Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  Gairad’s face turned sallow. “Oh, sweet God. The protest.”

  “What protest?” Bel said sharply.

  “There are protests scheduled for Unification Day,” Gairad said. “Our student society was coordinating with some other activist groups. Sit-ins and marches, nothing violent. But I guess”—she swallowed, her face an even more unhealthy color—“I guess an outsider could start something, if they wanted. We wouldn’t vet everyone who joined.”

  Kiem exchanged glances with Bel. He thought about strategic comms, and about Aren, who had known so much about fringe newslogs on Thea. He forced himself to reason it through. “You have to tell them,” he said. “Call it off. Tell them the Empire’s sent saboteurs—they’ll believe that, right? Tell them you think Kingfisher has been feeding inflammatory news to your press.”

  “You won’t get any comms out from here,” Bel said. “Take the shuttle—no, leave the shuttle for me and Kiem. Take an emergency pod.”

  Gairad pressed a hand to her face, looking between the rest of the warehouse and the door. “We still haven’t found Jainan.”

  “You don’t even know if he’s here,” Bel said brutally, making the tearing feeling in Kiem’s chest worse. “I wouldn’t keep a prisoner with the weapons. He may be in the uncloaked modules.”

  Before Gairad could reply, something clanked in the distance. It came from the depths of the warehouse, away from the door, and was followed by the sudden absence of a background hum that Kiem had taken to be part of the warehouse environment. Then, worse: smaller noises that were too intermittent to be mechanical. Someone was moving around farther in the warehouse.

  All of them went still. Kiem nearly stopped breathing. They must have been heard; they hadn’t been quiet enough for stealth, and they had the flashlight. Gairad reflexively stifled it with her hand and plunged them into darkness.

  Bel reached for her capper and started toward the source of the noise, her shoes making no sound at all. Kiem followed, slower, praying he didn’t make an incautious movement.

  Another loud clank. The hum started up again, quieter this time. Now Kiem was listening for it he could triangulate its direction a bit better. They rounded the last of the tanks while Kiem and Gairad tried to minimize the scuffing of their footsteps, and a gap in the stockpiles showed a pool of light.

  Before Kiem could see much in the light, a solitary trooper stepped out from behind a pile of crates, a helmet under her arm. She was peeling white nonconductive gloves away from her hands.

  “Don’t shoot yet!” Bel shouted, already at a flat run across the space. Kiem belatedly remembered he had a capper.

  The trooper stumbled back, dropping the helmet. Her eyes were unfocused as if she’d just come out of a simulation. “Who are—”

  Bel grabbed the trooper’s arm. Gairad passed Kiem from behind and threw herself into the struggle. Kiem backed off; he found himself raising his wristband, but of course that was useless. The trooper drove her elbow at Bel’s stomach; Bel twisted, Gairad yelled, and a few brutal seconds later they had the trooper in a headlock between them. Blood was streaming from Gairad’s nose, and her wrist was at the wrong angle.

  “Sorry,” Kiem said to the trooper. She was in some kind of technician’s uniform, but she seemed to have taken off her rank and division badges. “We’re just passing through. Do you happen to have seen—”

  “Oh, fuck,” Bel said softly, looking behind the technician. Something about her tone of voice made Kiem break off. “Kiem. Over there.”

  Kiem stepped around the crates so he could see the lighted area she’d come from. The technician tried to break away again—she hadn’t shouted for help yet—but he didn’t really have time to think about that, because now he could see the makeshift cleared area, and the form lying on a medical bed, strapped into a helmet like the one the trooper had just dropped. Jainan.

  It shouldn’t have taken Kiem as long as it did to reach him. It felt like gravity had doubled. He leant over Jainan when he reached his side and touched his shoulder to wake him up. But Jainan wasn’t asleep. Through the view panel on the medical helmet, his eyes were wide open in a fixed rictus, his face drained and frozen. A wire ran from his skull underneath the helmet to a transmission spike. His shoulder under Kiem’s hand was as stiff as a board, and little tremors went through his taut muscles.

