Chapter Four
Edi-Veen
The council chamber was the oldest room in the Collective.
Edi-Veen had been in it twice before — once at the age of twelve, when he had been brought to receive the blessing of the Prophet Mothers at the commencement of his formal training, and once at nineteen, when he had been commended for distinguished service during a government security assessment that had come uncomfortably close to the Collective's mainland entrance.
Both times he had stood in this room with his head up and his hands quiet at his sides and felt the weight of it settle around him like water.
It felt heavier now.
The nine Prophet Mothers sat in two curved rows, the way they always sat for judgment — four in the back, five in the front, Sraaak alone at the center of the front row like the point of something sharp.
The chamber walls carved from the same ancient stone as the rest of the Collective, dark and close, glowed from bioluminescent panels that gave the light a quality Edi-Veen had always found difficult to describe.
Not warm.
Not cold.
Honest, maybe.
Light that showed things as they were.
He had removed his hood. That was tradition. You showed your face to the Prophet Mothers or you showed them disrespect, and whatever else this was, it was not going to be disrespect.
"Fraluma Edi-Veen." Sraaak's voice filled the chamber without effort, the way it always did — not loud, simply complete, the voice of a woman who had not needed to raise it in decades. "You were given an order from your Resident Mother. You did not follow it."
"That is correct, Prophet Mother."
"You will explain yourself."
He had been constructing this explanation since the moment he had turned away from the woman on the dock and walked back to the Chancellor's side with a lie already assembled and waiting.
He had known, even then, that the lie would not outlast the night.
The Prophet Mothers saw too clearly for that.
"I felt Fraluma blood in her," he said. "The moment I found her. Before I saw her face."
The chamber went very still.
It was not silence — the council was never entirely silent, built as it was into living rock beneath a living ocean, always breathing in small ways.
But the particular quality of attention in the room changed.
He felt it the way he felt most things, through the trained peripheral awareness that had been his primary tool for fifteen years — not looking directly at a thing but knowing exactly where it was.
"That is not possible." Prophet Mother Triama, from the second row, her voice clipped and certain.
She was the youngest of the nine by nearly two decades, which in this chamber meant she was still old enough to remember things Edi-Veen had only been taught.
"The woman is human. She carries human implants, human documentation and a human name.
She works for a human news organization on a human salary and has done so for years.
Our people have been watching her for —" She stopped.
"For how long?" Edi-Veen asked.
Sraaak's eyes moved to him with a precision that communicated very clearly that questions were not his function in this room.
He held her gaze anyway. "Prophet Mother. If your people have been watching her, then you already have information that bears on what I felt. I am asking you to consider it."
"You are asking," Sraaak said, "rather a great deal, for someone standing where you are standing."
"Yes." He didn't move. "I am."
Another stillness. A different quality this time — assessment rather than shock.
He was aware of Dremma, at the far left of the front row, who had not spoken yet and whose silence had a texture to it that he'd been tracking since he walked in.
She was watching him the way she watched everything, with that particular quality of attention that suggested she was seeing slightly more than what was visible.
"The prophecy," Triama said, "is clear. The Cremmilek will be Fraluma. This woman is not Fraluma."
"The prophecy says the Cremmilek will carry the mark of the Fraluma," Edi-Veen said. "I felt that mark. I cannot tell you what it means that she appears human. I can only tell you what I felt."
"What you felt," Sraaak said, "is not evidence."
"With respect — we have been tracking her for some time. That suggests someone believed there was reason to look. That is also not nothing." Prophet Mother Willow interjected into the discussion.
The silence that followed was longer. He used it to breathe, slowly, the way he'd been taught — keep the body calm and the mind follows, or at least has fewer excuses not to.
Dremma spoke for the first time. "I have examined her." Her voice was quiet, the way it always was, which meant everyone in the room heard it perfectly. "Her hands. Her wrists." A pause. "There is something in her that I have not encountered before."
"That tells us nothing," Triama said.
"It tells us to be careful," Dremma replied, with the mild firmness of someone who had been being careful for longer than Triama had been alive. "Which is what I am recommending we be."
“Quickly careful,” Willow added. “For nothing is a coincidence, things come together as they should.”
Sraaak looked at Willow and Dremma for a moment. Then she looked back at Edi-Veen, and he had the familiar experience of being assessed by someone who was very good at it.
"You have been one of the Chancellor's personal guard for four years," she said. "You are aware of what that position represents. The access it affords us. The intelligence it provides."
"I am."
"And you have compromised it."
