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“No,” replied Ekalu, voice flat. “Fleet Captain was.” Me, she meant. “You knew the whole time, I suppose.” That I was an ancillary, and not human, she meant.

“Is that the problem then?” asked Medic. She hadn’t touched the tea the Etrepa had given her. “Fleet Captain is first?”

“No, of course not.” Ekalu looked up, finally, and her impassive expression flickered for just a moment into something different, but then it was gone. “Why would it?” I knew she was telling the truth.

Medic made a gesture of unconcern. “Some people get jealous. And Lieutenant Seivarden is… very attached to Fleet Captain. And you and Lieutenant Seivarden…”

“It would be stupid to be jealous of Fleet Captain,” said Ekalu, voice bland. She meant that, too. Her statement might conceivably be taken for an insult, but I knew that wasn’t her intention. And she was right. It didn’t make any sense at all to be jealous of me.

“That sort of thing,” observed Medic, dryly, “doesn’t always make sense.” Ekalu said nothing. “I’ve sometimes wondered what went through Seivarden’s mind when she discovered Fleet Captain was an ancillary. Not even human!” And then, in response to the merest flicker of an expression across Ekalu’s face, “But she’s not. Fleet Captain will tell you so herself, I imagine.”

“Are you going to call Fleet Captain
it
instead of
she
?” Ekalu challenged. And then looked away. “Your gracious pardon, Medic. It just sits wrong with me.”

Because I could see what Ship saw, I saw Medic’s dubious reaction to Ekalu’s overly formal apology, Ekalu’s suddenly
careful attempt to erase her usual lower-house accent. But Medic had known Ekalu a long time, and most of that when Ekalu had still been, as Medic put it, in the decades. “I think,” Medic said, “that Seivarden imagines she understands what it is to be on the bottom of the heap. Certainly she’s learned it’s possible to find oneself there despite good family and impeccable manners and every indication Aatr has granted you a life of happiness and plenty. She’s learned it’s possible that someone she’d dismissed and disregarded might be worthy of her respect. And now she’s learned it, she fancies she understands
you
.” Another thought struck her. “That’s why you don’t like my saying the fleet captain’s not human, isn’t it.”

“I’ve never been at the bottom of any heap.” Still carefully broadening her vowels in imitation of Medic or Tisarwat. Of Seivarden. Or of me. “And I said there wasn’t anything wrong.”

“I’m mistaken, then,” replied Medic, no rancor or sarcasm in her voice. “I beg your indulgent pardon, Lieutenant.” More formal than she needed to be with Ekalu, whom she’d known so long. Whose doctor she had been, all that time.

“Of course, Medic.”

Seivarden still slept. Unaware of her fellow lieutenant’s (and lover’s) discomfiture. Unaware, I feared, of Ship’s favorable regard. What I had begun to suspect was its strong affection. Any number of things, Ship wouldn’t hesitate to say quite directly, but never that, I was sure.

Beside me, on the shuttle, Tisarwat muttered, and stirred, but didn’t wake. I turned my thoughts to what I might find on Athoek Station when we reached it, and what I ought to do about it.

2

I met Governor Giarod in her office, its cream-and-green silk hangings today covering even the broad window that looked out onto Athoek Station’s main concourse, where citizens crossed the scuffed white floor, came or went from Station Administration, or stood talking in front of the temple of Amaat with its huge reliefs of the four Emanations. Governor Giarod was tall, broad-shouldered, outwardly serene, but I knew from experience she was liable to misgivings, and to acting on those misgivings at the least convenient moments. She offered me a seat, which I took, and tea, which I refused. Kalr Five, who had met me at the docks, stood impassive just behind me. I considered ordering her to the door, or even out into the corridor, but decided that an obvious reminder of who I was and what resources I commanded might be useful.

Governor Giarod couldn’t help but notice the soldier looming straight and stiff behind me, but pretended she did not. “Once the gravity came back on, Fleet Captain, Station Administrator Celar felt—and I agreed—that we should do a thorough inspection of the Undergarden, to be sure it was
structurally sound.” A few days earlier the public gardens, just above the part of the station that had been named for them, had begun to collapse, almost flooding the four levels below them. Athoek Station’s AI had solved the immediate problem by turning off the entire station’s gravity while the Undergarden was evacuated.

