Ancillary Justice (23 page)

After another five kilometers, during which she had intermittently fallen behind and then raced, gasping, to catch up, she said, “Aatr’s tits, you hold a grudge, don’t you.”

Still I said nothing, and didn’t stop.

Another hour passed, the town well behind us, and the bridge came in sight, flat black arcing across the drop, spikes and curls of glass below, brilliant red, intense yellow, ultramarine, and jagged stubs of others. The chasm walls were striated, black, green-gray, and blue, frosted here and there with ice. Below, the bottom of the chasm was lost in cloud. A sign in five languages proclaimed it to be a protected monument, access permitted only to a certain class of license holders—what license, to what purpose, was mysterious to me, as I did not recognize all the words on the sign. A low barrier blocked the entrance, nothing I could not easily step over, and there was no one here but me and Seivarden. The bridge itself was five meters wide, like all the others, and while the wind blew strong, it wasn’t strong enough to endanger me. I strode forward and stepped over the barrier and out onto the bridge.

Had heights troubled me, I might have found it dizzying.
Fortunately they did not, and my only discomfort was the feeling of open spaces behind and under me that I could not see unless I turned my attention away from other places. My boots thunked on the black glass, and the whole structure swayed slightly, and shuddered in the wind.

A new pattern of vibrations told me Seivarden had followed me.

What happened next was largely my own fault.

We were halfway across when Seivarden spoke. “All right, all right. I get it. You’re angry.”

I stopped, but did not turn. “How much did it get you?” I asked, finally, only one of the things I had considered saying.

“What?” Though I hadn’t turned, I could see the motion as she leaned over, hands on her knees, could hear her still breathing hard, straining to be heard against the wind.

“How much kef?”

“I only wanted a little,” she said, not quite answering my question. “Enough to take the edge off. I
need
it. And it’s not like you paid for that flier to begin with.” For an instant I thought she had remembered how I had acquired the flier, unlikely as that seemed. But she continued, “You’ve got enough in that pack to buy ten fliers, and none of it’s yours, it belongs to the Lord of the Radch, doesn’t it? Making me walk like this is just you being pissy.”

I stood, still facing forward, my coat flattened against me in the wind. Stood trying to understand what her words meant, about who or what she thought I was. Why she thought I had troubled myself about her.

“I know what you are,” she said, as I stood silent. “No doubt you wish you could leave me behind, but you can’t, can you? You’ve got orders to bring me back.”

“What am I?” I asked, still without turning. Loud, against the wind.

“
Nobody
, that’s who.” Seivarden’s voice was scornful. She was standing upright now, just behind my left shoulder. “You tested into military, in the aptitudes, and like a million other nobodies these days, you think that makes you
somebody
. And you practiced the accent and how to hold your utensils, and knelt your way to Special Missions and now
I’m
your special mission, you’ve got to bring me home in one piece even though you’d rather not, wouldn’t you? You’ve got a problem with me, at a guess your problem is that try all you like, whoever you kneel to, you’ll never be what I was born to be, and people like you
hate
that.”

I turned toward her. I’m certain my face was without expression, but when my eyes met hers she flinched—no edge taken off, none at all—and took three quick, reflexive steps backward.

Over the edge of the bridge.

I stepped to the edge, looked down. Seivarden hung six meters below, hands clenched around a complicated swirl of red glass, her eyes wide, mouth open slightly. She looked up at me and said, “You were going to hit me!”

The calculations came easily to me. All my clothes knotted would only reach 5.7 meters. The red glass was connected somewhere under the bridge I couldn’t see, no sign of anything she could climb. The colored glass wasn’t as strong as the bridge itself—I guessed the red spiral would shatter under Seivarden’s weight sometime in the next three to seven seconds. Though that was only a guess. Still, any help I might call would certainly arrive too late. Clouds still veiled the bottom reaches of the chasm. Those tubes were just a few
centimeters narrower than my outstretched arms, and were themselves very deep.

“Breq?” Seivarden’s voice was breathy and strained. “Can you do something?” Not, at least,
You have to do something
.

“Do you trust me?” I asked.

