Li could see just how it must have gone down. Helen Nguyen was the best interrogator she’d ever met. Everything Li knew about the subtle art, she’d learned at Nguyen’s knee. Real interrogation wasn’t about rubber hoses and broken fingers and dentists’ tools. Those things only work on people who are physical cowards—which Astrid Avery certainly wasn’t. No, breaking a woman like Avery wasn’t about violence. It was a game of high-stakes poker. You dealt and dealt and dealt again. And hand after hand you wormed your way inside your victim’s mind. You got inside her until you knew her skin better than your own. Until you knew her dreams, her fears, her desires and needs. You asked the questions she expected you to ask—but only to keep your victim’s guard down and her eyes away from the real prize. Because what you were really after was her. Her needs, her fears, her desires. You were
looking for that one thing that she couldn’t live without. The one card that you couldn’t pull out without the whole intricate structure of her personality coming down around her ears.
Nguyen had found that thing for Astrid Avery. And it wasn’t a ship, or even a career. It was William Llewellyn.
The more Li turned it over in her mind, the more neatly things fell into place. Avery had loved Llewellyn. It was all over her face every time she twisted a sentence to avoid saying his name. And she had cooperated with Nguyen to save him. When he had refused to play along, she had concluded, with the usual impeccable illogic of a woman in love, that he didn’t want her enough to do what had to be done to stay together.
And Nguyen had known how to use that. Avery hadn’t stood a chance against her.
Nguyen had played her, and she was still playing her. But for what? What had made it worth Nguyen’s while to risk exposure by taking Llewellyn down so publicly? What had Llewellyn known that made it worth her while to hang him?
That is, if Nguyen had ever really planned to hang him in the first place. After all, maybe the interrogation wasn’t over. Not all interrogations took place in windowless rooms with bolted-down furniture. Some of them happened out in the wide world, with free-running subjects who thought they were controlling their own destinies.
“I suppose you think I was hopelessly naïve, don’t you?”
Li schooled her face to rigid impassivity, but Avery read the answer in her eyes.
Avery’s chin lifted defiantly and a look of disgust and self-loathing spread across her beautiful features. “Well, not anymore,” she said.
“Avery. Listen to me. We’re not enemies. And I need to know something. I need you to tell me the truth. I can’t begin to tell you how important this is. What did Nguyen send Llewellyn out here to do?”
But Li never found out how Avery would have answered that question, because at that moment a door she’d barely noticed opened and Helen Nguyen walked into the room.
Li jumped to her feet when Nguyen walked in. She hated the
reaction—the transparency of it, the lack of self-control, the implied subservience—but she couldn’t help it. She was terrified of the woman. Somewhere deep inside she always had been.
“Sit down, Catherine. Or I suppose it’s Caitlyn now.”
She sat down.
Nguyen pointed toward the livewall. “Let me show you something.”
At first Li didn’t recognize the scene before her. The flyblown room, the eerie silver light. But then she knew that she was in the Crucible. And a moment later she saw Cohen walk into the middle of the screen, sit down at the cheap hotel room desk, and turn on the cheap hotel monitor.
She saw him speak the words she and Router/Decomposer had listened to in what seemed like another lifetime. She saw him look toward the door. She saw him pick up the gun.
And then she saw him shoot himself.
Avery cried out at the pistol report, but Li kept silent. She didn’t have the breath to do anything else.
The feed cut out, and for a moment the three women were silent. Then Nguyen spoke. “You really didn’t know, did you?”
Li kept her eyes locked on the screen, even though there was no longer anything to see there.
“All this time I thought you were working for ALEF,” Nguyen went on, “but you were only working for yourself. You were looking for revenge. You poor deluded child. You really didn’t believe he’d killed himself. What on earth are you going to do now?”
“You could have faked that feed,” Li muttered thickly.
“Yes, I could have,” Nguyen agreed. “But I didn’t.”
