Thirty-Three #2
“Oh, that’s right,” Bastien Korham said. “I forgot you’re Jellit Kaul’s sister, aren’t you? So few of us had family taken up with us, it just doesn’t occur to me. I haven’t seen Jellit in some time. He was doing something mysterious with Lord Alkhor.”
“ Lord Alkhor?”
Bastien grimaced. “Please forget I said that. It’s a nickname I shouldn’t have gotten used to. We don’t call him that to his face. It’s just that… Well, it’s healthy to poke a little fun at people in power, isn’t it?”
“As long as they don’t hear you, I guess.”
“I like to think he’d take it in the right spirit.” But his gaze cut away, and she didn’t think he particularly believed what he was saying. “You likely haven’t heard about Tonner Freis either. I’m sorry to be the one, but Tonner passed some time ago.”
Jessyn flinched. “What happened to him?”
“He lost his temper with… um, with Alkhor. His guard misunderstood. It overreacted.”
“God.”
“There was a mess,” Korham said, and his voice had lost its brightness. “People are still angry about it. But I’m sure Alkhor has constraints and limitations that we don’t understand. He’s the channel between us and them, and he does what he can to keep us safe. I believe that.”
Between one breath and the next, Jessyn’s pleasure and wonder at the moiety’s new space fell away. The urgency of passing on her report was like someone digging a thumb into her back.
“Where would I find him? I need to talk to him about some things.”
“It would probably be better to wait until after the security orientation. Most of the day-to-day things are being done by other people now, so depending on the issue, he may not even be the one you’ll want to speak with.”
“No,” she said. “I knew him before. This is for him. I need to talk to him .”
A Rak-hund was curled in the archway to the garden.
Its knife-cruel legs were almost beautiful in repose.
The alien’s head rose as she came close.
She didn’t see any movement in its shell-like face, but she still had the sense that it was sniffing at her.
For a moment, she was back in the labs with Rickar Daumatin while a beast like this one stabbed Synnia to death.
Her heart went triple-time and she could taste adrenaline.
She almost turned back. But then it shuddered like a sigh and shifted back into its resting pose.
Jessyn clenched her jaw, balled her fists, and walked past.
The garden was spare and pretty. A single tree with a low metal fountain and two people sitting on benches. It could have been a mosaic from an old monastery except for the lushness of the sunset clouds.
Movement on her right caught her eye—two Soft Lothark lumbering together.
Wide mouths and small black eyes. She looked away.
She’d been traveling with Carryx soldiers for months at least. She didn’t know why these were upsetting her as much as they were except that they were in the context of other people. In the context of home.
The woman on the bench was a stranger. Pretty in an odd sort of way, with faintly golden skin and dark hair.
Jessyn couldn’t remember ever having seen her before, but she recognized Dafyd immediately.
The time she’d spent away had been rough on him.
His face had grown not older but more worn.
His eyes weren’t bloodshot, but they weren’t entirely clear either.
The clothes he wore were the same tunic and trousers that they’d been getting from the Carryx since they’d arrived, but something about how he wore them made them seem awkward and badly cut, like he’d lost weight and gained it at the same time.
He looked up, saw her, and his smile erased the worst of the world’s damage. The woman followed his gaze. Jessyn didn’t know her, but the widened eyes and open mouth looked like shock. Before Jessyn could ask, Dafyd was standing up, arms open. His embrace was carefully sexless.
“I knew you were getting in soon, but I didn’t know when exactly,” he said. “The powers of the world are a little approximate with me sometimes. You’d think I wasn’t the most important person to them.”
“How odd,” Jessyn said, sharing the joke. “I got the tour. You have moved the human moiety up in the world. This is all much better than it was when I left.”
“We paid for it,” Dafyd said. “One way or another, we pay for all of it.”
The new woman stood, hesitated, and put out her hand for Jessyn to shake. Her grip was solid, her hand was warm.
“This is Clae,” Dafyd said, taking his place on the bench again. “She worked with Else back before Else worked with Tonner. She’s joining the protein reconciliation team now that Tonner’s gone.”
“Good to meet you,” Jessyn said.
Clae’s eyes were bright with tears, but she forced a smile and nodded. “Same,” she said. “Very much the same.” Jessyn wondered what conversation she’d just interrupted. If Dafyd was in the process of breaking something off with this woman or delivering some particularly bad news to her…
“There were things I needed to talk about,” Jessyn said. “But if this is a bad moment, I could come back.”
“It’s fine. Sit. Make yourself comfortable. There are better rooms, but they don’t have fresh air like this.”
“It’s a hell of an office,” Jessyn said, taking part of the bench beside the new woman, who smiled a dimpled smile at her. She smelled vaguely of spice. Jessyn found herself liking her immediately.
“Feel free to come here whenever you wish,” Dafyd said.
“You sure your staff won’t mind?”
Dafyd looked to see what she was talking about, then chuckled. “The Soft Lothark? There’s a story behind that. They aren’t as bad as you’d expected. You look like you’ve spent some time in the sun.”
“My first time in the field,” she said. “I always wanted to go, but… I don’t know. It seemed too risky. I may have gotten more courageous in my old age.”
“I don’t remember you being much of a coward,” Dafyd said.
“You didn’t know me that well in the before times. I’ve changed a lot. I talked to your builder. Korham? He said that he hadn’t seen my brother around in a while. Is Jellit here?”
“He’s on assignment,” Dafyd said. “I can get messages to him sometimes, but no. He isn’t here.”
“Oh,” she said. The disappointment was sharper than she’d expected, and maybe it showed. The new woman—Clae—put a hand on her shoulder like she was offering comfort. The gesture should have felt uncomfortably intimate coming from a stranger, but it didn’t.
“I think maybe I should go,” Clae said. Her voice was familiar. Not the timbre of it, exactly, but something in the cadence.
“That’s fine,” Dafyd said. “We’ll compare notes later.”
Clae stood, nodded once to Jessyn, then walked away with her spine stiff and her hands at her sides like she was holding her composure through a supreme act of will. Jessyn waited until she was safely out of earshot. “That was weird, right? Is that just me?”
“Probably not,” Dafyd said. “Clae’s a complicated situation.”
“I don’t remember seeing her before I left.”
“No, she was isolated for a long time. And…”
“Girlfriend?”
“Oh. No,” Dafyd said. “No.”
“Ex?”
His smile this time was less bright, wearier. “Complicated. She’s on our side, though. She knows about my…” He shrugged.
“Plot for bloody and cosmic revenge?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That. I trust her. You can too.”
“How far has that project gone?”
“Well, the towers are all still standing and unburned, but I’ve learned more.”
“I have too,” Jessyn said, lowering her voice even though there was no one nearby.
“This deathless enemy that the Carryx are so wound up about? When I was on assignment, I came across a bunch of them. I sabotaged Carryx ships and assassinated a Sinen overseer to help them escape too. It’s a long story.
I’ll tell you the whole thing, but the important thing is I sent one of us off with them. ”
“You did what?”
“There was an archaeologist on the team named Garral P?r. He went with them. He’s teaching them about us and swapping languages.
The Carryx don’t know. They think he’s dead.
But that’s not the big thing. You know how everyone back home was always clear that DNA-based life came from someplace besides Anjiin?
Well, I found out where we came from. The deathless enemy? It’s us.”