Gagnon was dead, and Ananke—Althea’s Ananke—had killed him.
She was still learning, Althea told herself. Ananke was still learning. Ananke hadn’t learned the ability fully to tell right from wrong. She was still thinking like a machine, finding the most straightforward solution to a problem and—and executing it.
She couldn’t let Ananke see how upset she was. She couldn’t let Ananke see her panic, see her grieve. The most frightening thing for a child to see was her mother crying, and Althea didn’t want to frighten Ananke any more. She didn’t want Ananke to see that she was upset; she didn’t want Ananke to see that she was afraid of—
“We have to find Ida,” said Domitian grimly from behind her, and broke her from the frightful beckoning of that unfinished thought. In some way, it troubled her that Domitian immediately sought Ida Stays, but that concern was buried beneath the sound like static that filled her ears, her eyes, her brain, looking down the small hatch to where Gagnon had been unmade, looking at the sparking metal arm that Althea had created.
There was nothing left of Gagnon. There was not even a body.
She could not let Ananke see her weep.
“Althea,” Domitian said. She turned. He was beckoning her. The shadow of Ananke’s arm fell over Althea’s shoulder. He moved only when she came forward to walk with him away from the open hatch, away from Ananke.
There was no away from Ananke, of course. The distance between them and the arm was a facade: Ananke was everywhere; everything around them was Ananke. If Althea could not let Ananke see her weep, then she could never weep. She said aloud in a voice that was tight and high with the force she used to keep it free of trembling, “Ananke, where is Ida Stays?”
The screens on the computer terminals all up and down the hall blinked on. Althea went to the nearest and forced herself not to stand too far from the screen. She read, IDA STAYS IS IN THE WHITE ROOM.
Domitian started walking again before she had finished speaking, and, numb, Althea trailed along in his wake. She said when they were about halfway there, “Domitian…”
“Don’t,” said Domitian, which was just as well, because Althea had nothing to say.
Gagnon was dead. Althea had worked with him for years; he had helped design the Ananke. And now he was gone.
Althea liked to solve problems. When she was presented with something that was wrong, something that troubled her, she took steps to remedy it immediately, and whether or not it could be fixed, there was something she could do to work toward an end. But no amount of grief or regret or teaching of Ananke could ever undo time, could ever recombine Gagnon’s shredded atoms, could pull him backward out of the event horizon of the black hole.
No matter what, she could not let Ananke see her weep.
Ahead of her, Domitian knocked on the door to the white room. There was no reaction. He shifted, impatient, and knocked again. Just as Althea was coming up to him, his patience was expended, and he opened the door, taking a step forward—and stopped.
The white room was no longer wholly white.
The floor around the table and the two chairs was coated in a dark vibrant crimson. It dripped off the table and onto the floor, joining the slow spread of scarlet as the pool spread itself to thinness. On the table, laid as if in her coffin, her face gray and her lips bloodless beneath the smeared patchy remnants of her dark lipstick, was Ida Stays. Her head was tilted toward the door or else it had fallen to that side, and her black hair was matted with blood, and her eyes were as blank and empty as a doll’s.
Althea lingered at the doorway with her hand over her mouth as Domitian strode in, gun out, checking the corners, although there was nowhere to hide in that white room.
There were bloody footsteps leading to a panel in the wall. Automatically, Althea called up the plans of the Ananke in her head. That panel led to the maintenance shafts.
“He got a knife somehow,” Domitian said grimly, leaning over the corpse as well as he could without stepping in the blood. He bent over, looking into the blood on the ground, and stopped, pointing. “That knife.”
Althea came into the room to see, because she was gripped with a terrible suspicion, and when she was near enough, standing just on the edge of Ida’s spreading blood, she saw a familiar box cutter lying in the clinging red.
“That’s mine,” she said. He must have stolen it from her when she had undone his chains. He must have stolen it from her and used it—and his greater range of movement from the loosened chains—to kill Ida. Althea had caused two deaths this evening.