Through her numbness, Li felt a heavy load of files being dumped into her internals. “Those are the time-relevant surveillance files for the entire block,” Nguyen said. “They’re yours. Look at them as long as you want. Check the time stamps. Do whatever you like. You’ll see that it’s just the way I said it was. We were looking for him, yes. I’ll admit that. But we weren’t there when he died. And by the time we got there, he had wiped every trace of himself off the local networks. He even killed that poor boy to make sure we couldn’t retrieve anything off his internals.
Face the facts, Caitlyn. Cohen killed himself. And he made damn sure no one could ever bring him back.”
“Then how do you explain Llewellyn’s ghost?”
“It’s not Cohen. It’s a sentient fragment, yes. And perhaps it will even turn out to be stable. But it’s not him. And it never will be, because he made sure to destroy any chance of that happening.”
Why?
Li almost asked. And then she caught herself, realizing that even asking that question would be a tacit admission that she believed Nguyen.
“Who am I supposed to believe?” she asked instead. “Either you’re lying or Cohen was. And why would he do that?”
“I don’t know. I only know that I’m not the one lying to you.”
“So why are you telling me now?”
“Because we’ve found Llewellyn. We’re going in tomorrow. We’re going to take his ship, and him with it. And we need Cohen to help us.”
Li almost laughed at that. “He can’t help himself. How is he supposed to help you?”
“He can help us. I’ve been watching the sessions. It’s Cohen, or at least enough of him to matter. He knows himself. He knows what Llewellyn’s ghost will do better than anyone. Better than you, even.”
“And what happens if we help you?”
“To you? Nothing. Nothing at all. You’re both free to go off and live happily ever after. I couldn’t care less what you do.”
Something must have showed in Li’s face, because Nguyen threw back her head and laughed. “Be sensible, Catherine! I’m fighting a war with the Syndicates. People who are as bad as people can possibly be. People who blow up ships full of civilians and cull eight-year-olds and send dissidents to re-norming centers. Do you really think I have time to spend on pointless revenge?”
When she said it like that, of course, it sounded ridiculous. And Li had nothing to put against that ridiculousness except a gut feeling that contradicted even her own memories. How did you judge the truthfulness of someone who knew more about you than you did about yourself? How did you second-guess someone who you knew had spun and doctored and deleted your memories until they said exactly what she
wanted them to say and pointed you only where she wanted you to go? It was hopeless. It was like second-guessing God.
“Why would I ever believe that you would keep a promise to me?” Li asked at last.
Nguyen smiled serenely at her. “It doesn’t really matter whether you believe it or not, does it? You’re on Avery’s ship. You’ll do what Avery tells you to.”
“And Avery does what
you
tell her to.”
Li glanced at Avery—but the other woman didn’t look up to meet her eyes.
Li stayed awake half the night, searching through Nguyen’s files, looking for the lie she was so desperate to find there. She never found it.
The next morning she sat down across the table from the ghost, acutely aware of Nguyen watching her on the other side of the monitor.
“Good morning,” she told the Hyacinthe interface when it materialized. “How are you? Have you read any more
Alice
today?”
In the end, the pirates held a trial. It wasn’t much of a trial, but at least the formalities were more or less observed. And no one was talking about airlocking anyone, either. Because when it came down to it, even Doyle—who had shot Llewellyn in the heat of the fight for control of the ship—wasn’t willing to murder him in cold-blooded deliberation.
Llewellyn tried to defend himself, but Catherine could see from the beginning that it was hopeless. And the final blow came when he appealed to Okoro to take his side.
Doyle’s faction had somehow managed to hack the shipboard spinstream. They’d stumbled on Li and Llewellyn’s argument, and had picked up on the idea of turning Cohen over to Nguyen in exchange for a shipwide pardon. More than picked up on it, Li soon realized: It was the entire reason for the mutiny and the entirety of their plan to rescue themselves once they’d deposed Llewellyn and formally taken command of the ship.
Worse still, Doyle had snipped out a misleading fragment of the conversation that made it sound like Llewellyn was thinking about dealing with Nguyen himself—and cutting the rest of the crew out of whatever bargain she offered him.
“Come on, Ike,” Llewellyn told Okoro. “You can’t possibly believe I’d do that!”
