“I’m not,” Kiem said. “Listen, if I’d met you before you got married, I’d have fallen over my own feet trying to get you to look at me. You’re out of my league. You’re out of most people’s league, especially Taam’s. I’ve been trying to tell you this for weeks. I don’t know how to say it so you’ll believe it.”
Jainan was silent for a long time. He was a solid warmth in Kiem’s arms, his head a weight on Kiem’s shoulder. Kiem shouldn’t be happy, but he was.
“I don’t know where that comes from,” Jainan said. “You can’t be one of my own hallucinations. I haven’t thought that.”
“That’s because I’m real?” Kiem said. “I thought we’d sorted that.”
Jainan let out half a breath of laughter. “It’s not sorted just because you say it’s sorted.”
“That’s all it should take—” Kiem started.
* * *
Kiem’s eyes slammed open into blackness. He drew a huge, painful gulp of air that felt like his first breath in minutes. There was something on his head; he clawed at it desperately for a moment before realizing it was the Tau field helmet and managed to still the panic for long enough to lift it away. His sight flooded back.
They were in the warehouse again. The technician lay slumped on the floor. There was no sign of Bel. Jainan sat up on his narrow bed a couple of meters away and pulled the medical helmet off. As he moved, the wire attached to his head came with him; he reached up and brushed it off. The end came away in bundles of filaments, like dead plants.
Jainan’s eyes went to the technician. “Asleep?”
“I don’t know,” Kiem said. “And where’s Bel? She was supposed to be watching us.” It felt like there was a lump lodged between his lungs and his throat. He knelt down to check the body.
“Kiem, I have to tell you what’s going on,” Jainan said, with a sudden thread of urgency. “Taam and General Fenrik were organizing an unsanctioned invasion of Thea. They used Kingfisher as cover to buy weapons and steal the remnants. They want to break with the Resolution and use the remnants for war. Aren saw the dark money flowing around and diverted some for himself, then killed Taam when he found out.”
Kiem had gotten halfway there already. He wished the rest of it came as a surprise. “And then Aren decided to frame you, right?” he said grimly. Aren had known what was going on in Jainan and Taam’s marriage. Was that what had made him think Jainan was an easy target? “Fuck Aren. Fuck Taam.”
“What happened to me is not important right now,” Jainan said, his voice thin and determined. He removed the guardrail from the side of his bed and swung his legs out. “People need to know. Someone needs to recover the remnants. We are all in danger.”
“We’ll blow it wide open the minute we’re out,” Kiem said. “Sunlight will cure it. Can you walk?” He couldn’t feel the technician breathing. He searched compulsively for a pulse; he couldn’t leave someone dying here. His fingers had only just touched her pulse point when someone else stepped into the pool of light.
The footsteps were such an ordinary, everyday sound that at first he didn’t even look up, preoccupied with trying to find a sign that he didn’t have a corpse on his hands. It was Jainan’s cut-off, strangled choke that made him raise his head.
A voice Kiem had heard far too recently said, “So Aren wasn’t lying. You are here.”
The form supporting itself with one hand on a storage rack wasn’t the hallucination Kiem had just seen. Taam was almost unrecognizable. He was wearing casual civilian clothes, but he didn’t fill them out anymore; his body was wasted and stringy. There were the shiny outlines of burn scars on his neck. His mouth curled in a nasty echo of his previous expressions as he met Kiem’s gaze. “You might as well stare, cousin. Thought I was dead, didn’t you?”
“You are dead.” Jainan looked transfixed; his voice was strained. “You can’t be—we would have known.”
“I was in some trouble,” Taam said. “Not that you were a lot of help, were you?” His voice sounded more tired than anything else.
Kiem stepped between him and Jainan. “Keep back.”
Taam’s manner turned uglier. “Keep back from your partner? Oh, no, wait, from mine. I heard about your sham of a wedding. Don’t get between me and Jainan.” He went to shoulder Kiem aside, but Kiem planted his feet and didn’t move. “I’m not going to fucking repeat myself.” Taam drew the capper at his hip.
A rustle of cloth was the only warning either of them got. Jainan seized the loose guardrail from the bed, stepped around Kiem, and cracked it down on Taam’s arm.
“Fuck!” Taam dropped the capper and grabbed his shoulder, swearing, while his wrist hung limp.
Jainan faced Taam, shifting his focus away from Kiem. He pulled his makeshift staff back. “Don’t touch him.”
Taam stared. He didn’t seem to be able to process what was happening. “What are you doing? Put that thing—shit.” He’d tried to move his wrist. The strain of ignoring it wrote lines of pain across his face. “Jainan!”
“Step away,” Jainan said. His voice sounded measured, though Jainan was capable of sounding measured well past when normal people would fall apart. “Two steps back will do.”
“Jainan,” Taam said. It wasn’t clear what he expected the word to do. Jainan didn’t move. Kiem’s fist clenched, but he stayed still. “Jainan. Look at yourself. You’re making a scene with that ridiculous … thing.”
“Very possibly,” Jainan said. “Step back from Kiem, Taam. I will not tell you again.” His grip tightened on the length of rail.
Taam took a step back. “You need me,” he said. The edge of anger hadn’t left his voice, but now there was something else there: he sounded lost. “I’m your partner.”
Jainan stood disturbingly still. He looked at Taam like he was a stranger. Kiem found he was barely breathing. The air smelled of metal.
It was a long, long moment before Jainan shook his head slightly, as if freeing himself from a cobweb. “No,” he said. “I think I was finished some time ago.”
He dropped the makeshift quarterstaff on the floor. It clattered, metal against metal, with a ringing sound that was shockingly loud and made even Taam flinch away. The ringing didn’t die away. Instead it hung in the air and echoed, unnaturally, growing louder and louder until Kiem had to clap his hands over his ears.
Taam’s form was blurry in front of him. Kiem looked down once more at the technician; she had the face of his prime five friend. The room wavered.
CHAPTER 28
And Kiem opened his eyes.
The first thing that hit him was the headache. That and the faint smell of station air circulation; he realized that though the hallucinations had been near-perfect, there had been no smell at all. He lifted the helmet off his head and saw the storage module as they’d left it.
“Welcome back.”
Or not quite as they’d left it. Aren Saffer sat on a pile of crates in front of him. He had a military-issue capper in his hand, and it was pointing straight at Kiem’s head.