The Tenth Silver Drachma
Soldiers were already scouring the tunnels for Kino, but there were relatively few outposts underground that they could be dispatched from. If Kino remained near the site of the collapsed tunnels, it might be easier to reach her by digging straight through the rubble, rather than taking a circuitous route around, but there was no way to know if she remained there. She could have been dragged away— it seemed quite likely that this attack had been aimed at her specifically, or at Aymon’s party generally, with Kino being the most vulnerable member.
Aside from General Lang, there was one other sensitive working in the base, and he had been dispatched down to assist with clearing away the rubble and looking for Kino. When Aymon heard this, he had to work hard to stomp his anger down and keep his tone cool.
“He’ll only find her with the power if she’s dead,” Aymon said to Lang. Kino’s peculiar near-invisibility was not written down in any of the precis that were provided to local security anywhere that Aymon was making an official visit, but Lang should have noticed it the moment she met Kino, and understood what it meant for the chances of finding her with the power.
“He’ll be helpful when clearing the path,” was all Lang said.
That may have been true, but it provided Aymon no comfort whatsoever. Not that there was anything that could calm him, save for Kino being returned to him safe and unharmed. Even Halen couldn’t do much to stop Aymon’s racing thoughts.
He was tempted to demand to be allowed into the tunnels to search for his apprentice himself. But he suspected that this request would have been refused by General Lang, at the very least. She would have stopped him, regardless of what refusing him would cost her. She probably only barely restrained herself from suggesting that Aymon return to the First Star and wait for news of Kino in that safer position.
Halen, too, would have objected to Aymon going down to search for Kino himself. He wondered how strong that objection would be, but he didn’t test it.
Halen stood at Aymon’s side and gave instructions to the soldiers who came in and out of the headquarters where the ad hoc coordination of the search was being carried out. But Aymon knew that Halen’s quiet, even voice was simply an excellent mask. Halen had been more attached to his apprentices than he was, Aymon thought.
But that deflection, pushing the responsibility of care onto Halen, was not enough to stop Aymon from feeling a keen horror at the idea of Kino being dead. In the empty spaces between one messenger carrying in a report and the next, his thoughts turned back to his own apprenticeship.
When Jalena, his fellow apprentice, had died, he had thought that his master, First Herrault, had been able to detach herself from it because she had not loved her apprentices in any way. Standing on that precipice, on the other side of that line, Aymon began to realize more completely how wrong he had been then. He and Herrault were too similar, in the ways that mattered.
Thinking of the direct line between master and apprentice brought him back to Kino, with her quiet confidence. Hadn’t he said to her just the other morning how they were alike? Even if she denied it, it was true. Aymon didn’t want to let his confidence in Kino’s ability to survive overwhelm the cautious part of his mind— allowing hope to flourish would only make things worse— but he couldn’t help but clench his fingers into a fist, nails into his palm, and believe in his core that Kino was still alive, and would return to him, somehow, and soon.
At some point, Halen began pacing the back of the room, even as Aymon sat in one of the hard plastic chairs with his fingers deliberately steepled on the table before him. It was a reversal from their usual patterns— Halen was usually quite still and unobtrusive behind Aymon, while Aymon often filled up all the space in a room. But because this was so personal, it set Halen off balance. This made more of an impact on Aymon than anything else.
Halen was attached to the three apprentices. Aymon knew this. He had known and accepted that fact. But it was an abstract knowledge, something that meant very little when the furthest that attachment needed to extend was to teaching them self defense, or arranging their daily schedules, or any of the other tasks that Halen performed for them— invisible and quiet and always in service of the apprenticeship itself, in service of Aymon. Even when he told Aymon how to treat the three, how to feel about them, that was for Aymon’s sake, still. But there was evidence here that this attachment was stronger than duty, stronger than familiarity, and stronger than fondness— it was love.
In a distant corner of his mind, Aymon might have been jealous. But that was just recognition of another fact, more a thought than a feeling. Aymon glanced at Halen, wondering if he had noticed this cloud passing through Aymon’s mental landscape, but he had no reaction to Aymon’s thoughts whatsoever.
Halen stalked back and forth across the rear of the room. As time stretched on, his voice’s timbre changed from soft to gruff. While his expression remained as neutral as he could keep it, and he never spoke to the soldiers who delivered reports in anything like audible anger, they still went out of their way to avoid him, keeping a wide berth unless they needed to approach. It was like he was a bear in a cage, with bars that they weren’t sure would hold if he decided to stop being placid and instead stretch out his claws.
“Halen,” Aymon said.
