Bright Shards (The Vardeshi Saga Book 2)

by Meg Pechenick

  I pressed the control to request entry, and the door slid open. I stepped inside and looked around curiously. Hathan’s rooms weren’t as expansive as Kylie’s suite on Arkhati, but they were generous, with multiple tiers giving the illusion of larger space. The lowest level, where I stood, held a recessed seating area. The second level contained a workspace with stools and a table. The highest level was the smallest, with room only for a bunk the size of my own, set beneath a bank of viewports. The view was impressive, if one wasn’t troubled by the thought of the cold depths of space only a hand’s breadth away from one’s pillow. Somehow I didn’t think the idea would bother Hathan.

  I saw immediately that Saresh hadn’t arrived yet. We were alone. Hathan was on the second level, preparing senek at a small alcove with a washbasin and water taps. The privileges of command, I thought. He hadn’t been eating cold cereal during the Flare. Then I remembered something I had overheard in the mess hall that morning. After Reyna had restrained the infected members of the crew, she had been driven to extreme measures to secure them. Unable to lock them in storerooms due to the override on the door controls, she had settled for putting them inside large empty containers in the cargo hold. Hathan had spent the second half of the outbreak locked in a metal carton roughly the size of a refrigerator box, bound at the wrists and feet. He probably hadn’t been eating anything.

  I felt the need to say something, if only to wrench my mind away from the image of him sitting there in his tiny dark cell as the rage ebbed slowly away. “Wow. Khavi quarters are nice.”

  “Feel free to look around. Saresh is on his way.”

  I did look around, eagerly, my senses heightened by the illicit thrill of trespassing on forbidden ground. The space was as immaculate as Zey’s, but there were a few more personal touches scattered around. A shelf held a shallow bowl carved from the same smoky gray quartz as the whiskey glasses I had bought for Dr. Sawyer. The bowl contained perhaps a dozen memory crystals. What memories did Hathan deem important enough to keep in view? I wished I could plunge my hand into the bowl and pull out a crystal at random, but I knew it would be unpardonably rude to do so.

  One wall held three ceremonial sashes, blue and orange and gold. “What are these from?” I asked.

  Hathan looked up from the senek things he was placing on a tray. His private senek set, I noticed, was matte green ceramic, nearly a perfect match for the Japanese teapot I’d bought in college. “From left to right, coming of age, Institute graduation, betrothal.”

  Betrothal. Right. With an odd sense of unreality, I realized that Hathan’s fiancée, whoever she was, had never been in this room. She had never seen the narrow bunk with its crimson and gray woven spread where he slept beneath the stars. There wouldn’t have been room for her in it anyway. I remembered Zey telling me that couples serving on the same ship were given individual quarters. But what if they wanted to sleep in the same bed? Or was that a thing only humans did? I couldn’t very well ask him.

  I wandered up the steps to the second level. Above the work table hung a placard bearing a few lines of text in a script so stylized I had to squint to make it out. “Citizens of the Vardeshi worlds,” it began, “the people of Earth send you their greetings across the void that divides us.” I recognized these as the opening words of Earth’s reply to the first transmission we ever received from the Vardeshi, more than twenty-five years ago now. Hathan had placed these words over his private workspace as, what, a reminder of his purpose? I felt a twinge of doubt. Maybe he really didn’t hate humans. How he felt about me in particular, of course, was the more pressing question.

  Hathan had gone down the steps to the first level. I followed him. The wall behind the seating area was dominated by a large piece of abstract art, intersecting circles and tangential lines, white upon black. I stood looking at it for a moment. He set the tray down on the table and came over to look as well. “What do you see in it?”

  I studied the curves and angles, trying to make sense of them, but I couldn’t make them resolve into any coherent picture. In the end, I fell back on my knowledge of who he was. “It looks like a star chart.”

  “It is.” He sounded surprised. “It shows a flight path. Vardesh Prime to the third moon to Arideth. My first trip offworld.”

