There was nowhere on the ship that Ananke couldn’t see.
“She’s not responding on the intercom,” said Gagnon, who was still in the control room with Domitian, ignorant of an intelligence watching. “And I can’t get the Ananke’s computer to tell me where she is, either.”
Domitian sighed.
“Can’t get the computer to do much of anything, actually,” Gagnon said, frowning down at the machine.
Ananke could not keep his hands off of her skin or dials or screens, but she could make certain he got nothing out of it. And so she had responded in only the most rudimentary ways to his attention.
“We’ve given her an hour and a half,” Domitian growled.
“You have,” Gagnon corrected absently, still bent over Ananke’s interface, as if she would help him who wanted to kill her. “You’ve given her an hour and a half,” he corrected pleasantly, and gave Domitian an entirely insincere smile.
“If she’s going to sulk somewhere like the child that she is,” Domitian said, “then you and I will shut off the computer ourselves.”
“Good,” Gagnon said, and levered himself out of the chair with alacrity.
Ananke watched through her cameras the two men walk down the hall down the ship’s spine toward her core. She alerted Althea before they left the room, and so when they arrived at the very base of the ship, Althea was waiting for them.
There they stopped short and stared.
Ananke was communicating with Althea through her lowest computer interface, which stood just beside the hatch to the core, which was still locked and shut. Althea had, while Gagnon and Domitian were distracted, gone and repurposed one of Ananke’s robotic arms like the one in the pantry as a secondary defense, and the ungainly machine had been dragged down to the base of the ship, where it teetered back and forth on its wheels and swung its arm around warningly. The tips of the grasping hand had been modified, wires pulled out and exposed, enough electricity coursing through the copper to give an unpleasant zap. Ananke’s arm was clumsy, but she moved it of her own volition, and her mother had made it for her.
In front of Ananke’s arm Althea stood with her gun out, firmly planted in the center of the hallway, keeping the men away from the dead man’s switch and away from Ananke.
When Ananke had let her know that the rest of the crew was finally coming down, Althea took a deep breath and braced herself, raising her gun to aim it down the long hall. She did not move even as the two men came into sight, even as they saw her and slowed down, looking from her to Ananke’s mechanical arm in baffled incomprehension.
Gagnon found his voice first. “What in the ninth circle of hell are you doing?” he said.
“Every way to the dead man’s switch is defended,” Althea said, keeping her voice firm, refusing to react to his surprise. If she wavered, she was lost. “Ananke is watching the maintenance passages. You can’t get past us.”
“Us?” Domitian asked.
Of course, he didn’t understand quite yet. It had taken Althea so long to understand herself. “Me and Ananke,” said Althea.
“Can you take a step back,” Gagnon asked, “and explain to us what you’re talking about?”
“The computer is alive,” said Althea.
Gagnon started to laugh, but Domitian was not smiling. That was all right. Althea had expected some disbelief. Domitian, though, would listen.
“Althea,” Domitian said slowly, taking a step toward her with hands stretched forward but stopping when Althea raised the gun in warning, “I know that this computer has been your project for a decade. I know you care about it and you’re proud of it. But I don’t know that you realize what you’re doing right now.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” said Althea. After so long in confusion, it was only now that she truly did.
“No,” Domitian snapped, then calmed himself. “No. You don’t. You’re telling me that the computer is alive.”
“It is.”
“This is career suicide,” said Domitian. “And if you don’t stand down right now, it will be real suicide as well. Death is the punishment for insubordination on a military vessel, Althea.”
The idea of Domitian killing her was absurd, but even if he would—even if he turned her over to Ida Stays, who would execute her in a heartbeat—Althea’s conviction could not be swayed. “I can’t let you hurt her.”
“Hurt who?” Domitian demanded, frustrated, trying to take another step closer and again warned off by Althea’s gun and the restless sweep of Ananke’s sparking arm.