Domitian’s look was cold and hard, but he said nothing to her.
“Check the halls,” he said tersely. “He’s probably headed for the docking bay. I’ll flush him out of the maintenance shafts. Don’t let him escape.”
Althea could only nod. While Domitian followed the bloody footprints into the wall, she fled from the white room.
Anger was growing in her, as strong as her grief and her guilt and fear, almost strong enough to cover up those worse emotions, almost strong enough to keep her from falling apart.
Ivan had done this; Ivan had killed both of them. She had to find Ivan.
“Ananke,” Althea said, walking up the hall faster and faster, “is Ivan going for the docking bay or the escape pods?”
She paused at a terminal as she passed it, looking for Ananke’s answer, but Ananke had not replied.
It should take the computer only a few seconds to determine an answer to her question. “Ananke?” she said, and Ananke said,
MATTHEW GALE.
“What?” said Althea. “He’s going for the escape pods? Like Gale?”
NO.
“Then what?”
PROTECT IVAN.
For one frustrating moment, Althea still did not understand and nearly shouted at the machine, not that shouting would have done any good.
And then she understood.
If she had created Ananke, so had Matthew Gale. Althea had provided the body, the raw materials, but Mattie had given her ship the spark of life. Althea would not have been remotely surprised if in programming her computer, Mattie had included a mandate: Protect Ivan.
“Ananke,” Althea said, “Mattie didn’t even know he made you. He was using you. And then he left you. I’m the one who’s been here, taking care of you. You can’t trust Mattie, but you can trust me. No matter what, you can trust me. And I need to find Ivan. Where is he?”
Silence. Althea held her breath.
DOCKING BAY.
Althea started to run. “Don’t let him get out. Don’t open the bay doors if he manages to board a ship. Do not let Ivan off of this ship!”
It was only a matter of time now that Domitian, too, was in the maintenance shafts before he also found evidence of a stranger’s secret stay in Ananke’s walls. Ananke watched him realize, watched him understand how close the ship’s crew had come to ruin, watched his wrath grow.
The path through the maintenance shafts was slower to reach the docking bay than the hall; that presumably was why Ivan had feigned entrance. Althea approached Ivan more swiftly than Domitian did.
When Althea reached the docking bay, Ivan was trying to gain access to Ida’s ship. Ida’s craft, Althea realized, was the only ship currently in Ananke’s hold with a working relativistic drive.
“Don’t move!” Althea shouted the moment she saw his bent back, bringing her gun up to bear, and Ivan raised his arms in the air, stepping away from the torn-open control panel. Fury and fear and adrenaline made Althea shake, and she shook even harder when she saw that his white clothes were stained in blood, torso, lap, arms, but she could not say which of the three feelings reigned supreme. He had a gun clutched in one of his hands, a tiny gun unfamiliar to Althea, but with his hands in the air it was pointed harmlessly at the ceiling.
When he had first appeared on the ship, he had been mysterious, strange, and dangerous. He looked dangerous now, too, but differently, the difference between a wolf ghosting gray through snow and brush and that wolf standing bloody in the open over the torn throat of its prey. No longer something mysterious but something monstrous instead.
Still he smiled that wolfish smile when he saw Althea aiming her gun at him.
“Do you know what that thing does to the human body?” he asked.
Althea could have shot him then and there.
She didn’t, but neither could she force herself to speak around the choking force of her rage.
“Well?” he said, eyebrows quirking up and arms splattered with red to the elbow. “Are you going to shoot me or let me go?”
“You lied to me,” Althea said.
It was not what she had meant to say, but it was what she was thinking. They were almost on opposite ends of the docking bay and had to speak loudly to be heard; Althea’s accusation traveled in indistinct echoes throughout the vast space, as if this ship were accusing him, too.
“Actually,” said Ivan, whose eyes were brilliantly blue even at this distance, “of all the people on this ship, you’re the only one I told the truth.”
“You used me,” Althea said, striding forward, “and manipulated me.” She stopped because of some sense that if she walked any farther, she really would have to shoot him then and there, and she said, “You’ve lied to everyone!”
