship, an ancient, sea-going vessel, with people in elaborate, heavy clothing. It is the first time she has been in an ocean-going vessel. Usually, planetary surfaces disturb her, but the fresh sea air clears her head a little, and the sound of the sea is soothing. She looks at the foamy line the ship draws in the dark surface of the sea. It is night, and the ship’s lights make blurry reflections in the dark water, mirroring the round yellow moon in the velvety sky.
They sit in deck chairs by the railing in the bow of the ship. A man in a white uniform brings them two glasses.
‘The best single malt in the Universe, or so I’m told,’ the thief says. ‘To your health.’ His hand is still shaking. He downs half of his drink with one gulp and closes his eyes. Mieli tastes hers carefully. At first, it’s just liquor with a smoky overtone, but as she holds it in her mouth, it blooms into something warm, soft and gentle, with a final endnote of a spice she does not recognise.
It mingles with the lingering taste of Perhonen’s last kiss.
They drink in silence for a while.
Only an echo of Mieli’s anger remains. She feels tired and helpless. She grits her teeth. The thief was right. Supra City may be fighting, but why should she care? She fought the zoku herself, in the past. Surely, it is just the tugging of the quantum chains of the zoku jewels, wrapped around her mind. She sips the strange liquor again.
Zinda didn’t have to tell me the truth. But she did. Everyone else has always lied to me.
‘So, is this who Jean le Flambeur is, now?’ she says aloud, just to brush away the thought. She pauses. ‘Did you really truekill someone to steal this ship?’
‘What? No! You have been listening to Barbicane, haven’t you? There may have been some property damage, but that’s all. It was he who did it, to protect his cover. He’s a callous bastard. I’ve never been very fond of killing, true or temporary. It’s not very elegant.’ He looks at Mieli curiously. ‘You have been busy.’
Mieli shrugs.
‘To be honest, I have been thinking of retiring,’ the thief says. ‘For real, this time. Getting you out was going to be my last job. But it sounds like we are going to have to think of something else now.’ He leans forward in his chair. ‘What about you? What have you been doing since you fed me to the Hunter?’
Between careful tastes of her drink, Mieli tells the thief her story. When she describes her encounter with the All-Defector and Joséphine’s sacrifice, the thief’s eyes widen.
‘Why would she do that? I know her pretty well, and I would have thought she considers you more expendable than even a low-level gogol of herself.’ He looks at Mieli. ‘But if she was more afraid of you being taken by All-D than of a copydeath—’ He squeezes the bridge of his nose.