Adam-Troy Castro - The Third Claw of God

I was growing more and more frustrated by this private joke I was failing to get. “I’m not your father’s doll to dress up. What is this? Is he infatuated with me or something?”

Jelaine winced. “Oh, Juje , no.”

“Then what the hell difference would it make to him what my hair looked like? Whether it was long, short, braided, absent, purple, glowing like Colette’s, or replaced with scales?”

The animal I’d spotted sleeping on the swing now leaped up on the table before her, inviting attention. Jelaine scratched the fuzzy head and made it purr. She said, “He just needed to see what you would look like with shoulder-length brown hair. Come on, Andrea. Think. I’ve already seen you astonish my father by anticipating the explanation for all this. I’m sure you can put it all together a second time if you try.”

Now irritated beyond all measure by her teasing ways, I rolled my eyes and this time found myself focusing on the Khaajiir’s staff, still propped up against the planter like any other design element in this fussy little garden.

Why was it here? Had I been using it before?

I remembered Skye’s words: “If I ever withhold anything from you it’s either because, by my considered judgment, it’s none of your business or nothing you need to know at the moment.”

She’d said that on the Royal Carriage, while giving me a tour of the Khaajiir’s database. She’d indicated her intension to leave out issues unrelated to the current problem, issues that I might have to deal with later. It was the only way to keep me on track.

But her briefing had seemed pretty complete anyway. Hadn’t it been?

She’d even allowed me to hold on to the staff myself, providing me direct access to the data she’d judged pertinent as she guided me through everything Oscin had found.

How could she have hidden anything from me then?

I thought back and realized.

No. She hadn’t let me hold the staff throughout that briefing.

Near the end, she’d taken it away before sharing her findings.

She’d done it with such casual skill, such a lack of apology, that I hadn’t seen anything suspicious.

But now I remembered that she’d taken the staff away while covering the only subject she claimed she hadn’t learned everything about. Her answers on that subject had been fragmentary at best, containing no information relevant to me. When that subject proved irrelevant to the identity of the murderer aboard the Royal Carriage, I’d allowed her to put the issue aside.

What issue had she been talking about then?

What was so big it might have hurt my ability to resolve this crisis threatening all our lives?

I found myself thinking of other moments, all the way to the beginning of this whole sorry business.

The AIsource had said, We hope you’ll survive the shock.

Jelaine had told me, “You need to stay.”

She’d also said, “We have more in common that you can possibly know.” Later on, when I’d figured out the true extent of the connection between her and Jason, I’d imagined that she was just talking about cylinking. But that was something she had in common with the Porrinyards, not with me.

She’d spoken to me with affection and looked at me with undisguised love.

They’d both looked at me with undisguised love.

The Bettelhines had made me not a personal guest, but honored guest.

And then there’s what the Dip Corps had done to me, their pet war criminal.

Antrecz Pescziuwicz had seen it right away. “The Dip Corps could have changed your name, maybe your hair color and a couple of other cosmetic things about you, given you a new ID file and a false history, and nobody but your bosses would have known that you were the same kid. Instead, they put you to work as Andrea Cort, child war criminal grown up, and willingly ate all the seven hundred flavors of crap they had to swallow because of the propaganda weapon they handed all the alien governments who want to paint humanity as a bunch of homicidal bastards who let their own get away with murder. Why would they put themselves through that? Why would they put you through that?”

The AIsource had given me part of the answer. Any conspiracies that have been around you since unformed childhood must have had less to do with manipulating you than using you as a tool to manipulate others.

But who could I have been used to manipulate, when still a child?

Jelaine had said, “A changed man can change his family, and what his family stands for. Even, I daresay, how the family sees its obligations toward its own.”

Too many other offhand comments to list, all now making a terrible kind of sense. I could think of a dozen more without even trying hard.

Among them, the AIsource assuring me that the tragedy on Bocai was the last thing any Bettelhine would have wanted.

Wethers, at the end, acting like he recognized me for the first time. Saying, “I’ve…been stupid. Didn’t see what was in front of me. Didn’t see what I should have known.”

And them, finally: when I struck Colette in anger, when I searched for the limitations of her inability to say no, Skye had looked at me as if just then discovering who I was for the very first time. She already knew, from what she’d read in the Khaajiir’s files. But how must it have felt for her, to see it demonstrated with such awful clarity?

I watched myself, as if from a distance, rising from the bench and approaching that planter, and as my right hand closed around the Khaajiir’s staff and as I thought a woman’s name.

The image that formed in my mind portrayed her the way she’d looked when she lived on Xana. She was a bright-eyed, wistful young woman with shoulder-length brown hair and the kind of face that makes light shine on any world where she chooses to walk.

I’d known her years later when she wore a different name and when that hair was cut short but still sleek enough to shine beneath the glow of a Bocaian sun.

Dejah had said, “You’d be surprised how many outcast Bettelhines live in other systems under assumed names.”

Lillian Jane Bettelhine.

Younger sister of Hans.

Aunt of Jason, Jelaine, and Philip.

Exiled idealist.

Name changed to Veronica Cort.

Resident of a doomed experimental Utopian community on Bocai.

Participant in the auto-genocide that community inflicted upon itself.

Loving wife of the late Bernard Cort.

Loving mother to my late brother and sister.

Loving mother to—

I dropped the Khaajiir’s staff and fell to my knees, crying a word I had not spoken in decades.

“Mommy…!”

I’ll skip over the hysterics of the next ten minutes. I was overwrought, wrapped in loss, mourning a family torn from me that I’d refused to remember with love for more years than I care to count. An idyll had been transformed in one horrid night of blood and madness to a hell of sterile incarceration and institutional rape, leaving me not just hard but also brittle, capable of shattering into pieces on those rare occasions when something scraped the scabs off my wounds.

The Porrinyards had been very good at dealing with me at such times. Now the shared persona of Jason-and-Jelaine proved the same, its Jelaine avatar embracing me, telling me that she knew what I’d been through, that it was all right, that I had a real home now if I wanted one. I’d be lying if I claimed that I didn’t hug her back, or that many of the tears I shed in that ten minutes were grateful ones.

But I’m also Andrea Cort, and not blind.

Even as I howled, part of me was picking it apart.