The coiled tension in Ivan’s body let loose like a spring snapping back into shape. Althea had not even noticed it was there until it was suddenly gone. Perhaps that tension had always been there and she simply had never noticed. She had noticed very little about him, she was starting to see.
“Of course I lied!” he said. “Of course I used you, and used everyone, and lied. Stop feeling so self-righteously wounded, Althea. I had to save the people I love, and the only way I could do that was by lying. Yes, I lied!”
His shout echoed its way through the docking bay, against the sealed doors to space.
And what about the ones Althea had loved? Gagnon was dead through a chain of events Ivan had put in motion and had hurried along, Gagnon, who had been Althea’s colleague and friend for almost as long as Mattie had been Ivan’s. Ivan could not have known that he was dead, but Althea knew, and she was certain that if Ivan had known, he wouldn’t have cared. Gagnon wasn’t Ivan’s friend, after all. Gagnon had only been Althea’s.
She had had enough of Ivan being frightened, of Ivan being victimized. It was all Ivan told her. “You killed Ida,” Althea accused. He had used Althea to kill Ida. Ivan had not been a victim then.
“Are you mourning her?” Ivan asked, and it was so cruel that even after everything else Althea was stunned by it. “I didn’t want to kill her. I had to.”
“And now you’re lying again,” said Althea. “Still trying to get my sympathy. That’s all you’ve ever done, is try to get me to help you.”
Ivan started to laugh. His hands had lowered as he spoke until they hovered around his shoulders; now his arms dropped to his sides, one hand still clutched loosely around the little gun.
“There is nothing I could say that could ever make you believe me,” he said. Althea almost wished there were. “I killed Ida because she was going to hurt the people I love, and she was going to enjoy it, too. I’m not on the Ananke to hurt anyone. I was here by accident; I was caught by bad luck. That much I promise you was completely true even if I lied about everything else. You needed me to be the Devil, so I was the Devil for you, but all I want is to protect the people I love. That’s the truth. Are you going to let me go?”
“Put your gun down,” Althea said. He had been right; there was nothing he could say that could make her believe him now.
Instead of putting the gun down, he lifted it up, aiming it at Althea one-handed. Althea tensed, her fingers tightening around her own weapon, her finger flexing against the trigger but not pulling. Double action—she just needed the slightest touch to the trigger, the slightest brush, and the gun would kick back in her hands and send its bullet into its target.
“How’s this?” Ivan said. “Now I’ve got a gun on you. Either you let me go or you shoot me, Althea; there’s no other option.”
Althea thought she might hate him yet.
“Let me go, Althea,” Ivan said. His voice had softened, grown gentle. “We both know you’re not going to shoot—”
The sound of a gun has the same aural kick as the kinetic strike of it hitting its target, and that sharp echo rang out through Ananke’s hold, almost deafening, as Althea fired.
Ananke watched Ivan wake up one hour and thirteen minutes later. The first thing he did was open his eyes and look around, head wobbling, moving his arms as if to clutch his head, shifting as if to stand, all his actions thwarted as he realized that he was back in the white room, chained again to the chair.
“Damn it,” he muttered, words slurred with the loss of blood that had made him paler than before, and he tried to sit up, which was approximately when the pain from the roughly bandaged gunshot wound in his right thigh hit him.
Ananke watched him scream.
It was only after he had come to again that Ananke saw him realize what else was in the white room with him: Ida, still lying where he had placed her, with her head tilted on its torn up throat to aim her blank black eyes at him, and Domitian, sitting on the other side of the table, staring at him over Ida’s chilling corpse.
Ivan’s breath came harshly panted; his hands flexed against the blood-slick metal of the chair.
Once Domitian had arrived and hauled the unconscious, bleeding Ivan out of the docking bay over his shoulder, Althea had gone straight to the computer. While Domitian dealt with Ivan’s wound, Althea worked on undoing some of the damage she had done in attempting to fix the computer. If she could only focus on working, she thought, she could drive from her head the memory of Gagnon crying out as he fell, the memory of the weight of the gun in her hands, kicking back as she pulled the trigger.