  “Jainan. Wake up.” Kiem hadn’t ever felt fear like this, fear that gripped his back and shoulders like a paralyzing current. He loosened the straps that held down the helmet. “We’re here.” His voice cracked on the last word. Jainan didn’t show any sign he’d heard. Kiem grabbed the wire running from his head, but he came to his senses just in time. He was not a medic. He would do damage. You’ve done enough damage already, he thought, and turned to look for the technician.

  Bel brought her over, still in a chokehold, her capper pressed under the trooper’s chin for a fatal shot. “Let’s make this very simple,” Bel said. “Get him out of that or I shoot you.”

  “I can’t,” the technician said.

  “And I’m the Emperor,” Bel said. She adjusted the angle of the capper. Gairad was holding on to a crate, looking sick. “One more chance.”

  Kiem’s head was flooding with anger like incendiary fumes. He took a breath of it, let it fill his head, let himself use it as fuel. “Wait, Bel,” he said, turning away from Jainan. He smiled at the technician. Bel raised her eyebrows. “I think this is the Tau field machine, isn’t it?” he said. He didn’t let himself shout. Instead, he forced his voice to an even, conversational tone that sounded like it was coming from someone else entirely. “We all thought it had been abandoned. You know, since the remnant it was built on was supposed to be surrendered to the Resolution. But I get it, you’re trained on it, and someone senior told you to use it. But this isn’t exactly a normal detention block, and you’ve taken off your insignia. Call me stupid, but I think you’re doing this unofficially, aren’t you? For my friend Major Saffer, by any chance?”

  The technician didn’t reply. Bel’s eyes had narrowed as she looked at Kiem.

  Kiem’s composure was snapping thread by thread like a fraying rope. Every minute Jainan was in the machine counted—Kiem didn’t know how long someone could be in a Tau field without brain damage—and he had no idea how to bring him out without persuading this technician. “You could come out of this so badly,” he said, forcing his tone to sound coaxing. “Court martial. Execution. The military had permission to interview Jainan, not commit a war crime, so they’ll have to come up with some story about an overenthusiastic junior soldier. Saffer will throw you to the wolves without a second thought.”

  That got a reaction. The technician’s eyes widened, only slightly, but it was a crack. Kiem seized on it. “This is way above your pay grade,” he said. He couldn’t let her see his fear. “When the authorities come in, you don’t want Saffer to leave you holding the bag.” He jerked his head. Bel picked up the signal and slowly removed her capper.

  After a long moment, the technician said, “The field has to run its course. I can’t turn it off. I programmed it for eight hours.”

  Kiem didn’t even feel relief at her capitulation. He couldn’t feel anything past the furious terror that hovered at the edges of his vision like static. “How long’s he been in there?”

  “Four.” The technician’s voice was still flat.

  Control yourself. Jainan would be able to control himself. “Four hours. What were you trying to do to him?”

  “Alter some memories,” the technician said, still reticent. “He’s got strong thought patterns. We haven’t made much headway.”

  So that either meant Aren was trying to make Jainan forget the embezzlement and the murders—unlikely, since other people knew as well—or he was trying to frame him. Kiem stopped trying to think. “How do we stop it?”

  In a sudden moment of animation, the technician looked at the console. “If we get what we need, we can sometimes go in and get them to cut the simula
tion short themselves. Bring them out early. They have to believe it’s a simulation, though—most people want to get caught up in their memories.”

  “She could be lying,” Gairad said. Her voice was thick with pain, and she’d used the sleeve of her good hand to try and staunch the nosebleed. She looked on the verge of collapse.

  Bel jerked her head at Gairad, though her eyes were still on Kiem. “Kid, you’re walking wounded. Go and sit down.” She jabbed a thumb meaningfully toward the docking hatch. Gairad’s eyes went wide, and she turned and disappeared into the dark.

  Kiem couldn’t make himself care about anyone else. He forced himself to parse the technician’s words through the static of his fury. “You’re saying if we convince him it’s really all fake, he wakes up?”

  “He rejects the brain pattern the field overlays,” the technician said. “I can try.”

  “And how do you make sure you don’t get caught in it?” Bel said skeptically.