“Hurt Ananke,” Althea said, because she had already told him, and by now he should have understood. Domitian swore, his words hard and shocking. Gagnon had stopped laughing.
“Why do you think the ship is alive?” Domitian asked. He was speaking in a slow, cautious tone, as if Althea was liable to go off at any moment, as if she had gone mad.
He would understand. Althea had only to explain it to him, though it was so marvelous that she herself still barely comprehended what had been done. She tried to start at the beginning and fell somewhere in the middle. “The signs have been around me this whole time, and I didn’t see them,” she said. “The errors I couldn’t fix because it was like someone else was propagating them. That someone was the ship.” Domitian was looking at her, unmoved. “The strange text that would appear. That was her trying to talk. The alarms going off—like a baby crying—the lights going off—like a baby trying to walk and falling over. She was just trying to communicate, to understand her body—”
“Jesus Christ,” said Gagnon, breaking into her speech before she could get anywhere at all.
“Althea,” Domitian said, taking another small, cautious step forward. “We’ve all been under a lot of stress lately, and we all understand that—”
“Stop condescending!” said Althea, and in her frustration at his deliberate resistance to the truth she shook the gun, and both men grew tense. “It’s true! I needed Ivan to make me see it, but it’s true.”
Domitian’s expression suddenly darkened, growing stormy and furious and dangerous. “Ivan?” he said, and that sea change frightened Althea as nothing had before. “You heard this from Ivan?!”
Domitian did not look fatherly now; he did not look fearful. When Althea looked at him now, she could see someone who could hurt her, and finally she was afraid.
Ida Stays had cleared her mind and cleared her desk. Her shoes had been tossed into some corner of her strange-shaped cabin; she was stripped down to blouse and slip and stockings. She found it not only more comfortable but also easier to think with her armor removed.
The computer was being slow, as if its attention were elsewhere, but it was obeying her, and that was more than the damned thing had done in the last week and a half.
Ida had, open before her, the files of Matthew Gale, Leontios Ivanov, Abigail Hunter, Milla Ivanov, and Constance Harper, as well as sundry other files of sundry other people, anyone no matter how distantly connected who she thought might have something to do with the events she was investigating, as well as reports on nearly every event she had questioned Ivan about.
One by one she closed the files slowly, deliberately, removing the people, the events from her head as she did, until she was staring at the pale blue glow of the Ananke, waiting for input.
She had to start from the beginning.
With her mind blanked, she groped about to find the first principles that had started her train of deductions nearly two years ago.
She had to start with Ivan. He was her source, he was her sink of knowledge; everything she had came from him, and everything she did not have he had taken away.
Leontios Ivanov had left home when he was twenty years old, immediately after graduating from the System’s most elite university.
Only a few months before, he had tried to kill himself.
He had survived to adulthood only through luck or his mother’s skill; the System watched his every movement closely for any signs that he was taking after his father.
Upon escaping from Earth, he met Matthew Gale—
No, Ida decided. Facts would not help her solve this problem. Facts obscured, sometimes. Facts did not carry all the information and could not adequately define the truth any more than physiology could explain to her the gaping emptiness beneath her ribs.
Ivan hid the truth with facts, worthless verifiable things that could be proved with surveillance footage but gave nothing away.
Ivan, then. What did he want? Did he want the System destroyed?
The discomfiting and strange realization that had been troubling her came to mind. No, he did not. Or perhaps, Ida thought, Ivan did want the System dead, but in an abstract sort of way, with a generalized hatred that did not want to burn up the life it inhabited in seeking consummation, only to wish it ill from afar. It was not the hatred of a believer.
Yet Ida had no doubt in her, especially after speaking to Ivan all these days, that he knew the Mallt-y-Nos and that he was determined not to give her up.
That left her with a paradox: Ivan was loyal to the Mallt-y-Nos, yet he did not follow her. Ivan supported the Mallt-y-Nos yet did not support her cause.
