The creature had eternity and craved blackness, the disconnection of the shoreless dark. It craved oblivion.
Siris met 237 in the atrium. When a mission was proposed, the habitat supervisor spoke to 237. For this mission, Charles gave the task to Siris.
After briefing, she'd hung out in the conferral room to talk about the assignment. "Will Dr. Zinn be with me?" She wasn't sure she'd understood the function grid.
"No, but along with our security specialists, she'll be watching and listening."
Daft, Charles had gone absolutely daft on this one. "I'm not asking because I'm worried it will harm me." A ludicrous concept-- not that 237 would do harm, but that someone could stop it if harm was 237's intention. "I'm all for doing what's needed, but why am I tapped for the meeting? I'm no longer the HS. I've been reassigned to Research. You're having me do a residence manager's function for a reason."
Charles Cotas regarded her steadily as a faint flush crept into his cheeks.
Siris experienced the tingle of alarm. "Are you thinking what I think you're thinking?"
"Your presence has had an unprecedented effect on the subject."
"It's not me," she hurried to say. Charles, however, looked at her with a flared eyebrow. "It's not me that's affecting him," she emphasized. "It's the other one, subject two hundred and thirty-eight. You should read my reports, Charles."
Thirty minutes later, she watched 237 on the running track. She used the track herself for exercise and to imagine 237's footfalls on the blacktop. 237 ran like a machine, or a god of the arena, like one of those UKSB-genetically enhanced athletes that captivated the mobs of the world. Unlike arena warriors, 237 never broke sweat. It was not winded or damp now, and it never had an odor.
Why do you crave oblivion? Why do you want the long dark, no dreams, no warmth, nothing good to remember?
It came to the table and sat down, long mouth set, not looking at her. Her mental query was perhaps imprudent, like whispering in a quiet room about someone who was present to overhear. 237 could hear her. With a sigh, she structured her thoughts, gave them order in accordance with the principles of StoMi.
"Should we begin with the weather?" she asked. She wore a lab coat, tan slacks, and a thin blue sweater. Her straightened hair was caught in a knot at the back of her neck. Siris consulted the sky through the atrium panel. Meanwhile, she settled on the bench next to 237.
Lifting its head, 237 curved its mouth into a faint smile. "The weather is the weather."
Siris leaned back in her chair, glanced down. She had prepared her question in the dead language of Shashal, a culture that existed before the second rise of the Misenian Empire. Wayne Vadas had taught her the words. The language, Vadas had told her, disappeared in all forms but the written around three thousand years ago.
Nevertheless, 237 answered her in it.
She said, "Go on."
"What would you like to hear? A"-- unknown word --"on the"-- 237 lost her for a while but finished with --"for you."
She switched to the Brianov state language, Ollano. "No one has spoken that tongue in thousands of years."
"You just did."
"I should not be amazed."
"No, you should not be."
She smiled to herself. "I've been in Research since ... Anyway, the present theory is your species was telepathically linked at one point in your evolution, and your ability to recall every language spoken to you is a trait called genetic memory, which would explain why you cannot name all the languages that you know. And why we have never spoken to you in a language you did not immediately and completely possess."
"Whose idea was that?" 237 asked, after a while.
-- Dr. Wayne Vadas.
"In your new work section, do you report to Dr. Vadas?"
"Yes."
"A pity."
237 disliked Vadas almost as much as it disliked Charles Cotas and Anselm Gakhal. It had a thing for officials, but also it was aware when people feared it.
All right. "Here," she said. She held out her hand.
237 took a sheet-sized photograph from her, looked briefly at it. It had no discernible reaction, but asked, "What is this?"
Siris looked hard into 237's face for a sign. "Do you recognize this woman?"
The image was twenty-five or so years old. The woman in it was young, attractive, and blond. She wore a white dress and pumps. She stood, smiling, on a balcony.
"Not really, no."
