Ancestral Night

CHAPTER 21

IT HURT SO MUCH, I wished I would die. I was felled, like a tree. Like an ox. Like all those primitive, atavistic things that humans used to fell with their primitive, atavistic tools. The hard way. An axe through the heartwood; a hammer at the center of an X drawn between the ears and eyes.

Swing hard; follow through to the other side of whatever you are swinging at.

Zanya Farweather had been swinging at my soul.

My identity, my selfhood. The person I’d been for nearly twenty ans. It dropped away, and I was left wrecked and retching, cramped, choking up a thin stream of bile.

She hadn’t really done anything to me physically. This was just what a broken heart felt like.

I’m an engineer. The little bit of my brain that stayed clear and focused in a crisis asserted itself, contemplated the problem. My fox wasn’t working.

I curled in on myself. The pain was physical, immobilizing. As if I had been electrocuted.

Which is another way they used to fell animals, and people.

I couldn’t… think. My mind skittered, blurred. I decided I needed to stand up; started to. Some indeterminate time later I realized I was still lying there. It seemed fine.

Somebody was touching me. Farweather. I wanted to recoil, but instead my body twitched feebly and lay still. She had pillowed my head on something uncomfortable, bony and soft. Her thigh. She petted my hair.

“Rest,” she said. “I’ve got you.”

I tried to organize myself, my thoughts. Tune the pain and grief and confusion down. Reflexively, I reached for that solace.

It wasn’t there. Concentration failed me. I wasn’t… unconscious, exactly. But I also wasn’t aware. The world swam fuzzily, as if on the other side of a high fever, a concussion, a heavy drunk or other mild poisoning. My limbs didn’t respond when I told them to, or when they did, they didn’t behave in the ways I desired. Like a small child who couldn’t quite get the stylus to move properly on the pad to make the smooth line she envisions.

Eventually, I slept.

I awoke several times into half-awareness and hungover discomfort before the final time, when I swam up into something like real consciousness. My body ached; I huddled in nausea. My skin felt chafed where the edges of my suit touched.

Farweather was right beside me. She seemed to be sleeping, sitting upright against the wall. She’d dragged me onto her improvised mattress. When I moved, the materials rustled, and she stirred.

“Drink this,” she said, when my eyes opened. She handed me a squeeze bulb of something green—an electrolyte drink from her stores.

The chain I’d put on her rattled as she did it; she didn’t seem to have gotten free.

I took the bulb, tried to sit up, and rapidly thought better of it. I lay back down and tried to remember exactly what had happened.

“How long?” I asked.

“About twelve hours,” she said. “The vascular effects should be wearing off by now. You might have some memory and attention deficits for a while. Drink.”

There was a bulb in my hand. I wasn’t sure where it had come from, though it looked like the ones in her stores. I put it to my lips and bit down on the valve.

Sweet, tangy. It hit bottom in my stomach, first nauseating and then, suddenly, soothing. I felt better.

She’d… not a virus. Not a physical concussion. An EM pulse? That must be it. She’d somehow, with her parasite or with an implant of some kind, generated a powerful magnetic field, and she’d blasted it through my head.

There was a bulb in my hand, and I realized I was thirsty. It was about two-thirds full of greenish electrolyte drink. I put it in my mouth and drank.

I couldn’t remember exactly what had happened. She’d put her hand to my face, like a caress. And then the pain.

I’d fallen down.

There were things… I reached for my fox, to try to tune some of the pain and nausea out. Nothing; not even the crackle of static. I remembered blood on my hands. I remembered the pain of loss. I remembered what it felt like to have your heart peeled out of your body and handed to you by somebody you’d loved and allowed yourself to be vulnerable to.

I didn’t want to remember those things, but for some reason I didn’t seem to be able to stop remembering.

I remembered that you couldn’t trust anyone.

There was a bulb in my hand. “Drink,” Farweather said, and I finished the little bit of fluid left in the bottom.

“Good girl,” she said, and took it away from me.

My stomach churned. My head rang, vision doubling. I closed my eyes. I felt nauseated for some reason. Had I been drinking?