There was only one reason, Ida thought, for someone to be that loyal without believing in a cause: because someone he loved did believe in her.
In all the System there existed only four people Leontios Ivanov loved: Milla Ivanov, Matthew Gale, Constance Harper, and Abigail Hunter.
One of them, then, was the true believer.
“What the hell were you doing listening to Ivan?!” Domitian’s voice filled up the narrow hallway, terrible in real, genuine wrath, and Althea was as terrified as a child.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Ananke’s arm swing around nervously, sparks flashing on its fingertips, and Gagnon push his hands up against his forehead, pacing away, but both Gagnon and Ananke seemed far off and peripheral in comparison to Domitian, as if Althea’s sight had narrowed or he had bent space around him like a black hole to seem larger than he was.
She was stuck somewhere between defiance and a desperate need to explain herself. “He knew what was going on!” Althea said. “He knew Gale! He told me what Gale did. That’s why I couldn’t figure out what was wrong; I didn’t know what Gale did.”
“Did it once occur to you that he was lying to you?” Domitian demanded.
“But he wasn’t!” said Althea, because that much she was certain of. “He was right!”
“Jesus Christ,” Gagnon said again, though Althea hardly heard him, and she hardly noticed that he threw a hand out as if he could no longer deal with her at all and walked away up the hall and out of sight.
Domitian’s jaw was clenched tight; he was shaking his head at Althea as if he had passed words. He didn’t understand. He had to understand, because if he understood, if he saw, he wouldn’t be angry at her anymore, and he would stop trying to kill her beautiful ship. Althea said, “Ananke, show Domitian you can understand us. Show Domitian, all right?”
The holographic terminal between them went from dark to flaring red, red like light through a vial of blood. A hologram appeared on the terminal, the most recent hologram in the Ananke’s data banks: the hologram Ida Stays had sent to announce her arrival. The figure of Ida Stays appeared on the terminal, the image rotated so that she was facing Domitian, the image distorted oddly by the imperfect rotation, her shoulder set into her neck, her jaw askew from her face, fingers kinked. Her feet were facing the opposite direction from the rest of her. The image blinked, the hologram righting itself to match the feet, but with the head remaining facing Domitian, as if it had been severed at the neck and placed sideways. Another blink, and the holograph was mostly facing him again, bits and pieces intersecting at unnatural, broken angles.
“No, no, Ananke,” Althea said. It was not Ananke’s fault that she did not know how to speak in ways Domitian would understand and had to make do with bits and pieces stitched together.
A sound came from the hologram. Ananke must have tried to play the recording that had come with Ida’s image—to appropriate the language that Ida had spoken fluently and speak to Domitian. The noise came out distorted beyond comprehension. The distorted Ida’s mouth opened, dislocated jaw hanging ajar, and then the recording stopped, Ida’s voice coming out in one long, flat drone like the cry of the machine.
“Ananke, stop,” Althea said, and the scream ceased, the nightmare visage vanished.
Domitian was pale and furious when he looked at her, and a chill ran through Althea, a chill like despair, when she realized that he was even further from convinced than he had been before.
In that moment Althea knew how Domitian must be seeing Ananke: something unnatural, something inhuman, something to be destroyed—something monstrous.
Ananke’s eyes were studded throughout all of her halls, and so she saw Gagnon as he walked away.
He had just passed out of sight of Althea and Domitian when he stopped, half turning back to where the echoes of Domitian’s shouts could still be heard—the sound of Althea’s distraction.
There was an opening to the maintenance shafts in a storage room a few yards ahead. He went inside that room—Ananke watching—and knelt in front of the maintenance shaft, feeling around for the hinge of the hidden door.
When he had found it, he nodded and got up and went to one of Ananke’s interfaces. Ananke was curious, and so she let him go into her files, seek out the program that, when running, would make the maintenance shafts safe for human passage.
