The Third Claw of God

16 JASON AND JELAINE

According to Skye, reporting what she’d seen through Oscin’s eyes, the three Bettelhines were surprised when I had him send them all up.

They were also disturbed when Oscin specified that the Bettelhines were to come without Monday Brown or Vernon Wethers along to vet their answers and safeguard their interests.

Brown and Wethers both raised serious objections to that, but then Oscin—acting on a suggestion I’d relayed through Skye—asked, “Aren’t three Bettelhines capable of looking out for themselves?”

It was about as transparent a gesture of psychological manipulation as any I’d ever attempted. The Bettelhines had to recognize it. But it worked regardless. The Bettelhines ordered Brown and Wethers to stand down, and came upstairs alone and unescorted in what must have felt like the latest leg of a journey with no destination in sight.

When the siblings arrived in the suite, they chose seats that reflected the uneasy rivalry between two parties. Philip and Jason sat facing each other, Philip wary and Jason wearing a sad mask that may have been either a put-on or a genuine reflection of his regret that things had to be so tense between them. On her own, Jelaine took a seat outside the circle and against the wall, a gesture that did not abdicate her place in this imminent confrontation between brothers so much as provide her strategic control over the battlefield. There were tears at the corners of her eyes, but I couldn’t tell whether they’d been of hope, or sadness, or stress and exhaustion. Nothing about her suggested that she felt she’d lost her control of the situation, not even when she said, “Are you all right, Counselor? You look grimmer than I’ve ever seen you, which is saying a lot.”

Skye would still not look at me.

I said, “You’re very perceptive, Jelaine. I am grimmer. You’ve been saying that you want to make friends, but then some of the things I’ve found out about your stinking, despicable family in the last few hours have made me even more disgusted than I was when I only knew you as abstractions.”

The knowing smile never left her face, nor did the quiet confidence on Jason’s. They continued to present a united front, a stance that had long since ceased to impress me.

Philip, who had indicated grudging respect for me in some of our more recent conversations, now flashed fresh anger. “Watch it, Counselor. We’ve given you license up until now, but it isn’t unlimited.”

I charged him with a speed that made him flinch and stopped only when we faced each other from across a gulf of inches. “You should be. If I had my way the lot of you would be lined up on the side of the road and confronted, one at a time, by an endless parade of everybody you’ve ever hurt. You’d get one fifteen-minute break every hour to wipe the spit off your face, but only so the next hundred people in line could enjoy an unsullied target. Do you see the look in my eyes, Philip? It’s what I think of your goddamned irrelevant license.”

As taken aback as he was by my fury, he still recovered quickly. “And you, Counselor? How long would your parade be? And have you accomplished a damn thing in all the hours we’ve given you, or are you still just running in circles?”

I held his challenging stare for several seconds, backing off only because I felt unbearably tired. It was not just physical weariness, or the metabolic crash that always hits a day or so after a long journey in Intersleep, but a deep, soul-sick weariness, of the sort that comes from too much immersion in Mankind’s talent for corruption. “I’ve accomplished more than you think, sir. In fact, as soon as we’re done here, I’m going to gather everybody together and tell you who killed the Khaajiir.”

The announcement had the effect I’d expected. Jason and Jelaine remained impassively pleasant. Philip started, glanced at them, then turned back to me. “Why not tell us now?”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Because if it was just a matter of pointing my finger at one murderer, I would have done so already. But you people have made a much bigger mess than that. Indeed, I suspect that once I name the name, we might find ourselves fighting for our lives.”

He weighed my expression for signs that I was kidding, found none, and said, “But if you get the murderer—”

I rolled my eyes. “The one murderer. The individual who put the Claw of God on the Khaajiir’s back. That one I can name, with something approaching certainty. But hasn’t it long since become clear to you, sir, that this is much larger and much more complex than that? After all, we’re facing a conspiracy capable of obtaining and smuggling exotic weapons, enlisting assassins from other worlds, sabotaging this elevator, and interfering with the priorities of those we would otherwise expect to rescue us. It may involve the cooperation of hundreds or possibly even thousands by the time you’re finished counting, and any ability I might have to provide you with one name out of all that many fails to account for how many others aboard might be sharing at least some responsibility for our predicament.”