“Did you find dozens of unauthorized people hiding there, as you feared?” Every Radchaai had a tracker implanted at birth, so that no citizen was ever lost or invisible to any watching AI. Particularly here in the relatively small space of Athoek Station, the idea that anyone could be moving secretly, or here without Station’s knowledge, was patently ridiculous. And yet the belief that the Undergarden hid crowds of such people, all of them a threat to law-abiding citizens, was alarmingly common.

“You think such fears are foolish,” replied Governor Giarod. “And yet our inspection turned up just such a person, hiding in the access tunnels between levels three and four.”

I asked, voice even, “Only one?”

Governor Giarod gestured acknowledgment of my point—one person was nowhere near what some—including, apparently, the governor—had feared. “She’s Ychana.” Most of the residents of the Undergarden had been Ychana. “No one will admit to knowing anything about her, though it’s fairly obvious some of them did know her. She’s in a cell in Security. I thought you might like to know, especially given the fact that the last person who did something like this was an alien.” Translator Dlique, the sort-of-human representative of the mysterious—and terrifying—Presger. Who before the treaty with the Radch—with, actually, all humanity, since the Presger didn’t make distinctions between one sort of human and another—had torn apart human ships, and humans,
for sport. Who were so powerful no human force, not even a Radchaai one, could destroy them, or even defend against them. Presger Translator Dlique, it had turned out, could deceive Station’s sensors with alarming ease, and had had no patience for being safely confined to the governor’s residence. Her dead body lay in a suspension pod in Medical, waiting for the hopefully distant day when the Presger came looking for her, and we had to explain that a
Sword of Atagaris
ancillary had shot her, on the suspicion that she’d vandalized a wall in the Undergarden.

At least the search that had turned up this one person ought to have allayed fears of a horde of murderous Ychana. “Did you look at her DNA? Is she closely related to anyone else in the Undergarden?”

“What an odd question, Fleet Captain! Do you know something you haven’t shared with me?”

“Many things,” I replied, “but most of them wouldn’t interest you. She isn’t, is she?”

“She isn’t,” replied Governor Giarod. “And Medical tells me she’s carrying some markers that haven’t been seen since before the annexation of Athoek.”
Annexation
was the polite term for the Radchaai invasion and colonization of entire star systems. “Since she can’t possibly be recently descended from a line that went extinct centuries ago, the only other possibility—in the loosest sense of that word—is that she’s over six hundred years old.”

There was another possibility, but Governor Giarod hadn’t seen it yet. “I imagine that’s probably the case. Though she’ll have been suspended for a fair amount of that time.”

Governor Giarod frowned. “You know who she is?”

“Not who,” I said, “not specifically. I have some suspicions as to
what
she is. May I speak to her?”

“Are you going to share your suspicions with me?”

“Not if they prove unfounded.” All I needed was for Governor Giarod to add another phantom enemy to her list. “I’d like to speak with her, and I’d like a medic to be brought to examine her again. Someone sensible, and discreet.”

The cell was tiny, two meters by two, a grate and a water supply in one corner. The person squatting on the scuffed floor, staring at a bowl of skel, obviously her supper, seemed unremarkable at first examination. She wore the bright-colored loose shirt and trousers most of the Ychana in the Undergarden preferred, yellow and orange and green. But this person also wore plain gray gloves, suspiciously new-looking. Likely they had come quite recently from Station stores, and Security had insisted she put them on. Hardly anyone in the Undergarden wore gloves, it was just one more reason to believe the people who lived there were uncivilized, unsettlingly, perhaps even dangerously, foreign. Not Radchaai at all.

There was no way to signal that I wanted to come in—not even the pretense of privacy, in Security’s custody. Station—the AI that controlled Athoek Station, that was for all intents and purposes the station itself—opened the door at my request. The person squatting on the floor didn’t even look up. “May I come in, citizen?” I asked. Though
citizen
was almost certainly the wrong term of address here, it was, in Radchaai, very nearly the only polite one possible.

