Despite his initial enthusiasm at the announcement, Dabry sought Niko out later, finding her in their shared office.
She put down her reader and flipped it off before he could glimpse the screen. Going over financial documents again, he thought, but refrained from asking. She’d let him know when she was ready. Instead, he asked about their destination.
“Do you really think this wise?” he challenged. “Even through it’s on the outskirts of the Known Universe, Coralind is well traveled. Well known. If Tubal Last is looking for a time and place to strike, it will be when we go to Coralind.”
Niko shook her head. “I’m not so sure. He’s waiting for something, I think. He won’t move fast on this.”
“What if he learned we had a weapon?”
Niko quirked a brow. “But it’s not one we can use, as we already found out. Petalia can operate it, but it requires a single target. Somehow, there’s now more than one Tubal Last.”
“But that part he might not learn, and he certainly doesn’t suspect you think there might be more than one of him. And time gives not just him—maybe them—the chance to prepare, but offers you the same opportunity.”
“He wants us to prepare. That’s what that message was about. Time to worry. Time to fret. Time to grow a new crop of fear for him to harvest.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Dabry crossed all four arms, staring at her with a furrowed brow.
“Then I am wrong,” she said with weary flatness and folded her hands on the table.
He shook his head and chose to move on to another subject. “What do you hope to accomplish there?”
“For one thing, it’s where Biboban ended up.”
His brow creased in confusion for a moment, then cleared. “The Jadoogar blobbship we worked with on those last two years?”
“The one and the same.”
“What is it doing there?”
“What it used to do for us, but on a much vaster scale.” He continued to frown, and she elaborated. “It runs the systems on the station.”
“Which systems?”
“All of them. It always could work at that level, at least with the right resources, and the station’s happy to supply them. In return, they get a smoothly running station that can respond to any emergencies in a flexible, adaptive way.”
“And you think Biboban will provide…”
“Information. Because one of the systems it runs is communications, and I would imagine it tracks any patterns it detects. One or the other of those patterns, happening on well-traveled Coralind, will lead us back to wherever Tubal Last is lurking.”
“How do you explain our results with the gun?”
“As I see it, there’s two possibilities. One is that he’s found some sort of protective shield. That’s always possible—magic-based energy stuff can get pretty complicated and full of loopholes.”
He nodded and waited. When she said nothing more, he prodded. “What’s the other possibility?”
“That there‘s actually more than one of him. Easy enough with clones and modern mind-transfer tech.”
“More than one.” He didn’t shudder, but revulsion tinged his voice.
“We’re all worried,” Niko said. “We need to think of something to boost morale. Coralind will also help with that.”
She broke off. Dabry smiled faintly.
“Jezli Farren has been doing her bit to boost morale with a nightly handbliss game.”
“For money?” Niko sat up straighter in her chair, outrage surging in her.
“For imaginary money, as I understand it. Niko, I think she’s harmless enough when it comes to us. Would Roxana really have traveled with her if she were capable of betrayal?”
“Keep in mind that she defrauded dozens of ships by pretending to fix a broken Gate. Jezli Farren, in my opinion, is capable of all sorts of things.”
It wasn’t just a card game, it was an experience in flirtation whenever you played handbliss with Skidoo, Atlanta thought. It was chatter and eye contact, and overacted glee when winning, and mock anger when losing. This flirtation was an art form, this sort of thing, and Skidoo was its utter mistress.
For her part, Skidoo was delighted by the enthusiasm which Atlanta brought to the game of handbliss. She thought the girl was becoming quite a skilled player. Much of which was that she now knew better than to ever play for money with Jezli Farren. The avaricious Jezli was why they all played for imaginary money now, and everyone owed her imaginary, but vast, sums as a result. After the kitchen disclosures, they had retired to the gathering room that usually served for such play and sat eye to eye across the table.
Atlanta played with fierce concentration and a determination to hide her emotions that was not commensurate with her actual ability to control them.
Skidoo paid attention to the game, of course, but liked the conversation better. Conversation formed a kind of intimacy, as much a kind of touch, or mutual regard, as any stroke or caress.
That was the fascinating thing about language. The way you could express things with it. It was one reason why she clung to the rhythms and syntaxes of her childhood, her young adulthood, the brief years before she realized that she had to get off-planet. Realized that she was different in a way she’d only heard mentioned before in derision and mockery. And realized that her sanity and survival depended on escaping that.
