He wouldn’t answer my questions unless I asked them in strit, and it was a hard language. He said Ki’hade wasn’t even the only language he knew from this planet but it was the one they mainly spoke on this side of the continent. I hoped he wouldn’t make me learn the others. I had to listen really close because they sang a lot of their words and if you didn’t sing them right nobody would know if you were talking about something in the past or future or right now and it would get confusing. There were so many different ways to say the same thing, and some of their symbols looked exactly alike except for one line or curve that made the word “war” turn into “one,” or something.
I was sure if I had to actually speak to a strit I would be absolutely confused and probably insulting. Nikolas outright laughed at me once when I wearily said, “You ate me for breakfast,” instead of, “Will we have breakfast?” In one lesson, when I’d had enough of parsing sentences, he made me write my name in strit and the meaning, which according to him was “playful” or “merry.” He thought that was funny too, since mostly I was serious. He found my mistakes amusing and wasn’t shy about showing it. In an odd way it got me to work harder—not to please him, but to shut him up. Maybe he knew this.
“So what does your name mean?” I asked, not in strit, while we ate our midday meal. “I bet I know—nasty teacher, right?”
“Ke Nikolas-dan ke u’itlan sastara.”
He said it quickly and all I caught was the word “people.”
He handed me the reader, on the vocabulary screen. I sighed and put aside my bowl, licked my sweet-sauce-tasting fingers and wiped my hands on my pants, which made him frown. I poked at the screen to bring up the input bar. “So spell it, Nikolas-dan.”
“Enh?”
He always gave me that straight-ahead look when I got lazy and didn’t speak Ki’hade. He knew I knew the word for “please.”
“Nikolas-dan, tori.”
Very nicely he spelled the unfamiliar words. I added the translations to my list of slowly growing vocabulary, like he told me to do.
“U’itlan sastara ... victory of people?”
“Nikolas,” he said. “In your words—the people’s victory.”
That sounded pretty full of it. I scowled. He smiled at my face. It made him look human, and young.
More than once I daydreamed during lessons, my head full of symbols and words and sounds, and found myself staring at the tattoo on his cheek and how it curled around his dark eye like the arm of a spiral galaxy. It didn’t matter his features were human—he walked, talked, dressed, and for all I knew pissed like a strit (however it was that strits pissed). And despite myself I was curious to know how he got that way, and why he didn’t mind.
His history wasn’t at the top of my curriculum. The lessons revolved around things like geography of the planet, concepts like “house” and “forest” and “ocean.” Weather was a big thing too. I discovered that up close when I first experienced rain pounding on my walls and window. I didn’t sleep the entire night. He said it was summer, though, and there wasn’t usually a lot of rain.
Once was a lot, I told him.
Every time I thought of the world falling away from the window I felt sick. So the screen stayed folded down. He never asked about it. Still, I wondered what was outside of this room, in the rest of the house, and when I could see it. Anything, just to get away from these lessons.
It was nearly night and the evening birds began to talk. The sharp, sweet smell outside bled through the window. Nikolas-dan told me it came from a clinging plant on the outer walls. It only smelled strong when the sun went down. At first it had made me sick but now I almost liked it. It helped me dream less, though now I almost always dreamed in strit. So he made me work even with my eyes shut.
He said he wasn’t a pirate, but he made me work like Falcone had. And even Falcone let me watch vids sometimes, when I was good. This room had no hologames or vid.
“It’s been over a month,” he said, in Ki’hade. “You still want to go back?”
“I don’t want to go back to Falcone but I don’t want to learn any more stupid strit.” I slapped the reader down on the mat. I had to say “stupid” in my own language because he hadn’t taught me the word in strit.
I always said strit in my head, but never to his face. Except now.
He looked like he wanted to hit me, for a second, but then it passed and he just looked. He looked for a long time until I started to feel stupid for making noise. Even when I yelled, he never hit me or yelled back. I tested him a few times, but he never touched me.
“You’re tired,” Nikolas-dan said.
“This stuff is hard.” I folded my arms. “I can’t even get away from it in my sleep.”
“Do you see Falcone too? Or your parents?”
I didn’t say anything or look up. But he wasn’t like a human. He never filled silent spaces with conversation. So his question hung in the air for a long time, rattling around in my head.
I wished he hadn’t mentioned my parents. Sitting in this room, on a planet, the thought of them unrolled with a sting, like the black insects I sometimes saw in the corner of my room, hard little things that bit your finger if you poked them.
“You’re not my parents,” I mumbled. “So stop asking.”
After a moment he said, “I’m sorry, Jos-na.”
Weird adult. He always said things like he meant them, as if he had a reason to be honest with me. Now he sat across from me, elbows on his knees, all calm good feelings. I got used to seeing him this up close, so I noticed every line on the tight bands of cloth that wrapped him up and all over. I noticed the dark blue tattoos on the backs of his hands, circles and swirls. His eyes seemed older than the rest of him. But I still couldn’t read them. He never let me that close.
“Am I going to stay here forever?” I asked. In this room, on this planet. Unsold.
“No.”