Siris hesitated. "She is Salmey Vasold Manegold. This was taken on her pilgrimage to Amorium. Like you, she was an Amarite Polytheist. She was at the time married to a man named Burgold Manegold, who was head of a crime syndicate that once based its operation in the Goraneg Mounatins of Volodya-- I know this seems meaningless, but I am going somewhere with it."
"I did not father him, this John Valten Manegold. I'm sorry, I should have mentioned it sooner." 237 glanced away.
"Are you sure?"
237 turned its head to look at her.
She handed him two additional photos. A file photo of a young man in custody, and another image, when the young man was bound and standing on a platform.
237 glanced at the photos and sighed. "It's hard to say from the stills, but there is some emanation. He may be his seeming age. He may only be a young man."
"Affarites tend to change identities. Makes it hard for Research to pin down an age. He could have assumed the life of John Mangegold, we don't know. We're still trying to verify."
The subject gingerly separated the photos, returning all but the first to Siris. "We must get to him. He can't be left as he is."
She kept her hands folded in her lap. "By and large, the world believes this young man, John Manegold, coordinated a spectacular act of terrorism."
"The destruction of the Needle in Bhavaja, now I remember." Kinder ensured 237's grasp of world affairs was current. "Did he?"
"Possibly. Probably."
"I'll have to ask him."
"Interestingly enough, our intelligence says the Volods were using him as an informant up to the instant they accused him of conspiracy."
"A terrorist." 237 looked into a brooding sky. "I would have said he was a builder, not a destroyer. Well, whatever. Get him anyway. Destroy him, if you wish. But do not leave him as he is. His condition ... grates on ... us both."
"They took him to the Ministry of Science because they already know he is more than he seems. He died of a broken neck. Would you like to see?"
"Not particularly. Show me anyway."
She pulled her flex hand-held from her pocket, showed him the screen. "I find it difficult to watch, but the UKSB and Volods stream executions, and the high profile ones always end up on GateKeeper Global. It's a short vid. Here."
He took the flex from her, and watched without any discernible reaction. He gave back the flex. "At the last moment, he released his shield. You know the shield of which I speak?"
Siris nodded.
"The goddess always speaks to us as we are dying. She tries to take away the doubt."
"She tells you that you are going to come back?"
"She would not concern herself with something as trivial as that. She tells us ... other things. His aura is not much more without his shield than with it, which means he is a very young being."
"Would the C-spine fracture have corrected itself by now?"
"You can be sure. That's not a difficult mechanism of death to reverse. And he isn't dead. He's dormant. We have to get him-- save him or destroy him, I don't care. He does not care. But we must do something." 237 studied the Varvins blue pines landscaped outside the atrium along a road that disappeared into the distant hills. "I believe he is just an infant, this one, no older than a quarter century."
* * *
Siris stood in the back of the mission preparation room. When the Kinder Group member nations approved a mission, the project employed a military team of mixed nationality and skill. Siris used to observe the mission preparation from a monitoring station located in another building of the compound. Her habitat supervisor duties did not require her presence at the actual briefing. She only needed to observe 237.
Dr. Mozun, her predecessor, told her there was nothing really to observe. During the transitional phase, she and the doctor observed a mission prep. They sat together in a long, narrow station under overly bright light panels and drank tea. Wishing badly that she was somewhere else, doing anything, something useful, Siris had squinted at the monitors. But nothing in her experience prepared her to understand what she was seeing.
The mission prep room was near the gymnasium, on the secure side. The preparation coordinator was Grazdoz, a figure whose presence at Kinder was somewhat controversial. Siris recalled Mozun's wince as he explained.
"How did Grazdoz come to be at Kinder?" he repeated her query. "Retired military commander, tactical and technical expertise." Then Mozun said, "She's not much of a conversationalist."
Most importantly, Grazdoz may have been a sort of intense personality but she had never heard of, much less practiced StoMi-- the Stoic Mind. The project leaders did not care. They were glad to have Grazdoz. Minimal was the term to describe Grazdoz's contact with 237. Untrue, but on paper it looked good.