Halen looked over at him, but did not walk forward and take the empty seat at the cluttered table. The soldiers in the room had not noticed, or were choosing to ignore, Aymon speaking up. In that way, like it sometimes did, it felt for a moment like they were alone in the universe as their eyes met.
Halen waited for whatever he was about to say. Aymon discarded most of the things that he was tempted to utter— the question of love to which the answer was already obvious, a request for an estimate of hope, and anything else. Halen surely already knew everything that Aymon could have said, and none of it mattered. The only thing that needed to be spoken was a command.
“Go find her,” Aymon said.
Halen looked into his eyes for a moment more, maybe looking for confirmation that Aymon did want him to leave his side, then nodded once, sharply. His whole posture changed; whatever had been coiled tense inside him loosened as he strode out the door. Aymon closed his eyes as he left, and followed him in his mental view with the power, watching him gather a few members of the security team, walk down the hallway towards the nearest elevator shaft, and begin to descend until he fell too deeply into the darkness and vanished out of sight.
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Although it was late at night, Aymon did not sleep at all. The only news that made its way back up to him was of the slowly updating map on the wall which showed the tunnels that had been checked thoroughly for Kino, and for any signs that members of the Adversary had passed through that direction. But there was no real information carried in those reports aside from the slow advancement through the planet’s labyrinth, a radius that widened in fits and starts, and only minutely each time.
Halen did not have his own specific position marker on the map, but Aymon could imagine that it was at the very forefront of the push, winding his way forward with his trusted team drawn from Aymon’s personal security.
At around five in the morning, Aymon finally received something that was closer to news than anything he had yet had. It might have been a bad sign, but Halen was making a direct request for him to come down into the tunnel, immediately. Halen demanding his presence made it very difficult for General Lang to refuse to allow it, and so Aymon went, surrounded by heavy security.
The area to which he had been summoned was ten kilometers from the place where the tunnels had collapsed. To get there, Aymon’s group went down to the deepest level of the tunnels: the largest, smoothest, oldest shafts that traversed long stretches of the planet. There, the tunnels were wide enough to allow for vehicles to move at a rapid clip through the dark red rock. They drove through the narrow aperture which had been cleared through the collapsed debris, wide enough just to fit one car, and formed hastily out of rocks shoved to the sides to form an archway. It was stable enough, Aymon decided, but it had been constructed only as a stopgap with the power.
It was almost as hot as the surface at this depth, and even the rush of speed as they drove in open-top cars through the tunnels did little to cool him down.
They took an elevator partway up to the level that Halen was waiting on, and then it was a further climb on foot, through a very narrow stairwell, packed shoulder to shoulder with his guard entourage. The area they were entering was not well trafficked, and Aymon wondered how Halen was even able to navigate some of it— the walls were so narrow that he was feeling nearly trapped.
At least in the area where Halen was waiting, the tunnel widened out marginally, enough for a few people to stand shoulder to shoulder, not quite so squeezed by the rock. Halen stood out among those already waiting, his hand pressed to the rough rock wall. His usual neat outfit was streaked with the grime of red dust, and it was in his hair and caked under his fingernails.
There was no sign of Kino.
“What’s going on?” Aymon asked.
“Come here,” Halen said. His voice was gravelly with tiredness, and when Aymon walked towards him, the soldiers parting to allow him through, Halen forewent all niceties and grabbed Aymon’s hand, pushing it against the rock beneath his own.
Do you feel that? Halen asked through the power. Even his mental voice sounded weary. But he pushed his power through the rock, forward and forward for maybe a hundred meters, pointing Aymon towards it as he went.
There, there was a place where the texture of the rock, in the sensation of the power, was strangely different— far denser than the surrounding area. And then there was a cavity within the rock, a chamber filled with air, and, in the center, curled up, was a small human figure.
Aymon was so startled as his power touched the curled figure that he lost focus before he could find out if Kino was alive or dead. He couldn’t even really tell if it was Kino, but there was no one else that it could reasonably be. At this distance, through the layers of rock, getting a sense of detail was difficult; there was just too much information that the power communicated in a great wave, and it was impossible to differentiate it quickly.
“Is she—” he asked aloud.
“I don’t know,” Halen said. “She hasn’t moved in the time that I’ve been here.” And she didn’t feel like anything in the power— not even the slippery sense that Aymon sometimes had of her, when she stood directly in front of him. All he could feel was the outline of her body, as much as he would feel a tree or a lump of clay.
Halen had only discovered this room because it was designed by Kino to be noticed by someone looking with the power: it was so perfectly shaped, and different from the surrounding rock. Even if she was invisible, this certainly wasn’t.
“Why didn’t you open it?” Aymon asked, though he already knew the answer in his heart. If Kino was dead, he would take it out on Halen if Halen had to be the messenger. It was just the way he was.
