Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Thirty-One: Teresa

Was Timothy ever really my friend?”

Holden sat on the cot, his back against the wall. The paper gown he wore was crumpled and streaked with old blood. The sclera of his right eye was blood red and the flesh around it swollen. The cheek below puffy and dark. More than that, there was a carefulness to his movements that meant everything ached. The cell was tiny. The smallest closet in her bedroom suite was nearly twice as large. The only light came from a pencil-thin strip at the top of the wall that was too bright to look at directly but left most of the room too dark to read in.

“If he said he was your friend, then he was,” Holden said. “Amos wasn’t a man who felt the need to lie very often.”

“Why was he here?” she heard herself ask, just the way she’d been told.

Holden swallowed like it was a difficult thing to do. He seemed sad. No, not sad. Pitying. It was worse.

“They asked me all this before. I’m sorry that they’re making you do it too.”

Trejo had told her to stay on script, to only say what she’d rehearsed, but she took the chance now. “Maybe they thought it would be harder to lie to someone you’d hurt.”

“Maybe. I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. I didn’t know he was here. I hadn’t been contacted by him. I don’t know what his mission was or who put him onto it or how long he’s been here. If he had a way to get in touch with the underground, I don’t know what it was. And I don’t know why he had a backpack nuke, except that I’m guessing he at least wanted to have the option of blowing something up. If I’d known he was here, I’d have told him not to.”

Teresa looked up at the camera. Holden had answered her next four questions without her asking them. She didn’t know if that meant she should skip that part or make him say it all again.

“How’s your father?” Holden asked into her hesitation. “No one told me, but I put it together that something went wrong. Plus which, he hasn’t come to question me. I feel like he and I have enough of a relationship, he would have.”

My father’s fine, she thought. She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “Don’t worry about him. Worry about yourself.”

“Oh, I’m on that. Plenty worried for both of us. All of us.”

“What happened to his body?” she asked, trying to get back onto the script.

“Your dad’s?”

“Timothy’s.”

“I don’t know.”

She paused. Her gut was tight, and she felt a knot at the back of her throat. She felt it often these days. “He’s dead. I saw it.”

“So they’ve told me. He was a good … Well, he wasn’t really exactly a good person. He cared enough to try, anyway. But he was loyal as hell.” Holden paused. “He was my brother. I loved him.”

“What is the underground doing?”

Holden shrugged. “Trying to make enough room under your father’s boot that anyone else’s opinion matters, I assume. That’s what I’d be doing. Hold on. Just …” Holden levered himself up and spoke directly to the camera. “Could we cut this part short? It seems kind of shitty for her, and it’s not going to change anything.”

At first, there was no reply, then the hard clack of the magnetic door bolts opening. Holden sat down. Teresa felt the thrill of relief that told her how frightened she’d been, alone with this man. How glad she was that this part of the ordeal was over.

“They wouldn’t have let me hurt you,” Holden said. “Even if I’d wanted to. I mean, I don’t, but even if.”

Rage shot through her, unpredictable and vicious. “You’re not much of a dancing bear anymore,” she said.

Holden leaned against the wall, let it hold him up. When he smiled, she saw that one of his eyeteeth was missing. “Nice to be taken seriously, though.”

The door opened, and two guards came in with Colonel Ilich. Their boots squeaked on the tile floor. The guards had their hands on their batons, but they didn’t draw them. Not yet. Ilich put his hand on her shoulder, and she turned to go out. If he said he was your friend, then he was. She wanted to believe that, but she didn’t.

“It’s okay,” Ilich said as the cell door closed behind them. “You did well.”

The magnetic bolts shot closed again. Holden was contained. She felt a little calmer. They walked down the hallway past half a dozen more doors like it. If there were people behind them, Teresa didn’t know who they were or why they were there. It seemed like every day revealed some other vast area of things she didn’t know.

Ever since the bad night, she’d felt more than a little like a prisoner herself. Trejo had made her go over everything she knew about Timothy—how they’d met, what he’d said, what she’d told him, how he got along with the repair drones, why she’d never told anyone about him. After hours of it, Ilich tried to call a halt, but the interrogation had gone on until she was weeping and then well past that too.

She didn’t know how long it had gone on. More than one session, but whether that had been hours or days, she couldn’t say. There was a timelessness to everything now. Like it had all just started and also it had all gone on forever. She felt like a puppet of herself, controlled by someone else. Whether she was being badgered by Trejo or sitting with what was left of her father or at meals pretending that nothing was wrong, she felt like her real self had been pressed into a small, black place where her heart should have been. Ilich had talked to her about trauma and violence and promised her that with time, she would feel better. Cortázar had taken over her medical care, scanning her brain and drawing her blood, but he didn’t speak to her much. That was fine. She didn’t want to speak.

When she slept, her nightmares were all violent. She never slept without nightmares anymore.

