some more. I hadn’t quite gotten it right.
Ian and I had spent the night before refining our technique with mixed drinks and then graduated to refining our technique with each other. I sighed and caressed the rumpled sheets with my fingers. “Clearly I haven’t spent enough time around the labor-castes. Lovely man.”
“Crude, coarse, distinctly uncivilized and likely possesses a severe testosterone imbalance.”
“Right. Lovely man.”
“He certainly possessed an inordinate amount of endurance.”
“Now you see the advantages of being eugenically bred for hard labor. Beats the hell out of a scholar-caste any day.”
“You come from scholar-caste stock and I notice you didn’t have any problem keeping up.”
I grinned. “Sure, but I’m hardly a normal example of the breed. Paul and I—”
The grin ran away and left me stranded. It all came crashing back.
Paul was dead.
That was the whole reason I’d slept with Ian. I’d wanted him, true enough, but mostly I’d wanted to forget, to lose myself in drunken sensation. If it hadn’t been Ian it would have been Campbell or, hell, just about anyone. I closed my eyes and lay there, listening to my heart hammering at the bars of my chest.
“Mallory?”
“Did he die quickly?” I whispered.
“Yes. I have the vid footage my camera recorded, but I don’t think you should see it.”
I swallowed thickly. “No. No, I don’t think so.” I closed my eyes for a minute, trying not to think about it.
I opened them again immediately. “Would you say the bodyguards were specifically aiming at Paul?”
“Yes, they were. Both of them. He was, without a doubt, the target of their initial response to the attack on Lorvan.”
“That’s...odd.” I studied the ceiling tiles.
“Yes it is.”
“I was the one threatening their boss’s life. Why wouldn’t they fire at me first?”
“The expression on the Sarcodinay who fired the killing shot indicates he either didn’t care he’d made a mistake or didn’t, in fact, make one.”
“Paul had been so frightened when they walked up. Not like him at all. Paul wasn’t scared of anything. We’d been through too much.”
“The fear was mutual.”
I frowned, chewing on the inside of my lip. “You’re right. Lorvan wasn’t happy to see Paul. Not happy at all. ‘You’re the only one from the school I can trust.’ He hadn’t included Paul in that statement. Why?”
“Heartbeat and capillary response would indicate that he more frightened of Paul than of you, although you were also a source of considerable anxiety. I wasn’t aware that Lorvan knew about your psychic abilities.” Her tone turned to accusation: I should have told her.
“I wasn’t aware either, Medusa. If he’d known back at the school, why didn’t he have me killed?” I sat up. “I’m not powerful. I never have been. Not much more than the equivalent of a vela-class psychic, just barely on the charts, but I can only affect humans and that’s one trick the Sarcodinay telepaths never mastered. Why didn’t I end up on a vivisectionist table?”
“His conversation indicated that he did know, and was forced to train you regardless. ‘Even though you made his skin crawl’.”
“Well, that’s one way to interpret what he said. It’s not necessarily what he meant. I’m not rushing to judgment.” I waited a beat. “Medusa, something happened when Lorvan died.”
“What do you mean?”
“I flashed back to a memory. The only problem is, it wasn’t my memory.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. I’m not Sarcodinay. I’ve certainly never had a private audience with the late Emperor before. They were talking about the discovery of Terra.”
“Could this have been a telepathic scan of someone’s thoughts?”
“I’m pretty sure it was a Sarcodinay. I can’t read Sarcodinay—” The words choked in my throat, because at that moment I remembered they were lies.
ggg
I feel the Sarcodinay’s fear, even through my own pain.
She is nervous, but the emotion does not show on her face. Still, she looks at me the way someone might look at a bug, a snake, a rat: something abhorrent, fascinating and awful. She is curious, even captivated, but at the root of it, she is frightened by this thing in front of her she does not understand.
The Sarcodinay woman speaks over me, to someone that I cannot see. “Are you quite sure she’s safe?”
“If you were human, I would say no, but I felt nothing when she lost control.” His voice is deep and rich and slightly bored.
Also, he is lying.
I can tell he is lying. He felt me pound against his mind as I did the others, but he is strong himself and experienced, and I am a wild thing flailing at shadows. I do not know why he lies, but I know enough to be grateful: I know that she will have me killed if she guesses what I can do.