Predictably, Grazdoz perceived 237 as a comrade in arms.
Mozun alerted her to this. "Oh, yes, you can tell. The most incautious interchanges. Look, she will even stand at the table next to our 237 when showing off mission equipment."
The mission, Siris recalled, was something awful and necessary, something she was raised to believe occurred only when national security was at risk. Brianovia, once a socialist state, now a model of reformism, did a better job with its interests than its neighbors, Borazjis and the United Kingdom of Solona and Burtisa. Stability was a mandate of the Holland-Tchey aliens. Not only national stability but world order. And this of course was the new purpose of ITAN. The treaty nations were powerful, resourceful, and above all plugged into the conveyor belt of alien technology. Brianovia was a model ITAN member.
Mozun had insisted that Siris read the report of 237's missions, including notes from the soldiers, who protected 237-- Hephaestion --and routinely effected 237's extraction. The reports were above her clearance level and should not have been available in hardcopy in the habitat supervisor's office. However, the reports had become part of the transition process, handed from one supervisor to the next, to orient the relief supervisor to the power 237 was capable of wielding.
"I could talk to you about it all day long," Mozun said. "Instead, read this."
Siris read. There were satellite images to glance at. Heady stuff. She was breathless.
"The military arm of Kinder is disconnected from our armed forces in every way," Mozun went on. "Look at Grazdoz, retired and now here. See the reason. No matter what you do, when there is a mission, Hephaestion is with the soldiers in reckless intimacy. Life and death. Too much adrenaline. Our soldiers are true believers. Hephaestion took away the planet-killer-- do you remember when we called the alien canon a planet-killer? He took that from our enemy."
Presently, Grazdoz called to Hephaestion and the four-member military unit, flicked a glance at Siris in the back, and shot a hand in the air.
Yanked out of the past, a moment passed before Siris realized Grazdoz's gesture was a summons.
The soldiers turned to look at her, two of them rotating only their heads, the others, on their feet, ambling around to gaze at her.
The room was large, with a small stage and lectern at the front, rows of chairs, and a workspace with an enormous table.
Siris strode down the aisle, her arms folded over her chest. When she stopped she was a meter closer to the soldiers than she ever wanted to be.
The captain extended a narrow but big-knuckled hand. "I'm Skocz."
She took him in, the long, proportioned legs first, his lean upper body packed with muscle. He wore a conservative haircut, enough on the side to help him pass for a Volod businessman if he wore the right clothes. She knew he used to be air force special services. He could fly helicopters and maybe build one if he had to.
She gripped his hand, thinking she might as well shake hands with wood. "Good evening, Captain."
"Don't call him that." The scolding woman was about thirty years. She hovered two finger spans shorter than Siris and wore a sleek cap of dark hair cropped in an androgynous style rumored trendy among professional Volod women. Her rank insignia said she was a warrant officer. Her boots, Siris noticed, were highly polished and very small. The rest of her was covered in a utility uniform that showed off a tiny waist.
"We don't use rank," another volunteered. "I'm Zedric. You can call me Rock."
He didn't look like a rock. Except for the basic utility uniform, he looked like an ordinary guy in his forties. He had fair eyes in weather-bronzed skin. He was Galanian.
"I'm sorry," she said, although she was not. She was not one of them. Why should she know their rules? She had no business in the prep room talking to them or going on a mission with them. Her presence was Charles's idea of a joke or his deeply misguided impression that she, Siris, mattered to Hephaestion. "But why can't I use rank?"
The woman clucked, angled away, and sought a chair as though creating distance from Siris was the only appropriate response to so stupid a question.
The fourth soldier winked at Siris. "Out there, you'll remember. I'm Wastagh. Call me Edge."
Siris looked at Hephaestion.