I tried to bump, to bring the pain down. For some reason, my fox didn’t seem to be responding.

I slept.

“You have to wake up,” Farweather said softly. “Both of us are going to need calories before long, and I can’t reach the rest of the supplies.”

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to open my eyes. My head was splitting, and all I wanted to do was lie down and hide. For some reason, though I kept trying to bump to kill the headache, it kept not improving.

“Dammit,” she said. “They told me neuronal death was going to be minimal.”

I cracked an eye. “What did you do to me?”

“EMP,” she said. “Don’t worry; I just wiped your fox. The OS is toast, and the memory, but there shouldn’t be a lot of organic damage.”

“You wiped my memory?”

“Machine memory,” she said. “You have backups, I’m sure.”

Not of most of what I’d seen and learned since Singer was killed. Since this woman helped kill Singer. In that time, I had just a few things that I’d squirreled away.

I closed my eyes again, then opened them, because I didn’t have the energy to sit up and punch her in the nose.

She said, “You’ll be fine, but you need some more hydration and calories.”

“Easy for you to say,” I said.

I slept again.

I dreamed, and they were the terrible dreams that I had been tuning out for twenty ans.

The bottle is heavy. An antique. An art object, some kind of collectible. Possibly even gray-market valuable. I haven’t asked where it came from, but I wonder how it made its way to space. What its history is.

None of that really matters now.

Now it is becoming a weapon in my hands.

I fill it meticulously, careful of the funnel. The glass is good because it’s unlikely to strike a spark. It takes a screw-top, and I’ve constructed a reinforced one. I wipe the threads very carefully before I screw it on.

I set the bottle aside as she appears in the doorway. “Done?”

I look at the row a little sadly. Four, two for her and two for me. Tomorrow, I won’t have to worry about not being real anymore.

Tomorrow I’ll have served a purpose that isn’t the one that was planned out for me since birth. Tomorrow, I’ll die with my love.

“Done,” I say.

She comes over and carefully touches a wall brace to discharge any sparks before she ruffles my hair. “Go home and clean up,” she suggests. “We ought to celebrate. I’ll pick you up in an hour?”

“Celebrate.” The word feels weird as I roll it around my tongue. “But these—”

“Aren’t going anywhere. I’ll lock them in.” She scritches my scalp luxuriously with her nails.

I stretch and purr.

She laughs and says, “If it makes you feel better, we can go to the same place as tomorrow. There. Now it’s reconnaissance, and you can’t say no.”

I didn’t jerk awake, because I woke so suddenly I was still paralyzed from the dream. The paralysis felt like a memory, too. Like running through glue when I heard the explosion. Knowing exactly what had happened. Knowing that Niyara had tricked me.

That I was going to have to live with what we’d done.

How would Niyara, of all people, ever have constructed a bomb? No, she needed me for that.

She needed an engineer.

And I needed somebody to help me take revenge for the way I was raised.

Because I couldn’t move, and because my head was still fogged and sore, eventually I slept again.

“Haimey, wake up,” she said. “You need to get up. You need to eat, and you need to bring me calories.”

Niyara, leave me alone.

I rolled over and tried to keep sleeping. The rolling over went better than previous attempts at movement, and I risked opening my eyes. My head hurt, still, but it wasn’t the sickening pain of before. Not Niyara.

Farweather.

“What did you do to me?” I whined.

She sighed. “EM pulse, as I have told you approximately seventy-five times. I wiped your fox.”

“You fried my white matter,” I said. I blinked. The world seemed less tunnely and dark at the edges than the last time I’d tried this.

“There’s not supposed to be any permanent damage,” she said. “But right now you need to eat, and so do I.”

I tried to sit up, very slowly. I felt like I’d lost a lot of blood, and I wondered how I knew what losing that much blood felt like. “What happened to me?” I said.

“Haimey,” Farweather said, with infinite patience. “Go over there and get the pack with the empanadas in it, would you? And a couple more bulbs of electrolyte drink.”

