She gestured at the many vials and tanks around her laboratory-like office. I eyed one of the many worms thoughtfully inspecting the seal of its glass prison.
She sniffed the vial. “I can’t catch much scent here that I recognize, unfortunately. But then, I am not altered for aromatics, only vision. But I can run it under the usual tests—exposing it to telltale plants and fungi and the like, which will react if there is anything pheromonally interesting. Could that do?”
“Whatever you can do to assist, ma’am,” I said.
“Very good. Now…” She sighed. “The other business. Captain Kiz Jolgalgan, correct?”
“That’s correct, ma’am.” I nodded at the papers and said, “I hope this isn’t all about her.”
“This? Oh, no. These are Preservation Board approvals. The Legion is preparing a new armament to combat the titans after the breach. Lots of grafts and alterations go with it—mostly explosives.” She gestured along her back wall, where glass jars containing a dark powder sat in a row. “Some kind of bombard. I’m to review and process the paperwork confirming that none of these alterations can escape the canton and cause havoc.” She cast a bleary eye over the remaining parchments. “But paperwork is a task I’m well accustomed to. I manage paper more than reagents these days. Now, I am curious…why did you ask about this Jolgalgan?”
I explained the interviews with the Engineers from yesterday, and all I’d learned with Miljin.
Nusis’s expression grew somber, so much so that I forgot about my own anxieties. “I see,” she said carefully. “Well. I regret to inform you that everyone who knew Captain Jolgalgan is dead.”
“Dead? Truly, ma’am?”
“Yes. She was a member of the Twelfth Cohort of the Apoths. And all of that cohort died at Sapfir, during the breach. Can’t even recover their bodies. Horrid thing. You will have no one to interview, I’m afraid.”
“But Jolgalgan,” I said. “Is she also…”
“Her status is…a different matter.” Nusis pivoted to her safe, then paused. “Might you avert your eyes again, please, Signum?”
I did so while she again went through the laborious process of unlocking her safe. She popped it open and slid out a scroll of parchment. Then she took the reagents key from her desk and placed it in the safe, next to all her boxes of immunities grafts. “Might as well keep that in here for now…I mean, it is evidence, yes? Anyway. I went ahead and fetched Jolgalgan’s alteration papers for you…She’s a Sublime, like you and I. An axiom, inducted and altered some six years ago in the Kurmin canton. Scored very high on her exams. Something else you two have in common, I think.”
I coughed and nodded.
“But Jolgalgan always demonstrated—how shall I put this—issues of the psyche,” said Nusis delicately.
“Issues?” I asked.
“Anger. Fits of rage. And anxiety, and paranoia. She was a hard worker, but she was hard to work with. She has had a pattern of complaints and outbursts throughout her career.”
I opened my engraver’s satchel. “Is it all right if I…”
“Be my guest,” said Nusis.
I selected the ash-scented vial again and sniffed at it, anchoring this conversation in my memories. “What was wrong with her?” I said. “Something to do with her alterations?”
“No,” she said. “No. It is not that.”
I watched her. Eyes still, mouth fixed in a soft frown. She had gone somewhere far away in her mind, I felt. I waited.
“You are aware, Signum,” she said, “that I was assigned to be on this investigation team because I served in Oypat.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And what do you know of Oypat?”
“I’d never heard of it until Blas. I learned it had been a canton that had been consumed by dappleglass, the same contagion that’s been wielded as a weapon here. That is all of it.”
“Well…I will tell you now, Kol, that what happened in Oypat made many people fear alterations as much as the titans. With good reason. I was a junior officer then, barely out of Sublime training. Axiom,” she said, tapping her head. “Figures and mathematics.”
“I remember, ma’am.”
“Of course you do. I worked on the environmental monitoring team during Oypat, ensuring that no dappleglass escaped the territory. I peered through a spyglass day after day, watching distant hills being eaten by grass. And then in the afternoon, when I served in the medikkers’ wards, I saw people having the grass cut from them—tangles in their kidneys, in their lungs, in their uteri. Many more died, of course. Especially after we sealed the whole thing up. They never made it out.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Those that did survive were resettled by the Iudex. And some…some of the Oypati say that it wasn’t the dappleglass that killed their home. They say it was us. That we imperials killed them with our lethargy. But that isn’t so. We tried. It was just too complex. The great and heavenly world is just all too complex, sometimes.”