JUST AS SABIRA was about to lose her mind from being cooped up with her grandfather in the medbay, Gabriel and the commander brought her some golden news.
“You’ll still be quartered here until your transfer to the Safehold, but I’ve managed to appeal to the commander’s good graces.” Gabriel gestured to Tauro Arkrider beside him. “You have two hours to get some exercise, see your friends, and otherwise roam the ship.”
“—Except for your cabin and any weapons caches,” Arkrider added.
“Agreed.” Sabira hopped up from the cot. She no longer felt a dizzying head rush, but ceaseless stabs of pain through her skull weren’t leaving her alone anytime soon.
“—And you’ll remain under supervision for the entire period,” the commander said.
Sabira side-eyed Gabriel. “So glad I escaped life under the Overseers. What am I going to do with all this freedom? Come on then, Gabriel, keep an eye on me and keep me out of trouble.”
“Not the Emissary,” a voice from the corridor added. “Me.”
Lieutenant Tavia Djeli stepped into the doorway. Like the commander, she was still encased in a transparent quarantine bubble.
Sabira squinted, waiting for the next hidden stipulation to be revealed.
“You going to stand there all day insulting the man trying to help you, or you going to take your rec time while you have it?” Djeli spoke Khvaziz with an accent very similar to Gabriel’s.
Sabira bit the inside of her cheek, taking them all in. “This a setup?”
“—It’s an opportunity for you to get up and stretch your legs,” Arkrider said. “No more, no less.”
“The only trouble you’ll find is the trouble you bring with you,” Djeli added.
Well, I’ve got plenty of that.
“Where would you like to go?” Gabriel asked.
“The pagoda. I want to see Orion.”
“—After you.” Arkrider swept his arm toward the door.
Lieutenant Djeli escorted her to the lift and rode down with her to the pagoda level. If she had retribution in mind for the hip toss Sabira’d given her on their first meeting, the private confines of the lift would be the perfect spot. But Tavia kept a respectful distance and silence.
“Now’s your chance,” Sabira said. “Going to take it?”
“I’m a professional, ma’am.”
Sabira thought the lieutenant had deep more she wanted to say, but if Djeli was generous enough to keep her mouth shut, then she would be, too. But when they exited the lift and walked the reed-lined halls, Lieutenant Djeli started singing. Her voice was soft and deep, and the melody wormed into Sabira’s head far too easily.
Primera, Primera,
Where have you gone?
Come home to Tierra,
Home where you belong.
Luna’s still shining
And the mountains stand strong
Come home, oh Primera,
Home where you belong.
“What is that?” Sabira asked.
“An old song that’s been stuck in my head lately.”
“Where I’m from, singing is only for chanting prayers.”
“It’s like that where I’m from, too. Sometimes I indulge myself, though.”
The door to the pagoda chamber slid open at their arrival. The jumbled disarray Sabira witnessed on her last visit had been swept into graceful order. Pristine furrows rippled concentric circles through the rock gardens. The larger greenish-brown stones once again stood upright and cast long gray shadows. Imitating the pre-twilight hours Sabira remembered from Dlamakuuz, oranges, yellows, and pinks brushed across the artificial sky and limned the pagoda in a golden radiance.
Lieutenant Djeli hung back, observing the rock gardens, while Sabira approached the pagoda steps and the watchful eyes of the statue guardians. The orbit of nodes around the structure had resumed. They floated in and out of long shadows and shafts of soft light, splaying the outer walls with rainbows of ultra-density data streams. On the front porch, the planks she had helped Torque pull up had yet to be replaced. The exposed high-tech guts blinked and hummed mysteriously as she stepped around the hole and into the pagoda proper.
The vat of pink gel once again sparked and dazzled with whatever arcane processing inundated Orion’s nude, original body. She placed her hand on the blue flower marking the front of the vat, feeling the minute vibrations.
“I should have mentioned this the first time,” said Orion’s disembodied voice, “but I’d appreciate it if you took your shoes off before you entered the pagoda.”