Usually I had to pry answers out of him. The quick reply made my stomach sick. So he was going to sell me after all.
But he said, “You’re not going back to Falcone.”
I looked up at him. “Probably not unless the price is good.”
His face was very still. “I have said it, Jos-na. You won’t go back.” As if he meant it.
I didn’t know exactly what he was, other than a symp, but after a month I thought he was somebody important. He’d brought me here and took care of me, and nobody seemed to mind because I never heard yelling. But I knew better. Nikolas-dan owned me now because he’d taken me off Chaos, even though he never said so. He owned this room when he was in it and when he left this room he probably owned the planet.
But he wasn’t as bad as Falcone. So far.
“What does ‘dan’ mean, in your name?”
As long as I asked questions he wouldn’t make me write exercises. And he would stop asking me questions.
“It’s the short form of the word ‘ka’redan.’ ”
“What does ‘ka’redan’ mean?”
“Assassin-priest.” He said it in my language, then switched back again to strit. “That is as close as I can translate. It’s not wholly accurate. Ka’redan is my place. It’s where I belong.”
“This is a striviirc-na thing, isn’t it?”
For some reason that made him smile, briefly. “Yes.”
“So you’re a priest?” That was kind of funny. The Universalist priests I’d met long ago on stations didn’t look or act like him.
“I help bring peace to the confused. Order in our society. Ka’redane search for our place in our training and our duties. Therefore I’m an example.”
He could say that without arrogance. It just confused me more.
I pointed to the shapes beneath his clothing. “You’re an assassin.” I knew that word. The Send had reports about strit and symp assassins who went on stations and killed people, usually govies.
Somehow it didn’t surprise me he was like that.
“Yes.”
“Why haven’t you killed me?”
He didn’t answer right away. Then, “I think you’ve stood enough in the place of death. For now.”
Did that mean he was going to kill me sometime in the future?
I couldn’t find the words to ask him. I didn’t know if I wanted the answer. Maybe he would kill me if I didn’t do well, like Falcone had always said. Or keep me locked up forever, just learning his lessons and eating his food. He was better than Falcone, but whatever stopped him from taking what he wanted once and for all was going to end, and then all the silence and softness he showed would disappear.
They were both slavers, after all.
* * *
VI.
One late afternoon, during a break from lessons, he said out of nowhere, “Do you like it here?”
Falcone had played this game with me—tried to make me grateful.
“It’s all right. What I’ve seen of it.”
He acted nice and sometimes smiled at me over meals and lessons, but at the end of it was a locked door. I always slept facing the door.
“You fight,” he said. “But I think out of survival. Habit. Perhaps for something you’re afraid to lose. But I’ve treated you well.”
“So did Falcone.”
“Did he?”
“Yeah, he did.” But we both knew who was lying.
Maybe he knew in some weird alien way about the dreams I had lately. I barely remembered them in detail now, but they always felt bad when the morning came.
“You want answers, Jos-na. But here you have to earn them. How can we trust you?”
“You trust me! I’m the prisoner.” I stood, as if there was someplace I could actually go.
He made me do exercises in the morning that stretched my muscles and taught me a different way of breathing. Sometimes they helped when I lost myself staring at the walls and their designs. He said the designs were there to meditate upon, even though they didn’t say anything specific. But sometimes nothing helped, not even jumping around the floor until I was so tired I couldn’t move.
Nikolas-dan said, “You think only in terms of prisoner and not prisoner. This is a place in-between. This is where you are until you wish to leave your prison.”
“Leave?” I almost laughed. “With the door locked?”
“You need only ask, Jos-na, and I would open it for you.”
“Right.”
“Why don’t you believe me?”
I’d learned that when he asked a question he really did want your answer, not something that would just make him happy.
“Why should I believe you, Nikolas-dan? You’re going to change.”
“I will?”
“I don’t know why you act this way. Why don’t you just get to the point?”
“Act this way?”
I folded my arms and looked around, not to really look, just to avoid him. He still sat on the mat, looking up at me. He was always so calm. I walked to the wall and leaned against it.
“Jos-na,” he said, “I’ve watched you pace this room for the last week. You want to leave. But you stopped asking.”
“Because you said no.”
“So you give up?”
“You said no.”
“You weren’t ready before. Before, you only wanted to leave because you wanted to run, but there isn’t anywhere to run to on Aaian-na. Now… now you want to leave, but not just to run. Now it’s because you’re ready. Do I speak true?”
“I don’t know.”
He unfolded to his feet. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t know! The only thing I know is a bunch of strit stuff, and I don’t know what good that is.”
“If you leave this room, Jos-na, you are going to meet striviirc-na. Sooner or later. If you can’t speak Ki’hade, how will you talk to them?”
“Maybe I’ll avoid them. I don’t want to meet any aliens.”
“What about the reports in your slate about Kali and Mukudori? They are in Ki’hade.”
“You can tell me just as easy, but you don’t because you like to play games.”
“That is Falcone in your head, speaking through your mouth.”
