Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(26)
The door to Strigan’s room opened, and she walked into the main living space, stopped, folded her arms, and cocked an eyebrow. Seivarden ignored her. None of us said anything, and after five seconds Strigan turned and strode to the kitchen and swung open a cabinet.
It was empty. Which I’d known the evening before. “You’ve cleaned me out, Breq from the Gerentate,” Strigan said, without rancor. Almost as though she thought it was funny. We were in very little danger of starving—even in summer here, the outdoors effectively functioned as a huge freezer, and the unheated storage building held plenty of provisions. It was only a matter of fetching some, and thawing them.
“Seivarden.” I spoke in the casually disdainful tone I had heard from Seivarden herself in the distant past. “Bring some food from the shed.”
She froze, and then blinked, startled. “Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Language, citizen,” I chided. “And I might ask you the same question.”
“You… you ignorant nobody.” The sudden intensity of her anger had brought her close to tears again. “You think you’re better than me? You’re barely even human.” She didn’t mean because I was an ancillary. I was fairly sure she hadn’t yet realized that. She meant because I wasn’t Radchaai, and perhaps because I might have implants that were common some places outside Radch space and that would, in Radchaai eyes, compromise my humanity. “I wasn’t bred to be your servant.”
I can move very, very quickly. I was standing, and my arm halfway through its swing, before I registered my intention to move. The barest fraction of a second passed during which I could have possibly checked myself, and then it was gone, and my fist connected with Seivarden’s face, too quickly for her to even look surprised.
She dropped, falling backward onto her pallet, blood pouring from her nose, and lay unmoving.
“Is he dead?” asked Strigan, still standing in the kitchen, her voice mildly curious.
I made an ambiguous gesture. “You’re the doctor.”
She walked over to where Seivarden lay, unconscious and bleeding. Gazed down at her. “Not dead,” she pronounced. “Though I’d like to make sure the concussion doesn’t turn into anything worse.”
I gestured resignation. “It is as Amaat wills,” I said, and put on my coat and went outside to bring in food.
6
On Shis’urna, in Ors, the Justice of Ente Seven Issa who had accompanied Lieutenant Skaaiat to Jen Shinnan’s sat with me in the lower level of the house. She had a name beyond her designation—one I never used, though I knew it. Even Lieutenant Skaaiat sometimes addressed individual human soldiers under her command as merely “Seven Issa.” Or by their segment numbers.
I brought out a board and counters, and we played a silent two games. “Can’t you let me win a time or two?” she asked, when the second was concluded, and before I could answer a thump sounded from the upper floor and she grinned. “It looks like Lieutenant Stiff can unbend after all!” and she cast me a look intended to share the joke, her amusement at the contrast between Awn’s usual careful formality and what was obviously going on upstairs between her and Lieutenant Skaaiat. But the instant after Seven Issa had spoken, her smile faded. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just what we…”
“I know,” I said. “I took no offense.”
Seven Issa frowned, and made a doubtful gesture with her left hand, awkwardly, her gloved fingers still curled around half a dozen counters. “Ships have feelings.”
“Yes, of course.” Without feelings insignificant decisions become excruciating attempts to compare endless arrays of inconsequential things. It’s just easier to handle those with emotions. “But as I said, I took no offense.”
Seven Issa looked down at the board, and dropped the counters she held into one of its depressions. She stared at them a moment, and then looked up. “You hear rumors. About ships and people they like. And I’d swear your face never changes, but…”
I engaged my facial muscles, smiled, an expression I’d seen many times.
Seven Issa flinched. “Don’t do that!” she said, indignant, but still hushed lest the lieutenants hear us.
It wasn’t that I’d gotten the smile wrong—I knew I hadn’t. It was the sudden change, from my habitual lack of expression to something human, that some of the Seven Issas found disturbing. I dropped the smile.
“Aatr’s tits,” swore Seven Issa. “When you do that it’s like you’re possessed or something.” She shook her head, and scooped up the counters and began to distribute them around the board. “All right, then, you don’t want to talk about it. One more game.”
The evening grew later. The neighbors’ conversations turned slow and aimless and finally ceased as people picked up sleeping children and went to bed.
Denz Ay arrived four hours before dawn, and I joined her, stepping into her boat without speaking. She did not acknowledge my presence, and neither did her daughter, sitting in the stern. Slowly, nearly noiselessly, we slid away from the house.
The vigil at the temple continued, the priests’ prayers audible on the plaza as an intermittent shushing murmur. The streets, upper and lower, were silent except for my own footsteps and the sound of the water, dark but for the stars brilliant overhead, the blinking of the prohibited zones’ encircling buoys, and the light from the temple of Ikkt. The Seven Issa who had accompanied us back to Lieutenant Awn’s house slept on a pallet on the ground floor.