Dabry met them in the ship bay, his eyes moving over the group to count the missing, widening as he noticed Roxana’s absence. To Niko, he looked worn. She thought wryly that perhaps his duty had been even harder than hers, having to deal with those that had been left behind.
She said, “What happened?”
“There was … there is a clone. The ship decanted it. I’ve talked with him. I named him.”
“Ah, I might have learned that from Gnarl and forgotten to tell you,” she admitted, and received a startled flicker from him. “But I thought things were safely in stasis. Why did the ship decant it?”
“I believe,” Dabry said, with grim irritation, “that the ship was bored.”
“No,” the ship protested.
She sighed. “We don’t need to assign blame quite yet,” she said. “You said you named it already.”
“Rebbe.”
“Which means?”
“The lost has been found.”
She nodded. “And right now, where is he?”
“I had the ship take him to Talon’s room for now. Talon has been told to prepare him a room but when I checked it was evident that he has put it off and not done it yet.”
“He gets worse and worse,” she said. She glanced upward. “I understand it was the ship who aided him. We’ll have to have a talk about that.”
Dabry nodded. “But it is we who lead him,” he said. “As ever, we are the ones responsible for what he does.”
“Lately I am thinking that we have not done a very good job of that.”
“We have tried, and we have put time and thought and work into it. Can anyone ask for more than that?”
“Talon can, apparently. And has.”
“How did you manage to get this aboard?” Niko asked Talon, staring at the discarded clone sac.
“Gnarl sent it, in a shipment. The Thing had everything else that I needed to do it. And it wasn’t the ship’s fault, Captain. I tricked it.”
The ship wavered between indignation at the thought that it could be tricked and a sense of relief that its behavior might be excused. Had Talon really deceived it? Was that a friendly act? It decided to say nothing. For now.
“How did you trick it?”
He focused fiercely on the floor. “I told it if we had a secret, it meant we were friends,” he muttered.
Niko blinked in disbelief. “Could you tell me that again?” she said.
“I thought. I mean…”
“You mean that you took advantage of the fact that it wanted to be friends with you. What if you found that we had done that to you? Picked you and pretended because it was because we were family but the truth being that we wanted to use you in some way?”
There was no way his whiskers could have sagged even lower.
Dabry exchanged looks with the captain. “Ingenious manipulation, at any rate,” he said.
“This is really not the time for complimenting him on how well he’s managed to do something utterly, absolutely against the law, and not to mention selfish.”
“Selfish?” Talon protested. “All I wanted was Thorn back.”
“That is not Thorn. That is not even a copy of Thorn. It is their own person, and they do not deserve to have you trying to make them into a replacement for someone they cannot be. Thorn is gone, Talon. Thorn. Is. Gone.”
He fell to his knees, fists gathered. He said, “I didn’t even get to see his body after his death! He died and then there we were fleeing the pirates and we didn’t take his body with us, and now it’s just floating out there somewhere! All alone somewhere!”
He took a deep, shuddering breath. “I know it’s not him. But it will look like him. It will smell like him, sound like him.”
He was crying now, he found. When had he started doing that? He wasn’t even sure, he was so lost in this storm of emotion tossing him every which way that he couldn’t find himself anymore, wasn’t sure who he was without the existence of Thorn to give him context.
Niko chewed her lip, watching Talon’s grief. She knew that she had to see him through this passage, but this was the most that she could do—could hope to do.
She said, looking at Dabry, “Before it was decanted, it had no consciousness yet.”
He said, “And now he does. Will you destroy that?”
“No,” Talon cried out, catching their meaning. “You can’t just kill him.”
“According to law, it is not a being and has no rights. If the authorities find out, it will be executed out of hand. Is that what you want, Talon? To condemn someone to a short lifetime of hiding and fleeing?”
He said, “He can step into Thorn’s identity.”
“Can he? Will he want to?”
Listening to all this, the Thing was not happy that Niko was angry with it. It had never experienced quite this mix of emotions, and while it blamed Talon in part, it was also aware that it had made choices rather than simply doing what it was told. It resolved in the future to tell Niko everything.
Well, everything that it thought she needed to know. Otherwise, how could she appreciate the twists of hourisigah to come?
“Will you destroy that?” Dabry said more urgently, as though calling Niko back to her senses.
“No,” Niko said and rubbed at her eyes. She looked at Dabry. “I’m going to regret this,” she told him.
“Frankly, Captain, I don’t know that there is any decision that can be made in this case that will not lead to some form of regret or another.” Dabry looked at Talon. “This is disappointing, Talon,” he said. “But I rather think you have created your own punishment.”
“All right, Thing,” Niko said and turned away. “Make quarters for our new acquisition. It’s Talon’s and your responsibility to make sure they’re taken care of, and you will treat them with courtesy and respect.” She looked at Dabry again. “I’m going to talk to Lassite,” she told him.
