eleven
The strangest thing about that afternoon’s encounter wasn’t Mira’s behavior—it was how Sulim wouldn’t leave her mind long into the evening, where they delicately avoided each other at dinner, until Mira was here, with her mother, attempting to go to bed.
“Your father sends his regards.” Joiya spoke after emerging from the bath, where she had loudly spoke on her communicator about this and that, while Mira changed into her sparse pajamas and attempted to write in the journal she kept on this journey.
What do I even say about today? That I kissed and felt up the future Lady Gardiah…
and enjoyed it? “Of course, he wants to know how you’re doing, so I told him you’d call tomorrow.”
That was the first thing to knock images of Sulim out of Mira’s head. Now, she was plagued with the vision of another blond. “You’re diabolical. I don’t want to call him.”
“Which is why I had to come up with a reason for you to call. He wants to talk to you about his plan for when we return to Garlahza.”
“That’s years away,” Mira said, as if she hadn’t just told Sulim that years might as well be weeks to a julah like her. “Ugh. Never mind. I don’t want to talk about Dad.”
Joiya pulled back the covers on her side of the bed and climbed in, her hair already dry and brushed for the evening.
Mira remained sitting up against the headboard, the covers neatly tucked around her waist as she watched a broadcast on a screen on the other wall.
The sound was muted. She preferred watching Federation news with Julah captions.
“Anything exciting?”
Joiya asked that to change the subject, surely, but the timing couldn’t be worse.
Because Mira wasn’t focused on the news broadcast that talked about a recent parliamentary vote.
She was thinking about a rainy barn where one of the prettiest women she had ever met silently begged her for another kiss.
Toying with, seducing, and gleaning pleasure from any woman who caught her fancy should have been another day in Mira’s long life, but something about Sulim… well, she was special. Mira just wasn’t sure how.
Get out of my head, thanks.
“No,” she eventually said.
Joiya opened the sorcerically protected book of scripture she carried in her knapsack.
The one she reads from every night. Sometimes, she hopped around, but as someone who had slept next to her mother every night for the past year, Mira realized that Joiya read one chapter of scripture a night, in order, over and over.
She’s not even that religious. Spiritual?
Insufferably so. But aside from her place in the Temple hierarchy, Joiya did not strike anyone as the type to lull herself to sleep with scripture.
Mira would rather chew on glass. Yet her brain neither focused on the broadcast nor on other thoughts in her head.
Because it wasn’t just about kissing Sulim and possibly upsetting the entire balance of the Gardiah family. It was what it said about Mira.
“Ma…” She braved bringing anything up with her own mother, who pretended not to be looking at her. “Do you think I’m a good person?”
The scripture book faltered in Joiya’s grasp, but she gracefully recovered. “Of course I do. Why would you ask that? Has something happened?”
I’m falling in deep again, Ma. Mira swallowed the air in her mouth. “I’ve killed people. I’m a murderer.”
A tepid sigh passed between them. Mira turned off the broadcast. Her mother lowered her book. “You didn’t do those things out of cruelty,” Joiya reminded her.
“Ma… Ba only knows about one of them.”
Although they conversed in Julah, Mira still felt strange referring to her father, the High Fucking Priest, as Ba, one of the first sounds any child in the universe made and had been decided, millions upon millions of years ago, to represent a father figure.
Mira was the only one who could ever call Nerilis Dunsman Ba, yet it was as strange to her as it would be to a random man at the Academy.
Yet calling my mother “Ma” is as natural as opening my mouth.
“Your father is concerned enough with your life,” Joiya said. “It’s best he doesn’t know every detail.”
“Tell me.” Mira pulled her communicator off the table next to the bed and saw a message from one of the only men to contact her. He talks to me more than my actual father. “Are there any other secrets you two keep from him? Or just that you two helped me bury another body?”
“Mira.” Joiya’s hushed whisper made it sound like somebody was listening through their communicators.
“I keep few secrets from your father, let alone alongside anyone else. But I will always keep your secrets. I don’t even need a blood oath for that. Now…”
She lightly smacked her daughter’s arm. “What is this about? What has you acting so melancholy on a rainy night?”
“Why haven’t we moved on yet? Why are we still here? Is it because of Hannu?”
Joiya’s face softened. “Ah, my heart… you figured it out. As bright as your father.”
“Actually…” Should Mira admit it? “Sulim told me how she and the others of her generation here know Hannu. She was the priestess in Yarensport when it was invaded by Second Tribe.” She nudged her mother. “Wasn’t she?”
