Some went to speak to audience members, and Wright, Joel, and Brook took this to mean that they could come talk to me. They reached me at the same moment as Vladimir Leontyev and Joan Braithwaite.
The two Ina and the three humans stared at one another for a moment, then Joan leaned on the table, clicked off my microphone, and said, “Shori, there are people in this room who have loved that old man for centuries.”
I focused on her and bit back all the things I could have said. She knew them as well as I did. That old man either ordered my families killed or sat by and watched while his sons did it. That old man had just told me I was no better than a dog because I had human as well as Ina genes. That old man is not sane. All true, all obvious.
“What should I have done?” I asked her.
She looked surprised. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
“You should have let me do it,” Vladimir said. “I’m only about ninety years younger than he is. A rebuke from me would have been more easily accepted.”
“Would you have done it?” Wright asked him.
Vladimir took a deep breath. “Eventually.”
“It’s done,” I said. “What happens now?”
“You didn’t think of that question before you humiliated him?” Joan asked. “You didn’t wonder what would happen afterward?”
“I didn’t humiliate him,” I said, finally stating the obvious. “I would not have humiliated him. I just stood back and let him humiliate himself.”
“Others won’t see it that way.”
“Are we rid of him?” I asked. “Will he step aside and let one of his sons represent the family?”
She looked at me as though she didn’t particularly like me. “He might,” she said. “What good do you imagine that will do you?”
“Perhaps the new representative will at least dislike me as one-individual-to-another, and not as man-to-animal.”
“And no doubt that will make you feel better,” she said. “But it won’t help you. You’ve shown your teeth, Shori. They’re sharp and set in strong female jaws. You are now less the victim and more the potentially dangerous opponent. You begin to overshadow your dead.”
I thought about that, although I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to go on feeling angry and justified. But finally I sighed. “You’re right. What shall I do?”
She nodded. Apparently I had asked the right question. “Remember your dead,” she said. “Keep them around you. And remember what you want. What do you want?”
“To punish them for what they’ve done,” I said. “To stop them from hunting me. To stop them from killing anyone else.”
She nodded once, then turned and walked across the arc toward where people were very gently arguing with Milo.
“She’s right,” Wright said to me, “but she’s cold.”
“She’s just female,” Joel said.
“And oldest sister,” Brook added. “I’ll bet the younger one, Margaret, is gentler.”
“She is,” I said.
“Nevertheless, Joan’s advice is good,” Vladimir told me.
“I know,” I said.
“The truth is your best weapon,” he said. “Put aside that temper of yours. Use the truth intelligently.” He turned and went back to his place in the arc.
Brook watched him go. Then she stepped behind me and put her hands on my shoulders. She massaged my neck and shoulders so that I began to relax before I realized I needed to. I looked up at her.
“Good?” she asked.
“Good,” I said.
Joel laughed. “Ina need to be touched, especially young Ina. I don’t think you always realize how much you need it, Shori.”
“We’ll have to see that she gets what she needs,” Wright said, looking at me. The look made me smile and shake my head.
“You should all go back to your seats,” I said. “They’re about to start the Council again.”
They went back to their seats, and on the other side of the arc, another of the Silks—Russell, I had heard him called—sat down in Milo’s place.
Twenty-three
Russell Silk had no story to tell. He denied all involvement in the death of my families and in the attacks on the Arlington house and on the Gordons. He denied that his family was involved in any of it. He suggested that I was confused or mistaken or that the humans who had been used as weapons had been given false information intended to incriminate the Silk family—which happened to be the only male Ina family in Los Angeles County. Who would create such a fiction? He did not know. He and his family were victims … just as I was.