Philip shook his head as if mere denial could will the facts out of existence. “But none of these people—”

“Please, sir. Refrain from mentioning the ones you know to be loyal, or from telling me why you believe a conspiracy on that scale to be impossible. I know why you consider it impossible, and as I intend to prove in a few minutes, loyalty’s the very nature of your problem. You may think you control these people, but you’ve allowed somebody else to take the reins.”

That took a second to sink in, but when it did, he rose, his face pink, and his eyes turning into little circles. “You know about—”

“Ever since you’ve gotten your hands on the technology, you’ve treated your key people the same way Magrison treated the innocent young woman who became Dina Pearlman. The technology isn’t exactly the same—if it was, then every affected individual would sport the same kind of chip Mrs. Pearlman wears—but the effect is. You put governors on their minds, making sure they define contentment as loyalty and obedience to you.”

There was a moment of shamed silence.

Jason said, “You’re right, of course. It’s exactly as shameful as you say, but Mrs. Pearlman perfected the current system, involving nanite manipulation of the pleasure centers, in my grandfather’s time. But how did you figure it out?”

I answered him without taking my eyes off Philip. “That was downright easy, compared to some elements of the messy business. I was willing to believe people like Monday Brown and Vernon Wethers forgoing personal lives in exchange for proximity to power; there have always been people like them, in every generation. Arturo bothered me, though; he formed his values and his ambitions somewhere else, and he still jumped at the chance to serve you inside this tin box for years on end, when everything else about his life story indicated a passionate longing for a life near the ocean. It was also suspicious that your family would get its hands on somebody like Dina Pearlman without investigating, and if necessary reverse-engineering the technology that allowed the beast Magrison to command her unconditional loyalty. And even more so when she referenced unspecified ‘other means’ used to control Farley’s vile compulsions.” Still looming over Philip, I swiveled my head and focused my anger on Jason. “But it all came together when Arturo was suiting up for his trip outside the elevator, and you told him, quote, ‘You may think you owe us your allegiance, but you don’t. We forged that debt. Do you understand? It’s all us.’ That’s when I saw what you bastards had done to him and by extension all of these other poor souls who work for you. They’re leashed.”

“Get out of my face,” Philip said.

I glanced at him, as if reminded of his existence, then backed off, giving them all a chance to decide who wanted to offer justifications first.

Jelaine brushed a strand of golden hair away from eyes that had not grown one iota less warm or compassionate during the hostile exchanges of the past few minutes. When she spoke, her voice was mild, her tone entirely free of facile self-justification. “Not all of us approve of the governors, Counselor. Some of us loathe the very idea of them. It’s the main reason my brother and I operate without personal aides, as we told you. We prefer to earn the loyalty of those who work for us.”

“That doesn’t make you innocent of profiting from a system that enslaves people.”

“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”

That stopped me.

She continued. “That system existed before we were born. It didn’t leave me, or Jason, much of a choice over a status quo we were too young and too powerless to change. I never walked away, so you may hate me if you must. But Jason left. He left while he was too young to forge his own way, and paid a terrible price for it. And returning didn’t mean he’d changed his mind. It’s just as I told you before. The two of us intend to change what our family stands for.”

I quoted the rest of what Jelaine had said, on that occasion. “‘And how far the web of family extends.’”

She flashed a secret smile. “Quite so.”

Philip turned in his seat, either not quite understanding what he’d heard or unable to accept it coming from her. She raised her eyebrows at him, not in affront but in mute apology. I don’t think he understood whatever unspoken message she was trying to send. Nor did he receive the answer he needed from Jason, who offered him the same sad, sorry, apologetic look, more loving than confrontational, and more infuriating for that.

Skye still refused to look at me. She was paying attention, but wasn’t sharing what she thought, either about the situation or about me. I ached to wonder if the damage was permanent, but could not afford to, not now, not with the worst looming all around us.

Philip did me the favor of giving me another reason to hate him. He straightened his collar and fixed me with the full weight of his contempt. “You’re very clever, Counselor. And you do enjoy your unearned moral superiority. But you’ve never once considered that people operating at our level might have good reason to for the decisions we make.”