  “I can shape it,” the technician said, with an edge of almost condescension. “They’re not my memories.”

  Kiem’s gaze went to Jainan’s shivering, wide-eyed form on the bed. “No,” he said roughly.

  The technician’s eyes narrowed. “You said—”

  Kiem didn’t have to look at Bel to know she shared his visceral revulsion at letting the technician mess around in Jainan’s head any more than she already had. “You’re going to send me instead.”

  He knew it was a bad idea. Invading Jainan’s privacy like that would probably be the end of anything between them. Kiem wasn’t even sure what they’d had between them, but there had been something that had made Jainan smile when Kiem came into the room, something Kiem had been trying desperately not to hold too hard, in case he broke it. He might be breaking it now. But the alternative was letting someone else—a stranger, someone who had already hurt him—into Jainan’s mind again. “You’re sending me in,” Kiem repeated. “And you’re going to do it now.”

  The technician nodded, slowly. She pointed at the helmet that had rolled away in the struggle. “That will make you part of the simulation,” she said.

  “Great!” Kiem said. He strode over to pick it up and smiled at the technician. For some reason, her face went even stonier. “Bel—”

  “Already on it,” Bel said. She rested her hip on one of the crates and pointed her capper at the technician. “I’ll keep watch. If you take more than ten minutes, though, I’m pulling that helmet off your head and shooting someone.”

  “Don’t do that,” Kiem said. “I won’t take ten minutes.” He put the helmet on.

  CHAPTER 27

  For a nauseating moment, Kiem could see two images overlapping each other. He blinked hard, suppressing the lurch in his stomach. His muscles ached in a strange way, as if he wasn’t fully using them. He stretched out his hand. It looked normal.

  When he blinked again, the refinery warehouse had disappeared. In its place was a light, airy space with grand marble arches that he recognized: the lesser banqueting hall back at the palace, in the middle of some sort of formal dinner. He was sitting at a long table with people around him, and at first he looked around wildly, because that seemed impossible. Then he realized they must be hallucinations, laughing and talking like real people.

  Now that he was looking properly, he could see the gaps in his surroundings. The arches and tables were clear enough, but the corners of the room were fuzzy and indistinct. When he looked at them straight on, he saw they were actually a gray, unformed fog, as if the projection didn’t reach that far, but as he kept watching, detail would start to creep in: a chair appeared, a patch of wall, a side table with ebony inlay. It made his brain itch. More unsettling still was the realization that some of the people farther down his table were also incomplete: they gave the impression of bright uniforms or court fashions from the corner of his eyes, but when he turned to look directly at them, they were only patches of color with a gray oval for a face. Color and features flowed across them as he watched like they were being brushed on. Kiem frowned as he placed the new faces—a friend from prime school, his tutor in university. This looked like a military dinner. The Tau field was putting these people where they had no reason to be.

  Wait. Wasn’t this place made from Jainan’s memories? Jainan couldn’t know those people; did that mean the Tau field was grabbing memories from Kiem’s own head now? The idea was skin-crawlingly unpleasant. He put up his hand to touch the helmet he knew he’d put on. He couldn’t feel it. His fingers seemed to graze his hair instead.

  What was this event, anyway? When he looked around, he saw posting insignia from Rtul, Kaan, Thea, all the inner system planets. The officers were mainly Iskaners, though, so it must be an internal military thing. Some significant date, maybe. His mother had attended dinners like this. But this one—

  Kiem’s head swiveled as if it were drawn to a magnetic point. He homed in on Jainan and Taam sitting at one of the long tables on the dais.

  He pushed his chair back and rose to his feet. One of the other diners made an incomprehensible protesting sound, so Kiem said, “’Scuse me,” politely, and shoved his way between the tables until he was within earshot of Jainan. He raised his hand to catch Jainan’s attention. Jainan wasn’t looking at him. Kiem recognized the way he was sitting, taut and tense. He also recognized Taam’s manner, but only because he knew what people looked like when they were being drunk and loud at dinner. Taam looked too solid and confident to be a hallucination, and he wasn’t alone in enjoying the evening. Everyone at that end of the table was several glasses into the festivities. Except Jainan.