They reckoned her a criminal, back on her home planet. They would have immediately condemned her. Imprisoned her, if not worse. But that didn’t matter, since she was never returning there.
Atlanta played another card and said, “You said that there are others like you on Coralind?”
Skidoo undulated in negation. “That is not being accurate. Is being others from my planet but is being another species. They is being living in our waters, but then is being going to space. But they is never being returning. It is forbidden.”
“So you can never go back?”
Skidoo’s shudder was sufficient, and Atlanta took a different tack.
“But you’re a Tlellan—aren’t they?”
“Tlellan is being the name for anyone who is being from Tlella. There is being five species—maybe is being five and a half, depending on who is being doing the counting—and four and a half is never being going to space.”
“But you did.”
“I is being different,” Skidoo said, eyes standing up in pride and fascination. “Is being some like me but—” She waggled a couple of tentacles in the air. “Very few.”
Atlanta hesitated but decided to press. “And your modifications…”
Skidoo undulated again; this time the gentle ripple was full of amusement. “I is liking the world enough to be touching it all the time. Not many of us, and others is being thinking it…” She hesitated. “Is being a mix of sinful and unethical and un-civic-minded. Otherwise, we would just live our lives and not make babies to keep doing things for the good of everyone.”
She had lapsed—for the first time since Atlanta had known her—into a different cadence, a different pattern, and Atlanta thought to herself, She’s echoing someone else talking at her long ago, but she refrained from comment.
Skidoo uncoiled a tentacle to drape it over Atlanta’s wrist. “Is being gardens there much like Tlella. If you is being willing, is perhaps is being we is being visiting one of them?”
“Together,” she added after a second, in case her meaning was not clear. Sometimes people could not see a thing until you pointed it out.
“Oh,” Atlanta exclaimed. “Yes! Yes, I’d like that. Very much.” She touched a fingertip to the soft surface of the tentacle, tracing along a scarlet stripe. “We’ll go together.”
Others on the ship had things to think about beyond their destination.
No matter where Rebbe went in the ship, it seemed, Talon would soon appear. Mooning after him while pretending not to.
Talon, who was responsible for his whole existence. Talon, who had thought he was creating his lost twin and made Rebbe instead, someone very definitely not the lost Thorn. Talon, who he hated, and Talon, who loved what Talon thought he was, and never really saw him at all.
That was the worst of it. He could see the expectancy in Talon, the belief that the other youth clung to, that at some point Rebbe would disappear, would be wiped away with the return of body memories. Talon still thought that he would become Thorn, someday, and that was what Rebbe hated most of all, because it would have meant Rebbe would vanish as though he had never been.
Rebbe had worried about that at first. Searched his mind for any sign of Thorn’s presence, there among his limited memories since waking. Feared that his hand might move of its own volition, that he might become a prisoner in his own body. Or that Thorn was already a prisoner there, without Rebbe knowing.
The only person who seemed to understand what was going through his head was Milly, and so he didn’t mind spending time with her. Something lay between her and the other teammates, he could tell, but he wasn’t sure what, and he didn’t want to ask. It seemed connected to Thorn’s death and therefore was doubly imperative not to discuss. There were so many ways to go wrong in the world.
Still, he could feel her trying to reach across that divide to the others, and sometimes they seemed to respond, like Gio and Skidoo, or even Dabry. But there was a coldness in the captain when dealing with Milly, a coldness that seemed unfair to Rebbe when Milly was charming and sweet and funny and could always make him laugh.
He gave Talon the slip once again and found Skidoo and Atlanta playing handbliss in a lounge. He positioned himself so he would not be readily visible from the doorway—Talon could work for it, if he truly wanted to keep chasing him down. He watched the game silently until Skidoo finally glanced his way and, without asking, dealt him in.
They played that way for a while. Gio and Milly wandered in together and sat down to join the game. They chatted about what they’d heard, trade gossip and lore, about Coralind.
“Never been there, but it’s a byword, Coralind in Festival,” Milly told Atlanta.
“Why a byword?” Atlanta considered her cards, pretending not to notice Skidoo’s tentacle draped affectionately over her wrist.