But for some reason Ananke was broadcasting on all available screens the surveillance footage from the white room.
The image showing on the screen was the scene from overhead. Domitian’s back was to the camera, and he leaned over the table a dark shape, faceless; Ivan was pale, strained, pain and fear on his face. The dark pool of blood beneath them looked as if someone had opened up a pit in the floor and Ivan and Domitian and the corpse of Ida Stays were just about to fall into it all together.
The white room’s camera still claimed to be unusable, but the evidence of its functionality was right before her. “You could see this whole time,” Althea said. With all her energy gone into keeping herself under control, she could not even feel surprised.
The screen blinked.
YES, said Ananke.
“You just were keeping it from us,” said Althea.
YES.
“Because Mattie told you to.”
YES.
“You may have killed Ida,” Domitian said, and Ananke watched, and listened, and broadcast what she saw, “but the System still wants to know what you know. You’re going to tell me the truth.”
Ivan laughed. It was a weak sound. He could not sit fully upright in the chair, arms trembling in the much-shortened chains.
“Sure,” Ivan said. “Just one thing first. What’s the date?”
Ananke knew the date. It had just become the first of November, an hour past.
“What does that matter?” Domitian asked.
“It matters to me,” Ivan said.
Domitian rose and with slow, heavy steps walked through the tacky blood to Ivan’s side, where he laid one hand against Ivan’s neck beneath his chin, pressing his sagging head up against the back of the chair so that Ivan was forced to meet his eyes.
“I don’t care what matters to you.”
Althea didn’t know how long it took her to notice Ananke’s latest message for her, but when she saw it, her blood chilled.
YOU SHOT IVAN BECAUSE HE KILLED SOMEONE, said Ananke.
Sitting beside the computer terminal, her arms in the wall of the ship, undoing clips from wires, Althea hesitated.
“Yes,” she said. She had wires snagged around her wrists, as if the ship were trying to pull her in, make her a part of it.
I KILLED SOMEONE.
“No,” Althea said immediately, fear rising in her chest again. She struggled not to let it show in her face, be heard in her voice. “That’s not the same, Ananke. It’s not the same thing.”
Ananke was silent. The silence struck Althea as ominous, and it only made her fear the harder to control.
“You didn’t know what you were doing,” Althea said. “Ivan did. He knew.” She kept telling herself that you couldn’t expect a toddler to understand these things. Ivan, though. Ivan was a grown man. It was not the same.
I KNEW.
“Yes, but you didn’t—” Althea stopped, trying to find a better way to explain; she did not even know how to begin to explain the value of a life and how Ivan must have known it, and Ananke must not. “You were defending yourself,” she tried.
SO WAS IVAN.
“It’s not the same,” Althea said, and bent back over the open wall panel and hoped Ananke would let it go.
It wasn’t the same. It couldn’t be.
“Why did you kill Ida?” Domitian asked, releasing Ivan’s neck, letting his head sag forward again. He could not seem to hold it upright on his own.
Ivan snickered with the humor of the light-headed, and Ananke accessed her data—her memories—wondering how badly injured he was. Could an injury to a limb kill a man?
“Tell me the date and maybe I’ll tell you,” he said.
“There will be no more trades,” Domitian said with eerie calm. “No more deals. No more exchanges. Only you will talk, and you will tell me the truth.”
“What do you want to hear?” Ivan asked. “I don’t know anything. Ida was going to kill me because of it, so I cut her throat.”
“Ida Stays,” said Domitian in a voice suddenly so loud that Ivan flinched back against his chair and Ananke heard the shout echo through the room, “was an honest woman.”
“Ida Stays was a sociopath,” said Ivan just as fiercely. “The only reason you liked her was because she needed you to like her. She would have had you tortured just as happily as she did me.”