I tried to stand up. It didn’t work; I made it to a crouch and fell over. I lay there for a little while until Farweather made me get up on my hands and knees.

“Go over there and get two empanadas, and two bulbs of electrolyte drink.”

I made it to the packs. She waited behind me, rattling her chain impatiently like a ghost of old guilt issues. I couldn’t find the pack with the food in it. Eventually she guided me there, and after a couple of false starts I made it back to her and brought her a cold stuffed dumpling in a sterile, shelf-stable vacpac and a bulb of electrolytes, sugar, and water. Apparently I had been supposed to get one for myself, as well, and she woke me up and made me go back over.

Because she kept waking me up, I managed to get the food and the hydration inside me. Then I went back to sleep, because I was no better at maintaining a train of thought than any drunk person, and besides my head still hurt abominably.

I guess it was probably a couple of diar before I started being able to hold a conversation again, and by then I really didn’t want to. Because I was starting to remember things when I was awake, not just when I was asleep—and not just which pack the empanadas were kept in.

Neural pathways are pretty well established, and I’d been wearing a fox since before puberty: external rig until my brain reached adult size, and then they’d done the transcranial surgery. They start us younger in the clades: not so much time to develop ideas of our own that way. Ideas of our own, such as might lead to discontent and unhappiness.

It would be terrible to be unhappy.

So I kept reaching reflexively for my machine capabilities—memory, processing, math, tuning—and finding nothing there. No response. In addition, my symptoms included cognitive and attention issues. I couldn’t hold a thought. I couldn’t accomplish a task without being distracted. And I couldn’t keep my temper at all.

I was utterly deregulated, in other words.

If Farweather was telling me the truth, I had been fuzzily conscious for about three standard hours. Then I’d slept a lot, which—honestly—I continued to do as I slowly recovered. I don’t think she’d expected my body’s response to her gadget to be so extreme. But if they’d tested it—or modeled it, which I figured was more likely—they hadn’t tested or modeled it on people who had grown up in a clade, or had significant Judicial Recon.

I think I’d actually worried her. At least, she’d acted concerned. Which was either a glimpse of a softer side of her, or a symptom that the Stockholmification was working. Or maybe just recognition that she couldn’t reach the food without me.

Please tell me I’ve got some kind of a chance to get out of this.

There was no answering banter.

I felt even more hollow than I had. I knew the voice I had been imagining for company wasn’t really Singer; I hadn’t lost that much contact with reality. I knew it was just me talking to myself, giving myself a little bit of comfort here and there. I knew I’d just been playing his role in my head; still, it had been nice to pretend he was in there somewhere.

Now I couldn’t hear it anymore. And the absence left me so profoundly lonely that it was a physical ache in my chest and belly.

There were other aches, too. There was the sense of something having been ripped from me; that heartbroken punch of loss without any memories to explain where it was coming from. And there was the neuralgic pain that tended to spike through my body unexpectedly, flaring and fading almost as fast again.

My afthands developed the habit of cramping in very awkward positions. Some of the fine motor control for those fingers and thumbs had been processed through my fox, too. Now I was also going to have to learn to do that the hard way.

That was when I salvaged the backup voice recorder—the black box—out of my space suit and started keeping a voice diary. Because I couldn’t make backups, and I had no access to an ayatana. And if something happened to me—who was I kidding, something had already happened to me—I wanted to leave behind some kind of a record. Some kind of evidence. I made notes of everything that had happened since we found the murdered Ativahika. And I made notes of my conversations with Farweather, and what I found on the ship.

It helped me deal with the feelings, too. Talking them out. Even if it was only to a recorder.

As the dia went by, I slowly got back some control. And with the control, the shadows of memories I hadn’t considered in ans—that perhaps I had not been permitted to consider in ans?—began emerging.

They were terrible, and I didn’t want to think about them. Didn’t want to remember the nightmares that emerged from under conflicting, and safer (though still terrible) memories.

It was as if two different versions of reality coexisted in my head at the same time. There was the story of Niyara and me, of her betrayal, the one that I’d polished and kept in my pocket all these ans in order to ward off unwise personal attachments.

