Chapter 31
THE POD FIRES THROUGH THE Loop tunnel in a vacuum-induced calm. I sit, hunched forward in the cool fluorescence. Staring at the vial of clear liquid, smoky black tendrils drifting through it, in my hand. Atti can’t see it. No cams in here.
“Azure? You there?”
“Yeah.” I roll the vial between my fingers. “Just thinking.”
“About how confident you are in this whole plan, right?” I don’t say anything. “Right?”
“Sure. Listen, I’m going to tap off for the trip, I think. About a half hour or so.”
“Bored of me already?”
“I wouldn’t say bored.”
“Fine,” she huffs. “Anything you want me to do?”
“Just monitor the chatter.” I’m increasingly sure the Dupe is off script and hasn’t told the Keres what’s going on, but better to be sure.
“Yeah. Okay.”
I tap the q-com in my ear, and let the soft hum of the pod’s progress be the only sound for a while. Just watching those dark wisps float.
Then I unseal the nostrum, and down it.
I replace the cap carefully and slip the vial back in my pocket.
Sit there and wait amidst the hush. This is the only type of nostrum I’ve ever taken.
“Deep,” it’s called. Not a popular one; the regulars at Sanctum wouldn’t have even heard of it.
Verity had to go through three different suppliers just to find someone who would make it, when I finally told her what I wanted.
I know it’s starting to take effect because that period after Oceanus, after I’d just been relocated, is the first thing I always think about.
I was aware of Sanctum, of course. Everyone was.
But I’d never been there, never really thought about going.
Just happenstance, that I was chasing down information on a lifer there, less than six months after I’d started back.
Everything leading up to that had felt so…
flat. Not bad. Bad would have been okay.
Bad would have made sense. I’d been friends with Landry and I never shed a tear for him.
Not for him, and not for the tens of thousands of other innocent people who died because I didn’t do my job well enough.
At first I thought it was shock, after they told me.
And then I thought it was some sort of dissociation, like my brain couldn’t get past the denial stage of grief.
And then, eventually, I just had to accept that I didn’t feel any especially profound sadness over it.
It was after that realisation that I went back to work.
Before the bombing, I’d never enjoyed what I was doing, but it was legal and I had the skills for it and it kept me off Basic.
If it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else.
And the lifers were all greedy and knew, they knew, what they were bringing down on their heads.
They signed the warrants for their own executions, every time.
Still, I’d always felt … unpleasant, after. At least a little.
So Oceanus had clearly made me harder, or colder, or had completely broken something in me, depending on how you looked at it.
I was satisfying more contracts than ever—had to, given my debt to the Keres—but I never once had that old reaction to a job.
And I noticed. Slowly. Like an itch in the back of my mind that I couldn’t scratch.
I knew I wasn’t quite right, any more, and it didn’t bother me, but I wanted it to bother me.
Which is why that night, when Verity told me she could make me feel anything, I made the joke.
Off-handed and entirely meant. I wanted something to make me feel everything.
Not happiness or sadness or libido in a bottle like she usually sold, but a way of intensifying my emotions. Tapping into them. All of them.
And eventually, she gave me Deep.
Along with the memories, the nostrum manages to kick in with the worry that it won’t be the same, this time.
That its effect will be diminished because I used it too many times back then, or that the years since will have changed something in me.
But then, like always, I realise that the worry means it is working.
Unfamiliar uncertainties flood me, and I suddenly feel wretchedly sad.
Sad that I lost my friend, the only real one I’d made since joining the Keres.
Hollow that I will not see him again, ever; that he is gone and I cannot laugh with him again and that nothing I can do will ever bring him back.
Furious that I know, deep down, it wasn’t the assholes at Talios, and that someone else killed him and all those other people, and I cannot find out who or why or whether it was even really my fault.
I feel guilty about Jasa, too. It’s not exactly grief—I didn’t know her well enough for that—but definitely regret that I couldn’t do my job well enough to save her.
Sadness, too. She was different from most people I’ve met.
Unafraid of me, for a start. And the things she’d achieved were remarkable, even if the consequences of them were mostly along the lines of “screw up the entire world.” I didn’t get the impression that part was through malice, though.
If anything, she sort of seemed to regret it all.
I never really bought her explanation for why she didn’t take the drug she invented, the one that ultimately left her on the top of Ten-O-Ten’s first Proscription list. But it did feel like it was a choice.
It felt like, maybe, it was her way of acknowledging just how terrible a thing it was that she’d created.
I wish I’d pressed her on it. Wish I’d understood her better.
Then melancholy twists to anger as I keep thinking about her. If the Keres really made a healthy, high-functioning Dupe based on me, then she had to have been involved. And she knew exactly what was after us. She was playing some sort of game with them, and I was a damned pawn in it.
Screw the Keres, too. Screw them for copying me like that. It’s a violation. Feels stupid to be so furious at a corp for being a corp, and I’m not dumb enough to ever have imagined they had attributes like loyalty or honour, but…damn.
Still. I worked for them. I chose them. Jasa died, but it could have so easily been me doing the killing. I always tell myself the people I put an end to deserve it. Did Jasa really deserve it?
Doubt. Rage. Horror. Despondency. The sense of being completely adrift.
I feel everything and it aches in my chest, and it is wonderful.
Ten minutes, is all it lasts for. Ten minutes of humanity. Ten minutes of genuinely feeling like I know I’m supposed to feel, like what everyone else says they feel. Ten minutes of shame and anger and sorrow and confusion and real connection with the rest of the world.
And then it wears off. Fades, an almost physical sensation. The lack of caring returns. I am, once again, completely fine.
And I wipe a few tears from my eyes, and take a breath, and tap the q-com back on.