The privacy screen dissolved once more as the Auditor stepped through, trailed by his staffer. “Thank you for your time,” the staffer said serenely. “You may go.”
“Excuse me,” Jainan said. “What does our status mean?”
“Your Emperor will—” the staffer began.
“Wait,” Kiem said. The Auditor, standing coolly separate from his own staff as if he were another species, was starting to get on his nerves. Kiem gave a polite nod to the staffer and stepped past them, putting himself in front of the Auditor. “I think you owe us an explanation. The treaty renewal is in three weeks. How long does it take to confirm us?”
Kiem was now standing disturbingly close to the swirling shell across the Auditor’s face. Kiem’s eyes suggested urgently that staring at it was bad for him, so Kiem tried looking at the embroidery on the Auditor’s shirt designs, at his ear, and finally at the wall beyond. The Auditor focused on him.
“One purpose of the audit is to ensure the parties are authorized to speak for their planets,” the Auditor said, his voice as calm and rational as a textbook readout. “The Resolution cannot confirm Iskat and Thea are entering into the treaty voluntarily when the designated Iskat representative was murdered last month.”
The silence was like sudden pressure on Kiem’s hearing.
“Murdered?” he said. “No. Wait. That’s not—that’s not what happened.” He glanced over at Jainan, who had a strange, calm look in his eyes, as if his whole world had just cracked and there was nothing he could do about it.
“The aggregated data suggests otherwise,” the Auditor said, as precisely and unemotionally as if he were talking about the weather. His face shell was moving constantly now—Kiem had the feeling it would be changing color, if he could recognize any of the colors in it. “Thean news sources show discontent from multiple angles. Official communications have broken down. When the Thean representative requests sight of the investigation into the death of a politically bonded partner, and is denied…” He shrugged, an oddly human motion. “I cannot instate either of you at this point.”
“Denied what?” Kiem said. He’d missed something.
“No,” Jainan said, as if he understood.
The Auditor turned away. His shell had stopped moving, as if he had lost interest in further conversation, and the staffer smoothly stepped in front of him to prevent Kiem from following the Auditor behind the privacy screen.
“The instation process is not up for debate,” the staffer said. They sounded perfectly reasonable. Kiem might have felt less off-balance if they’d shouted.
“There must be an appeal,” Jainan said, something desperately controlled in his voice. “Or a process for—for replacement. We must have a treaty.”
He wasn’t wrong. Kiem started to realize how serious this was. The Resolution treated each comma of its interplanetary agreements like a law of nature. If Iskat and Thea couldn’t provide representatives that satisfied them, there wouldn’t be a treaty. And if there wasn’t a treaty, Iskat’s peace terms with the rest of the universe would have all the formal weight of something scrawled on the back of a napkin. Surely this was some sort of temporary setback, though. Everyone wanted a treaty.
“The Auditor is still processing the political context,” the staffer said. In the first flash of personality they’d shown, they glanced at Kiem and said, “Your partner has apparently not been entirely honest with you.”
“Jainan?” Kiem said, nonplussed. Jainan just shook his head. Kiem filed that away as ask later. “Look,” he said to the staffer, “you have to do something. The Emperor isn’t going to be happy.”
“The Auditor will discuss it with your Emperor,” the staffer said politely. “You are, of course, free to do the same.”
Kiem would have paid money to see the Emperor and the Auditor trying to out-stonewall each other under less important circumstances. “All right!” he said. “All right. You talk to the Emperor. We’ll ask the palace about Taam’s accident. And then we can fill in your form Thirty-Four B or whatever and get this sorted.”
“We appreciate your cooperation,” the staffer said. The data on the walls moved around, patternless and chaotic. The UNCONFIRMED tags beside Jainan’s and Kiem’s pictures didn’t change.
The door shut behind them as they left. There were officials passing in the corridor, but a sharp right turn took them to a landing on a quiet staircase, where an arched window looked out on the dome of the palace shrine and the grand entrance hall behind it.
Jainan stopped as soon as they had some privacy and immediately turned to Kiem. There were lines of tension around his eyes. The shrine dome framed his head and shoulders, making his figure seem smaller. “I have not held back anything of significance.”
“What are we talking about?” Kiem said plaintively. “Jainan, I have zero idea what the Auditor meant. Surely someone would have told us if Taam was murdered. And what did he mean about you and the investigation?”
Jainan ran a hand across his face, the first visible sign Kiem had seen of his control cracking. “It was nothing. Nothing important. I asked Internal Security for the crash data after the accident—Taam’s flyer was army-issue, but I know the military gave them the flight logs. I was told only the investigators had a need to know. They were right. This is irrelevant. There is no way Taam could have been murdered.”
Kiem leaned against the bannister next to him and frowned, trying to make sense of this. “Internal Security said you didn’t have a right to know about the investigation?”
“It was an accident,” Jainan said, though more as if he was trying to convince himself. “This is a mistake. The Auditor must confirm us.”
“Internal Security refused to give you the crash data?” Kiem said. “The crash your partner died in? You’re an engineer, aren’t you? You could have helped them read it.”
There was a pause that Kiem couldn’t parse at all. Then Jainan touched his newly fixed wristband and said abruptly, “I am not making this up.”
“I didn’t say—” Kiem broke off as Jainan, suddenly intense, brought up a light-screen in front of him and started spinning through his messages.
The stairwell had no display screen. Jainan turned to the wall instead, which was inlaid with the brushed-steel crest of the Hill Enduring, and projected his messages on top of it. Kiem wished he would stop doing that. He was prepared for Thea to have different notions of privacy, but it felt wrong to see all of Jainan’s correspondence. He tried to glance away surreptitiously until Jainan found the one he wanted to display.
“Here,” Jainan said. Kiem looked back. Jainan had put up a conversation with several officials: Internal Security, palace civil servants, some military bureaucrats. “I would not bother you with this,” Jainan said, his voice sounding as if his control was fraying, “except you should know what he was talking about. I don’t know how the Auditor brought this into his data set. I thought it was private.”
Kiem scanned the messages with a growing sense of indignation. Jainan was right, he had asked for information, and he’d been refused. “This is ridiculous,” Kiem said. “You could have genuinely helped—even if this murder stuff is rubbish, it could have given you some closure—” He fumbled in his pocket for his seal, which, for a miracle, he hadn’t lost. The lump of gold, engraved with Iskat’s crest, hummed as he brought up a small screen on his wristband and tapped the seal against it. The seal bled a golden patch onto the screen, forming a miniature version of the royal crest. Kiem signed some text across it—a quick demand Internal Security find the data and hand it to Jainan—and sent it to Jainan to add to the message chain. “There. See if that helps.”