And then there was the contradictory one, starting to assert itself, like a history from a parallel universe.

And it was so much more terrible than the first.

Zanya was washing her hair. And I was watching the networks of tiny glistening particles swirl across her skin as she knelt over the basin of water I’d brought her. She was rinsing soap out and squeezing the last clear droplets from the black strands.

We both spent a good amount of time doing calisthenics and body weight exercises, because it was a long, boring trip and we didn’t have a lot to keep us busy. My joints hurt, but it was fascinating how easy gravity made exercise. She was getting more muscular, under the effects of all this gravity, and it was happening even more dramatically to me.

I also spent a good amount of time trying not to stare at her. And then trying not to get caught staring when I inevitably failed.

She didn’t seem to care when I did. If anything, she looked smug about it when she noticed. As for me—well, there’s a reason I had my sexuality turned off after Niyara. I have terrible taste in women. And Zanya, being an awful human being, was exactly the kind of terrible that was just to my taste.

And now my fox was fried, and my external self-control was wiped as well.

You’re a grownup now, I told myself. You know better.

I did.

It didn’t comfort me, honestly, because Hester Prynne knew better too, and look where that got her.

It would be different if I could rely on my rightminding, on my fox, to keep me going. But all I had were the stirrings in my loins and my own unpracticed self-control, neither of which were doing me any favors currently.

I had my memories, too. My slowly evolving memories, with their freight of guilt and revelation, were not helpful. They made me want to find distractions. Things to bury myself in.

“You’re staring,” Zanya said without lifting her head. She flexed her shoulders. “Like what you see?”

I watched the patterns of light sparkle across her back. “That has to make it harder to sneak up on people.”

She shrugged. More muscles, more rippling. More sparkles, like glitter flowing in water under moving lights. “You tell me.”

“I don’t sneak up on people.”

She chuckled and rattled her chain.

“…not professionally.”

She sat up, reaching for her dirty shirt to dry her hair.

When she’d wrapped it up, I handed her a clean one, because watching her wriggle into it was less distracting than staring at her breasts. My hormones had made up for their hiatus by reasserting themselves with adolescent ferocity.

And I’m getting these damned things turned off again the instant I can.

“Why did you say you had no options about going back to the Freeports?”

She sat down on her improvised mattress, which crackled under her weight. “That’s easy,” she said. “If I don’t go back, the explosives packed along my spine will detonate. I’ll die, and I’ll probably blow a hole in the hull of this nice old ship, and that would be a pity for both of us, wouldn’t it?”

I shuddered.

She’d mentioned this before. But not in such graphic terms. And I’d had a box in my head that kept me from feeling what she described quite so viscerally unless I wanted to.

She was a walking time bomb. As with Niyara… quite literally.

My type of woman. Damn it to the Well.

Conversationally, she said, “You know, I do still have Niyara’s ayatana.”

“Sure you do,” I said.

She shrugged.

“If you have that, what do you need my information for?”

“You’ve got a key inside you, and you don’t even know it.”

I strained against the fuzziness and fog that still infected me. “Your random number string.”

“Not random.”

“What does it have to do with that book Niyara gave me?”

Her lips curved in a smile.

“At least tell me what you’re gloating about.”

“Maybe if you help us out.”

“Why’s that book so important?”

“Why’d you keep it all this time? Especially given what Niyara did to you. And what you thought she did to you.”

That was an excellent question. And the answer was, I had to. “I had to,” I said. And wished I hadn’t.

“Because it was buried in your brain—in your fox—somewhere that you had to.”

“If that was in there, the Recon would have found it out and Judicial would have taken the book.”

“Not if the command predated Niyara.”

I blinked at her. “You’re saying my clade put it there?”

“I’m saying you weren’t rebelling against your clade when you worked with her. You thought you were. But you were following their program all along.”

“I can’t handle this,” I said.

I walked away.

I kind of wished she’d call after me, give me an excuse not to go.

She didn’t. So I stayed away for a good long time.

When I came back, I brought fresh water. I even gave her a drink.

