Chapter Two
Edi-Veen
Maelek was on door watch, which was either fortunate or the opposite, depending on what happened in the next five minutes.
He looked at Edi-Veen. He looked at the woman in Edi-Veen's arms. He opened his mouth.
"Get Dremma," Edi-Veen said.
"You were supposed to —"
"I know what I was supposed to do."
Maelek closed his mouth. Opened it again. "Sraaak is going to —"
"Maelek." He kept his voice level, because raising it would mean this had already become something he couldn't control, and he was not yet ready to concede that. "Get Dremma. Tell her it is urgent and private, in that order, and do not tell anyone else."
A beat. Then Maelek turned and went.
Edi-Veen carried her through the passage toward the upper rooms, angling her sideways through the narrow bend without slowing.
She hadn't stirred since the dock. Her breathing was shallow but even, and the blue had faded from her fingers on the walk in, which was something.
Her fake implant had shifted in the fall — the seam wrong, the edge slightly lifted.
He had noticed it on the container. He was noticing it again now, the specific wrongness of it, and he was doing what he had been doing since the dock: turning it over.
Looking at it from every angle. Arriving at the same place every time.
He settled her on the bed in the upper chamber — pink-lit, mineral-cold, the small shelf with the crystal catching the light in the corner — and stepped back and looked at her face and thought about a word he hadn't planned to say.
He waited.
Dremma arrived in less time than he expected. She had been awake.
She took in the room with a single pass of her eyes — the woman on the bed, the shifted implant, Edi-Veen standing at the door — and said nothing, which meant she was already thinking.
"Her fingers were blue when I brought her in," he said. "They've improved. Her breathing is stable. She was conscious on the dock until the cold and the shock caught up with her."
Dremma moved to the bed. She stood over the woman for a moment, looking down with that particular quality of attention that had nothing to do with sight. Then she reached out and lifted the woman's hand in both of hers.
Edi-Veen watched.
The silence stretched. Below them, the Collective breathed — the water through the rock, the slow telepathic murmur of sleeping minds. He tracked it the way he tracked all things in his periphery, and kept his focus on Dremma's face, and waited for it to tell him something.
It told him something.
Her expression shifted. A small thing — a change in the set of her jaw, a stillness that was different from her ordinary stillness. He had known her face since he was twelve years old. He did not have a name for what it was doing now.
She set the woman's hand down carefully, the way you set down something that might be fragile and might not be and you didn't want to be wrong about.
She looked at him.
"What did you feel on the dock?" she said.
"Fraluma blood."
"That is not possible."
"I know it isn't possible." He kept his voice level. "I felt it anyway."
Dremma turned back to the bed. She lifted the woman's other hand and ran her thumb slowly along the inside of the wrist, her eyes slightly unfocused in the way they went when she was reading something that didn't have words.
"Describe it," she said. "Precisely."
"Faint. Diluted." He chose his words with care, because this was Dremma, and imprecision with Dremma was worse than silence. "Not the full signature — not what I would feel from one of our own. Something between. Like —" He stopped.
"Like what?"
"Like a translation," he said. "The source material is ours. The language it's been rendered into isn't."
Dremma was quiet for a moment. She set the second hand down with the same care as the first. When she turned to look at him, her expression had resolved into something he recognized: a conclusion she hadn't wanted to reach and was going to reach anyway, because she was Dremma and that was what she did.
"And you told the Chancellor —"
"Nothing. An urchin. He was satisfied."
"For now," she said.
"For now," he agreed.
She moved toward him — not toward the door, toward him specifically — and stopped close enough that her voice could stay low and still reach him. "You understand what this means. If you are right."
"I understand what it means if I'm wrong," he said. "I've been standing here considering both."
"And?"
He held her gaze. "I'm not wrong."
Dremma looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes were tired in the way they had always been tired, which he had once thought meant she was exhausted and had long since understood meant she had been paying attention for a very long time without any particular expectation that the attention would be rewarded.
"I need to examine her properly," she said. "You'll wait below."
"I'll wait below."
"And Edi-Veen." She paused at the door, hand on the mechanism. "You were given a direct order from your Resident Mother."
"I know."
"So does Sraaak." She said it without apology, without softness. Simply true. "Be ready."
The floor panel opened. She descended. It closed above her, and the room above his head was quiet, and Edi-Veen stood in the passage below and let out a slow breath and began constructing the explanation he was going to need for the tribunal.
He heard her wake.
Not the sound of it — the rooms in the old section were too thick for sound.
He felt it the way he felt most things in the Collective, through the ambient awareness that ran like a current beneath the surface of conscious thought.
A mind going from absence to presence. Something alert and cautious and immediately, intently focused.
He thought: she looked up at me on the dock.
Most people, in that situation, didn't look up.
They looked away, or they looked down, or they held very still and hoped very hard and concentrated on being invisible.
She had looked up. She had looked directly at him, in the dark, in the cold, with no advantage and no options, and her eyes had been doing what they always appeared to be doing: collecting everything.
He thought about the word he had said.
He had not planned to say it. There had been no calculation, no decision, no moment of weighing the consequences and concluding they were acceptable.
It had simply come out of him the way true things sometimes came out, bypassing the careful architecture he had spent fifteen years constructing between feeling and expression.
He had looked down at her and felt what he felt and the word had been there in his mouth before he had decided to speak.
He did not know what to do with that. He was going to have to think about it considerably more than he currently had time to think about it.
He heard the floor panel above him and stepped back as Dremma descended.
She reached the bottom and stood in the passage and looked at him with an expression that was doing what his had been doing since the dock — carrying more than it was showing.
"Well," he said.
"She is asking for her clothes," Dremma said. "I've told her you will take her home."
"What did you find?"
Dremma was quiet for a moment. Long enough that he understood the answer was not a small one and she was deciding how to give it to him. "There is a biological signature in her," she said finally. "In her hands. Her wrists." A pause. "I have felt it before."
He waited.
"Thirty years ago." Her voice was precise and level, the voice she used when she had decided to say a true thing regardless of what the true thing cost. "In a warrior named Sevaaki.
Who broke the breeding program. Who left, and was recorded as lost, and whose file is now a single page with most of it blacked out. "
The passage was very quiet.
"Dremma —"
"I am not drawing a conclusion," she said. "I am telling you what I recognized. The conclusion is yours and the council's and I am not yet certain I am willing to have it."
He absorbed that. Stood with it for a moment the way he stood with all things that required more space than the immediate moment could give them. "The prophecy says —"
"I know what the prophecy says." Something moved through her expression that he didn't have a name for.
"I have also spent forty years watching the council interpret it, and I am not certain we have been interpreting it correctly.
" She turned toward the passage that led toward the chamber level.
"Get her home. Say nothing. Let me bring this to Sraaak before Sraaak comes to it herself, which she will, and soon. "
"Dremma."
She paused.
"You believe it," he said. "Don't you."
She looked at him over her shoulder for a moment. Her face was composed and tired and entirely itself.
"I believe," she said carefully, "that I held her hands and felt what I felt. And that it is not nothing." She turned away. "It is not nothing, Edi-Veen."
She moved down the passage and he heard her footsteps slow and stop, and then the lower door, and then the voices beginning — hers and Sraaak's, in the chamber below, the sharp one and the measured one, carrying through the old stone of the Collective the way everything carried down here, the way nothing that was said stayed only between the people who said it.
He listened to the shape of it. He did not try to make out words.
He had his own words to prepare.