I glared at him. “Such as?”

He looked tired. “Hasn’t it occurred to you that our business model requires us to prevent the human race from exterminating itself?”

“Go on.”

“I can’t say we haven’t profited, but we deal in skills that must be kept out of the hands of monsters like Magrison, or some even worse than him. When we race to acquire dangerous technology, it’s so we can control it, limit the number of governments with access to it, or keep it off the market entirely if we feel it’s too risky to allow even in the context of savage warfare. You don’t know how much we’ve locked up or just thrown away over the years. But if our best people were ever able to consider going into business for themselves, either by seizing control of Xana or by wandering from system to system dispensing our secrets at will—”

“So you put hobbles on their brains.”

“Not on their creativity,” he said. “Not on their cognitive abilities. Not even on their ability to enjoy the pleasures of life. Just on their capacity for betrayal. So we install, not hobbles, but governors: internal fences, if you will, ensuring that everything they develop for the Bettelhines remains in the control of the Bettelhines.”

“Even if that warps their lives beyond all recognition? It didn’t take me long to see how many of your people don’t seem to have priorities beyond their service to you. One of the first things I learned about Brown and Wethers, for instance, is that they’re both so focused on their work that they have nothing else.”

“It’s not that overt with most of the people affected. Most just go to work and do what they need to do before returning home to live their normal lives. What you see with Brown and Wethers is not at all uncommon among any high-level executives. I know officers of your Diplomatic Corps who exhibit the same behaviors, without any internal governors as excuse.”

“So Brown and Wethers are not being controlled?”

“Controlled is the wrong word. They still possess free will, within certain parameters. If they wanted social lives, we wouldn’t stop them. But you need to understand, the potential for corruption, not just penny-ante corruption, but corruption on a destructive societal scale, with people of their level is worse than you can possibly imagine. An unaltered Monday Brown, left to his own devices, has the capacity to bring down the entire corporation. He can embezzle, he can steal secrets, he can use what he knows to forge an empire of his own. Somebody like him needs to take so much satisfaction in his work, in serving the Bettelhines above all other personal considerations, that this becomes impossible.”

Damned if he didn’t make it seem almost reasonable. But it didn’t take me long to find something capable of stoking my outrage back to its previous heat. “And how would this justify rape by mind control? Like what’s happened to Colette?”

His prior righteousness faltered a little at that. “I don’t deny it goes on. Every once in a while one of us takes a predatory liking to one employee or another and reconfigures the governors to define loyalty as sexual compliance. It’s frowned upon, and I’ve never done it myself, but we all recognize that it still goes on more than any of us would like. The worst you could say about it, though, is that it’s contemptible only to those of us who stand outside it. The people it’s done to are all almost blessed in their way. Colette’s happier than anybody I’ve ever met.”

“At the expense of everything she once was.”

“As I said, I don’t approve of using the technology for anything but security purposes, and I’ve talked to Magnus about returning her to her old life.”

This was maddening. “And what of Arturo Mendez? His sponsor, Conrad, is dead. He’s been dead for years. He’s never coming back. And yet Arturo’s still here, working year in and year out under conditions utterly at odds with the way he’d live his life if allowed to choose for himself.”

Philip didn’t seem proud of that, either. “Arturo’s like all of our low-level employees. He’s spent time with us, heard our conversations, and has been privy to our secrets. He knows things that can never be allowed to fall into the hands of outsiders. So we’ve counteracted his ambitions to work elsewhere. It’s ugly, but to him it’s just an alteration in the criteria that keep him happy. Someday, sooner than he thinks, he’ll receive a retirement package far greater than any a man of his resources might have ever been able to earn otherwise. Whether or not you believe it, Counselor, it’s a win-win situation.”

“It’s slavery.”

“Of a kind. On a world where unfettered freedom could mean mass destruction.”

“And what prevents some individual Bettelhine lower in the pecking order from seizing the opportunity to use your compliant little robots for a power grab?”