“That’s not the point,” Okoro said gently. “The point is you should have told us. You should have asked us. The ghost told you that you
held a chip in your hands that could save all our lives and get us all pardons … and you decided not to play it without even asking us. I told you I wasn’t taking sides in this, and I’m not. But don’t look at me like that’s a betrayal. You betrayed them. You lied to people who have risked their lives for you. How can you stand there with a straight face and ask me to defend that?”
And that was it. Llewellyn turned briefly to Sital. But she had listened to the whole tawdry debate curled in on herself with her face turned away from him. She didn’t look up when Llewellyn turned to her for support. And she didn’t look up when they led him away to the firewalled cargo hold they’d fixed up to contain Llewellyn and deny Cohen any access to the shipboard systems.
Llewellyn lay in the brig of his own ship, and thought about prisons. He thought about every kind of prison. The prison Cohen’s ghost had locked him into. The prison his brain was for the poor marooned ghost, God rest its soul. The prison he had kept Ada in—at first oblivious, then because he couldn’t afford to know without his whole life crumbling. Because he still couldn’t bring himself to really examine his motives.
The more he thought about it, the more amazed he was that the mutineers hadn’t shot him again and finished the job. But he knew as well as anyone that there was an almost unbridgeable chasm between being able to shoot an enemy in the heat of battle and being able to shoot a friend in cold blood. He supposed he ought to be grateful for that. And grateful to Doyle, who had only shoved him into the brig—not out of an airlock.
Still, here he was. Locked out of his own ship. Which was also no doubt completely locked down in the absence of the NavComp’s cooperation. Which they would get over his dead body. Something he knew and they knew—and probably the reason Doyle hadn’t sent Sital or Okoro in to try to coax the keys to the kingdom out of him.
He was glad of that. He didn’t want to talk to them now. And he wanted even less to talk to Catherine Li, or confront the complicated memories and conflicting desires she aroused in him.
In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realized that the
only person he really wanted to talk to was the same person he’d spent the last several months trying not to talk to.
It didn’t occur to Llewellyn until he was deep inside the memory palace that this was the first time he’d gone looking for Cohen instead of waiting for the ghost to come to him.
Or that somewhere in the course of his cautious, elliptical, allusive conversations with Catherine Li—none of which ever did more than touch on the heart of the matter and skitter nervously away from it—he’d stopped thinking of him as “the ghost” and started thinking of him as “Cohen.”
Cohen was back in Spain, it seemed, because the city Llewellyn found himself walking through smelled of dust and olives and orange blossoms. And yet it was subtly different than the one he’d walked through before at Cohen’s side. It was flatter, and the streets were more smoothly paved, and the houses were more regular in silhouette and tightly joined in their masonry. But the dainty little garbage donkeys still plied the alleyways. And the old men still sat in the cafés talking. And the women still flowed through the streets in robes of silk as bright as running water.
He turned a corner, not knowing where he was going, and almost tripped over a little dark-haired boy who laughed out loud at the clumsy barbarian.
An old man walking in front of him turned, white wool robe swirling around his bare shins, and blew his nose straight into the gutter without breaking stride or bothering with a handkerchief.
A horseman clattered down the street at a brisk trot, sending everyone diving into doorways for fear of being trampled on.
Llewellyn shrank into his hard-won doorway as the horseman rode by. He saw the stallion’s liquid eye roll in its velvet socket to keep sight of him. Then he glimpsed the bright silver flash of the engraved stirrup iron, the swish of a silken tail, and dust motes swirling in the empty sunlight.
“Now that you’ve found me,” Cohen said from somewhere behind him, “you might as well come in and talk to me.”
Llewellyn turned and opened the door, without question—the way you do in a dream—and stepped into the cool, dry, stone-smelling shadows.
The building he found himself in was tiny, no more than thirty feet high from foundation to rooftop. It was a little cube of space, vaulted over in stone, smelling of earth and mortarwork, and hidden from the street outside by ornately carved stone screens. The building was empty, not a stick of furniture to be seen anywhere. Llewellyn thought it must be a deconsecrated church or chapel. There was a sort of altar at one side, and on the other side a steep flight of stairs leading to a loftlike space hemmed in by more carved screens.