  The hiss of the door signaled Saresh’s arrival. I wondered for a moment at the absence of a chime—I’d had to request entry, after all—then realized that Saresh, as Hathan’s brother, probably knew his private door code. The three of us settled ourselves on cushions around the low table. Hathan poured the senek and passed a cup to each of us. Saresh looked at me over his. “Do you have any questions for me?”

  “It’s a one-way transfer, right?” Hathan had told me as much, but I felt compelled to clarify.

  He nodded. “If it works, the connection will be one-way. Hathan will choose the memory, I’ll transmit it, and you’ll see it. It’s a procedure we use frequently to settle legal disputes. A sharing between two latent telepaths can be unpredictable; cognitive slips can occur on either side. Having a Vox serve as intermediary helps to control the flow of information. Generally speaking,” he added, and I had to suppress a smile. He went on, “I don’t know for sure that it will work, but I’m more confident than before that your mind won’t be damaged. The exchange went smoothly last time. That’s an encouraging sign. Any other questions?”

  I shook my head.

  Hathan said, “I have one for you, Avery. Are you sure you want to do this?”

  I took a gulp of my senek and immediately felt its calming effect. My voice steadied by the drink, I said, “I’m sure.”

  Saresh set his cup down and held out his hand for me to take it. “Then let’s begin.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The instant Saresh’s hand closed on mine, I found myself immersed in the weightless sapphire calm I remembered from our previous Listening. I was still adjusting to the sensation when he said, I’m going to bring Hathan in now, the words as clear as if he had spoken them in my ear. I heard them in English; I had a moment to wonder if he’d thought them in Vardeshi before he was gone and I found myself abruptly and unequivocally in Hathan’s mind.

  It wasn’t at all what I had expected. With Saresh, I had been enveloped by his presence, but I hadn’t been able to hear his thoughts. Now Hathan’s thoughts were mine. My own were still there, but faint and tinny and somehow intrusive, like someone’s cell phone ringing in the middle of a symphony. I saw the world through his eyes. More than that, I felt it. I knew the exact spot on his left heel where the standard-issue boot rubbed against it. He’d been planning to replace it before launch, but the debriefing sessions had consumed every waking hour, and now he’d have to pray that Khiva had a pair in his size down in Requisitions. I knew he was regretting that he’d just eaten his last starhaven meal and hoping Ahnir wouldn’t find a way to incorporate mizik root into quite so many dinners on the next arc of the journey. A regional preference, of course, but they didn’t spice their food quite so strongly on the Southern Continent, and it had been difficult to force the stuff down by the end. I knew he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in weeks, and that while he longed for the cool silence of his bunk, he was all too aware that in a few short hours he would be expected on the docking level for the prelaunch walkthrough of the Ascendant. I knew that in the back of his mind there simmered a constant low-grade worry about Zey, who was showing signs of favoring piloting as his specialization. It had been one of his weakest subjects at the Institute, and Hathan was concerned about finding him a suitable mentor.

  I watched him reach for the dice cup on the table and hold it up to the young woman in the Echelon uniform sitting across from him. “Game?”

  “Khivrik sevens,” said Reyna.

  Hathan nodded and shook the dice out into his palm. Khivrik sevens was a formidably difficult variant of the standard Institute dice game, requiring near-perfect recall of one’s opponent’s preceding rolls. At this hour and after a full day of being
grilled by Echelon examiners, he would have chosen something a little less taxing, and he thought she was probably testing him.