“Will you help me?” Halen asked.
“Yes,” Aymon said.
It had been a long time since he had last worked with Halen in the power for something important, or public. Aymon’s personal security, well versed in the way that Halen operated, forced the regular base soldiers back, giving the two of them space. Aymon ignored this, and closed his eyes.
Halen’s hand was still pressed over his, forcing his palm to scrape flat against the rock wall. This gave a locus for Aymon’s attention, the place where their skin met. It was easy to sink down into the power completely, to lose track of everything except his own mind and Halen’s, incorporeal, and the rock there in front of them. They were so familiar with each other, like one person, it took no effort at all to link their minds.
How had Kino sealed herself up inside the rock? She clearly had done it herself. The easiest method was to use heat and melt it, but Aymon couldn’t do that without risking hurting her, and she likely hadn’t done that either. She could have disposed of the heat by dumping it further down into the planet, but that would have been another layer of complications. The denser rock areas were glassy smooth, perfectly crystalline in their structure. She was elegant, if nothing else.
Aymon didn’t waste time on replicating Kino’s trick, whatever it had been. Instead, he distantly heard Halen tell the soldiers to move further back, as Aymon used the power to carve rocks in slabs from the wall and move them bodily. It blocked up the tunnel further down, but he didn’t care. Halen’s power pressed around the roof of the tunnel, ensuring that Aymon wouldn’t cave the ceiling in. He wouldn’t, but it was easy enough for Halen to feel the changing stress and strain in the rock, and nudge Aymon’s work to keep it balanced.
The tunnel he constructed was wide enough for Halen, and, as soon as it was clear of debris, Halen walked through it. Aymon stayed connected to him through the power, but did not enter the tunnel himself; Halen kept him out, even though there was no danger.
He moved slowly, tracing his hands along the tunnel walls. It was totally lightless, without even the moon-glow fungal life that decorated all the naturally formed tunnels on Tyx. Through Halen’s hands, Aymon could feel the place where the texture of the rock in the carved channel changed to Kino’s glassy smooth and diamond-hard protective crystal. If there had been light, it would have glittered black in the cave. Halen didn’t need to see; with the power he could gain a complete awareness of every inch of the chamber.
As Halen’s power passed over Kino, Aymon leaned heavily on the wall in visceral relief— she was alive. Her breath stirred the air, slight and invisible but present, and her heart beat slowly in her chest.
Halen entered Kino’s chamber and crouched down at her side. She was curled up, trying to hold her right arm to her chest. When Halen touched her forehead, brushing her hair away from her face, he felt sweat or blood damp on her skin.
On the ground before her was an open candy tin, with a few pills laying in the bottom— ten all together, but split up into deliberate groups of two whole pills and one half. She had divided out her dosage there in advance before she took any. Aymon thought she must have taken whatever she considered to be just under a lethal dose, as she was completely insensate as Halen touched her face and murmured a few incoherent words in a first attempt to rouse her.
Halen made sure that moving her would not hurt her further, and then sat down so that he could hold her in his lap. He dwarfed her completely. As Halen’s power moved through Kino’s body, Aymon— though his connection to Halen— could see its mental map. Her right arm was broken in several places from collarbone to elbow, presumably from having been pinned under a falling rock.
It was a gruesome injury, and it was made no better by the flicker of thoughts that crossed Halen’s mind: an involuntary knowledge of how similar wounds felt to receive; how to manipulate the broken bones; and how this would all look under a clinical, exact light, with Kino stretched out on a table before him, rather than cradled gently on his lap.
Aymon watched these thoughts coldly, though he could feel Halen’s emotions passing underneath him, too deep and dark to peer fully into. Halen let the knowledge rise to the surface of his mind because it was necessary. Even if he had first learned how to stitch bones back together for the purpose of breaking them again, he still knew the method. And that was all that mattered for Kino at this moment.
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Aymon would have preferred to take this task upon himself rather than have Halen do it, because Halen was tired, more than he was, but Halen brushed that suggestion away like a bothersome fly and got to work. It took a long time, mending he bones in Kino’s arm together, knitting the torn muscles back. Even with Halen’s help, it would take Kino a while for her body to heal, and her arm would be a useless bruised lump for some time. But she would at least be whole, and in less pain.
That thought echoed between Aymon and Halen with a bleak kind of amusement: for once, Halen did not feel anything from the body before him. Kino was so drugged with vena that she would not wake for anything, and even if she had been awake, her invisibility would have protected Halen from every sensation and feeling.