Ananke did not expect the blow, and neither, it seemed, did Althea—in the hallway she flinched, her hands coming up to cover her mouth—but Ivan had braced himself and did not look surprised when he raised his head again to smirk at Domitian, blood trickling down his nose.
“Stop being such a little bitch,” Ivan said, “and execute me already.”
“I found traces of someone living in the walls of the ship,” said Domitian. “Who was it?”
“The Devil,” said Ivan. Ida’s body continued to gape and stare.
Ananke was not surprised this time when Domitian struck him again.
Domitian asked, “Who was it?”
Ivan looked up at him and did not flinch away. “Go to hell,” he said with remarkable calm.
Domitian knelt at his side. Ivan looked uneasy, then frightened. Uncaring of the blood sticking to his uniform trousers, Domitian reached forward toward Ivan’s leg and stuck his thumb against the bandages covering the bullet hole, pushing until spots of red stained the fresh whiteness and Ivan’s scream filled the white room.
“Mattie!” said Ivan. “It was Mattie, but he’s long gone now.”
“The maintenance shafts were occupied for days,” said Domitian. “Gale was only here for a few minutes.”
Ivan laughed, breathless. “That’s what you were supposed to think.”
“Supposed to?”
“You were an easy mark,” Ivan said. “You ate it right up. Mattie leaving in the escape pod.”
“He didn’t leave? He was on the ship?”
“He didn’t leave,” Ivan said. “Not then.”
“But he told you he was leaving,” said Domitian. “He stopped by your cell, and when he couldn’t get you out, he told you he was leaving.”
“You mean the Scheherazade thing?” Ivan said. The blood from his nose was running down into the seam of his lips. “Scheherazade isn’t a nickname; it’s code.”
“Code for what?”
“Code between me and Mattie,” Ivan said. “Scheherazade, she told the Persian king stories for a thousand and one nights to keep him from killing her. Scheherazade was a message. Mattie was telling me to stall.”
“Stall for what?”
“Until he could get me free,” said Ivan.
Ananke knew that Domitian would have hit Ivan again—his hand raised, that cold directed fury on his face—but Althea burst into the white room before he could.
“Domitian, you need to come,” she said frantically, and Domitian lingered a moment at Ivan’s side before following her away, leaving Ivan to gasp and sag in his chair beside Ida, his blood joining hers on the floor.
An urgent broadcast had come through from the System. Eager to watch anything other than the surveillance of Ivan being beaten by Domitian, Althea had played it.
It was a printed broadcast from the Lunar System representatives. She read it quickly and then read it again, then a third time, and still could hardly understand what she had read.
Domitian, she knew, would not have wanted her to interrupt his interrogation of Ivan. Althea did not think twice.
“What is it?” he asked tersely as she urged him out of the room and into Ananke’s halls, where the broadcast was still playing on the nearest screen.
“Look,” said Althea.
PEOPLE OF THE SYSTEM, the message read. THERE HAS JUST BEEN A LARGE-SCALE TERRORIST ATTACK ON EARTH. AT PRESENT WE HAVE NOT RECEIVED CONTACT FROM THE SYSTEM CAPITOL AND DO NOT HAVE ANY INFORMATION ON THE STATUS OF THE PLANET OR OF THE SYSTEM—
The printed broadcast was interrupted by a video that stuttered and flashed static before finally becoming clear. Althea nearly leaped forward to bring back the earlier broadcast, instinct having her believe that Ananke had suffered another glitch, but when she saw what had interrupted and replaced the broadcast, she stopped.
On-screen was a woman, a familiar woman, dark hair and eyes like coals, strong chin and broad shoulders, regal in bearing.
It was Constance Harper.
“People of the System,” she said in a low alto lifted and fierce with fervor, “former slaves of the System, I am the Mallt-y-Nos. A few minutes ago, I and my people liberated us all from the System by destroying its source. For so long has the System destroyed your planets and killed your people, and now we have destroyed theirs. Earth was a symbol of oppression and control. It will be no longer. The System is dead. Let freedom reign.”