  She was an interesting mix, he thought. Pretty in classical homeworld style—dark hair, dark eyes, sharp chin—but flaunting her Mirzand accent. Most offworlders dropped their accents as soon as they decently could; there was a strand of xenophobia running through both Echelon and Fleet, and the teasing could be intense. Somehow, though, Reyna Ekhran didn’t look as if she’d be discomfited by any amount of teasing. The gold sigil on her hand was that of Vadra House, but Hathan knew that was a recent acquisition. She had broken a long-standing engagement to a childhood friend when the match with Vadra offered itself. Her new fiancé, a fellow Echelon officer, was reportedly no prize in the personality department, but that wasn’t why she’d accepted him. She was ambitious. She was also, to judge from her record, a skilled systems officer and a gifted ranshai fighter. The film of her last qualification trial had been appended to her file. She had won her designation of advanced seventh class with enviable ease, while he had fought like a cornered nivakh for his own intermediate fourth. She could take him apart at any time, probably one-handed and wearing one of the disorientation visors the Fleet used for antigrav training. And, of course, her English was impeccable. With all this she had evinced none of the typical Echelon arrogance during their two days of meetings. If she could be trusted, she would be an asset.

  A server came by to see if their glasses needed refilling. Hathan waved him away. It was tacitly understood between him and Reyna that this was a professional rather than a social meeting. The preferred time for a commander to pass on essential yet sensitive personnel details to his newly assigned second was over a prelaunch drink. He had already summarized the most pressing items, beginning with Vethna’s unfortunate rana habit, moving through the escalating tension between Ziral and Ahnir in the wake of the Echelon’s efforts to recruit the former as a pilot, and concluding with Sohra’s silent yet protracted battle with homesickness. He considered mentioning Khiva’s extreme mood swings, but decided against it. An observant supervisor would spot them on her own in short order. He’d see how long it took for Reyna to mention them to him. Just as she would be assessing his competence in the days to come, he would be assessing hers. That, too, was tacitly understood.

  Reyna cast her dice. The result was dismal, but she gave no sign of annoyance as she swept them into her hand and passed them to him. “And then there’s the human,” she prompted.

  “Eyvri,” Hathan said, with a flash of rueful inward humor. “What do you want to know?”

  “What do I need to know to keep her safe?” Reyna countered.

  It was the right question, he thought, though not easily answered. He stared down into his glass while he considered his answer.

  This was the moment, I realized. This was why he had chosen this particular memory. At last I saw myself in his mind. It was a peculiar feeling, not unlike looking at a friend’s photographs of an event we’d attended together. The subjects were familiar, but glimpsed from odd angles and through unexpected filters. I watched, horrified and enthralled, while he sorted through the swirl of contradictory images. There were a lot of them. At first he had seen me as incompetent but harmless, fumbling my kevet—the Vardeshi eating utensil that had given me particular trouble—and mangling my honorifics. I cringed. My accent in those early days had been worse than I’d known. Time passed, and his derision deepened into scorn. I watched myself whisper to Zey in the middle of a briefing, shout at Vethna outside the mess hall, stammer denials as Hathan himself presented me with the two surveillance devices he’d found in my quarters. Then, with a shock like plunging into cold water, came the report of Vekesh’s gun. I cringed again, not for myself this time, as Hathan recalled cradling my limp body in his arms, guilt and horror and panic tangling together in his chest.

  There followed a few images he dismissed before they could fully register. I saw myself laughing with Kylie in Downhelix, talking animatedly to Sohra, watching while Saresh demonstrated something on his flexscreen, my eyes intent on his face. Irrelevant, Hathan thought. Abruptly everything else fell away, revealing a handful of memories that glowed with significance. I saw myself in the interview room at the Villiger Center, in Vekesh’s sham tribunal, in the corridor where I had run into Hathan after the explosion in the Pinion’s cargo bay. The most recent memory was from earlier in the day of his meeting with Reyna. I was standing with her and Tavri, wearing Kylie’s black dress with the gold beads, looking both earnest and apprehensive. That was Eyvri, Hathan thought. Always outnumbered. Always underestimated.

  “She’s brave,” he said aloud. “She’s lonely. She cares too much what we think. And she deserves better than she’s gotten from me. I should have worked harder to keep her safe.”

  “That’s my job now,” Reyna observed.

  “It’s yours because I failed at it.”