“Aside from the fact that any Bettelhine who thought of it has everything to lose and almost nothing to gain? We’re too sophisticated to let that happen, Counselor. At most higher levels, our employees are not loyal to any individual Bettelhines, but to the Bettelhine power grid as a whole.”

“So there are some employees more powerful than Bettelhines?”

“There have to be. It’s a necessary check on the destructive potential of Family rivalry. I heard Jason mention our aunt Lillian Jane before; her tutors were certainly loyal to her, but they were still able to report her activities. The real reason we’ve never had some scheming sociopathic cousin poison all the people above him and seize control is the presence of parties like Brown and Wethers, whose true loyalties are to the corporate structure and to the principles that have guided our family since—”

He stopped in mid-sentence.

He frowned.

He mentally reviewed everything he’d just said.

He started to get it.

I said, “What are the Pearlmans doing here today? Do they normally get surprise trips on the Royal Carriage? Or are they usually not much more than well-treated prisoners, working in their little island gulag?”

“N-no. I—”

“You knew something was up with Jason and Jelaine. But your suspicions were focused on Jason, the half brother you would never trust again. And so you came up with an entirely mistaken theory. You suspected that, in some way, Jason was controlling Jelaine. You worried that somebody working for Dina Pearlman might have gone off the reservation and helped him install controllers in her. So you used your influence to get the Pearlmans a free elevator ride and directed Dina to conduct her own covert observation of your brother and sister, in the belief that this would turn out to be the explanation.”

Jelaine shook her head. “Oh, Philip. You could not possibly be more wrong.”

“No, he couldn’t,” I said. “And not just about that.” I hit him with the full force of his family’s great mistake. “Your grandfather wanted to make it impossible for key employees to ever raise moral objections to Bettelhine orders or to defect to other powers and corporations. He wanted to prevent any one of them from ever drawing a line in the sand and saying, This is as far as I go, I won’t go any further. And he thought that’s what he accomplished. For decades every Bettelhine with access to the tech has believed that this would keep you safe. But what it’s really done is create a chain of command even more vulnerable to middle managers with their own definition of loyalty.”

Philip stood.

I approached him, placed my hands on his shoulders, shoved him back down into his chair, and lowered my face to his as I delivered the angry summation. “Loyalty that may include agreeing to commit terrible crimes, even against Bettelhines, as long as somebody above them, one of your precious internal auditors, can tell them it’s for the good of the Family as a whole.”

Philip’s lips moved without sound.

This time he didn’t warn me to get off him.

After a moment I walked away from him again, pacing the room with a fury that some observers might have mistaken for hysteria.

“Whatever your justification,” I said, “the point remains. This evil program of yours exists, and it’s what made these crimes possible by enforcing blind obedience up and down your chain of command. And it’s what endangers us most now, because it limits the number of people we can trust, even aboard the carriage. I’ve done the math. Would you like to hear it?”

“Please,” Jason said.

Philip nodded, with an unwillingness that suggested he would have much preferred to forestall the grim truth by ignoring it.

“Fine.” I resumed pacing. “There are sixteen of us. I know that I’m innocent and I can say the same for my companions as well.”

Philip opened his mouth.

I raised my hand to silence him. “If you won’t take my word for it, consider that I’ve never been to Xana, and that I only knew I was coming to Xana hours before I left New London. Will you agree for the sake of argument that it makes more sense to just agree we can’t be guilty?”

Jelaine surprised me by laughing out loud. It was the heartiest merriment I’d ever heard from her, utterly undisturbed by the grimness of the occasion, or the danger we were in. Almost a guffaw, it testified to a capacity for enjoyment that must have rendered her a genuine life-force among the members of her family. “I never suspected you, Counselor.”

The weariness that had overtaken me a few minutes before now seemed to affect Philip as well. “Get on with it.”

I began ticking off points on my fingers. “After that, any attempt to use the process of elimination enters the realm of speculation. Since this is a crime that endangers the Bettelhines in general and the Bettelhine chain of command in particular, I’m willing to declare the three of you probably innocent as well. I’m more sure about Jason and Jelaine than I am about you, Philip, since it was their own agenda under attack, but I’m somewhat inclined to give you a pass as well, as you went out of your way to be aboard and would not need to endanger yourself when any assassins in your employ did their work. That’s not a certainty, of course. Just an extreme likelihood.”