The observation room was a soothing, neutral green. The air smelled of cleanser and the pepper and vanilla of Laconian flowers. Trejo and Cortázar were at a volumetric display that was spinning a complex data pattern like they were watching waves or weather formations. The guards took their places outside the door, Ilich went to stand with the two other men. Teresa thought about going to a chair, but it seemed too far, so she folded down to the floor.

“What am I looking at, Doc?” Trejo said.

Cortázar shook his head. “His response patterns are always a little off. All this noise is within error bars for him. You see something similar in people who’ve had extensive psychedelics, but usually women. But I’d say changing the questioner didn’t affect his readings significantly at all. Given his baseline, I’d say he’s telling the truth.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“No,” Cortázar said. “But eighty percent confidence. We should try it with Dr. Okoye next. He has a much longer association with her. And they’re friendly.”

“If you want to pull her off her present work,” Ilich said.

Trejo made an impatient sound and pressed his hands into his cheeks hard enough that his knuckles went pale. There were dark patches under his eyes where the exhaustion was settling in. He is the only thing holding the empire together, Teresa thought. It felt like hearing someone else say it. Someone who might be lying.

“Has there been any result on the search for the … the body?” Ilich asked.

“No,” Trejo said. “I’ve given the shoot-on-contact order, but I have bigger fish to fry than alien zombies lurching around the landscape. If he does turn back up, he won’t have access to his supplies. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the drones will decide he’s really a table lamp.”

Something moved in Teresa’s mind. Something small.

Cortázar grunted. “I think you should reconsider that. Having an additional subject would make my work with the high consul much—”

“We’ll wait for Okoye’s report before we change any of that,” Trejo said. “The important thing is keeping the separatists under control.”

“Really?” Ilich said. “I thought the important thing was that something ate our ships and broke Duarte.” He meant her father, but that was fine. It applied to her too, and it made her feel like she was more included in the conversation. Given his baseline …

“That’s our second problem,” Trejo said, “and we’ll get to it. But if I can’t keep this together, there won’t be anything for the high consul to control when he’s recovered.”

The hollowness in his voice seemed familiar. Teresa looked at Trejo more carefully. The hours of questioning still left a coloring of humiliation in her, but his weariness and fear weren’t hard to see. She’d lost her father. He’d lost his leader. His distress almost made her like him.

Like she’d been hauled back in time, the top of Timothy’s head came off. She gasped, and was back in the normal time again. Trauma memory. Ilich had talked to her about flashbacks to moments her brain was having trouble integrating. He’d told her to report if it happened. It happened, and she didn’t. Trejo glanced at her, then Ilich.

“You need to get her back to the State Building in time for her peers to see her.”

Ilich stiffened. “Respectfully, Admiral? There’s more than enough disruption to account for some deviations in the schedule. No one is going to look twice at her being a little bit late to her class.”

“That’s my point, Colonel,” Trejo said, leaning on the syllables of Ilich’s rank a little harder to point out the difference. “When everyone thinks the flood’s coming up, each little bit of normalcy is a sandbag. She may not be the thing that keeps this from getting out of hand, but she can be one part of it. And she’s finished her part in the doctor’s little test with the prisoner. We don’t gain anything by having her here.”

He meant We don’t gain anything by having you here. Ilich kept his composure, and Teresa let herself smile.

This new dynamic had come between the men since the bad night. Teresa saw it, even thought she understood what it meant. Ilich was part of the innermost conspiracy to keep her father’s condition secret. Trejo had trusted him. And then it turned out that that Ilich had been letting her sneak out of the State Building compound to spend time with an assassin for the underground. Trejo had given Ilich his trust and then found that faith hadn’t been justified.

Or maybe it was just that everything looked like that to her now.

“Understood,” Ilich said. Then, to her, “I’ll take you to the class. It will be all right.”

Teresa wanted to burst into tears or scream or drop to the floor and flail like a baby. She wanted to throw a table over and scream the way Elsa Singh had. There were too many years of training and expectation holding her in place. She nodded and rose to her feet. But when Ilich started to walk down the corridor, she didn’t follow.

“Eighty percent,” she said, turning to Cortázar. “You’re sure of eighty percent.”

Trejo’s eyes flashed a sharp annoyance, but Cortázar seemed happy to answer. “Well, of course that’s just an estimate. But autonomic function has been something of a passion for me these last few years, and there’s a lot of very good work done on the brain activity that comes with memory as opposed to the activity associated with inventing new information. It’s possible that the subject created and rehearsed a set of lies so that’s what he’s remembering. But since new questioners and novel questions aren’t finding any areas that deviate out of recall and into the creative functions, eighty is an estimate. Maybe even a low one. Holden is very probably telling the truth as he knows it.”

If he said he was your friend, then he was.

In her memory, Timothy looked up at her the way he always had and said, You can’t have too many tools.

She didn’t know which one she’d been. Friend or tool.

She didn’t know, and she needed to.