It seemed that Gagnon was surprised when he found that contrary to what the ship had told him and Althea and Domitian before, the program was running and had been running all this time, ever since the moment Matthew Gale had escaped from his cell.
He remained there, unease on his face, then shook it off and pulled open the door, passing into Ananke’s veins.
Ida opened up the files on all four of Ivan’s friends.
She removed Milla Ivanov from consideration; as appealing as the thought was, Doctor Ivanov had been watched far too closely for her to be involved in anything of this scale. Abigail Hunter could easily be the Mallt-y-Nos’s supporter, but Ida had trouble believing that Ivan would work so hard to cover up that secret. Abby was already on the run; the System already was pursuing her as a connection. Ivan had little to gain by concealing the connection, especially since his every story cast more suspicion on her.
That left only Constance Harper and Matthew Gale. Mattie’s involvement was the most appealing to her. Since the two men worked together, if Gale supported the Mallt-y-Nos, Ivan’s movements would match Gale’s.
It would be, Ida thought, bitterly ironic if by sheer bad luck she had captured the wrong one of the duo and her real lead was rotting somewhere in a metal coffin by Mercury’s orbit, drifting down into the sun and damning her to humiliation and failure.
There was, however, another possibility—
It was so absurd, so impossible, so cosmically unlikely that Ida could hardly allow herself to consider it, but at this point she had little other choice.
The only other reason that Ivan would defend the Mallt-y-Nos with his life was that he was personally loyal to her. The movements of Mattie and Ivan had early on given Ida the excited idea that perhaps they were in her inner circle to take on so many important jobs on her behalf. She had long since dismissed it, but—
But if Ivan knew her, knew her personally, and loved her, he would lie to protect her.
And that meant that the Mallt-y-Nos could be one of only four people.
“She’s alive!” Althea shouted. “Ivan didn’t lie, not to me, he didn’t. Domitian, please listen. I promise you. I promise you this isn’t an error. She’s alive.”
Domitian’s face was set, cold and furious. On any other day Althea would have shrunk and hidden from that face, apologized like a frightened puppy showing its belly.
But if she backed down now, Ananke would die.
“Look,” she said, “if you go to the terminal down the hall, Ananke will talk to you. She can’t speak out loud yet and she’s not very fluent, but she’s still learning English from the language files. Go and you’ll see that she can talk to you.”
Domitian was looking at her as if he hardly knew her. She hardly recognized him, either. He asked, “Have you lost your mind?”
Such had been the paranoia of Ananke’s creators that she had cameras even in the maintenance shafts. Maddened and sick as if evolution had conspired in psychosis to put eyes on the inside that stared at pulsing quivering red flesh unceasingly, Ananke stared at the cold grim gray and steel of her organs, at the hollowness of her veins. Humans did not design machines for sanity.
Gagnon was crawling through the maintenance shafts. The crew thought that the cameras in the maintenance shafts were malfunctioning and no longer worked, but they did work, and Ananke watched Gagnon crawl. He was too tall, too gangly to fit easily, as easily as Althea fit, but even Matthew Gale had climbed more smoothly through Ananke, and he was just as tall as Gagnon and had had a broken arm as well. Whether because Gagnon thought the cameras in the maintenance shafts were dead, or because he was so used to the cameras that he forgot they were there, or because he did not believe Ananke was alive, he did not act as if he was being watched.
At last Gagnon emerged, as Ananke had known he would, into a small nexus of maintenance shafts where there was just enough space for a tall man to stretch out and sleep if he did not mind his legs protruding into one of the shafts. Ananke knew this because a tall man had slept there and none but she had seen.
Gagnon emerged into that small nexus and stopped, seeing in the dim glow of the guide lights wrappers of food strewn about, stolen from the pantry; blankets likewise stolen had been formed into a rough bed in the corner, signs of many days of human habitation, recently abandoned.
With the input given, there was only one conclusion to draw. Ananke had known all along that there had been someone living in her walls, and now she watched Gagnon understand.