Joiya’s eyes flickered, her brain debating what she should address first. Yes, I know that look. Anyone who had ever slept beside Joiya Lerenan for more than one night knew that look.
She stuck to the subject. “Yes. Hannu has a history with three of the people here.”
“But mostly Sulim.”
“When did you have this conversation with her? Today?”
Damnit. Mira preferred it if her mother didn’t linger on that part. “Yes. I think Lady Jacelah immediately went after her when we had our own conversation with her today.”
Joiya sighed again. “I was afraid of that. Poor thing.”
Which one? “She was very upset. I offered her counsel. She ended up telling me about what happened in Yarensport.” Should Mira continue? “Apparently, her lover before her husband was killed in the attack. There is bad blood between her and Hannu.”
“I know.”
Mira didn’t ask how. Never, ever ask my mother how she knows something.
Mira often swore that her mother was omniscient.
Either that, or the Void told her in the inner sanctum, where Joiya performed her duties as the Keeper.
In that room lies the thinnest veneer between the mortal world and the Void.
Mira had never advanced in hierarchy enough to see it for herself, but her mother spent more time there than anyone, and not just because she was Keeper.
She meditates in there. All the time. Mira didn’t get it.
The few times she earnestly attempted to communicate with the Void, all she heard was silence—and the infuriating pounding in her head.
“It was not Hannu’s idea to come along, my heart,” Joiya confessed.
“I told her she was coming with us. For a few years, she has skulked around the High Temple like a wraith wracked with guilt. She blames herself for much of the death that day. I will not share what she told me, exactly, in confidence since those are her words to share. But trust me, my heart,
she is repentant. Now, I knew we were coming to Arrah on our pilgrimage. We’re also going to Qahrain, eventually. But I had no idea we would be passing by here, or that one of the ghosts of that past now lives here. Of course, it was the perfect opportunity.
We have not moved on because Hannu has not made peace with the victims. And as long as the family allows us to stay here, we will be here until that happens. Besides…”
Mira waited.
“The Void wants us here. There is work to do here.”
This time, it was Mira’s sigh blasting across the bed. “Ma…”
“Listen to me, my heart.” Rarely did Joiya sound so serious while the two of them casually conversed at night.
This was a tone usually reserved for when fear gripped the soul, such as when Mira killed for the first time.
Self-defense… it was self-defense… “From the moment we stepped down on this planet, the Void has been whispering in the wind. I am meant to be here. I was meant to bring you and Hannu here. I do not go against the Void’s wishes.”
What could Mira say to that?
“I do not yet know the connection between you and this place.
I knew Hannu’s almost immediately, and that was enough for me to think on my feet.
Even Kema seems to have a connection to this land.
The strangest thing... julah do not usually concern themselves with Arrah outside of the occasional holiday."
“It’s a little too much like home in places.”
“It’s like Sah Zenlit, but without the julah amenities we are accustomed to.”
“I can see that.” Sah Zenlit was the pleasure moon of Yahzen, where sorcery and classic terraforming had created a paradise fit for every flavor of vice.
Mira’s parents had their own vacation home on Sah Zenlit, and there were times when she felt as if she grew up there as much as Lerenan or Dunsman Estates.
Also took many a girlfriend there when we wanted to be alone.
It was a classic use for the Privacy Planet, as it was sometimes called.
“You think I have something to do with this place? I’ve never been here before.”
She had been to Arrah on her mother’s previous travels, but not Gardiah Estate, specifically.
“I don’t quite yet know, my heart.”
Mira turned off the light next to her. There was a time I could do this with a snap of her fingers. She wondered if she still could, if she concentrated enough.
Now wasn’t the time to find out.
“Let’s get some sleep,” Joiya agreed. “But… Mira, dear…”
She was already lying down, the covers up to her chin. “What?”
“You’re a good person.”
It was said with such a mother’s loving candor that Mira couldn’t fall for it. Nor did she feel assuaged by the hand resting on her arm as she turned over and faced the rainy window.
How can that be so? Mira had killed. She had committed the grievous sin of sending people prematurely back to the Void. And now?
She was responsible for leading a married woman astray. A human. That one act of kissing Sulim would weigh more heavily upon her life than it ever would Mira’s.
I’m a piece of shit. Mira pulled the covers over her head. If I’m here for a reason, it’s to face temptation.
So far, she had done a terrible job of resisting.