He sat near the front. Mission preparation began on a number of levels. Hephaestion spent the morning going over tactics with the four soldiers. They did drills, scenarios. He still wore the combat boots and a utility uniform, without insignia, appropriate for the training. Last night, Grazdoz had altered Hephaestion's hairstyle. The long locks had been clipped to effect the popular fashion of international executives. (They were going to cut short her, Siris' hair, too, since she was going with the soldiers and Hephaestion to Volodya.) She saw Hephaestion's ears, the strong column of his neck. Look at the ancient frosted irises set against such crisp, youthful white. Nothing they could do about his eyes, their color, the contrast. Volod security used iris scans. They'd stop him if he wore contact lenses to blend in, make him take the contacts out before they passed him through checkpoints. Except for the odd eyes, Hephaestion looked like a law school graduate. The pretty face saved by a rigid, masculine mouth.
"What do they call you?" Siris asked him.
Captain Skocz said, "Lifeline."
Warrant Officer Jetta Phanuff, the scolding woman, said with confidence, "The end-all."
Sergeant Wastagh drifted to a vacant chair. "That's the Duke."
Suddenly Phanuff found all this amusing. "Hephaestion, I meant to ask you, how was Empress Joanna?"
"Who is Empress Joanna?" Skocz interjected.
Zedric settled in a chair and tipped his head back to eye the captain. "Go back a few. She screwed a lot of kings, tried to fight off the Aiglentines by giving her daughter to a barbarian prince."
Hephaestion held open his mission package. Without looking up, "She was before my time," he said, quietly.
As soon as he spoke, Siris knew where she would sit.
Phanuff continued. "How was Reagan Thaine?"
Hephaestion: "I never met him. We would not have got along."
Phanuff turned with a smile to Wastagh, who rewarded her bravado with a grin. On previous occasions, from the comfort of the control room with the audio low, Siris had observed the soldiers' banter. Phanuff, a veteran, violated Kinder practice, dipping her fingers into the pool of Hephaestion's past. Even in jest, Kinder prohibited unauthorized forays. Phanuff no doubt enjoyed crossing the line as much as she delighted in Hephaestion's off-hand response. Like her comrades, she probably did not believe in monsters. At such times, the soldiers drew Hephaestion from the distant, sterile, and severe world of the habitat into something with a little more sensation in it. His was not an overly strong attachment. How could it be? Now and then, someone did not come back. And they grew old, these soldiers. Were replaced. That, too, Hephaestion took in stride.
Siris sat next to Hephaestion.
At the lectern, Grazdoz switched on the projector and began.
"The mission objective is to retrieve the remains of John Manegold, guard the remains for two to six days, and extract Manegold.
"The mission has two insertion points.
"Dr. Interlandi will enter Volodya at Tolna-Kraj International Airport. She will be on a chartered airjet carrying medical doctors who volunteer to assist International Relief in Vodikovo City. Our Lady of Service Medical Center in Vodikovo City coordinates the country's mass casualty trauma centers.
"The trauma centers are a hot coal, because nobody is allowed to report what they see. Everything bad coming out of Volodya is about the terrorists. Abductions, bombings, shootings." Grazdoz paused to glance at the projector images, hand-picked demonstrations of unnatural death. Some urban, some rural locations. A couple of ITAN headlines. She wanted to show the soldiers what they were getting into.
"State-run media controls the output," she went on. "The country doesn't want ITAN human rights teams telling GateKeeper about the government raids, the minefields, the death squads, the unofficial detention centers, summary executions."
Images smuggled out of infirmaries, emergency rooms. The clinics, the ERs seemed modern, well-provisioned. The patients were captured by a camera on a button or a pin at odd angles: amputations, burning victims, torture victims, gunshots. More shots of a pastel countryside, an ordinary paved highway littered with corpses.
"Soon as the hospital workers break silence," Grazdoz told them, "International Relief will get kicked out of the country. It's the same thing you saw ten years ago in Grete. They're still digging up mass graves over there and nobody said a word until ITAN backed the elections."
She called up a picture of the airport outside the capital city of Bhavaja.