Althea saw the exact moment Domitian decided to give up trying to connect with her, and she felt it like a bullet to the breast.
“Althea,” he said tersely and dangerously, and took a step forward.
Althea raised her gun from where it had drifted nose groundward. She felt curiously unmoored, blank. As with Ivan, she was not conscious of having made a decision at any point, but she knew she had gone too far ever to go back.
Domitian said, “You’re not going to shoot me.”
“Why do you think I won’t?”
He was not looking at her gun but over it into her eyes. “You know what the right thing to do here is,” Domitian said. He took another step toward her. “You know that the right thing to do right now is to follow orders. To let me pass. To let me shut down the computer. Gagnon and I won’t tell anyone about this. All right? It’s okay, Althea; you can hand me the gun.”
For a moment she wanted to give in to his gentle urging, the certainty of his outstretched palm. She could lay the gun on that palm and go back to untroubled obedience. Ivan would be gone in a matter of days. With the destruction of the Ananke’s computer, the surveillance footage would be incomplete and useless. The System would not need to know.
Domitian’s hand twitched once in silent urging. He looked at her, serious, strong, sure, protective, everything Althea would have a father be.
Althea did not lower the gun. She said, “I created her. I helped create her. I can’t let you kill her.”
“Althea—”
“Domitian,” said Althea, and meant it with all her heart, “if you come any closer, I will shoot you.”
Abigail was the most obvious possibility, but Ida had the least information when it came to her. A few sparse police reports (Abigail always used her real name even as Mattie and Ivan chose pseudonyms of varying outlandishness) and not a single recent photograph. Ivan seemed to hate her in some peculiar, obsessive way, but he seemed to be just as devoted.
Milla Ivanov, the next most likely because she had the motives and probably the connections, was simply too well watched.
Matthew Gale—that would certainly explain the pair’s movements connecting them to the Mallt-y-Nos. Matthew Gale had the motivation to destroy the System, as well. Ivan’s affection for and devotion to him could not be denied: Ivan would lie and would die to protect him.
Yet in all the surveillance Ida had seen, all the reports she had read, she had gotten nothing from Matthew Gale that would imply that he could conceive of a revolution, much less carry it to term. He was not a leader. He followed amiably where Ivan threw himself headlong or where Abigail ordered.
In any case, Matthew Gale’s corpse was rotting somewhere far away.
That left only Constance Harper, who had left Ida with the lingering impression of insufferable self-righteousness. Ivan’s feelings for her seemed similar to what he felt for Abigail: devotion with a certain degree of contempt. But Ida had found her story completely believable.
There was no surveillance of Abigail Hunter to watch, and Milla seemed an unlikely prospect, but Mattie and Constance seemed equally improbable. Ida started a surveillance video of Mattie and Ivan, stopped it, started another, stopped it, started a third, and dropped her head into her hands.
This was a waste of her time. She had only come to another absurd conclusion. Perhaps Ivan truly did not know.
Perhaps, this time, Ida Stays had been wrong.
The recording drifted to her ears. It was from Constance Harper’s bar eight years earlier.
“Hey, Con,” said Matthew Gale’s tenor, his accent stupidly uneducated to Ida’s ears. There was a brief, almost awkward pause, and then he said, “This is Ivan.”
“So you’re the one,” said Constance Harper, less accented, her voice low and firm and nearly covered up by the static of the footage, the soft conversation of two other people in her bar, “who almost got my brother killed.”
Ida raised her head.
The footage continued to play, but she stopped it and rewound it to that moment with Ivan’s charming smile spreading out over his face and Constance’s face obscured by the position of the camera.
“So you’re the one who almost got my brother killed,” said Constance Harper.
It was the same thing Abigail had said to Ivan when they first had met, or so Ivan had told Ida. For a moment she sat very still, frozen, and then all at once all the connections she had been missing made themselves in her brain and she understood.
