Foreigner

“Nadi.” Giri was hovering over him. He didn’t know Giri. Giri didn’t know him. Giri just saw the paidhi acting oddly, and the dowager didn’t want him to die because she had use for him.

It was good that someone did.

He wiped his eyes, leaned his head back against the chair and composed his face, mentally severing the nerves to it, drawing smaller and smaller breaths until he could be as statue-calm as Banichi or Tabini.

“Are you hurting, nand’ paidhi? Do you need a doctor?”

Giri’s confusion was funny, so wildly, hysterically funny, it all but shattered him. He laughed once, a strangled sound, and got control of it, and wiped his eyes a second time.

“No,” he said, before Giri could escape in alarm. “ No, dammit, I don’t need a doctor. I’m all right. I’m just tired.” He shut his eyes against further ministrations, felt the leak of tears and didn’t open his eyelids, just kept his breathing calm, down a long, long, head-splitting spiral of fire-warmth and lack of oxygen, that bottomed out somewhere in a dizzy dark. He heard a confused set of voices talking in the background, probably discussing him. Hell, why not? he asked himself.

Usually it was the servants that betrayed you, the likes of Djinana and Maigi, Tano and Algini. But in the flutter of banners, the clashing of weapons, the smoke of shattered buildings, the rules of all existence changed. Hell broke loose. Or maybe it was television. Machimi and shadows.

Blood on the terrace, Jago had said, coming back out of the rain, and Banichi’s face had turned up in the mirror.

The beast walked Malguri’s halls after midnight, when everyone was asleep… looking for its head, and damned upset about it.

It’s my gun, Banichi had said, and it was. He’d been used, Banichi had been used, Jago had been used—everyone had been used, in every way. It was all machimi, and ordinary atevi didn’t know the game either—ordinary atevi had never understood the feud between the humans who’d had to stay on the station and those who’d taken the ship and gone, for two hundred cursed, earthbound years…

They’d fallen through a hole in space and found not a single star they knew, in the spectra of a thousand suns that fluttered on atevi banners, banners declaring war, declaring ownership of the world that seemed, for stranded strangers, the surest chance to live in freedom.

He lay still in the chair, listening to the snap of the fire, letting the tides of headache come and go—exhausted emotionally and physically—aching in a dozen places, now that he was warm, but hurting less than he did when he moved.

Build the station for a base and go and search for resources at the next likely star, that was what the Pilots’ Guild had decided they would do. The hell with the non-crew technicians and construction workers. Every kid on Mospheira knew the story. Every kid knew how Phoenixhad betrayed them, and why Phoenixwasn’t a factor in their lives any longer. Time ran long between the stars and age didn’t pass the way it ought to—like in the stories, the man that slept a hundred years and never knew.

An atevi story or human, he wasn’t personally sure.

Goseniin and eggs. They daren’t kill the paidhi. Otherwise, how could they find out anything they needed to know?

“Bren-ji.”

He flashed on the cellar, and the shadows around him, and the cold metal against his head. No. A less definite touch than that, brushing his cheek.

“Bren-ji.”

A second touch. He blinked at a black, yellow-eyed face, a warm and worried face.

“Jago!”

“Bren-ji, Bren-ji, you have to leave this province. Some people have come into Maidingi, following rumors—the same who’ve acted against you. We need to get you out of here, now—for your protection, and theirs. Far too many innocents, Bren-ji. We’ve received advisement from the aiji-dowager, from her people inside the rebel movement… certain of them will take her orders. Certain of that group she knows will not. The aijiin of two provinces are in rebellion—they’ve sent forces to come up the road and take you from Malguri.” The back of her fingers brushed his cheek a third time, her yellow eyes held him paralyzed. “We’ll hold them by what tactics we can use. Rely on Ilisidi. We’ll join you if we can.”

“Jago?”

“I’ve got to go. Gotto go, Bren-ji.”

He tried to delay her to ask where Banichi was or what they meant by hold them—but her fingers slipped through his, and Jago was away and out the door, her black braid swinging.

Alarm brought him to his feet—sore joints, headache, and lapful of blankets and all—with half that Jago had said ringing and rattling around a dazed and exhausted brain.

Hold them? Hold a mob off from Malguri? How in hell, Jago?

And for what? One damned more illusion, Jago? Is thisone real?

Innocents, Jago said.

People who wanted to kill him? Innocents?