Her eyes widened further, her gasps became a bit more ragged. She didn’t trust me, I knew. She was only still with me because she thought I was official, hence inescapable, and she was important enough for the Radch to send someone after her—underestimating her own importance was never one of Seivarden’s failings—and perhaps because she was tired of running, from the world, from herself. Ready to give up. But I still didn’t understand why
I
was with
her
. Of all the officers I’ve served with, she was never one of my favorites.

“I trust you,” she lied.

“When I grab you, raise your armor and put your arms around me.” Fresh alarm flashed across her face, but there was no more time. I extended my armor under my clothes and stepped off the bridge.

The instant my hands touched her shoulders, the red glass shattered, sharp-edged fragments flying out and away, glittering briefly. Seivarden closed her eyes, ducked her head, face into my neck, held me tight enough that if I hadn’t been armored my breathing would have been impeded. Because of the armor I couldn’t feel her panicked breath on my skin, couldn’t feel the air rushing past, though I could hear it. But she didn’t extend her own armor.

If I had been more than just myself, if I had had the numbers I needed, I could have calculated our terminal velocity, and just how long it would take to reach it. Gravity was easy, but the drag of my pack and our heavy coats, whipping up
around us, affecting our speed, was beyond me. It would have been much easier to calculate in a vacuum, but we weren’t falling in a vacuum.

But the difference between fifty meters a second and 150 was, at that moment, only large in the abstract. I couldn’t see the bottom yet, the target I was hoping to hit was small, and I didn’t know how much time we’d have to adjust our attitude, if we even could. For the next twenty to forty seconds we had nothing to do but wait, and fall.

“Armor!” I shouted into Seivarden’s ear.

“Sold it,” she answered. Her voice shook slightly, straining against the rushing air. Her face was still pressed hard against my neck.

Suddenly gray. Moisture formed on exposed portions of my armor and blew streaming upward. One point three five seconds later I saw the ground, dark circles packed tight. Bigger, and therefore closer, than I liked. A surge of adrenaline surprised me; I must have gotten too used to falling. I turned my head, trying to look straight down past Seivarden’s shoulder to what lay directly below us.

My armor was made to spread out the force of a bullet’s impact, bleed some of it away as heat. It was theoretically impenetrable, but I could still be injured or even killed with the application of sufficient force. I’d suffered broken bones, lost bodies under an unrelenting hail of bullets. I wasn’t sure what the friction of decelerating would do to my armor, or to me; I had some skeletal and muscular augmentation, but whether it would be sufficient for this, I had no idea. I was unable to calculate just exactly how fast we were going, just exactly how much energy needed to be bled away to slow to a survivable speed, how hot it would get inside and outside my armor. And unarmored, Seivarden wouldn’t be able to assist.

Of course, if I had still been what I once was, it wouldn’t matter. This wouldn’t have been my only body. I couldn’t help thinking I should have let Seivarden fall. Shouldn’t have jumped. Falling, I still didn’t know why I had done it. But at the moment of choice I had found I couldn’t walk away.

By then I knew our distance in centimeters. “Five seconds,” I said, shouted, above the wind. By then it was four. If we were very, very lucky we’d fall straight into the tube below us and I’d push my hands and feet against the walls. If we were very, very lucky the heat from the friction wouldn’t burn unarmored Seivarden too badly. If I was even luckier I’d only break my wrists and ankles. All of it struck me as unlikely, but the omens would fall as Amaat intended.

Falling didn’t bother me. I could fall forever and not be hurt. It’s stopping that’s the problem. “Three seconds,” I said.

“Breq,” Seivarden said, a gasping sob. “Please.”

Some answers I would never have. I abandoned what calculations I was still making. I didn’t know why I had jumped but at that moment it no longer mattered, at that moment there was nothing else. “Whatever you do”—one second—“don’t let go.”

Darkness. No impact. I thrust out my arms, which were immediately forced upward, wrists and one ankle breaking on impact despite my armor’s reinforcement, tendons and muscles tearing, and we began a tumble sideways. Despite the pain I pulled my arms and legs in and reached and kicked out again, quickly, steadying us the instant after. Something in my right leg broke as I did, but I couldn’t afford to worry about it. Centimeter by centimeter we slowed.

