Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1)(99)

“Second.” I reached into my jacket, pulled out the gun, the dark gray of my glove bleeding into the white the weapon had taken from my shirt. “I’m going to kill you.” I aimed at the right-hand Mianaai.

Who began to sing, in a slightly flat baritone, in a language dead for ten thousand years. “The person, the person, the person with weapons.” I couldn’t move. Couldn’t squeeze the trigger.

You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.

All around the cry goes out, put on armor made of iron.

The person, the person, the person with weapons.

You should be afraid of the person with weapons. You should be afraid.



She shouldn’t know that song. Why would Anaander Mianaai ever go digging in forgotten Valskaayan archives, why would she trouble to learn a song that very possibly no one but me had sung for longer than she had been alive?

“Justice of Toren One Esk,” said the right-hand Mianaai, “shoot the instance of me to the left of the instance that’s speaking to you.”

Muscles moved without my willing them. I shifted my aim to the left and fired. The left-hand Mianaai collapsed to the ground.

The right-hand one said, “Now I just have to get to the docks before I do. And yes, Seivarden, I know you’re confused but you were warned.”

“Where did you learn that song?” I asked. Still otherwise frozen.

“From you,” said Anaander Mianaai. “A hundred years ago, at Valskaay.” This, then, was that Anaander who had pushed reforms, begun dismantling Radchaai ships. The one who had first visited me secretly at Valskaay and laid down those orders I could sense but never see. “I asked you to teach me the song least likely to ever be sung by anyone else, and then I set it as an access and hid it from you. My enemy and I are far too evenly matched. The only advantage I have is what might occur to me when I’m apart from myself. And that day it occurred to me that I had never paid close enough attention to you—you, One Esk. To what you might be.”

“Something like you,” I guessed. “Apart from myself.” My arm still outstretched, gun aimed at the back wall.

“Insurance,” Mianaai corrected. “An access I wouldn’t think of looking for, to erase or invalidate. So very clever of me. And now it’s blown up in my face. All of this, it seems, is happening because I paid attention to you, in particular, and because I never paid any attention to you. I’m going to return control of your body to you, because it’ll be more efficient, but you’ll find you can’t shoot me.”

I lowered the gun. “Which me?”

“What’s blown up?” asked Seivarden, still on the floor. “My lord,” she added.

“She’s split,” I explained. “It started at Garsedd. She was appalled by what she’d done, but she couldn’t decide how to react. She’s been secretly moving against herself ever since. The reforms—getting rid of ancillaries, stopping the annexations, opening up assignments to lower houses, she did all of that. And Ime was the other part of her, building up a base, and resources, to go to war against herself and put things back the way they had been. And the whole time all of her has been pretending not to know it was happening, because as soon as she admitted it the conflict would be in the open, and unavoidable.”

“But you said it straight out to all of me,” Mianaai acknowledged. “Because I couldn’t exactly pretend the rest of me wasn’t interested in Seivarden Vendaai’s second return. Or what had happened to you. You showed up so publically, so obviously, I couldn’t hide it and pretend it hadn’t happened, and only talk to you myself. And now I can’t ignore it anymore. Why? Why would you do such a thing? It wasn’t any order I ever gave you.”

“No,” I agreed. “It wasn’t.”

“And surely you guessed what would happen if you did such a thing.”

“Yes.” I could be my ancillary self again. Unsmiling. No satisfaction in my voice.

Anaander considered me a moment and then made a hmf sound, as though she’d reached some conclusion that surprised her. “Get up off the floor, citizen,” she said to Seivarden.

Seivarden rose, brushing her trouser legs with one gloved hand. “Are you all right, Breq?”

“Breq,” interrupted Mianaai before I could answer, stepping off the dais and striding past, “is the last remaining fragment of a grief-crazed AI, which has just managed to trigger a civil war.” She turned to me. “Is that what you wanted?”

“I haven’t been crazed with grief for at least ten years,” I protested. “And the civil war was going to happen anyway, sooner or later.”

“I was rather hoping to avoid the worst of it. If we’re extremely fortunate, that war will only cause decades of chaos, and not tear the Radch apart completely. Come with me.”

“Ships can’t do that anymore,” insisted Seivarden, walking beside me. “You made them that way, my lord, so they didn’t lose their minds when their captains died, like they used to, or follow their captains against you.”

Mianaai lifted an eyebrow. “Not exactly.” She found a panel on the wall by the door that had been previously invisible to me, yanked it open, and triggered the manual door switch. “They still get attached, still have favorites.” The door slid open. “One Esk, shoot the guard.” My arm swung up and I fired. The guard staggered back against the wall, reached for her own weapon, but slid to the floor and then lay still. Dead, because her armor retracted. “I couldn’t take that away without making them useless to me,” Anaander Mianaai continued, oblivious to the person—the citizen?—she’d just ordered killed. Still explaining to Seivarden, who frowned, not understanding. “They have to be smart. They have to be able to think.”