“The Ambassador will tell Lady Ressid anyway,” Kiem said from behind him. “As will at least a dozen other people by the end of the day, if I’m reading them right. The attendants can’t find your coat.”
Jainan turned, distracted. “I came without one.”
“Why did you—okay, you know what, never mind.” As an attendant opened the door, Jainan felt warmth enveloping his shoulders and realized it was Kiem’s coat. Kiem was still talking as he settled it around Jainan. “I told Bel I was going to walk back. I thought I was going to want to clear my head. Do you mind? The other alternative is that I call her now and we wait, but it’ll take ten minutes.”
Jainan thought of staying in here where the Ambassador could pull him aside for a word. “No,” he said. “Let’s walk.” He started to shrug out of the coat.
“No. Yes. I kind of thought that—wait, what are you doing? Please wear the coat.”
“It’s your coat.”
“I’m the one who didn’t plan ahead for a lift! Look, I don’t get cold. And I’m wearing a jacket.” Jainan almost glanced at him, but stopped himself before he made eye contact, and didn’t argue further.
Outside the embassy, the wind hit them with a flurry of snowflakes. The embassy was on the edge of the old part of town; it was a short walk back to the palace along streets covered with powdery drifts of snow and packed ice, all uphill. Kiem started off at a brisk, determined pace quite unlike his usual stroll. Jainan quickened his stride to fall in beside him. He was glad of the coat, even if he wished Kiem hadn’t given it to him: his back was already tight with tension, and the cold would have made it worse.
After the first exchange, Kiem said nothing for long minutes. Part of Jainan wanted to bring up Taam’s crash data, but this would be precisely the wrong time, when Kiem was already annoyed and Jainan doubted his own memory. All he could think of was Kiem sitting up straight on that ridiculous chair while the Ambassador and the senior staff of the Thean embassy took turns to reprimand him over something completely outside his control. Jainan couldn’t even think of what Taam would have done in that situation; his skin prickled trying to imagine it.
He threw a glance at Kiem, who was walking beside him with his hands shoved deep in his pockets against the cold. His face was set in a slight frown. After a while Jainan couldn’t bear the waiting any more. “What are you going to do?” he said. Too direct. Much more direct than he would have been with Taam.
Kiem had started in the middle of a step when Jainan spoke, and now he turned his head. “Huh? What am I going to do?” he said. There was still something off about his voice, and without knowing what it was, just the oddness was enough to flip all of Jainan’s danger switches. “I’m going to find Internal Security and yell at them until they fix this. Sorry, I sort of thought that was obvious. Do you want to come?”
It took Jainan a couple of steps to even begin to process this, but when he had, he forced the next words out because they needed to be said. “I don’t think the clearance issue can be fixed.”
Kiem didn’t seem to notice that Jainan had directly contradicted him. “There must be a way,” he said. “What kind of information did you actually pass on to Thea? It can’t have been that bad, I can’t believe—I mean, you don’t seem the careless type. And Thea is our ally.”
Jainan scrabbled for an answer. “Nothing,” he said finally. It sounded just as thin and insubstantial as he’d expected; perhaps he should have made something up. He pulled the coat more tightly around him with stiff fingers. “I—I suppose there must have been something, but I have very little idea what it could have been. I sometimes discussed politics with Ressid, but only what had already appeared in the newslogs, and I never discussed Taam’s work. I didn’t know enough to talk about it.” The artificially dry surface of the path rose into a bridge that led from the city to the palace with a clear glass windbreak on each side. The city traffic veins weren’t allowed over the palace; tunnels of light arced down from the sky over Arlusk, filled with jostling flyers, and dived into a canyon below the bridge. “I know that sounds implausible.”
“That should make it easier,” Kiem said. The wind snaked around the sides of the windbreak and threw up goose bumps on his wrists, where the shirtsleeves met his gloves. “Don’t feel you have to come if you don’t want to.”
Jainan had missed a step in Kiem’s thought process. It was possible that Kiem just hoped Internal Security would take the whole mess off his hands.
But then again, if that was true, Jainan had information that Kiem needed to know or he would be walking in unprepared. “Kiem,” Jainan said. “About the data.”
Kiem threw him a nonplussed look. “What data?”
“The flybug logs from Taam’s crash,” Jainan said. Suddenly they were on the bridge, sheltered from the snow-laden wind by the barrier, and his voice seemed too loud in the stillness. “I—I found a similar example in a textbook.” He swallowed. “In fact, identical.”
“Oh, just what we needed,” Kiem said. “Great. That’s just great. So, what, fake logs? Or whoever collected them made a mistake—was that Internal Security or Colonel Lunver’s lot? Hell, I really hope it’s a mistake.”
“It could be a mistake,” Jainan said. “I could have analyzed them badly.” With every word he said, the possibility he had made it all up seemed to solidify. He wished he had kept his mouth shut. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to cause trouble.”
“Cause trouble?” Kiem halted in midstride. Jainan nearly missed the cue, but managed to stop before he overtook him. Kiem turned to him, and what was on his face was close enough to anger to make Jainan go still.
“Okay, so let me check if I’ve got this straight,” Kiem said. “The palace revoked your clearance and you don’t even know why. On top of that, your partner dies—might have been killed—and Internal Security can’t even get themselves together long enough to give you the right data about it. And you can’t complain to your family because the palace says that you need clearance to do even that—Jainan, that’s appalling. Cause trouble? You must hate us!”
For some reason that hurt, like scratching at a scab. “No,” Jainan said. “I don’t.”
“I don’t understand,” Kiem said, his voice changing to bewilderment. “Why didn’t you tell someone they revoked your clearance? Why didn’t you tell me—Taam—anyone? Or did you?”
“There was nothing to be done,” Jainan said shortly, because that hurt even more, and he wanted to head it off. “I agreed to marry Taam and live here. That means I agreed to be bound by palace procedures. I have no quarrel with Internal Security.”
“I don’t get it.” They had come to a stop just before the central rise of the bridge. Behind Kiem, the palace was spread out in all its crystalline glory, the towers blurring with the white-gray snow clouds. “You got cut off from everyone. Just because the palace told you it was a matter of security doesn’t mean that’s okay!”