"The relief effort works on a rotating schedule. Medical staff is cleared by the Volods in advance. Adding a name this close to departure will most certainly exclude the entire rotation and strand the doctors finishing up their tour. Dr. Interlandi will go as a flight attendant. Her long-term involvement with Kinder guarantees her peers will not recognize her.
"There is a one-week window as the new doctors are quarantined, screened, and in-serviced on Volod policy and security. The flight crew is quartered in the Holiday Hotel at Tolna-Kraj." Grazdoz showed more images of the Volodyan international airport, the hotel. "The flight crew is subjected to minimum screening, mainly because they don't have access to the Volod infrastructure. A card with identification data, photo, prints, birth certificate, travel logs and citizenship status is all Dr. Interlandi will need. The flight crew is allowed to shuttle into Bhavaja. Tourism is down but if they want to, the flight crew can sightsee, stay in the city, essentially do whatever they want except leave Vodikovo Province and miss the flight out.
"Dr. Interlandi will meet this man."
The man on the screen had gray hair and deep-set, sad little eyes.
"Fredric Karian is Kinder intelligence. He operates the safe house in the Palisad district in North Bhavaja." Images of a narrow two-story house behind a rampart of ancient-seeming trees. Neighborhood shots revealed a quaint sidewalk mall, a fuel station, and a firehouse. "Bhavaja University owns the property. The university wall starts right there." Grazdoz flicked a laser pointer at the screen. "The property is shielded by the trees, has an independent power source and water supply. University security can't see it, doesn't want to see it, isn't interested in it. And with the safe house security system on you can see whose coming up the street for a kilometer. The driveway and the surrounding grounds have motion, seismic, and heat sensors. The emergency escape route is through the basement into a utility tunnel under the university. Questions so far?"
Grazdoz nodded with approval at the silence.
"The rest of you. Volodya is a restricted fly zone. Without a flight plan, you are history. The Volod Air Force asks no questions. They will put two rockets up your ass, I don't care if you put sixty sisters of Our Lady singing up against the windows of an airbus.
"Volodya's borders are not for the faint-hearted. From the west, you have the ocean. Alina, Temor, and Volney share Volodya's inland borders. The best way in is this way.
"The first leg of your flight is by military cargo carrier to a private air strip in Alina. We control the airstrip. Then, my friends, you are on your way to a high altitude deployment, low altitude open-parachute insertion in Kodopovec Province in Volodya.
"If you are picked up by any of these groups"-- Grazdoz grabbed a finger --"government troops, Volodyan Intelligence, or the Federal Authority, you will be killed. The only question is whether you will be tortured first and how badly.
"The anti-government network is active in this province. You are set to meet this man, Szalay Crivosin, the head of a local criminal syndicate, at a point about a half-kilometer from your landing zone. Kinder agents developed this Crivosin as an asset, but this is his first field test, and you know what that means."
"Means it can go either way," Zone said.
"You got it. Crivosin is putting it on the line for some non-traceable credits and because he believes the Volod government staged the execution of John Manegold. Nobody's exchanging credentials in this enterprise, but he's been fed enough bullshit to think we're Moukibi-paid mercenaries sent in retaliation for the"-- Grazdoz held up the first two fingers of each hand and wagged them --"unlawful ITAN raid on Moukibi soil. You know, to stir up the pot. He and his bunch like the idea we might be able to prove the Federal Authority hanged a lookalike. According to Crivosin, the terrorist group Holbek wants Manegold as badly as we do.
"Don't turn your backs on Crivosin. If he's not active Holbek, he's with a Holbek-funded organization, intel we'll be happily passing on to ITAN soon as the mission is over.
"Don't joke with him or his people. Don't smile at them. You get their help because they believe you can show them John Manegold standing up and breathing. They can turn on you in a moment, and they're every bit as brutal as the Volod government. Yes, Dance."
Phanuff had her hand up. "Why is Manegold important to the Holbeks?"
Grazdoz shrugged. "It's Holbek, not Holbeks. Think ancient history, holy warriors looking after the sweet old lady in Amorium. Ring a bell with anyone?"