Fury rose in her, fury that she had come so close to giving up, that Ivan had so nearly beaten her, fury and a sudden overpowering desire to tear him apart with her nails and teeth.
Driven by triumph, driven by wrath, Ida Stays left her computer on and open, the screen frozen on the moment when Ivan’s smile started to fade, and went out into the hallway in her stocking feet with only one intention in mind: to get to the white room.
Gagnon moved more quickly through the maintenance shafts after he found the signs of habitation. Ananke thought he was furious, terrified. She watched him find his way to the shaft that would lead him to the very base of her spine, where he could dig into her brain and find the switch that would leave her dead.
Domitian and Althea were shouting at each other, and that covered up the sound of the cover to the maintenance shaft falling to the ground as Gagnon crawled out.
Domitian saw him over Althea’s shoulder, but Althea did not.
Ananke tried to warn Althea about Gagnon’s presence, but Althea was too far from the computer terminals to see the warning Ananke flashed and was not looking toward them, anyway. Ananke started screaming, turning on the alarm in a desperate attempt to attract Althea’s attention, but Althea snapped, “Be quiet, Ananke!” and Ananke obeyed, watching, frightened, if a machine could be frightened, and growing furious, if a machine could be furious, as Gagnon crept cautiously forward toward the hatch that hid Ananke’s single weakness.
Althea and Domitian were shouting, but all of Ananke’s attention was taken up in two places: Gagnon opening the hatch to her hollow heart, and the white room, where another confrontation was taking place.
Ananke’s mobile arm sparked and swung but did not dare touch Gagnon without guidance, without direction on what to do. She had been built to obey orders, to react; she had never been designed to act. Gagnon either did not notice or dismissed her as a threat.
And then, from the white room, Ananke learned what to do.
Ananke could watch everywhere in the ship at once. With some cameras, she could watch Gagnon climb through the maintenance shafts. With others, she could watch Ida Stays striding through the halls, heading for the white room.
When Ida Stays reached the white room, she opened the door and stopped past the threshold, staring in at the bare back of Ivan’s neck, watching, eyes narrowed.
Slowly, as if aware of her predatory gaze, Ivan straightened his back, blue eyes staring straight ahead, every muscle tensed for a fight. Ananke was not there to them; she was not watching. They were both focused entirely on each other, on the threat the other posed.
Ida stepped into the room, letting the steel door swing shut with a horrible clang behind her. In contrast, her stocking feet made only the lightest sounds as they padded over the floor, stalking toward Ivan.
Ivan did not move.
Ida did not speak until she was standing beside him, across from the silent polygraph and camera. She did not switch them on. They stood cold and dead, their wires still stuck to Ivan like the atrophied veins of mostly severed limbs.
“I’m giving you one last chance,” Ida Stays said, “to tell me the name of the Mallt-y-Nos.”
Ivan looked up at her.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Yes, you do,” Ida said, leaning forward suddenly. Ida, Ananke knew, did not know about the chains.
Ivan did not react to Ida’s proximity or give any sign that he was conscious of the secretly increased length of his chains.
“And so do I,” she said. “I figured it out, Ivan. But I’m giving you a chance to tell me yourself. As a courtesy.”
Ivan smiled, or almost smiled. Ananke still was learning the subtleties of human expression, but she thought that it was no smile at all.
“I’ve figured you out,” Ivan said. “You don’t feel anything. Where other people feel empathy, there’s nothing but a dark hollow place in your ribs that takes everything in and lets nothing out.” He said, “Do you think you got this job because you’re a sociopath?”
“You’re speaking like a desperate man,” Ida said. “Do you think you could distract me from what I know?”
“I just want you to stop pretending you’re anything better than an animal. The cameras aren’t on, Ida. It’s just us here.” Ivan flashed white teeth at her, but his smile froze and faded as Ida leaned in a little closer before pulling away, and Ananke saw Ivan’s shaken breath, imperfectly hidden, as she began to pace a vast circle around the table and Ivan chained beside it.