Of all the things Sabira expected Orion to say, that wasn’t one of them. She looked around, eyebrows furrowed.
“Leave them on the top step.”
She stepped back out and slipped her shoes off like he requested.
“You really should be nicer to Gabriel,” Orion said on her way back in.
Sabira took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I see you. It’s just . . .”
“Things with the Constellation are a bit more glitchy than you were expecting? That’s our fault. We were so eager to get you back here, we didn’t prepare you enough for the inevitable bureaucratic and diplomatic mazes waiting for us.”
“Should have been a bit less naive, myself.” She began walking in circles around the vat, gliding her fingertips along the cylinder. “Glitchy or not, we made an agreement. I’m going back through the Gates with you. We can’t let them have Godsfall. Can’t let them get away with what they’ve done.”
“Any plans on how to take back a superweapon?”
“Was hoping you could come up with the plans. I’ll do the shooting.”
“And here I thought you were done with a life of violence.”
“A life of violence isn’t done with me.” Sabira had walked full circle and faced the front door. Outside, Djeli knelt beside one of the larger rocks, sitting back on her heels with her eyes closed. Sabira nodded her way. “What is she doing?”
“Praying, I think.”
“You do that in the Constellation?”
“Some do.”
“I know I should be used to this by now, but do you have a lem around? Speaking to a voice with no face gets weird after a while.”
“All the lems are busy on slicer engine repairs. But . . .” A node zoomed in through the doorway and stopped beside the vat. It projected a holographic image of Orion in blue and green robes. His spiky hair wavered above his head, mimicking how it floated in the pink goo. “How’s this?”
“Better. Thanks.”
“Crunchy. So you’ve made your mind up. You’d rather go back and try to kill Daggeira than stay here and start a new life? That’s really what you want?”
“You’re godsdamned right. You yourself said you wanted to go back for your father.”
“I did. I do. But not to kill him.”
“What if he kills you?”
“I’ve got more bodies. Other minds, too. You, on the other hand, only got one of each. You should be more careful with them.”
“Still don’t understand how you do that. How you can have so many bodies? So many copies of your mind?”
“It’s an Adept thing. Hard to explain.”
“Did you ever want to be anything other than an Adept?”
“Never.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Same with me. All my life I wanted to be in the Servants. Killing is a Servant thing. I don’t like it, but that’s what I know how to do. Even though everything I had is gone, I’m still who I’ve always been.”
“Don’t you want to be something else, now you finally have the chance? After everything you gave up to get here?”
I do . . . I did . . . but how can I move on as if Daggeira won’t kill more innocents like Zonte? Thousands more, maybe billions more, as long as she controls Godsfall.
“Since you’re an Adept, and you can take over all these bodies, can you control other people’s bodies? The way Zika controlled Spear and Daggeira?”
“In some cases, technically, yes. But I wouldn’t.”
“Me?”
“Not you actually, no. Segundos with n-tech colonies and link augments like Tavia, sure. But not first and third diasporas.”
Did Djeli just raise an eyebrow? Damn, she’s been listening the whole time. The only reason Arkrider let me out of medbay was on the bet that I’d talk about Godsfall to someone. But we haven’t said anything that Arkrider probably wasn’t already aware of anyway. Which means he knows about Subaru and Daggeira. And that she has that same horrid thing stuck in her that we took out of Spear. The thing that let Zika . . .
“Daggeira’s got that implant. Like a cyborg,” she said. “That means when we get back there, you could take her over and—”
“No. Never.”
“What?”
“It’s forbidden for any Muyama to merge with a body that already has a human-level sentient mind. It’s a long story. You should read up about the copy/paste virus that took billions throughout the cluster a few centuries ago. Both the Muyama Academy and the Constellation were founded in the ashes of that interstellar spandemic. And the Academy has strict rules because of it. Seriously strict rules. If I were to ever break the central edict, every Adept in the cluster would hunt me down. So yeah . . . that’s a big ‘no way’ to that idea.”
“Then we’ll have to come up with some other plan.”
“You’re godsdamn right.”