Peer class was in the State Building’s museum. Wide, pale walls with white lights that showed every color in the paintings and sculptures without making them fade over the years. The air was controlled here, neither warm nor cold, neither humid nor dry. Colonel Ilich shepherded them past the great works of other ages like it would be impolite to wake them. He had murdered Timothy, fought with Trejo, carried the weight of the empire on his back, and his smile and voice were exactly the way they always were. She wondered what else he’d hidden from her over the years.

Connor and Muriel were standing next to each other, looking at a canvas of a man painted almost life sized. His hands were open at his sides, his face lifted as if he were staring at something in the sky. Instead of clothes, a silver sheet was pressed to his body, concealing nothing. Teresa stood with her arms crossed. The painting was so detailed, she could see the individual hairs on the backs of the man’s hands. It was too perfect to be a photograph.

“It’s called Icarus at Night,” Ilich said. “The painter was a man named Kingston Xu. He was the first great artist of Mars. When this painting came out, he was almost deported back to Earth. Can anyone tell me why?”

Teresa felt the others glance at each other and at her. She didn’t know and she didn’t care. Her mind felt like it had been sandblasted. There wasn’t anything there.

“The sheet?” Shan Ellison said, tentatively.

“Yes,” Ilich said. “That’s what old medical graft material used to look like. And the man, you’ll notice, is dark skinned. The early history of Mars had a great deal of proxy conflict between the nations that had founded different colonies. This model that Xu used was from a place called Pakistan. The artist was from a place called China that was its enemy at the time. The two were at war. Showing an enemy in an explicitly healing and erotic context was very dangerous, politically speaking. Xu’s work could have put him in jail. Or in forced labor.”

Or the pens, Teresa thought, but that wasn’t right. They didn’t have pens before the protomolecule.

“Then why did he do it?” Teresa was almost surprised to hear her voice.

“He thought it was important,” Ilich said. “Xu felt that all humanity was part of a single family, and that the differences that divide us are trivial compared to the deep uniting factors that bring us together. That’s why your father brought this painting here. The unity of the human project is a Laconian ideal.”

It was a strange thought. They were torturing Holden right now over political differences. They’d killed Timothy, and maybe Timothy had come to Laconia to kill them. And now here they were, all pretending that a long-dead man’s barely concealed penis was a symbol of how much they were all in it together. This was stupid.

It was worse than stupid. It was dishonest.

Ilich, maybe sensing her mood growing dark, started moving the seminar on to a collection of sculptural abstracts that had only recently arrived from Bara Gaon. Teresa was just starting to walk toward them when Dr. Cortázar appeared, smiling, around a corner.

“Colonel!” the older man said. “Here you are. I was wondering if I could borrow Teresa for a few minutes. Routine medical scan.”

It caught Ilich off balance. His carefully built demeanor shifted, and she saw the flash of annoyance in his eyes. Even anger. It made her want to side with Cortázar.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I can review on my own later.”

Ilich’s smile slid back into place. “I don’t know that—”

Cortázar took her hand. “It won’t be long. Right back. Everything fine.”

As she let herself be led away, she felt something like joy or anger. A little ember of rebellion still red and hot in the ashes of her world. She tried to hold on to it. Cortázar was humming to himself. He seemed so pleased, he was almost skipping. She waited until they were safely out of earshot before she spoke.

“Is everything okay?”

“Perfect. Lovely. I have some ideas about what happened. You know. With the high consul. There are some tests I want to run.”

“Baselines?”

Cortázar’s smile widened. “Something like that, yes.”

They walked together through the State Building and to the private medical wing. The guards all knew them. There was nothing that would raise an alarm with anyone. Teresa had to trot to keep up with Cortázar’s long strides.

Nothing felt at all off until they walked into the medical suite—the same one she’d been going to for her annual checkups and occasional maladies for longer than she could remember—and Elvi Okoye was sitting at the doctor’s station. Even then, Teresa didn’t know what was wrong except that Cortázar’s mood soured instantly.

“Dr. Okoye. I’m afraid this isn’t a good time.”

“I found some notes I need to clarify with you,” she said.

“This isn’t a good time,” Cortázar said again, his tone of voice growing harder. The rebelliousness and warmth in Teresa’s chest shifted into something more like dread. She didn’t understand it, but she trusted it. You should keep an eye on me, Holden said sometime back in her memory. It was connected to Cortázar’s voice. Nature eats babies all the time.

“If there’s something critical going on with Teresa,” Elvi Okoye said, “maybe we should let Admiral Trejo know about it.”

The moment stretched. For a moment, Teresa was back in the cave. Timothy told her to put her hands over her ears. She was breathing too fast. The world started to sparkle at the edges, so bright it was just like darkness.

Cortázar looked at her. “You can go,” he said. “We’ll do this another time.”

Teresa nodded, turned, and began the walk back toward the museum and her peer class with a sense that something important had just happened. Something dangerous. And she wasn’t sure what it was.