Audel blinked, coming out of a trance. “This?” she said. “Sad to say, Prince Kiem, we’re doing very little. Most of this is a Kingfisher admin script I took with me when they discharged me. You’d need a Sefalan systems breaker to do this manually. Ah. Here we are.”
Kiem looked up at the screens as they began to fill with the square branches of a data map. Gairad handed Audel another data coin, which must have had another script on it, because the data started to flicker and Audel muttered. Gairad was scowling.
“Well, we can’t get what we wanted,” Audel said, looking up at the screen. “They’ve rotated the keys.”
“But that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Gairad said, pointing at a string of numbers that meant nothing to Kiem. “That’s a commanding officer. Who is it?”
“I believe that’s General Fenrik’s code,” Audel said, with an unseemly satisfaction. “How careless. He must have a local storage module. I wonder what he doesn’t want to keep on his personal systems?”
Gairad started to grin. “Can I have a look?” Audel gestured for her to go ahead.
Kiem finally realized what they were doing when Gairad started to open things. They were … personnel dossiers. Some of them had vids. They were all from officers whose names Kiem didn’t recognize, all at colonel rank or above.
“This isn’t right,” Gairad said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the refinery.”
They didn’t. The one she had open was about an officer’s conviction for petty theft and the affair he was having with a subordinate. Kiem felt dirty even skimming it. “Why would General Fenrik have this?”
Gairad shrugged and moved to the next one. Kiem took a moment to realize this was Aren Saffer’s file. “Close it,” he said, but Gairad didn’t. Instead she expanded it to fill both screens. Aren had been busy, Kiem realized, with a slightly sick feeling. He had gambling debts going back ten years.
“This is blackmail material,” Kiem said.
Professor Audel nodded, apparently unfazed. “So there must be a reason Fenrik needed to keep his senior officers in line.”
“Here’s a file on Prince Taam,” Gairad said suddenly.
“Don’t look at that,” Kiem said, but she’d already opened it.
It wasn’t a file. It was a vid. Gairad’s expression changed as she opened it.
At first Kiem couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Then his eyes adjusted, and he realized it was a view of a corridor from the static angle of a security camera. It wasn’t a place he recognized, but it had the white walls and polished opalescent flooring of—no, he did recognize that flooring pattern, that must be somewhere in the palace. It looked like the Emperor’s Wing.
Taam and Jainan stood outside the door of their quarters. Too close to each other, Taam furious, Jainan blank. Somewhere in Kiem’s head, the floor gave way.
Blackmail material.
“I … maybe we shouldn’t,” Gairad said uncertainly.
“Give me the vid,” Kiem said. He held out the data coin.
Gairad looked at him and did a double take, as if whatever was on his face wasn’t worth arguing with. She downloaded the vid and hastily came out of the program.
“We’ll carry on looking, then,” Professor Audel said, scrutinizing Kiem as if he were a research subject. “You’ll want to take that … outside.”
Kiem wasn’t listening anymore. Kingfisher didn’t seem important. Nothing seemed important except the slim disc of cool metal he held in his hand.
The door shut behind him. He was aware of passing other people in the corridors, but he didn’t see their faces. He realized he was walking too fast; he was probably drawing attention, and attention was the last thing he wanted right now. He stopped in a corner where two little-used corridors met and took the coin out of his pocket. It was warm from his hand; had he been holding it that tightly? He attached it to his wristband.
The security camera feed ran for a handful of seconds without any movement. Kiem focused on it like the mountainside under his falling flybug.
The screen moved, and two distant shapes came into view. Kiem’s stomach lurched as he recognized Jainan’s slim, straight figure again. Beside him was a man the same height in a gold-braided uniform with close-shaven hair—Taam.
Even though there was no sound, it was clear something was wrong the minute they came in the picture. Taam was saying something with his face distorted into a scowl, and the expression Jainan wore was completely closed-off. Kiem checked the time stamp in the corner—late at night. Both of them were in formal dress; they must have been coming back from an event. Jainan said nothing as Taam pressed in close to him, clearly angry from his jerky strides down the corridor. Taam seemed to grow more and more irritated as they drew closer to the camera, and finally something he said seemed to resonate with Jainan, who turned his head and replied with something short and clipped.
In the next second, Taam had grabbed Jainan’s arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him against a wall. Jainan said something else. Taam backhanded him across the face.
Kiem’s fingers clenched on the insubstantial sides of the projection. He froze it with a violent, instinctive jab, but then couldn’t move his hand again. It felt like he had ripped a scab half off.
In the frozen vid, Jainan’s expression was one of pure shock. He wasn’t even looking at Taam but past him, to the corridor where they’d come from. He was checking if anyone had seen.
The prickling down Kiem’s spine wasn’t going to stop if he didn’t get this over with. He unfroze it.
Taam said something only inches away from Jainan’s face. Jainan was fully focused on him now: he held his head stiffly and said something in the gap between whatever Taam was saying—from the shapes of his lips, and because he was expecting it, Kiem could make out public and not here. Jainan jerked his chin to the door opposite.
Taam stopped. His lips drew back from his teeth, but Jainan had carried the point. He adjusted his grip on Jainan’s arm—Kiem let out an involuntary hiss—and shoved him toward the door. Jainan put up little resistance, only shook his arm as Taam let go as if dislodging something unpleasant. The door opened and he stepped through it. Before Taam followed, he looked around, and his eyes fixed on the security camera. Kiem had the urge to draw back, as if he’d been seen. But he carried on watching as he saw Taam call over Jainan’s shoulder to someone already in the room. That—delete—Kiem couldn’t make out any more.
Kiem recognized the place now. That must be their rooms.
The vid—the security camera footage Taam had called out to delete—ended and shrank back to a dot. That was it. The data coin held nothing else.
Kiem didn’t feel shock. That was the worst part. He felt surreal, headachy, as if his muscles weren’t under his control, but not shocked. He gestured the replay command by mistake. It started to play again; he jabbed it to stop, and then to start, and then to stop again a second later when he couldn’t bear it. His wrist-screen shut off.
All of a sudden, he couldn’t stand still anymore. He paced to a viewport and back to the corridor wall. It felt like there were stinging insects moving under his skin, crawling inside his rib cage and pooling in his chest. This made no sense. He raised his wristband, spun through to Bel’s contact, and then violently canceled the action. He couldn’t call anyone. This made no sense.