She didn’t ask where I had been. She emptied the cup and set it down and then looked up at me. “Are you ready to resume that conversation?”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Ah.” She steepled her fingers. “Well, as I recall, when you left you had asked me what might be in your head that I could want.”

“It’s a book code,” I said. I’d had a lot of time to think about it, and while they were archaic and unused and hardly anybody even knew about them anymore, book codes were the only reason I could think of that you would need a particular edition of a particular book… and a string of numbers. “But the book is gone. You blew it up. So can we just stop… playing whatever game this is?”

“You get high marks,” she said. “That’s half of it. Niyara left you information you didn’t know you had, and that’s one reason we wanted you. But that’s not the most important one.”

I sat down on my mattress and sighed. I rummaged in the supplies, added water to a pack of rice, and triggered the heating unit. Space nori was pretty good on rice.

“All you need for that is the book. And the book is gone.”

Apparently Farweather was going to keep talking no matter what. “But the information you have, Haimey. Your own memories. Even though you don’t entirely know it. That information is so much more valuable to us than whatever Niyara gave you in a code. She couldn’t put maps in a book code, and anyway she wouldn’t hide that from us.” She grinned. “Besides, I’m the one who knows how to get into this ship’s databases. Thanks to your family and your ex.”

I grunted. “A clade is not a family.”

She waved it away airily. “Let’s just say that we have reason to believe that some of what’s locked up inside your head—the real history of Niyara, et al—is so sensitive that it seems likely that the Synarche would probably be willing to grant us certain concessions in order to keep it from being spread around. Undermining their moral authority.”

I stared at her.

“Moral authority is pretty much what they operate on, so—” She shrugged.

“You think there’s something so awful in my memories that you can use it to blackmail the entire Synarche?”

“Yep,” she said.

“What?” It was bad enough what she’d done to me; how she’d violated me again and again. Setting up the booby trap that had injected me with this atrocity tech, the Koregoi senso. And then destroying my fox, my machine memories, everything that made me… me. The me I wanted to be.

She said, “Your guess is as good as mine, honestly. I’m just the guy with the EM gun; I’m not a psychospecialist.”

The worst was when I retired to my secret nest in the maintenance tube to float, and sleep, and be alone.

There were no distractions in my nest, which had appealed to me before Farweather blew up my emotional regulation. Now it just meant that there was nothing to hold or focus my attention. I was restless. Feverish. The feeling of being ungrounded and unable to follow a mental thread was relentless. I couldn’t think, couldn’t reason. I certainly couldn’t sleep reliably, or for long.

So I hung in my tube and drifted lightly on the end of my tether, trying not to fidget lest I put myself into a wobbling spin.

It was all so deeply frustrating, and there was so little I could come up with to remedy the situation. It was possible that stimulants might aid my concentration, but the strongest thing I had access to was Farweather’s limited coffee supply, and we were rationing that. I’d cut her off, actually; more for me. It seemed like the least I could manage in terms of consequences, considering what she’d done to me.

I tried mindfulness, along with some other primitive rightminding techniques I’d heard of or read about or studied, back when I was still studying history. They helped a little, though the level of effort on return was pretty high. But they did not help enough. Whenever my concentration on my breathing (this is my in breath; this is my out breath) lapsed, my thoughts went skying off in every possible direction. And when I managed to rein them back from flying to the next thing, and the thing after that, and the next thing too, they fixated obsessively on history.

Not galactic history, either. But my own personal history. The ugly kind.

As I already mentioned, we were on a date when Niyara blew up.

Actually blew up. Literally on a date.

That part is true. Or anyway, I remembered it as true now, without the mediation of my machine memory. Though of course it was possible that long exposure to my fox’s version of events had changed my own recollections. It was not true that we had fought, but we had parted company and then met at that cafe in the outer ring of Ansara Station.

Some things hadn’t changed. I was, indeed, supposedly on my Choice An, supposedly getting a glimpse of the outside universe before I made my final decision to stay with the clade. The opportunity to change my mind was legally mandated by the Synarche, of course. I couldn’t commit entirely to the clade until I turned twenty-five standard, and I had to do it, legally, while I wasn’t under the influence of any tuning or rightminding controlled by the clade.