He allowed himself a wry grimace. “I’m touched by your opinion of me.”

“I would say the same about Dejah; she has the resources, and even a reasonable motive given your family’s past attempts on her life, but even if she was financing this thing, I see no reason why she’d feel the need to place herself on the front line. I may be wrong about any or all of those last four names. But the rest are wide open. If I allow your own tentative removal from the list of suspects to stand, that still leaves nine people out of sixteen—nine people out of sixteen who might have been co-opted. Nine people out of sixteen whose actions, once I name the single murderer I am certain about, cannot be predicted. Nine people out of sixteen who might be harboring weapons of their own and may be more than willing to leave another corpse or two cooling in your parlor, if we interfere with the agenda that brought them together.” I took a deep breath and focused on Philip again. “Are you beginning to see how precarious our situation is, sir?”

The silence that followed that question was profound. Philip bit his thumb, glanced at Jelaine (whose expression had not changed), and then at Jason (whose own air of invulnerability echoed hers). Again, they’d given him nothing. Then he turned back to me and said, “What do you suggest?”

“I suggest that when I do get around to providing the name, we should all be ready to fight for our lives. And,” I said, focusing my next attention on Jason and Jelaine as well, “I suggest that the best way for that to happen is to let your brother know just how inaccurate his guess was.”

Philip started at that. His eyes widened as he realized he was about to get some of the answers he’d longed for, and he turned toward them, measuring their own reaction, probing their blandly pleasant expressions as if in determination to ferret out the truth before they got around to giving it.

Jason rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Do you need to know all of it now, Counselor? What happened to me on Deriflys? What my sister and I were looking for, when we left Xana? Why we then did what we did?”

I considered it. It was tempting. But then I shook my head. “No. I can wait for those answers, and the reason you had your father invite me here, until we’re safe. I just need you to admit what you are, so Philip can see how it’s going to affect what’s coming.”

Jason nodded, and for just a moment allowed a look of great sadness to come over his face as he regarded his older half brother with unapologetic affection. Tears welled at the corners of his eyes. “I’m sorry, brother. It was never any reflection on the way we felt about you. But it’s such a difficult secret to hide from the people who know us best. And this thing we’re trying to do together is so very, very important.”

“We do love you,” Jelaine said. “Never question that.”

Philip’s gaze darted between Jason and Jelaine and back, his lips moving without words as he tried to pull the answer from the air. After about a million years, still not getting it, he managed, “…what?”

Jelaine brushed the back of her hand against her gown and stood, the charming half-smile still tugging at the corners of her lips, the tears so much like Jason’s shining at the corners of her beautiful eyes. There was no defiance in her stance, no anger, nothing but a love so bright that it pained me to look at it.

I wondered about the kind of courage it took to share a confidence like this when it could destroy as much as it healed, and found against my will that I envied her, as much as I’d always envied the Porrinyards, for their courage in taking this journey that still remained beyond my own powers of faith.

Even as she stood, Jason stood and joined her, so they could stand together as they faced Philip as the united force they’d been for so long. A subtle change overtook their expressions as they synched up, emphasizing their already strong resemblance, rendering them more than mere siblings, closer than they would have been even if born twins.

They each raised complementary eyebrows as they faced their older brother in shared entreaty and challenge.

Philip’s eyes went wider. He was not a stupid man, and I think he figured out the truth a fraction of a second before his strange brother and sister spoke in unison, their shared voice not male or female, but some gender that was both and neither. Maybe that heartbeat of advance realization made the moment easier to absorb when his siblings said, “Once upon a time I was two people, a brother and sister named Jason and Jelaine Bettelhine. Once upon a time they left Xana as separate people and came back as one. Now I’m a linked pair. Now I’m both Jason and Jelaine, together….”

Philip fell out of his chair. Literally.

He tried to stand but his legs collapsed underneath him and sent him falling to his knees as the slackjawed attention he owed his siblings swallowed all other capacity for thought. It would have been comical if not for the horror and revulsion and incomprehension and denial warring on his handsome, aristocratic features. When he finally managed words he said, “How… could you?”