I looked up at him quickly, then down again at the floor. He had never said anything like that before. His voice was hard, but it didn’t sound directed at me. I knew enough Ki’hade to hear the meaning behind his words.
“Jos-na, the things you want to know are better if you’re ready to know them.”
“And you decide when I’m ready?”
“Things have happened too soon for you. I think you need to slow down.”
I stared at the floor so hard my eyes began to hurt. “Nikolas-dan, what do you want me for?”
The silence between my question and his answer felt as large as a planet.
He didn’t touch me, not with his hands. “I saw an injured child on a deck, injured maybe because of something I had done—or not done. I brought him here so he can grow— away from the war, for a while. I teach him things so he can know the striviirc-na, because he is on their world. They are not beasts that will eat you. I want this child to live. I think he wants to live. But it’s easy to live and harder to trust. Do I speak true?”
The pain behind my eyes spread to my head and down my throat, to my chest. It was hard to breathe.
“Jos-na,” he said. My name in his voice, in a way I’d never heard it. And still he didn’t get too close because he knew I’d just move away. He didn’t try.
I couldn’t understand why he never tried. He attacked stations and killed people, like Falcone.
He said, “I am not Falcone,” reading my thoughts somehow.
The wall was hard against my back. “Nikolas-dan, will you open the door?”
He didn’t answer right away. He waited for me to look up into his eyes and ask it again with my own. So I couldn’t lie.
Then he said simply, “Yes.”
* * *
VII.
He let me step out first, into an empty, quiet hallway with dark blue carpeting down the center. The color of the walls shone pale gold, beribboned with thorny shapes, just like my room. Left and right both led directly to two more doors, paneled like mine, full of fancy design.
“This way, Jos-na,” he said, and pointed down my right.
So I walked. Open-eyed globes of light cast moon circles on the thick carpet. The edges of the floor were shiny white tiles. Just the one hall looked like a high-end station den, full of color and priceless materials. Earthly things. Planet things that weren’t found on merchant ships—or pirate ones.
Nikolas-dan stopped at the next paneled door and slid it aside, motioning for me to go first. I stepped just inside, thinking of aliens. But I didn’t see a strit, just a woman. And my heart made a fist and started to pound.
The woman raised an unnaturally white hand and motioned me forward.
“Come,” she said, in my language. EarthHub language.
I took another step, but that was all. She didn’t look EarthHub. Her face was totally white, the color of Mukudori’s corridors, except for the twin tattoos that curved around the outer edges of her eyes—dark blue tattoos like Nikolas-dan’s, like a mask or a face of some Earth bird. She could have been an alien except her features were small, soft, not like the sharp bold angles I’d seen on Chaos Station. She was human, like Nikolas-dan was human. It was far from my kind of human. Far from the Hub.
I was far from the Hub. It didn’t seem more obvious than now, facing this white-faced stranger. She sat motionless at one of their low black tables, in this room that had all the vid-familiar comforts of a house on Earth but none of the human touches. The air was cooler here than in my room, the colors all black and white and pale gold, with some small shapes of red. I glanced over it all, avoiding the strange woman’s face and her sharp gray eyes. I looked at the tall black screens in the corner, the white paintings flowing across them in ways that made pictures of man-shapes and tree-shapes, so detailed it was almost like the animation in
my primer. The shelves and thin carved objects, all shining shades of red, were the types of things I could never touch in my quarters on Mukudori because they belonged to Mama or Daddy and sat high above my head where I couldn’t reach them.
These little sculptures were low on the ground, like all the drawers, like the bed in the corner with its black frame and curving legs in the shape of feathers. A wide bed, neatly blanketed in red.
I pulled my hands up inside my sleeves and shifted.
The white-faced woman sat at the table, in the center of the room on a thick black and gold carpet, watching me. Letting me look and looking at me. Nikolas-dan still stood behind me in the doorway.
“Come,” the woman said, this time in strit. In Ki’hade, so I understood. Her voice was lighter than Nikolas-dan’s. Her hair was blacker, longer, straight down her shoulders. Her eyes were the color of the gun I’d used to kill that pirate long ago. Her gaze narrowed slightly. “Do you understand me?”
“Enh,” I said, one word in the alien language that I couldn’t screw up.
“Come here,” she repeated, stronger.
A hand touched my back. Nikolas-dan. I flinched away, took a step. The woman kept staring, bright silver eyes in that wide, white face. She didn’t look real. She could have been painted or sculpted or sprung from a dream. She wore strips of cloth, like Nikolas-dan, but pure black and pure gray, all wrapped together and around her body. Her arms showed the smooth curves of muscle, more slender than Nikolas-dan.
An assassin-priest, ka’redan. She had to be one too.
“Is the boy wither-brained?” She smiled a little, looking above my head.
“No, ki’redan,” Nikolas-dan replied. “Just afraid.”
My hands curled tight. My feet felt weighted by too much gravity.
“Sit, it will be all right,” the assassin-priest said, pointing to a flat cushion on one side of the triangular table. The back of her hand had the same circular patterns as Nikolas-dan’s, the skin underneath just as white as her face. Only her fingernails were pale pink.
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