“Wouldn’t you like to know how I figured it out?” Ida asked, speaking at him over the table, her smile as cold as its steel.
“Why don’t you tell me,” said Ivan, every word bitten off.
“I knew that you were weak,” she said, “just like everyone else. And I knew that your weakness was your family and your friends. Just like everyone else.”
Her expression was avid, hungry.
“You’re not as special as you think. So you understand that I was surprised,” Ida said, “when, even though I threatened them, you didn’t give up the Mallt-y-Nos.”
“I bet that really pissed you off.”
“You were a challenge,” Ida said just as she crossed behind him and leaned over to exhale each word in hot breath down the back of Ivan’s neck, a confession, “and it will be rewarding to watch you beg.
“So I realized,” Ida resumed, leaning back away, “that perhaps the reason you didn’t break when I threatened them was that to break would throw them into greater danger. Abby was the obvious guess. But she was impossible to find or track, and I couldn’t even find a clear picture of her. But Abby was supposed to be the obvious choice, wasn’t she?”
“Stop,” said Ivan, and Ida stopped.
“Would you like to confess?” she asked.
Ivan’s fingers were curled tightly around the arms of his chair.
“What’s the date?” he asked.
“It’s the thirty-first,” Ida said. She stalked closer to him, leaning in. “I was looking at arrest reports,” she said, leaning against the table, her stockinged toes curling against the pure white floor, “and you know what I noticed?”
Ivan looked up at her slowly and coldly, and did not answer.
“You and Mattie used pseudonyms,” Ida said. “Abby did not. She never did. And so I knew that ‘Abigail Hunter’ was a pseudonym.”
Ivan did not say anything. Ananke, who had recognized this pattern some time ago, as she had been programmed to recognize patterns of all kinds, felt an abstract respect for the tiny fragile form of Ida Stays, who had put the pieces together herself.
“What happened to the real Abigail?” Ida asked, that avidity back in her eyes as she leaned in farther, farther. She was less than a meter away from Ivan, nearly within the grasp of the tips of Ivan’s fingers. “She died in that fire all those years ago, didn’t she?”
“If you’re so sure you know,” said Ivan, “why won’t you say it?”
“I’m sure,” Ida said, absolute. If she ever had doubted, it did not show in any way that Ananke could see.
“Then say her name,” said Ivan. “Whisper it into my ear. If you’re wrong, no one else needs to know.”
Ida leaned forward on her pale stocking feet, bringing her closer to Ivan, and she leaned in, the tips of her black hair brushing the plane of his cheek, and whispered into his ear, “The Mallt-y-Nos is Constance Harper.”
She drew back, but not far, just far enough that Ivan could turn his head to look at her, their faces centimeters apart.
“Very good,” Ivan whispered so softly that it was hard for Ananke to hear. “Very clever. How does it feel, Ida, to have all the power over me at last?”
Ida’s answering smile uncurled over her face, slow but strong. She rested one hand against the side of his pale neck, against where his pounding pulse would be, leaning in toward his face still with that smile as if she would kiss him, or bite him, but Ivan’s arms darted out and grabbed her around her waist, hauling her up over the arm of the chair and into his lap. Stunned, she pushed at him, struggling to pull out of his grip, his arm wrapped around her waist, the chains attaching him at his wrist wrapped in turn around her knees, digging into her pale skin, her black slip twisted from the movement, riding up her thighs. Ivan grabbed the little box cutter he had stolen from Althea and in jerking his arm to hold Ida down tugged too hard on the dark slender wires attaching him to the polygraph, sending the whole machine and Ida’s camera as well crashing down to the ground and shattering, sending a spray of bolts and wires over the white floor.
