Redemption Ark

[Even if he thinks she’s his daughter? Is that what you were going to say?]

He’s an old man, Remontoire. An old man with delusions. They’re not my responsibility.

The servitors moved aside to allow him to leave. She watched the seemingly detached ovoid of his face bob out of the room like a balloon. There had been instants in their conversation when she had almost sensed cracks in the neural blockade, pathways that Delmar had — through understandable oversight — not completely disabled. The cracks had been like strobe flashes, opening up brief frozen windows into Remontoire’s skull. Very probably he had not even been aware of her intrusions. Perhaps she had even imagined them.

But if she had imagined them, she had also imagined the horror that went with them. And the horror came from what Remontoire was seeing.

Delmar…I really would like to know the facts…

[Later, Skade, after you’ve been healed. Then you can know. Until then, I’d rather put you back into coma.]

Show me now, you bastard.

He came closer to her side. The first of the swan-necked servitors towered over him, the chrome segments of its neck gleaming. The machine angled its head back and forth, digesting what lay below it.

[All right. But don’t say you weren’t warned.]

The blockades came down like heavy metal shutters: clunk, clunk, clunk through her skull. A barrage of neural data crashed in. She saw herself through Delmar’s eyes. The thing down on the medical couch was her, recognisably so — her head was bizarrely unharmed — but she was not remotely the right shape. She felt a twisting spasm of revulsion, as if she had just accessed a photograph from some bleak pre-industrial archive of medical nightmares. She wanted desperately to turn the page, to move on to the next pitiful atrocity.

She had been bisected.

The tether must have fallen across her from her left shoulder to her right hip, a precise diagonal severance. It had taken her legs and her left arm. Carapacial machinery hugged the wounds: gloss-white humming scabs of medical armour, like huge pus-filled blisters. Fluid lines erupted from the machinery and trailed into white modules squatting by her side. She looked as if she was bursting out of a white steel chrysalis. Or being consumed by it, transformed into something strange and phantasmagoric.

Delmar…

[I’m sorry, Skade, but I did warn…]

You don’t understand. This… state … doesn’t concern me at all. We’re Conjoiners, aren’t we? There isn’t anything we can’t repair, given time. I know you can fix me, eventually. She felt his relief.

[Eventually, yes…]

But eventually isn’t good enough. In a few days, three at the most, I need to be on a ship.

CHAPTER 13

They had to drag Thorn to the Inquisitor’s office. The great doors creaked open and there she was, her back to him, standing by the window. He studied the woman through gummed-up eyes, never having seen her before. She looked smaller and younger than he had expected, almost like a girl wearing adult clothes. She wore highly polished boots and dark trousers under a side-buttoned leather tunic that appeared slightly too large for her, so that her gloved hands were almost lost in the sleeves. The tunic’s hem almost reached her knees. Her black hair was combed back from her forehead in tight, glistening rows that curved down to tiny curls like inverted question marks above the nape of her neck. Her face was in near-profile, her skin a tone darker than his, her thin nose hooked above a small, straight mouth.

She turned around and spoke to the guard waiting by the door. ‘You can leave us now.’

‘Ma’am…’

‘I said you can leave us now.’

The guard left. Thorn stood by himself, only wavering slightly. The woman moved in and out of focus. For a long, long time she just looked at him. Then she spoke, with the same voice he had heard coming out of the speaker grille. ‘Are you going to be all right? I’m sorry that they hurt you.’

‘Not as sorry as I am.’

‘I only wanted to talk to you.’

‘Maybe you should keep an eye on what happens to your guests, in that case.’ He tasted blood in his mouth as he spoke.

‘Will you come with me, please?’ She gestured across the room to what looked like a private chamber. ‘There’s something that we need to discuss.’

‘I’m fine here, thank you.’

‘It wasn’t an invitation. I have no interest in whether you are fine or not, Thorn.’