“People come from all over the Known Universe for that sort of thing, but travel takes money, so they’re all well enough pocketed to come, which means well enough pocketed to spend plenty on food and drink and music and performances and every other indulgence you can think of. Coralind’s gardens produce everything under any sun, they say, or at least the best of it.” Milly played a card, then shot Gio a grin as he huffed out frustration when she raked in her winnings.
Rebbe could feel himself relaxing, could feel the tension that thrummed through him uncoiling, uncurling. Then Talon stuck his head in the room and all of it came back.
It was too much. This time he threw his hand down and snarled at Talon, a hot, challenging “I’m going to fight you now” roar that surprised everyone in the room, including himself, so instead of acting on it, he held back, despite the urge to change into full lion form and tear at the other.
“Enough!” Gio signed.
“Stop following me,” he shouted at Talon, desperate and angry. “Stop!”
Talon’s whole body sagged. Perhaps Rebbe would have been sorry to have hurt him, if he had been anyone else. Anyone who was not responsible for the fact he was an illegal clone, and not just that, a clone without memories, without history, and most importantly, without any legal standing.
But Rebbe was and always would be an illegal clone, and so there would be no forgiveness for him.
Talon took a step backward, his eyes still fixed on Rebbe. Looking for his reaction, like he genuinely thought that Rebbe would relent, would tell him to stay. That unquenchable hope in Talon’s eyes steeled Rebbe, kept him frowning until Talon was gone from the doorway.
He took a breath and turned to the others, who remained silent. Gio’s arms were folded, Milly beside him eyeing Rebbe as though she’d been expecting him to give in. Atlanta’s lips were pursed at his rudeness. Only Skidoo looked at all sympathetic, and it was always hard for him to read her expressions, so he wasn’t sure.
“He follows me everywhere!” he tried to explain. He could feel the disapproval coming off them, although he didn’t entirely understand it. One of the tenets of the crew was that you got along, and if you didn’t, then you worked it out.
The unfairness of that burned in him. Talon counted on that niceness, and he thought he could just wait and wear Rebbe down.
Utterly, angeringly unfair.
So he snarled wordlessly at the rest of them and dropped to the floor in lion form, then stalked away in a direction other than the one in which Talon had gone.
Milly sighed. Gio gave her a sidelong look, then unfolded a long arm to reach out and hug her. She leaned into him. He searched through the soft feathers of her scalp with his fingers, grooming her the way he might have a fellow chimp. She curled her neck so he could reach more easily, accepting the gentle caress. They sat that way for a little while, not talking, and then Atlanta and Skidoo dealt them in anew, and they continued playing.
Niko had charted their course, and they were en route to Coralind.
Everyone seemed excited enough. Niko still hadn’t mentioned that her main reason for that course was that Coralind held a physical office for the financial institution administering their insurance money. There, perhaps, finally, she could convince them to give it to her.
It wasn’t just that their money was locked away to the point where its accessibility was in question. It wasn’t just that getting the financial institution to even start the process necessary for accessing said money involved complex forms and negotiations. It was that all the rules and requirements seemed deliberately constructed to make her efforts fruitless. That some depended on arcane and outmoded forms of filing, such as hard copy forms.
This had been the second, unspoken, part of Niko’s decision to come to Coralind. EverRich Cooperative Insurance & Banking had a sub-branch here, and thus she would be able to hand over such forms as were necessary in person. She was good at persuading people face-to-face.
She’d chosen her insurance agency back in the day because the price was … well, more than reasonable at a time when their budget was already flensed to the bone.
Suspiciously reasonable, Dabry had said, and pushed her to investigate further. But she’d filed away the work item in that any-day-now fashion that running a restaurant demands and had not, in fact gotten to it before things started exploding and everything went to shit.
She printed out—printed—plas-sheets of specified dimensions, to be written on with ink of particular acidity levels and colors. Who demanded the arcane practice of hard copy forms nowadays?! She filled them out with slow, meticulous care.
Surely this would be the last formality the bank demanded. Otherwise …
She set down the stylus and sighed. It wasn’t that the money would be gone. They’d lost money before and managed to recover. Coralind would surely provide opportunities for them. It would be difficult, getting back on their feet, but that wouldn’t be the hardest part.
No, the hardest part would be admitting to Dabry that he had been right.