The person didn’t answer. I came in, a matter of a single step, and squatted across from her. Kalr Five stopped in the doorway. “What’s your name?” I asked. Governor Giarod had said that this person had refused to speak, from the moment she’d been arrested. She was scheduled for interrogation the next morning. But of course, for an interrogation to
work, you had to know what questions to ask. Chances were, no one here did.

“You won’t be able to keep your secret,” I continued, addressing the person squatting on the floor in front of me staring at her bowl of skel. They had left her no utensil to eat it with—fearing, perhaps, that she might do herself an injury with it. She would have to eat the thick leaves with her hands, or put her face into the bowl, either option unpleasant and demeaning, to a Radchaai. “You’re scheduled for an interrogation in the morning. I’m sure they’ll be as careful as they can, but I don’t think it’s ever a terribly pleasant experience.” And, like a lot of people annexed by the Radch, most Ychana were convinced that interrogation was inseparable from the re-education a convicted criminal would undergo to ensure she wouldn’t offend again. Certainly the drugs used were the same, and an incompetent interrogator could do a good deal of damage to a person. Even the most Radchaai of Radchaai had something of a horror of interrogation and re-education, and tried to avoid mentioning either one, would walk all around the topics even when they were obviously staring them in the face.

Still no answer. She did not even look up. I was just as capable as this person was of sitting in silence. I thought of asking Station to show me what it could see of her—certainly temperature changes, possibly heart rate, possibly more. I didn’t doubt that what sensors existed here in Security were set to pick up as much information as possible from inmates. But I doubted I would see anything surprising in that data. “Do you know any songs?” I asked.

Almost, I thought I saw a change, however small, in the set of her shoulders, in the way she held herself. My question had surprised her. It was, I had to admit, an inane one. Nearly
everyone I had met, in my two-thousand-year life, had known at least a few songs. Station said, in my ear, “That surprised her, Fleet Captain.”

“No doubt,” I responded, silently. Didn’t look up as Five stepped back into the corridor to make way for Eight, carrying a box, gold inlaid with red and blue and green. Before I had left the governor’s office, I had messaged to ask her to bring it. I gestured to her to set it on the floor beside me. And when she had done so, I opened the lid.

The box had once held an antique tea set—flask, strainer, bowls for twelve—of blue and green glass, and gold. It had survived three thousand years unbroken—possibly more. Now it was in fragments, shattered, strewn around the box’s interior, or collected in the depressions that had once held its pieces snug and safe. Unbroken, it had been worth several fortunes. In pieces it was still a prize.

The person squatting on the floor in front of me turned her head, finally, to look at it. Said, in an even voice, in Radchaai, “Who did this?”

“Surely you knew,” I said, “when you traded it away, that something like this might happen. Surely you knew that no one else could possibly treasure it as much as you did.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Still she stared at the broken tea set. Still her voice was even. She spoke Radchaai with the same accent I’d heard from other Ychana in the Undergarden. “This is obviously valuable, and whoever broke it was obviously someone entirely uncivilized.”

“I think she’s upset, Fleet Captain,” said Station, in my ear. “She’s reacted emotionally, anyway. It’s hard to be more definite, with only externals, when I don’t know someone well.”

I knew how that worked, from personal experience. But I didn’t say so. I replied, silently, “Thank you, Station, that’s good to know.” I knew, also from personal experience, just how helpful an AI could be when it liked you. And how obstructive and unhelpful one could be when it had some reason for dislike or resentment. I was genuinely, pleasantly surprised to find Station volunteering information for me. Aloud I said, to the person crouched in front of me, “What’s your name?”

“Fuck you,” she said, even and bland. Still looking at that shattered tea set.

“What was the captain’s name, that you removed before you traded the tea set away?” The inscription on the inside of the box lid had been altered to remove a name that, I suspected, might allow someone to trace it back to its origin.

“Why wait until tomorrow to interrogate me?” she asked. “Do it now. Then you’ll have answers to all your questions.”

“Heart rate increase,” said Station, into my ear. “Her respiration is faster.”

Ah. Aloud I said, “There’s a fail-safe, then. The drugs will kill you. This part of you, anyway.”

She looked at me, finally. Blinked, slowly. “Fleet Captain Breq Mianaai, are you sure you’re quite all right? That didn’t make any sense at all.”