Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(20)

“What?”

“Waking up and finding you don’t know where you are, who you’re with, or how you got there?”

She fidgeted the blanket on and off again, and rubbed her arms and wrists together. “A couple of times.”

“I’m Breq, from the Gerentate.” I had already told her, but I knew she would ask me again. “I found you two days ago in front of a tavern. I don’t know how you got there. You would have died if I’d left you. I’m sorry if that’s what you wanted.”

For some reason that angered her. “How very charming you are, Breq from the Gerentate.” She sneered slightly as she said it. It was mildly, irrationally surprising to hear that tone from her, naked and disheveled as she was, and not in uniform.

That tone made me angry. I knew very precisely why I was angry, and knew as well that if I dared to explain my anger to Seivarden she would respond with nothing but contempt, and that made me even angrier. I held my face in the neutral, slightly interested expression I had used with her from the moment she’d awakened, and made the same indifferent gesture I had made moments before.


I had been the first ship Seivarden ever served on. She’d arrived fresh out of training, seventeen years old, plunged straight into the tail end of an annexation. In a tunnel carved through red-brown stone under the surface of a small moon she had been ordered to guard a line of prisoners, nineteen of them, crouched naked and shivering along the chill passageway, waiting to be evaluated.

Actually I was doing the guarding, seven of me ranged along the corridor, weapons ready. Seivarden—so young then, still slight, dark hair, brown skin, and brown eyes unremarkable, unlike the aristocratic lines of her face, including a nose she hadn’t quite grown into yet. Nervous, yes, left in charge here just days after arriving, but also proud of herself and her sudden, small authority. Proud of that dark-brown uniform jacket, trousers, and gloves, that lieutenant’s insignia. And, I thought, a tiny bit too excited at holding an actual gun in what certainly wasn’t a training exercise.

One of the people along the wall—broad-shouldered, muscled, cradling a broken arm against her torso—wept noisily, moaning each exhale, gasping every inhale. She knew, everyone in this line knew, that they would either be stored for future use as ancillaries—like the ancillaries of mine that stood before them even now, identities gone, bodies appendages to a Radchaai warship—or else they would be disposed of.

Seivarden, pacing importantly up and down the line, grew more irritated with this piteous captive’s every convulsive breath, until finally she halted in front of her. “Aatr’s tits! Stop that noise!” Small movements of Seivarden’s arm muscles told me she was about to raise her weapon. No one would have cared if she’d taken the butt of her gun and beaten the prisoner senseless. No one would have cared if she’d shot the prisoner in the head, so long as no vital equipment was damaged in the process. Human bodies to make into ancillaries weren’t exactly a scarce resource.

I stepped in front of her. “Lieutenant,” I said, flat and toneless. “The tea you asked for is ready.” Actually it had been ready five minutes before but I’d said nothing, held it in reserve.

In the readings coming from that terribly young Lieutenant Seivarden I saw startlement, frustration, anger. Irritation. “That was fifteen minutes ago,” she snapped. I didn’t answer. Behind me the prisoner still sobbed and moaned. “Can’t you shut her up?”

“I’ll do my best, Lieutenant,” I said, though I knew there was only one way to really do that, only one thing that would silence that captive’s grief. The newly minted Lieutenant Seivarden seemed unaware of that.


Twenty-one years after arriving on Justice of Toren—just over a thousand years before I found her in the snow—Seivarden was senior Esk lieutenant. Thirty-eight, still quite young by Radchaai standards. A citizen could live some two hundred years.

Her last day, she sat drinking tea on her bunk in her quarters, three meters by two meters by two, white-walled, severely neat. She was grown into that aristocratic nose by now, grown into herself. No longer awkward or unsure.

Beside her on the tightly made-up bunk sat the Esk decade’s most junior lieutenant, arrived just weeks ago, a sort of cousin of Seivarden’s, though from another house. Taller than Seivarden had been at that age, broader, a bit more graceful. Mostly. Nervous at being asked to confer in private here with the senior lieutenant, cousin or no, but concealing it. Seivarden said to her, “You want to be careful, Lieutenant, who you favor with your… attentions.”

The very young lieutenant frowned, embarrassed, realizing suddenly what this was about.

“You know who I mean,” continued Seivarden, and I knew too. One of the other Esk lieutenants had definitely noticed when the very young lieutenant had come on board, had been slowly, discreetly sounding out the possibility of the very young lieutenant perhaps noticing her back. But not so discreetly that Seivarden hadn’t seen it. In fact, the entire decade room had seen it, and seen, as well, the very young lieutenant’s intrigued response.

“I know who you mean,” said the very young lieutenant. Indignant. “But I don’t see why…”

“Ah!” said Seivarden, sharp and peremptory. “You think it’s harmless fun. Well, it would probably be fun.” Seivarden had slept with the lieutenant in question herself at one point and knew whereof she spoke. “But it wouldn’t be harmless. She’s a good enough officer, but her house is very provincial. If she weren’t senior to you, there would be no problem.”