  She blinked. It was the strongest sign of emotion she had shown in the hour they had been sitting together. “You honor me with your candor.”

  He says that’s enough, Saresh said.

  I opened my eyes and looked across the table at Hathan. For a split second I knew with absolute certainty that I was in the wrong body, looking at my own face from outside. The feeling went beyond mere disorientation into deep, stomach-twisting horror. This must be what madness felt like. I tasted bile. I scrambled to my feet and sprinted for the half-hidden door at the far end of the room that I was sure concealed a sanitation room. I had better be right. If not, I was going to throw up in his closet.

  It was a sanitation room. And I did throw up, humiliatingly, with the door open, because there wasn’t time to close it. Then I sat on the floor with my head between my knees until the dizziness and trembling went away. The sense of wrongness took longer to subside. Even after my mind settled back into itself, accepting that I was Avery and not Hathan or some hideous amalgam of the two, the physical sense of displacement continued. My heartbeat was too fast. My senses were ever so slightly dulled, so that sounds were muffled and edges that should have been sharp looked blurred. I stared down at my hands. They were mine. This body was mine. I knew that it was. So why did I feel like I’d been put back into it slightly wrong? Had I lost some degree of nervous-system function during the Listening? I waited, and breathed, until I was sure that I hadn’t. This was what being in a human body felt like. I’d just never had anything to compare it to before.

  I looked up at the doorway, where Hathan and Saresh stood side by side, their faces drawn, and said, “Let’s not do that again.”

  Their relief at hearing me speak coherent words was unmistakable. “Are you all right?” Saresh asked. Hathan didn’t say anything, but he closed his eyes briefly and released his grip on the doorframe. I could see the tension leave his body. After what we’d just shared, I could practically feel it.

  “I think I’m fine,” I said. “I was . . . confused for a minute. I didn’t know which body I was supposed to be in. It was awful. I don’t think my mind is meant to do that.”

  Saresh took out his flexscreen. “Stay where you are, Eyvri. I’m going to call Daskar.”

  “No!” Both of them looked startled by my vehemence. I went on, “If we tell her, she’ll have to report it, won’t she? I thought we were going to keep this quiet.”

  “Not after what just happened,” Hathan said firmly. “We took an idiotic risk. I’m not about to compound it by keeping it a secret. You’re clearly in need of medical attention.” To Saresh he said, “Call her.”

  Saresh went out into the larger space beyond the doorway. After a moment I heard him speaking in a low voice, presumably to Daskar. Hathan said, “I’m sorry I suggested this.”

  “Don’t be. It worked.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Saw it? My body thinks I was there. I’m pretty sure that if I took a polygraph test right now, I’d pass it.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” he admitted.

&n
bsp; “It’s a machine that tells you when someone’s lying. You guys don’t need them.”

  He smiled a little. “I wish I’d known about those before I talked you into another Listening.”

  “You didn’t have to twist my arm very hard. I wanted to do it. And, like I said, it worked.”

  “Then you know I don’t hate you.”

  I met his eyes. “I do now.”

  He sighed. “Well, I guess that’s something.”

  It was more than something, I thought. It was everything.

  Daskar arrived after a few minutes, looking so much like herself that I questioned whether I had imagined the gray apparition I had seen in the clinic. When she had examined me thoroughly, she said, “You seem unhurt. That was a very foolish thing to do. I hope it was necessary.”

  “It was,” I said.

  “I’m glad it worked, then.”

  I looked up at her. “Are you going to report us?”

  “I have no choice.”

  “Are they going to get in trouble?”

  “Very possibly. But they knew that from the beginning.”

  She helped me up, made sure I was steady on my feet, then went into the outer room to speak to Hathan and Saresh. I washed my face and rinsed my mouth out in the sink. I wanted to laugh at myself for feeling so guilty about invading Hathan’s privacy. I had been inside his head. Using his bathroom shouldn’t feel like such a big deal.