Jelaine spoke alone. “I know this is difficult, Philip, but you must understand. Jason was shattered by his time on Deriflys, and by…some other things that happened when we went away. He could not live inside his own skull, not by himself. So Jelaine, the single Jelaine, offered to seek out the procedure and help him carry the weight.”

“He was wrong! He shouldn’t have let you destroy yourself to save him!”

Now Jason and Jelaine spoke together. “That’s what he thought. He fought her. He tried to tell her he wasn’t worth what she would have to sacrifice.”

Jelaine let out a soft laugh. “He was wrong. It was no sacrifice.”

Philip recoiled from them as they approached in a misbegotten attempt to comfort him.

Stymied for the moment, the linked siblings turned to the silent Skye and said, “Oscin? Skye? You’re what I am. Please back me up on this. Tell my brother that neither Jason nor Jelaine sacrificed a damn thing. Tell him that everything that made up the two people they were, from their memories to their loves to their heartbreaks and their convictions, all still exists inside this new individual created at the moment they joined. Tell him how healing the process is, how insignificant it made your old concerns seem, how much better it became to look at life through two sets of eyes instead of only one. Tell him that there’s nothing horrible about it, nothing in it that needs to change how he sees my shared self as a sibling or how I can see him as a brother. Tell him.”

Skye, who was visibly moved by their plea, turned from them to the distraught Philip, regarding him with something very much like pity. Sparing only the briefest look at me, one I read as a warning not to interfere, she knelt beside him, placed a single hand on his shoulder, and asked, “Sir? Would it be less offensive to your delicate sensibilities had your brother ended life a defeated suicide, and your sister had spent the rest of her own blighted by the knowledge that she had not done everything she could to save him?”

“She didn’t save him,” he said miserably. “She just destroyed herself with him.”

“No, she did not. She just changed. That’s what life is, sir. Change.”

“She didn’t have to change like that.”

“I agree. She might have changed any number of other ways, including some that might have made her less precious to you. But whatever happened, she never would have stayed the same person she was as a younger woman. She would have grown up, developed new priorities, moved on, become in some ways a stranger to the person she once was. The only thing different here is that she decided how.”

“But what she had to give up—”

“Please, sir, if we accomplish nothing else here, trust the word of somebody who knows this from the inside. The sister you knew, the one who was capable of taking such a giant step for your wounded brother’s sake, is still with us, and if she kept this a secret from you, it had to be at least in part because she knew you would react as you have.”

Philip closed his eyes, shuddered, then felt for the chair and pulled himself back up, refusing to look at them but allowing himself a slight nod, as close to acceptance as he was now able to provide.

This would not be over today. If we all survived, there would still be shouts, accusations, apologies, and hurt at the sight of one another. There was no telling now whether there would ever be peace between Philip and his linked siblings. But there was a truce, and it was all we needed if we were to get through this.

Jason and Jelaine seemed to realize that too. They backed away from him and sat down, their complementary faces both shining with the hopes of a single, oversized soul.

Philip continued to look at his hands. “Counselor?”

I tried not to feel pity for this man I hated, and failed. “What?”

“Before we get into whatever else there is…please. Tell me how you knew. Tell me how you saw what my brother and sister had done, when I thought I knew them and didn’t see a damned thing.”

Skye just shook her head, a bitter smile curling her lips. Her thoughts, their thoughts, were no deep mystery. Why don’t you, Andrea? Why not? After all, demonstrating how brilliant you are has always been your favorite part.

If only Oscin were here. It didn’t matter that if Skye was mad at me, he would be too. The thought of him, standing among the others, participating in their conversations, revealing no hurt at all as he maintained the false veneer of individuality, was almost more than I could bear.

Maybe if they were both here I could make them believe I was sorry.

I felt another wave of exhaustion. I don’t know what this one was. I’d been up too many hours and been through too much shit to care. But Philip was still waiting for his explanation, and there was no way to get to the more important business still ahead of us unless I got through this part. So I ran my hand through my hair and began, my voice sounding far too dull for a woman who normally reveled in being the smartest person in the room. “My associates saw it first. They’re linked themselves, as you know, and were able to pick up a number of subtle cues in short order, even before we all sat down to dinner. They decided it was a private matter between your siblings and none of my business. But I knew they’d seen something, and that kept me on the lookout for phenomena they would have been better equipped to notice.