Ansara was the biggest human habitation I had ever visited, at the time, and the also first I’d ever been to with a significant percentage of nonhuman systers in residence. That isn’t saying much, because I’d grown up on the station entirely populated by the women of Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango, and I’d stopped at a grand total of two transfer points or waystations on my way to Ansara, which I had chosen because…

…because…

I opened my eyes and stared into the darkness of the maintenance tube. It wasn’t very dark darkness. One of the things I’d noticed was that, in addition to all my weird new secondary senses relating to gravity and mass and so forth, my eyes were becoming better adapted to seeing under a variety of light conditions.

A less beneficial side effect, under the current conditions of tight rationing, was that I was hungry all the time and had started losing weight again, though the algae tanks kept Farweather and me from actually starving.

But I was distracting myself from thinking about Ansara. Ansara, which I had chosen to go to for my Choice An because…

I couldn’t remember. There had been a logical process, I was sure. A reason to go there. Museums? A chance to study? It had a pretty good technical program.

No, I realized, as a second set of memories unveiled itself, coexisting alongside the first like some weird double exposure of the mind. I hadn’t decided to go to Ansara. I’d been sent—or at least, the decision had been made for me, though at the time I’d accepted it as my own.

My own clade had set me up. Farweather was not lying about that.

…Unless she was, and my fragile, discombobulated memories were recoalescing around the seed she’d planted. Confabulating.

Well and Void, meat brains were useless things!

I had no way of knowing which version of events might be true. But now I remembered—thought I remembered?—additional details. We had gone to the Ethiopian cafe in order to run reconnaissance for a suicide bombing mission. Now I remembered having known about the mission, and I remembered having been an aware and willing participant.

At the time, I’d been a rebel. I’d thought I was striking back against the people who had raised me in a bubble. I’m not sure why I thought that. Except it seemed perfectly logical at the time. And my thinking that certainly cleared the clade of any culpability, didn’t it? If I should happen to be interrogated.

But in retrospect, it seemed obvious that my clademothers sent me to Ansara specifically to meet up with Niyara and her cell, to join them, and to provide technical expertise for their mission of destruction. It was absolutely intentional, a blow against a Synarche that my clade deemed a threat to its existence and way of life. The Synarche insisted that individuals be granted personal freedom and autonomy of choice and body; my clade believed that the path to universal happiness was obedience to authority. Not even obedience, exactly; just allowing yourself to be subsumed by the authority, to become a part of it, to accept its decisions and program as your own.

Ansara was one of the bigger stations, and I believe I also mentioned the shops and bars and places to eat or relax with friends or potential friends or potential sex partners, for that matter, that blanketed the hull between the docking tunnels.

I’d built the explosives. We weren’t supposed to be carrying them that dia, however. That dia, we were only supposed to be checking out the restaurant and estimating when its peak crowds would be. I decided I wanted a bottle of wine, since it was probably the last one we would ever drink.

Did I decide that?

No.

Niyara suggested it.

Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we most definitely die.

I picked out that nice-enough bottle of white—actually, it was a very good bottle, because there was no point in saving up against a holed hull at that point.

And while I was away from the table, Niyara detonated the bomb she had been wearing under her tunic, destroying herself and the restaurant and leaving me behind.

I knew instantly what had happened. The concussion wave hit me, and the decomp doors came down. I avoided decapitation because I was paying for the wine and I wasn’t anywhere near the shop entrance. I remember standing by the doors, numbed, staring up at the pressure readout until the outside ring stabilized and the decomp door went up again. I scuttled under it hurriedly, thinking that if there was a seal problem or the pressure otherwise fluctuated while I was under the hatch, well, that was that for me.

Why did she do that? I wondered. Why did she leave me behind?

We had been going to change the galaxy together.

I still had the wine in my hand when I reached her. I dropped it. The flask bounced a couple of times and rolled a little bit away. These bottles were not made of glass. Then I also dropped, to my knees beside her, and gathered up the scraps of my lover into my arms.

