“Yes.”
“Why are you here?” Ahmadi said, making another note on her pad. The way she wrote without ever breaking eye contact with her subject seemed like a skill she must have spent a lot of time practicing. It was a little creepy.
The need to move in her overly soft chair was finally too much, and Tanaka stood up. Her legs tingled like there was a low-level electric current running through the muscles, so she walked across the room and pretended to examine a painting on the far wall. It was a neo-impressionist rendering of Laconia’s capital city at night, done in thick oil paints. The painter had studied Imogene Batia or someone in her school. The way it was painted made it seem like the observer was looking out through a window in the pouring rain. She wondered if Ahmadi had painted it herself, or if she’d had it shipped out from Laconia when she’d taken the assignment on Gewitter Base. I used to paint, said a voice in her head.
Ahmadi cleared her throat, and Tanaka realized the doctor had asked a question that had never been answered.
“Did you paint this yourself ?” Tanaka asked.
“Why are you here?” Ahmadi repeated.
Tanaka turned to face her again, throwing her full focus at the counselor and waiting for the flinch. Tristan had once told her that when she was annoyed, she radiated Don’t fuck with me. Most people took a subconscious step back.
Ahmadi smiled and rested her hand on the datapad. Tanaka had a vague and uneasy sense of having been outplayed.
“I was present at . . . something,” Tanaka finally said. “It is part of my mission to understand it.”
“And you don’t?”
Tanaka turned back to the painting. If Aunt Akari had let her study art history instead of enlisting in active service, where would she be right now? And who would be tracking down the high consul? What else—how many thousands of other things— would be different?
A flash of a woman very like Ahmadi blinking at her with sleepy eyes on a bed covered with white sheets. God, I used to love waking up next to her, someone thought in Tanaka’s head.
“Something happened,” Tanaka said, surprised to hear her own voice saying the words.
Ahmadi nodded. She looked . . . not sympathetic. Not pitying. She looked like she was weary too. Like she’d led a life of having the rug pulled out from under her, and she knew how much it hurt. She gestured toward the chair in invitation. “Tell me about it.”
Tanaka sat. Don’t tell her, she’s mean. Tell her, she always loved you, competed in her head.
“There was an incident in the ring space,” Tanaka said, softly. “I was there. You can’t know this.”
“Colonel,” Ahmadi said, “because of the nature of my work I have very high-level classified clearance. The empire has to be able to trust me with state secrets a patient might reveal during a counseling session. I take this aspect of my job very seriously.”
“If you didn’t, they’d send you to the Pen. Would have. I guess now they’d just shoot you.”
Ahmadi nodded and set her datapad aside. The canny operative in Tanaka recognized the theater in all of it, but she could feel it working anyway. Ahmadi wanted to listen. It made Tanaka want to talk.
“There was an incursion. There were cognitive effects. Like when everyone lost consciousness, only not that. The people who were there . . . connected. Mind to mind. Memory to memory. I was in other people’s minds.”
“It’s not an uncommon hallucination—”
“I checked it out. It was true. Everyone I could confirm played out. We were in each other’s heads. It was real.” She was trembling. She didn’t know why she was trembling. Ahmadi was very still. “Do you believe me?”
“I do.”
Tanaka nodded slowly. “I can’t have anyone inside my head.”
“Because that’s yours,” Ahmadi said. “That’s the only place that’s yours.”
“I have . . . outlets.”
“Outlets?”
“I have secrets. That are . . . mine. It’s the way I make room for myself in the world. By having secrets, I can still exist. I love Laconia because if I got caught, it would matter.”
“Do you want to tell me what those secrets are?”
Tanaka shook her head.
“Since the incident, I have been having . . . experiences.”
“Experiences,” Ahmadi echoed.
“Voices, but not like command hallucinations. Images from lives I haven’t lived, faces of people I’ve never met. Feelings. Deep, overwhelming feelings from situations I’ve never been in. And I am afraid that somewhere out there, someone is having that same experience . . . of me.”