Dabry arched an eyebrow. “Why?”
“Because I want to make sure none of this is due to some terrible act committed in a previous existence.”
Despite her facetiousness, she did want Lassite to reassure her. That this was part of his Golden Path—well, she didn’t really believe in it, she told herself—but some of the rest of the crew did, and so it was important to keep that under consideration.
The dry air sucked at her as she entered. He was sitting in the middle of the room, cross-legged, his hands resting on his knees. His red velvet hood had been pushed back to his narrow shoulders, exposing his hairless, snakelike skull, the divots of his nostrils, his flat, scaled face. A Derloen ghost was flowing on the flooring in front of him, a shape like a sigil, repeated again and again.
He opened his enormous dark eyes to regard her.
Before she could ask her question, he spoke. The ghost left off its tracing and fled as though startled, disappearing into the wall.
“It will be all right, Captain. It will not turn out anything like he expects, but it will be all right.”
It was a reassurance, but somehow not as reassuring as she had hoped. There was an eerie implacability to his tone at these times when he was uttering prophecies that made her skin crawl, made her feel like an animal in a trap.
She ignored it, as she always did.
“Very well,” she said, and went about her business.
Lassite stared after her. Despite what he had said, he was not sure this particular thing would go very well. It was simply that it didn’t matter much to the overall shape of things.
The truth was that it could go very badly indeed.
Talon waited and waited to hear what his punishment would be. He could not imagine it. He had disobeyed Niko in the past but only in small ways. This had been an act of major rebellion, the sort of thing that got a crew member turned away.
The thought of that made him feel weak, as though his bones had been replaced with melting ice. What if he had betrayed Niko so thoroughly that she no longer wanted him in her crew? What would he do if he was out in the universe, utterly alone? What would happen to the clone? The thought surrounded him, terrified him.
It was what drove him, finally, to go to her rather than waiting for her to come to him. He went to her in her cabin, where she was reading. She looked up from the tablet and said, “Yes, soldier?” Her tone was businesslike and matter-of-fact.
He said, “I wanted to find out what my punishment is.”
“Your punishment. Ah.” She laid the tablet down. “What are your thoughts on it?”
“You could make me do scrub work for a long time.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I thought that was a given.”
He faltered, then went on. “I don’t want to be sent away but if you had to, maybe only for a while?”
She sighed. “Oh, Talon. I will not send you away. You are my responsibility. When you do something like this, I am the one that the law will punish, you know. Because you did it while under my command.”
He hadn’t known that and it shocked him. He had been willing to take the risk on his own, but to think that he had made her liable … “No! That’s not fair!”
“The laws of the Known Universe are more known for being inflexible than fair,” she said. “No, here is your punishment. You are responsible for that clone. You will oversee him.”
His heart leaped for joy. But she went on.
“You will never tell him that he is a replacement for your brother. You will never treat him as anything but his own person. Like a cousin you have never met before, freshly arrived, who you have to take under your wing. Do you understand me?”
He opened his mouth and closed it, then swallowed and said, “Yes, sir.”
“Never. Do you understand? You will never make him feel that he is obliged to you in any way. If he asks where his genetic material came from, you will say your mother. Do you understand what I am saying?”
“To let him be his own person, without pressure,” he said easily, but his heart was starting to sing again. No matter what, surely it would be like having Thorn back, the smell of him at least, the sense of him in the air.
And while the clone would not be as close as a twin, if he were watching over Rebbe, then there would be a reason that they would be together all the time. He didn’t need to be lonely anymore. He caught himself smiling and made his face somber. He didn’t understand how Niko would think this was actually a punishment, but that was all right. He said, “Yes, sir.”
“Thing has prepared quarters for him. Take him to them and show him how everything works.”
“Quarters for him? But he will share mine.”
She shook her head. “No. That is not letting him be his own person. If that is what he wants, certainly you can change to that later. But you will not invite him or try to sway him or imply that it is expected of him or anything like that. You will let Rebbe become whoever they want to become. Perhaps that person will resemble your twin, a little. But I would not count on it, I would not set my hopes on it, because I know—not guess, not suspect—I know that will lead to heartbreak.”
She could see that he still wasn’t listening and understanding fully. And that broke her heart in turn.
After Talon had gone, the ship said, “Am I to be punished as well?”
“What do you think would be a suitable punishment?”
“I will give up artistic expression for a month.”
“All artistic expression? Including tourwhatsit?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. But Thing, you understand what I will have to do if you keep acting in ways that are harmful? We will give you back to Takraven and say goodbye.”
Panic seized it. “No! You can’t do that!”
Niko rubbed her nose to avoid smiling. As she’d thought, this was the best lever to use. “Just keep that in mind,” she said. “I’d hate to have to do it.”