I see the others. They are on the floor, the same as I am, but whereas I have broken bones and pain flaring through me from when they beat me, beat me again and again, they are shells. Empty. Dead. Human eyes do not go black when they die, like Sarcodinay eyes, but some vital spark fades. They stare at me, unseeing, yet still accusing. You did this, their eyes tell me.
My moan draws her attention, and the Sarcodinay woman says, “Do you have her on short-term memory blocks?”
“Of course. She’ll remember nothing of this.”
“Good. We may yet find her useful.”
ggg
I blinked, and I was back in my room in FirstCity.
“Are you all right? Your heartbeat just skyrocketed.”
“I remembered something.”
“Something either very pleasant or very horrible, I’d say.”
“Unpleasant, I think. Another flashback.”
“We’re alone, so you aren’t reading someone’s thoughts unless—you don’t think Ian Delgado’s in range—?”
“No, this memory is mine. Except, I don’t remember it. Rather, I didn’t remember it.” I rubbed my temples. “Someone’s been messing with my head.”
“Recently?”
“No. I don’t think—no. Not recently. After Campbell knocked me out, I remembered a conversation with one of my teachers, Vana-Goliard Duncan. I think he was talking about dampening my abilities.”
“That would be consistent with Lorvan’s question about blocks still being in place. But it leads us right back to why the Sarcodinay did not have killed you if they knew?”
“Sarcodinay can’t affect humans. There’s a fairly obvious advantage to having someone under your authority who can do what you can’t. Maybe they wanted me to bridge the gap. That might have seemed like a good idea when they thought they could control me.” My breath shuddered. “Medusa—I think I may have killed people. When I was a child. I remember the Sarcodinay testing me, deliberately provoking me. I think I—” I rubbed my caste-mark, “—killed them with my mind.”
“That is not consistent with Vela-class level psychic ability.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You’re talking about Omashai-class.”
“Shinu-class, at least.”
“Even the Sarcodinay only have a small minority of Shinu-class telepaths—”
“I know!” I inhaled, ragged and raw. “They shut it down. Whatever it was that I should have been able to do, Goliard shut it down. Which means Goliard was a telepath too. Someone who could do that. Maybe I was too dangerous.” I laughed. “Okay, remove the ‘maybe’. Lorvan must have known. But why kill Paul?”
“Unfortunately the only three people who can truly answer that question are deceased.”
“Was it because Lorvan was scared of everyone other than the person he’d decided could protect him or was it Paul specifically? I wonder if they’d run into each other recently?”
“It’s possible. I’ll look into it.”
“Thanks, Medusa.” I t
wisted my fingers around the sheets.
Paul. It was so hard to think about him, and so impossible to think about anything else. Logically, I knew there wasn’t enough alcohol or comfort sex in the whole galaxy to put off dealing with his memory forever. I could feel him, on the edge of my consciousness, waiting. I could hear his voice in my mind, sarcastic, whip-smart: Don’t you think it’s about time a smart girl like you figured out that you can’t run away from every problem in your life?
I whimpered and sank deeper into the bed.
ggg
“Hey, new kids!” Someone shouts. I look up and see that it is true. The front gates open, with the usual armed guards at the top to make sure no one has any bright ideas about escape. A hoversled with a dozen young kids floated through. One of them is older, but most of them are about my age.
The other children holler catcalls and jeers, taunts and threats: traditional greeting for the Kaimer School. I’d been through it myself a few months earlier. It seems like forever. Quite naturally, most of the new children are in tears.
I look over the group and see one who is not. He wants to cry, that is clear enough. I can feel his terror, stark and horrible. He doesn’t let it show. He looks out over the crowd of children blankly, showing no reaction. He seems younger than eight, though I’ve been told that is the standard start age. He is small, petite, with large deep liquid wells for eyes. For a fraction of a second his eyes met mine. Neither of us smile, but a kind of solemn recognition occurs. He isn’t crying, and I’m not taunting. Then he is passed me, on to the administrative center.
I wonder how long he will live.
ggg
We stand at regimental formation for roll call, as we do every time roll is called. The times change.