  Then Kiem saw Aren sitting a few places down from Taam and froze. But Aren’s gaze went right through him as if they were strangers. Kiem recalled he was wearing the only headset. This Aren was just a memory, pulled from Jainan’s memory of the dinner.

  Suddenly Jainan’s spine went rigid, and people were looking at him. Someone must have made a comment. The person next to him leaned over and clapped him on the shoulder. Jainan flinched.

  Kiem couldn’t help himself: as he reached them, he grabbed the wrist of the offending officer. “You’re drunk,” he said. “Have some bloody manners.” The officer stared at him with outraged, slightly fuzzy eyes, and Kiem remembered it wasn’t real. He dropped their hand and turned. “Jainan…?”

  Jainan was real. Kiem knew every tiny line and shadow on his face as Jainan stared up at him in shock, and he knew the way Jainan wiped the shock and rapidly replaced it with a mask of blankness.

  “Prince Kiem?” Jainan said. “I didn’t realize Your Highness would be at this dinner.”

  “Who the hell are—Kiem?” Taam said from the other side of Jainan. As he did, Jainan leaned back to allow him space. “What are you doing here? This isn’t for civvies.”

  Kiem opened his mouth to say, Jainan, you’re in a Tau field. But then something strange happened. As he started to form the words, an invisible current around him took hold, and what came out was, “Yeah, not sure why I got the invitation.”

  “Makes two of us,” Taam said. “Maybe your mother’s hoping we’ll rub off on you. What do you want?”

  Kiem’s head felt fuzzy. He seemed to have forgotten his next line. He looked around for inspiration and caught Jainan’s frozen expression. Oh, yes. “I just wanted to see if Jainan was all right.”

  Now Taam’s face took on a look of suspicion. “What does that mean? How do you know Jainan?”

  Kiem frowned. “We’ve seen each other … around.”

  “We haven’t,” Jainan said, quiet and tense. “Taam, I’ve barely met him.”

  “Have you?” Taam said.

  Kiem looked between the two of them. Something was wrong.

  “People are looking,” Taam said. “Go and sit down, Kiem, they’re bringing out the next course.”

  Kiem opened his mouth, and once again that strange thing happened where words he hadn’t planned came out. “Right,” he said. “Sorry to bother you.” He nod
ded—to Taam, not to Jainan—and turned away.

  He was nearly back to his seat before his mind slipped out of the grip of the flowing current. He’d let himself be hijacked into being part of the scenario. Was that how Jainan saw him? Someone who’d abandon him at the first sign of trouble? He turned back, horrified, and saw Jainan hunched over his food with Taam pointedly ignoring him. “Jainan!” he shouted, throwing any attempt at subtlety to the winds. “This is the machine they put you in!”

  Jainan looked up, bafflement on his face. Taam turned with an oath. “It’s called a Tau field!” Kiem said. He tried to stride back across the banqueting hall, but there were chairs in his way, and people getting up, shocked. He was making a scene. Damn right he was making a scene. “Aren put you in it to alter your memories! I think he’s trying to frame you! And where the hell does Taam get off, talking to you like that?” As he spoke, he saw Jainan mouth the word memories. And then the walls disappeared.

  * * *

  Kiem sat at a table—one of the curved, horseshoe-shaped ones used for duller meetings—in a conference room filled with thin white light. The sky beyond the windows was pale. He must be here for a meeting. He squinted at the others around the table, who all had an attenuated quality, as if the spectrum of the sun’s light had shifted slightly while Kiem hadn’t been paying attention.

  It must be something to do with Thean affairs, because Jainan sat across from him, as did some of the staffers from the Thean embassy. Taam was also there—of course, Taam was heavily involved with Thea—and some other Iskat officials. An elderly man seemed to be presiding, but his head had nodded down to his chest, and every now and then, he gave a gentle snore.

  “Next is the proposal for a replacement Thean Ambassador,” one of the officials said. “Objections? She looked at the elderly man, realized she would get nothing out of him, and turned to Taam.