Юн Ли - Revenant Gun

“It got away,” Inesser said. “We’re all on high alert, but none of the listening posts have reported spotting anything like it.”

Wonderful. Cheris finally registered that Brezan was wearing a pendant with a rose carved into some blue stone with a pair of silver duck-charms dangling from it. She recognized the symbolism of the ducks—mating for life—immediately. “Brezan,” she said, less tactful than she might otherwise have been under the influence of her own medications, “are you engaged ?”

The Brezan she had once known would have flushed. Today, he merely held her gaze and said, “It’s a political arrangement. Tell you about it later.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Cheris said, meaning it. She expected interrogating the other Jedao to be grueling. It was nice to have something domestic and gossipy and (if she was honest with herself) reminiscent of Andan romance/intrigue dramas to look forward to afterward. Then she tipped her chin up and nodded at Inesser. “Make the arrangements.”

WHEN JEDAO WOKE, he had no sense of how much time had passed. Someone had disabled his augment. He sat up and looked around. Someone had placed him in a cell barren of features. No sign of Talaw. “Commander Talaw!” he cried. His captors did not respond, despite repeated shouts. A transparent barrier separated him from the entrance. Even at full strength he wouldn’t have been able to batter it down.

He had faint memories of unfamiliar voices, needles, thrashing about until someone figured out how to knock him out. What had they done to him while he was unconscious? An inspection revealed no obvious injuries, and he supposed that once he surrendered they could stash him wherever they pleased.

They had provided food. He didn’t eat it. But he was extremely weak, and at last sleep overcame him again.

The next time he woke, he was hooked up to a medical unit. It resembled the ones he had seen on the Revenant . He felt less weak, and not a little resentful because of it. Either the distracting nausea was a side-effect of the poison after all, or of learning to fly, or something to do with the medical unit. Possibly all three.

A woman awaited him, flanked by two servitors. Jedao’s heart went cold at the sight of the latter. She sat at a table on the other side of the transparent barrier. He recognized her face immediately: the assassin. Cheris.

“What do you call yourself?” she asked.

“Kujen named me Jedao,” he said. “I don’t know what I am anymore.” He had a hard time looking her in the eyes.

“About Kujen,” Cheris said. “I am under the impression that you were trying to kill him.”

“Yes,” Jedao said. There was no point hiding it. He explained about the formations and his use of the infantry. “I wasn’t sure it was going to work. For the longest time it didn’t. I was—” He averted his gaze again. “I was ready to shoot myself, if it came to that, to buy time. But if Kujen had carried through with the threshold winnowers, it would probably have reestablished the high calendar anyway.”

“That was me,” Cheris said. “You messed up the formation just enough to misalign it. I had to contact some Kel ground troops to intervene.” She fished out a slate, scribbled on it, then held it up so he could read the notation. “ That’s what it should have been.”

“Oh, fuck me,” Jedao said once he’d determined where he’d gone wrong. “A sign error, really ?”

“Tell me about it,” Cheris said wryly. “I used to tutor math in Kel Academy. You’re far from the first to do that. There was this one instructor we had to watch like, pardon the expression, hawks or else he’d mess up the signs every time he computed a determinant. To say nothing of the arithmetic errors doing column reductions.”

Jedao tried to remember math class and drew a blank.

“Something’s the matter, isn’t it,” Cheris said. Her voice was soft, calming. He knew it was deliberate, a manipulation like all of Kujen’s, but he was beyond caring. “Tell me.”

“I don’t remember,” he said. “I mean that literally. Kujen claimed that you had my memories. Is that true?”

Cheris’s eyes darkened, as though he’d just explained something important to her. “Then you must have the rest.”

“He said something like that.”

“So you’re what’s left over,” she said. “It must have been difficult.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jedao said. He hesitated. “I did have one question that maybe you could answer—” It was a selfish question, but he suspected this would be his last opportunity for selfishness for a long time.

“I’ll answer if I can,” Cheris said.

“Did you... did we know someone named Vestenya Ruo? I can’t remember what became of him.”

Cheris considered this for a moment. “I believe he died young,” she said. “I don’t know much beyond that.”

“Oh,” Jedao said faintly. For some reason it was worse hearing it from someone who knew, even if he’d realized intellectually that Ruo had died centuries ago. He tried to imagine it: an ambush, an accident, something else? But he couldn’t envision his friend lying cold and still, or with a hole in the side of his head like—

Stop.

“I need to ask you about what happened to Nirai Kujen,” Cheris said after she’d given him time to process that.

Again that calm voice. Jedao was starting to be grateful for it. He recounted everything, although it came out in a jumble, and she frequently had to prompt him to resume speaking when he stopped and stared at the wall, transfixed by memories he didn’t know how to escape: the play of light on Kujen’s earrings, the Vidona’s knife, the look of hatred in Dhanneth’s eyes.

After Cheris had satisfied her curiosity on that topic, Jedao ventured another question. “The Kel,” he said. “How are they?”

Cheris regarded him coolly. “There was a complicated negotiation whereby Protector-General Inesser accepted their surrender. She’ll treat them well.”

“Thank you,” Jedao whispered. “There should have been someone else with me—”

“The other survival capsule. Yes. You’re both lucky we didn’t lob missiles at you.”

“Lucky” wasn’t what Jedao had been thinking. “Commander Kel Talaw. Are they all right?”

“They’re being cared for.” She wouldn’t say more on the subject. Perhaps that was all she knew.

You’re free of me too , Jedao thought at Talaw, absent Talaw.

Cheris hadn’t finished with him. “It’s also curious that your command moth went rogue. Do you have an explanation?”

Jedao didn’t dare tell her about the Revenant . Not when she was accompanied by servitors of unknown allegiance. He had a story prepared. “The crew revolted.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Surely not, if they’re Kel.”

Jedao smiled at her for the first time. Thought of Dhanneth’s hand rising, the muzzle-flash of the gun. No one will ever love you again , Kujen had said. “I raped their commander. He shot himself.”

Although Jedao knew what a terrible thing he had done, he was unprepared for the force of her contempt. “Hawkfucker,” she snapped. “I suppose you don’t remember anything Khiaz did, either? That you were once one of her victims?” He drew back. She said something he couldn’t follow. The barrier blinked out. She drew a gun and emptied the clip into his head.

The world went black and red. He left it behind gladly.

HE DID NOT die, of course.

He would not have allowed himself to surface even to the realm of dreams if he had understood that he was not dead. The bullets had come so suddenly, had been so fitting, that he hadn’t fought it. The sentence was kinder than he deserved. He had hoped it would be followed by more permanent measures.