Her lips shaped a word. Senso picked up her intent and relayed it to me.

“See?” she was saying, dying. “I do care about you.”

I had been about to say something comforting. It got stuck in my throat, and while I goggled at her, she bubbled a laugh.

“I couldn’t… You didn’t have a choice… ,” she said, and died.

She didn’t have to die. The injuries weren’t severe enough to kill her if she got on life support. What was enough to kill her was the time-release poison she’d taken before she blew the station hatchway. And that was the end of that, for Niyara Omedela, the love of my life.

I lunged to my feet. Grabbed the flask of wine, because I was thinking that it had my fingerprints on it. I smeared blood on the neck and the label. I wasn’t thinking really clearly; I guess I was hoping that any security feeds would have been damaged by the blast and wouldn’t have shown me clearly enough for immediate identification.

She’d worn one suicide harness. Two explosive bottles. There was another one at her apartment storage locker. If I ran, I could get there. It would open to my passcode. I could collect the other harness, and follow Niyara into glorious oblivion.

It was the most stunning protest I could think of, dying to oppose the Synarche, doing a little damage along the way. Self-immolation plus.

Surely her sacrifice, my sacrifice, could not be in vain.

When I got to her apartment and crashed into the tiny workroom where I’d assembled the bombs, it was empty. There was nothing on the desk at all.

I washed my hands and recycled my bloody clothes. I slid back into the crowd still holding the wine and tried to plan what to do next. My heart was racing in a frenzy that even my fox could barely control. Did the fact that my harness was missing mean that the constables were on to us? On to both of us? Or just her?

I could build another harness. I could—

There were monitors going everywhere, full of the news of the attacks. Attacks. Plural.

As in, more than one.

That was how I found out that in addition to the suicide bombing of Niyara Omedela, there had been a second suicide bombing that dia as well. Her wife, Amelie Omedela, exploded over in H sector. Used the explosive harness I’d built for myself to do it. Killed five people for no good reason except some political philosophy from the dark ages.

One that I subscribed to, too. Or that my clade subscribed to for me, and which I had never questioned, because we were not built to question such things and we never really learned how.

I hadn’t known she had a wife.

I didn’t build a harness. I got very drunk, finishing that flask of wine all by myself.

The constables had picked me up before I got sober.

Somehow I fell asleep. This surprised me, when I woke up from it and realized that my eyes were crusty and my mouth was dried out like space.

I had no idea how I’d managed to unwind enough to go under, and no idea how long I’d been asleep for. Possibly I was too exhausted with memories and the volatile tears that memories seemed to drag from me at every opportunity now. Lability. That was the old-fashioned term. People under stress—physical, emotional, hormonal—used to be labile, before rightminding and before more primitive tech like mood regulators and so on.

I was labile now.

I was also still full of images and recollections, and they seemed the clearer for sleeping on them. Perhaps I had been dreaming, processing and refining old memories in the way you’re supposed to process and refine newer ones. And I felt, for the first time perhaps, the full impact of what Farweather’s booby trap had done to me.

That, all by itself, made me want to peel my own skin off with my fingernails. It was in me, this terrible history. It was a part of me, and I could not get it out.

But maybe I owed justice to the Ativahikas, if I could manage it.

If I could even keep myself alive.

I remembered now. I… had spent a lot of time being interrogated, and eventually went before Justice, where it was decided after a lengthy series of hearings, held in camera because I was a legal minor, that Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango had brainwashed and controlled me, and that I—and all other minor children—were to be removed from their care.

The clade itself was to be disbanded, and its members subjected to incarceration or Recon.

They were given eight hours to surrender themselves and their children to Justice.

You can probably guess how this ends. They didn’t turn themselves in.

They committed suicide en masse, making the decision as one. If they couldn’t be together, and content; if they couldn’t avoid being unhappy, even for a little while; if they were expected to take individual responsibility for their collective decision and suffer consequences for it…

…they did not wish to.

They killed the children, too.