“After that…there were more indications than I have time or inclination to list. Jelaine saying of Jason, ‘I do my best to help him carry the weight.’ The way she talked about some of his experiences almost as if they had happened to her personally. The way the two of them went out of their way to express provincial wide-eyed wonder at Oscin and Skye. Jason blinded by blood in his eyes, unable to see a thing, and still running without mishap across a floor covered with debris when Jelaine and the Khaajiir needed him. Jason agreeing with me when I said he’d told me he wanted to be friends, when he’d never spoken those precise words to me, and had not even been present when they were said; when it had been Jelaine the charmer, Jelaine the gracious hostess, who spoke them. You want a half dozen more from the events of the past few hours? I could go on. After a while, they were obvious.”

The room fell silent as I allowed Philip the minutes he needed to decide whether or not to forgive his siblings. It took longer than I thought it would. Then he stirred himself, rose, and straightened his jacket with the same kind of excessive formality I’d used many times, whenever I was in the greatest danger of falling apart. It could have gone either way, but then his stern mask trembled, and he turned toward the first sibling within reach, in this case Jelaine, who hugged him with all her strength and whispered something I failed to catch. Jason joined them less than a second later, and the three stood in silence for about thirty seconds, not resolving the differences between them but for the moment accepting them.

I tried to make contact with Skye again and was this time rewarded with one of the most complicated looks either Porrinyard had ever given me. It was rife with empathy, and concern, and anger, and a certain unambiguous warning.

I was just happy under the circumstances to find love in there, somewhere.

The Bettelhines disengaged. Philip wiped moisture from the corner of one eye, and said, “Well. Counselor. I hope that’s all we need to put aside for the moment. Because I really would like to know who killed the Khaajiir now.”

“So would I,” said Jason and Jelaine.

I walked past them and approached Skye, who averted her eyes again. I damned the situation without quite understanding it. This wasn’t just my distrust, or my momentary brutality toward a bartender with chains on her soul; it was something else, something that might have been too profound to allow everything between us to remain unchanged.

I spoke to her and through her to Oscin. “Love?”

She lowered her voice. “Remember who you are.”

“What?”

She grabbed my hand and gave it an urgent squeeze. “It won’t be easy, given what’s facing you. But remember who you are.”

I didn’t have even the slightest idea what she might have been talking about, but it sounded too much like a goodbye. Were the Porrinyards saying they didn’t expect to survive the next part? Or that they intended to sever their relationship with me if we got past this and had the luxury to decide where our lives went next?

A third possibility occurred to me, one so awful that for a moment I felt what the Khaajiir might have felt as all his life drained away. Hours and a lifetime ago, Pescziuwicz had warned me about the dangers of ever pushing the Bettelhines too far. He’d cited the example of a previous Dip Corps representative, one Bard Daiken, who’d overstepped his bounds and suffered some kind of unspecified retribution. Had I thrown away whatever kind of diplomatic immunity the Bettelhines felt they owed an honored guest? Did I know too much now? Was I going to reach Xana only to be spirited away to one of their prisons, or worse, provided internal governors that would make me happy to fulfill any role they might deem appropriate for me?

Remember who you are? Would it make a difference to me to even remember who I was if I was tucked away at some isolated Bettelhine estate and wearing a sincere but frozen smile on my face as I poured drinks for family members who needed only a few more to decide just what they wanted to do with me in the privacy of a bedroom suite?

Remember who you are.

If that’s what awaited me, once this business was done, I didn’t want to live to see it.

Behind me, Philip said, “Counselor?”

Skye had looked away again.

Damn this. It wasn’t as if I had any choice anymore. Sooner or later, either the air or the water or the food or the power would run out. Whatever happened to me, the Khaajiir’s murderer still stood between us and the rest of our lives.

I took a deep breath and told Oscin, through Skye: “Bring everybody back up. It’s time.”