Hephaestion said, "Yes," and that was it.
"It's the name, now, of Burgolt Manegold's pet group of homicidal maniacs, and their leader, a wonderfully psychotic son of a bitch, is our Manegold's father."
Siris said, quietly, "They're all terrorists."
Hephaestion addressed the room. "Holbek and Burgolt Manegold are the same, yes, that is true. John Manegold is friend to neither. They want him so they can, how shall we say it, debrief him."
What would Josefa Zinn, observing on her monitor while safe across the complex, make of this? Probably she had no idea how different this briefing was. How much of Hephaestion's information came directly from Manegold, and how much was interpretation? Manegold wasn't in the room. The spectral scans showed him in the habitat, where he tended to stay.
Siris cleared her throat. "Our lives may depend on Manegold. What is the level of trust you have for this young man and what he tells you?"
"John has decided he is dead and I am an angel of Our Lady. Until he is with us again, and I mean in the flesh, he will do what I tell him when I tell him to do it. But he holds to the belief that he has nothing further to offer this world."
Grazdoz, unfazed, boomed in. "So, one hundred percent trust, I got it. Thank you, Angel." Angel was Hephaestion's code name.
Phanuff whistled, predictably.
Grazdoz fought a smile. "After the Kodopovec team meets up with its Holbek contact all of you will be given current travel papers to match your identification cards. In Volodya, travel papers are updated weekly at checkpoints designed to target citizens who travel outside the security net. You'll be a site approval team for a company called XTO Sun Energies that wants to build a hydroelectric power station in Kodopovec Province. Your cover is you're heading back to Bhavaja to meet the project's finance component. You've been out in the countryside, so if your papers are a little off the guards shouldn't shoot you without making a call first. Anyone piping cash into Volodya is getting a little moving room right now.
"When you take the body from the Ministry of Science, the city will raise the alert level and lock down. That's why we're not trying to bring Manegold out of Bhavaja right away. Dr. Interlandi, this corpse is frozen. Can you do your thing in six days?"
Siris felt the soldiers staring. "You're imagining that I will be working with someone who has to be brought from one state to another gradually. Yes, I am working with living tissue, but I do not have to restore Manegold's body in stages. I only need six hours with the equipment I asked for to relieve his current condition. I estimate forty-eight hours from then his power will provide a pulse and breathing and I'll be able to start an IV. Return to consciousness will be Manegold's call. Thirty-six hours, maybe a bit longer. What do think, Hephaestion, for his first time?"
"I think it could be never. He has no connection to this world beyond the violence that facilitated his leaving it, and the murder by his government of the woman he loved, a woman who was treated roughly by her peers. His last connection to life was a reporter who somehow managed to get out of Volodya before her arrest papers were drawn up. He wants nothing from us especially but to be allowed to pass the gate."
No one spoke.
A vent puffed warm air.
Grazdoz, staring at Hephaestion, got a little wide-eyed. "Then what are we going over there for, my friend?"
Siris said, "We would go anyway, to destroy the corpse, and to let John Manegold sleep."
"Death is not sleep," said Hephaestion, unexpectedly. Siris, especially, was surprised. On several occasions Hepaestion had referred to death-- and always as a form of release. "Every thing that ends begins again in the pure and perfect light of creation."
"Is that," Siris wondered, while the others looked inward in silence, "the light of one's own funeral pyre?"
Hephaestion leveled his crystal optics on her, and she shivered. "Close," he whispered, saying nothing more. Very faintly, he smiled.
* * *
One of the last things Siris did for Kinder was tell the truth.
"Charles, you're a fool."
Her compound prox card no longer allowed access to administrative facilities. The upper habitat facilities, too, were off limits. She had to find Charles Cotas outside Admin One, literally on the steps leading to the driveway as the medical director strolled to the dark sedan that would ferry him to a helicopter. It was almost 1700 hours and the brass sky was turbulent. Charles had finished meetings with Dr. Zinn and the the international board. His next stop was the capital with Peter Weihing, a long flight with complaining winds and a low sky.
