When he comes to, Darius’s head is throbbing. A sharp jab cutting through, and it takes a moment for his mind to catch up with the rest of his body, remember the cause for that rush of adrenaline that’s asking what in the savage Quiet he’s doing, staying still like this?
“Kopitar,” he groans, mouth dry, unsure who he’s even really talking to. “Get me Kopitar.”
“Calm down, officer. You need to rest.”
The room swims into focus, and so does the nausea. White sheets. The golden blaze of a setting sun through long windows. A medicus about ten years his senior, all golden hair and dimples. Hospitium Luxana.
“No,” Darius tells him, urgency rushing in, and pushes the bedsheets off his legs even as the room still swims. “Kopitar. I need to speak with the Chief General right now.”
Fragging Quiet, his head hurts.
“What you need,” the medicus responds, infuriatingly, “is to let yourself heal. You got lucky—that’s a nasty skull fracture, but it missed your vital centers. You’ve got a brain bleed, though, so—”
“Are you deaf? This is Intelligentia business. Send word for Kopitar now.”
“No need for that, Miranda.”
Thank Terra. Kopitar stands in the doorway of the room, long black overcoat and salt-streak hair, arms crossed over his chest. Darius wets his chapped lips, pushing down the nausea still swimming in his sinuses. They haven’t got time to lose.
Theodora Arlot is a Revenant. A spy. The thought curdles, a rancid addition to the very real nausea, because he’d thought they were the same. He’d thought they understood each other, understood how a person could rise in the world, the duty they owed to the Imperium in return. She’d been playing him for a fool the whole time.
The betrayal stings so much more than it should. They aren’t the same. They never were. She’s a Revenant spy. So, it would seem, is Arran Alexander, the late Historian’s own bastard son. A veritable nest of deceit buried in the heart of the Kleios familia, and more than that—this serva woman Una. Alexander Kleios’s self-confessed killer. Darius doesn’t know where to start with that, the new information swimming groggily in his mind alongside the nausea and the pain like a knife and the way he can’t fragging seem to make the room stay still.
“Chief,” he says, and tries to push back his sweaty hair. His fingers brush against bandage, and come away tinged red. “The Revenants, they—” But the words won’t order themselves. He takes a deep breath, tries again. “Theo Nix . . .”
“You’re confused, Miranda.”
“No. No, I’m just—”
“Concussed, and confused.” Kopitar sits, concern at the furrow of his brow. “Perhaps you could start by explaining what, precisely, you were doing on Breakwater Estate.”
Yes, of course. Because he very explicitly was not supposed to be there. But Kopitar will understand. Once Darius tells him what he’s discovered, Kopitar will set the Cohort to action, scour the city until Una and her co-conspirators are found and brought to justice. So Darius breathes in hard, and speaks through the searing pain in the side of his head. He tells him everything. The water hemlock. Tobin Persie’s apothecary. Theodora Arlot—no, Theo Nix, deceitful bitch that she is. Una, who confessed her loyalties and her crime, clear as day. And Arran Alexander, revealing his true colors at the last minute before dealing the blow that’s landed Darius here in the first place.
“If we act quickly, there should still be time to catch them before they leave the city,” he says, then, heart beating fast. “Shut down the ports, both the Western and Southern gates. Rouse the Publica, the reserves, the legions stationed on the walls. We’ll flush them out and—”
“I thought I told you to leave the Kleios familia alone.”
Darius falters. Because Kopitar hasn’t moved from where he sits, but there isn’t a trace of ease or that usual vague amusement Darius knows how to look for. Something hard, instead, like concra falling into place. Disappointment where he’d thought there was concern. His heart sinks.
“I,” he starts, but that’s no good. His mind is racing fast. Hadn’t Kopitar understood? “Persie’s tip-off about water hemlock. I felt it would be a dereliction of duty not to pursue that link.”
“Despite strict orders not to?”
“You told me not to investigate the senator, not to ignore a perfectly good—”
“I explicitly told you to investigate Avis Tiago-Laith’s trail in pursuit of the Revenants.”
“And I found them.”
It comes out sharper than he means it to, practically a bark, but Darius is so nauseous he thinks he’s halfway to being sick, and he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t see how Kopitar can’t grasp what he’s saying. How the Chief could be more concerned with a minor break in order and decorum than in the very real and urgent threat of three known Revenants—murderers—at large in Luxana, their chances of disappearing growing more and more with every second the two of them waste here talking about it.
He breathes in through the pain. “I’m sorry, Chief. I’ll answer for my insubordination. I understand I acted against orders. But . . .” And then he stops, because he forgot something. In the picture of reality swimming in and out of focus, the thoughts and words fighting to arrange themselves, he forgot one vital, uncanny piece of information. Darius breathes in sharp. “Consul Palmar,” he says.
Kopitar’s dark eyes narrow. “What about him?”
“The serva woman. She said . . . she tried to claim that she was acting under the Consul’s orders.” A lie. It has to be a lie. Low and dirty and underhanded, an Ynglot savage undermining the very integrity of the Imperial soul. “We need to find her before she has the chance to discredit him further.”
He’s halfway out of the bed again, but then a strong hand is at his shoulder, the Chief General pressing him back.
“You’re not well,” Kopitar says.
“I’m well enough to—”
“You’re not. Well. You’ll need rest before your journey.”
Darius falters. “My . . . what?”
Then Kopitar is standing, straightening the black overcoat over his uniform. “I believe I was clear about the consequences of pursuing this suspicion of yours,” he says. “We’ll have an escort put together once you’re well enough to ride. They’ll see you back to Ithaca in one piece.”
No.
No.
This can’t be happening. This isn’t.
He didn’t disobey orders, not really. He had been right about the Kleios familia, but he hadn’t touched Naevia. He’d left her alone, her and the Lady Historian both. He had been wrong about the senator, but he had been right to follow his gut. He had been right.
He must be more concussed than he thought.
“Chief, you can’t—”
“I certainly can. Your last month’s pay will find you there, but don’t expect a reference.”
Darius is falling. Fast and endless through some terrible abyss, with nothing to grab onto to make it stop. The bottom of his stomach an endless pit where his esophagus has fallen through, and he can’t find his tongue to speak. Doesn’t know how to form words even if he could.
He’s spent his life doing the right thing. He’s prided himself on that. His gut has never led him astray. It’s the reason Kopitar took him under his wing. The reason their correspondence blossomed into a mentorship. Late-night conversation and necessary introductions and professional references and those words of advice that showed Darius how to open the door to a brighter future. Kopitar was his rock, the way his own father never could have been. Alcohol on his breath and bruises the size of a grown man’s fist against Darius’s cheek, and the cold and run-down manor in Ithaca looms like a haunted house in the nauseous dark.
So this isn’t happening. It can’t be. He can’t go back.
But it is. It’s happening, and he can do nothing but watch as Kopitar leaves the room without so much as a look back his way.