"Yes."
"Because you felt something."
"Because I felt Fraluma blood in a human woman standing in the Chancellor's loading dock at midnight," he said. "Yes. I understand what I have cost us. I am prepared to answer for it. I am asking you to consider that what I felt may cost us more if we ignore it."
Sraaak was quiet for a long moment. Around her the other Prophet Mothers were still, watching, most of them giving nothing away. He had the impression of a vote being taken in some medium he couldn't observe directly.
"Your position with the Chancellor is ended," Sraaak said. "Another will be assigned in your place."
He expected this. "I understand."
"You will be assigned to the woman instead.
You will ensure her safety. You will shadow her movements and you will report anything relevant to this council.
You will not tell her about the Collective, about our ways, about the Cremmilek, or about what you believe you felt. " She paused. "Is that understood?"
"Understood."
"If this woman is what you believe she is, we will know in time. If she is not —" Sraaak let that sit for a moment, precise as a blade placement. "Then you will have given up a great deal for a feeling." That last word hit him like a stab.
As Sraaak was known for.
"Yes," Edi-Veen said. "I will have."
He kept his face still and his hands quiet and did not look at Dremma or Willow, who were the only ones in the room who seemed to understand that in time was not a luxury any of them actually had.
Kra-May was waiting in the passage outside the chamber, which was not a surprise. His mentor had a talent for being in the right place without appearing to have positioned himself there, a skill Edi-Veen had spent years trying to learn and suspected he would spend years more.
"Well," Kra-May said.
"I'm assigned to the woman."
"And your position with the Chancellor?"
"Gone."
Kra-May absorbed this without visible reaction, which was also not a surprise.
He was a large man, older than his role suggested — the Chancellor's primary guard was typically a young warrior's post, but Kra-May had held it through two administrations on the strength of being very good at it and very difficult to argue with.
His face, in the low light of the passage, was unreadable in the way that faces became after long practice at making them so.
"You're certain about her," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"The Prophet Mothers are not."
"Willow seemed curious, but urgently so.”
“Does not surprise me. The others?” he asked.
“Dremma is uncertain. That's different from being certain she isn't." Edi-Veen adjusted his cloak. "Sraaak has reasons of her own for hoping I'm wrong."
He hadn't said that in the chamber. He wasn't sure he should have said it now. But Kra-May had trained him, which meant Kra-May had also taught him to say the true thing in the true company, and this was the truest company he had.
"Be careful with that thought," Kra-May said. "It may be correct. It is also the kind of thought that makes people careless."
"I know."
"Keep her safe." He said it simply, without ceremony. "Whatever she is or isn't — keep her safe. The rest will sort itself."
Edi-Veen nodded. They stood in the passage for a moment in the way they sometimes stood — not needing to fill the space with words, which was its own kind of communication.
Then Kra-May turned and walked back toward the main corridor, and Edi-Veen turned toward the chamber where the woman was waiting, and the passage between the two of them stretched in both directions into the low light, equal and irreversible.
She was standing in the center of the room when he came up through the floor, which told him she had heard the tribunal — or heard enough of it to know that standing near walls would give her away — and had decided to look like she hadn't been listening.
He respected that.
She was also dressed, which meant Dremma had moved efficiently, and she was looking at him with an expression that was working very hard to be neutral and mostly succeeding.
Her eyes, he noted for the second time, were an unusual color — a dark amber that the pink light made almost gold — and they were doing the same thing her posture was doing, which was collecting information while appearing to give nothing away.
She was, he thought, very good at that.
She was also, up close and dry and not in immediate danger of dying of cold, considerably more arresting than the loading dock had allowed him to register. He immediately set aside the irrelevant observation, for it didn’t provide any purpose at the moment.
"I will take you home," he said.
As expected, she asked her questions — his name, whether he'd been going to kill her, whether he would tell her what had happened.
He answered what he could answer and was honest about the rest, which seemed to register with her in some way, though she didn't show it.
When he told her she'd been here sixteen hours she went very still for just a moment, the stillness of someone processing an unexpected fact.
He noticed that too.
He held out the cloak. She took it, and pulled it around her shoulders. When she met his gaze again, her expression gave away nothing. No anger, no fear, nor any trust.
"All right," she said after a beat. "Take me home."
He led her to the transport panel and said nothing else, because there was nothing else he was permitted to say, and because the things he wasn't permitted to say were considerable enough that he needed the silence to keep them contained.
Keep her safe, Kra-May had said.
He intended to.