Siris gazed up at Cotas anxiously. An assistant crowded his elbow, pointing at her.
Two Admin security staff stepped outside. They were quite capable of keeping her from Cotas. Meanwhile, Charles lowered his head, eyes narrowed. It was difficult to know what he made of her running to him for help.
Siris hurried to intercept him. "I have to talk to you."
"Of course you do."
The tone, she knew it. Resented it.
Charles gestured to security, waved them off. He spoke to his assistant, who got into the sedan and shut the door.
Siris and Dr. Cotas were alone on the walkway.
"The Volodya mission does not need me. Send a medic. We have several field medics trained to do everything I can do. I shouldn't be on this mission."
Charles looked over her head with the blank indifference.
It was because she was past tense, an anecdote. How many times did she, Siris, sit patiently through the ramblings of a compromised employee?
-- I thought that ...
-- I did not really ...
-- I'm thinking clearly, believe me ...
Kinder made plans without Siris, now. Though she might have a role in the mission, she no longer had a voice.
"Charles, don't send me to Volodya."
"You're due at the final mission conference, Siris."
"Oh, gods." The gods she did not believe in. She was a Reformist and committed to atheism. Why get squeamish now?
Charles noted her lapse with disapproval.
It was well known that Hephaestion considered the entity in Amorium, the Lady of the Blessed Waters, a demi-god. 237 had been an Amarite polytheist just about seven hundred years. If anyone knew that, she did.
Her government's official position about the Lady was that over the last six centuries her eminence was a succession of exceptionally kind women elevated to a revered clerical post. The Lady advocated peace without force of arms. On occasion, she was rumored to heal someone, maybe restore a missing limb. She was conspicuously mute on the topic of the Holland-Tchey aliens. And she never left the gilt worship chamber in her temple in Amorium.
She was not a threat.
She was not a subject.
Siris realized that she shouldn't be thinking about the Lady now. Or thinking about never knowing (before now) Hephaestion's mission code name was angel.
"My presence will precipitate a crisis. I am the ward of his memories."
"Wasn't it your doing, that 237 gave them to you in the first place?"
"Holy hell, Charles, is that what you think? That I asked for this?"
"What other reason would it have for choosing you?"
"I've not asked, but maybe you should. Charles, 237 has nearly perfect recall. Do you know what it is like to possess centuries of experience, to sift the ages for the one answer you cannot learn but have searched for all your life? He's kept up with the lives-- count them, plural, lives of a being he believes houses the spirit of his sister. All these years! He wants a connection. He needs a conection. He wants to see himself in Manegold. Let him go to Volodya and do his job without me to remind him that after fifteen hundred years he, too, is just an infant."
"You referred," Charles said, "to it, as he. He wants, he needs."
Siris all but laughed, and her tone kicked up a notch. "What if he wants to sleep with me?" She just threw that out. Made eye contact with Charles, who messed up and glanced her way. She put on her serious face, to show him she was asking because she thought it might happen.
Charles said nothing.
"Charles, no." She already knew what he was thinking. "I'm going to control a fifteen hundred-year-old affarite with a toss of my hair? May I say something?"
His look said, Say anything you want.
Somehow she had fallen beneath the waves with barely a nostril above the water. Her country had abandoned her for a piece of the greater good. Forced her into a war zone. She was without any rights. Her name was used in meetings about manipulation through sex. Ludicrous. Anticipating a sexual advance from Hephaestion was like looking forward to a romp with her older brother. Didn't they read the file? Hephaestion was not sexually aroused in inequitable partnerships. When there was an imbalance of power, he preferred celibacy.
"Typically," she said, "it-- he--will do what we ask because we ask. This may not be true now. He's just received confirmation he's not alone."
Again, Cotas was silent.
"Maybe I am not the one contaminated, Charles. Think about it." She walked away.
The last briefing was due, and they were waiting for her.
-- Next Chapter
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