I could no longer control my hands or feet, could only push against the walls and hope we wouldn’t be pushed off balance again, and fall helpless, headfirst, to our deaths. The
pain was sharp, blinding, blocking out everything except numbers—a distance (estimated) decreasing by centimeters (also estimated); speed (estimated) decreasing; external armor temperature (increasing at my extremities, possible danger of exceeding acceptable parameters, possible resulting injury), but the numbers were near-meaningless to me, the pain was louder, more immediate, than anything else.

But the numbers were important. A comparison of distance and our rate of deceleration suggested disaster ahead. I tried to take a deep breath, found I was incapable of it, and tried to push harder against the walls.

I have no memory of the rest of the descent.

I woke, on my back, in pain. My hands and arms, my shoulders. Feet and legs. In front of me—directly above—a circle of gray light. “Seivarden,” I tried to say, but it came out as a convulsive sigh that echoed just slightly against the walls. “Seivarden.” The name came out this time, but barely audible, and distorted by my armor. I dropped the armor and tried speaking again, managing this time to engage my voice. “Seivarden.”

I raised my head, just slightly. In the dim light from above I saw that I lay on the ground, knees bent and turned to one side, the right leg at a disturbing angle, my arms straight beside my body. I tried to move a finger, failed. A hand. Failed—of course. I tried shifting my right leg, which responded with more pain.

There was no one here but me. Nothing here but me—I didn’t see my pack.

At one time, if there had been a Radchaai ship in orbit, I could have contacted it, easy as thought. But if I had been
anywhere a Radchaai ship was likely to be, this would never have happened.

If I had left Seivarden in the snow, this would never have happened.

I had been so close. After twenty years of planning and working, of maneuvering, two steps forward here, a step backward there, slowly, patiently, against all likelihood I had gotten this far. So many times I had made a throw like this, not only my success at hazard, but my life, and each time I had won, or at least not lost in any way that prevented me from trying again.

Until now. And for such a stupid reason. Above me clouds hid the unreachable sky, the future I no longer had, the goal I was now incapable of accomplishing. Failed.

I closed my eyes against tears not brought on by physical pain. If I failed, it would not be because I had ever, at any time, given up. Seivarden had left somehow. I would find her. I would rest a moment, recollect myself, find the strength to pull out the handheld I kept in my coat and call for help, or discover some other way to leave here, and if it meant I dragged myself out on the bloody, useless remains of my limbs, I would do that, pain or no pain, or I would die trying.

One of the three Mianaais did not even arrive at the Var deck, but transmitted the code for my central access deck.
Invalid access
, I thought, receiving it, but stopped the lift on that level and opened the door anyway. That Mianaai made her way to my main console, gestured up records, scanned quickly through a century of log headings. Stopped, frowned, at a point in the list that would have been made in the five years surrounding that last visit, that I had concealed from her.

The other two of her stowed their bags in quarters, and went to the newly lit and slowly warming Var decade room. Both of her sat at the table, the silent colored-glass Valskaayan saint smiling mildly down. Without speaking aloud she requested information from me—a random sample of memories from that five-year span that had so attracted her attention, above on the central access deck. Silent, expressionless—unreal, in a sense, since I could only see her exteriors—she watched as my memories played out before her visions, in her ears. I began to doubt the truth of my memory of that other visit. There seemed to be no trace of it
in the information Anaander Mianaai was accessing, nothing during that time but routine operations.

But something had attracted her attention to that stretch of time. And there was that
Invalid access
to account for—none of Anaander Mianaai’s accesses were ever invalid, never could be. And why had I opened to an invalid access? And when one Anaander, in the Var decade room, frowned and said, “No, nothing,” and the Lord of the Radch turned her attention to more recent memories, I found myself tremendously relieved.

In the meantime my captain and all my other officers went about the routine business of the day—training, exercising, eating, talking—completely unaware that the Lord of the Radch was aboard. The whole thing was wrong.