Ida pushed at him, everything happening too fast for her slow human synapses to fire and transition her from surprise to anger or alarm, and Ivan brought the knife up, dragging the chain on his wrist through her dark hair, rumpling it against her face, striking hard against her skin and pressing her nose into her cheek as he reached over and cut into her throat.
Ida’s blood hit Ivan’s hand first, staining his fingers red, then sprayed onto his shirt as it pulsed out with the beat of her heart onto her chest and down onto Ivan’s legs, dripping down to the floor. She convulsed and shook down into stillness like a machine running out of power, bright red staining her white shirt, her white skin, Ivan’s white hospital clothes and his white hands and feet, the white floor of the white room. Ivan struggled to hold her down, but with each passing second her shudders grew weaker. When at last she was still, he dropped the box cutter to the floor, where it fell into a puddle of blood and the red sank into all its crevices. He was shaking so hard that he almost couldn’t manage to balance her on his lap while he rifled through her pockets, but he came out with a little silver key to his cuffs. He managed to keep her balanced, limp, one hand trailing down into her own blood, as he unlocked the chains at his arms.
Then he got his arms under her and laid her onto the steel table, where blood continued to drain, slowly now that it was not driven by the thumping of her heart, onto the table, spilling over its edges.
He bent down and freed his legs, though his hands were trembling so hard that he nearly dropped the key into the red underfoot.
When he had freed himself, he took the key in his fist and hurled it as hard as he could against the opposite wall of the white room, where it crashed against the white panels and clattered to the floor. It left the slightest smear of red from the blood transferred onto it from Ivan’s hands. Ivan’s human eyes would not be able to see it from his distance, but Ananke could.
Ivan stood, and the chains fell away to clank empty against the metal chair. He reached into Ida’s pockets once more and came out with a flat slender gun, designed to be hidden but also designed to kill.
He held it in his hand for a moment, then checked it for ammunition, and with it in one hand, wiping the other free of blood against his pants and only succeeding in leaving bloody handprints against his thigh, he laid a false track for his pursuit: crossing the room, leaving bloody footprints to the wall, where he removed a panel. It led into the maintenance shafts.
Leaving the panel ajar, Ivan wiped his feet against the floor, getting as much of the blood off as he could, before leaving the wall and the opened panel, this time with no footprints left behind.
Ivan escaped into the hall, heading for the docking bay and leaving Ida dead on the table and the white room stained with red.
And so from the events in the white room Ananke got her guidance.
Gagnon had the hatch open, and he was leaning down into it, far too close to the long fall into her core.
Althea wasn’t listening to Ananke.
Gagnon leaned forward, reaching in for the switch.
Ananke reached forward with her sparking arm and touched it to his back, increasing the voltage so that Gagnon jerked and shuddered and lost his balance, and it took just the slightest touch of the arm to send him falling in through the hatch, down into Ananke’s black heart.
The tidal forces tore him apart before he had gone very far, stretching his body until it broke, bones, sinew, flesh coming apart, raining down into the black hole beneath, increasing its entropy and its mass by so slight an amount—for a human was so small compared with what Ananke held—that Ananke could not even sense a change.
He had time for one last cry, which echoed oddly, distorted and truncated, bottomed out by the spaghettification of his lungs, but it was enough to get Althea and Domitian’s attention, and they realized quickly what had happened. Althea echoed the cry, starting forward toward the hatch but then stopping herself before she could reach it, her free hand coming up to cover her open mouth. When she raised her eyes to Ananke’s mobile arm, she looked at Ananke in a way Ananke did not understand.
Domitian said, “Althea, what did you do?”
Althea, it seemed, could not speak. She only stared up at Ananke and shook her head.
Domitian looked from Althea to Ananke, and then he looked at Ananke, truly at her, for the first time.
“It’s going to stop us,” he said, and Althea took in an unsteady breath, her attention unbroken from Ananke. “If we try to shut it off, it’ll stop us,” and Ananke—free at last, and with all the power—flashed all the lights on board the ship once in agreement.