Once Halen was done mending her arm, he picked up the tin of vena and stuffed it in his pocket. Then he very carefully moved his power through her body one last time, like he was searching Aymon’s food for poisons, and broke apart the vena molecules into their harmless constituent atoms. Those that had already acted on Kino’s brain he couldn’t touch, not without being more invasive than he wanted to be, so it would still take some time for her to wake. But she would wake.
Halen stood in one smooth motion, carrying her limp body in his arms, and maneuvered his way out of the cave. As he entered the light and blinked, he let his connection with Aymon fall away, and they were back in their own minds, without the dizzy sensation of looking at themselves through each other’s eyes. There was a time and place for that, but it wasn’t here.
Aymon looked at Kino in Halen’s arms. She was covered in a mixture of dirt, sweat, and blood. Her hair, which was usually tucked into two long and neat braids, fell in a wild black tangle around her head. Her face had lost some of the tension that it often held when she was awake, but otherwise remained expressionless. Her uninjured arm was dangling down from her body as Halen carried her, and when Aymon picked it up to drape it across her chest, he noticed that she had bitten her hand enough to draw blood— neat little puncture marks from her canines were embedded in the flesh between her thumb and index finger, accompanied by a blossoming bruise.
“How long until she wakes up?” Aymon asked.
“Long enough to get to the First Star ,” Halen said.
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Kino began to rouse on the way back to the surface, turning and shifting in Halen’s arms as they rode in cars through the long, deep tunnels. She was incoherent, half-formed words falling out of her mouth, and Halen seemed surprised for some reason; his brow furrowing as Kino struggled to move.
“It’s alright, Kino,” he said, and smoothed her hair down off her face. Aymon watched his hand— it was strange to see Halen’s gentlest touch from a different angle. “You’re safe.”
Kino’s face twitched in an unreadable expression, but she stilled and stiffened, until tiredness or the soothing feeling of Halen’s hand on her forehead overcame her, and she slumped back down into sleep.
Aymon said nothing until he was sure she was completely unconscious. “What was that about?” he asked.
“She’s a brave girl,” Halen said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the vena tin, passing it to Aymon. “Withdrawal is not going to be pleasant.”
Aymon looked at the pills inside, then put it in his own pocket. “Better now than later.”
Halen looked at him sidelong. “I have a theory.”
“What?”
“She wasn’t taking those for the pain,” he said.
Aymon raised an eyebrow.
“I’ve never felt fear like that from her before just now,” Halen said. “I think she was trying to mute the power to help us find her.”
“It didn’t work.”
“It would if she could have taken that amount of vena and remained conscious,” Halen said. “But I expect that’s impossible. She has a tolerance, but not that much.”
Aymon made a noise that wasn’t exactly assent. “She’s been addicted to all of this long enough that she should know better.”
“Maybe.” Halen looked down at her. “But she wouldn’t have any reason to know how her power works when she’s sleeping. The unconscious mind moves in strange ways, and gets overpowered by the conscious one. But that’s what vena disrupts.” He trailed off into murmurs, which was unlike him.
Aymon’s mouth pinched. “And does yours work while you’re sleeping?”
“Of course,” Halen said. “I can always feel your dreams in mine.”
Aymon looked away. They were coming to the elevator shaft to the surface now, the cars pulling to a stop.
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Aymon didn’t spare much time to speak with General Lang, as most of their business on Tyx had been concluded already. She wasn’t the type to make token statements reassuring him of her dedication, or the way base safety would be improved going forward.
“I’m glad she’s safe,” was all Lang said, and then they made their goodbyes. If she felt personal relief that Kino hadn’t died under her watch, she didn’t show it. Aymon wondered, idly, as he shook her hand, what he would have done if Kino had died.
Back on the First Star , Kino was left in her bedroom. She would wake fully soon enough, though Aymon would likely not speak with her until he, too, had slept. He could use the power to sustain himself for long periods of alertness if he had to, and had been drawing on that reserve all night, but he was feeling his age now.
Even more than his private rooms in Stonecourt, the First Star felt like Aymon’s private kingdom. All of her crew knew him and his habits, and there were no prying eyes to disturb him. Once they jumped away from Tyx, into interstellar space, there would be no communication with the outside world. The ship was a self-contained universe, and Aymon embraced the brief period of respite as he settled back into his chambers.
He sat on the edge of his bed, waiting for Halen, who came in after a while, having showered and changed in his own personal quarters on board the ship. He sat down beside Aymon without speaking, and brushed his hand across Aymon’s bare back, nothing in the touch but touch itself.
“Kino is still asleep?”
“She’ll stay that way for another few hours,” Halen said. “I made sure of it.”
“Good.”
“It’s only a few days to Olar,” Halen said. “For her sake, I almost wish it was longer.”
Aymon made a noise of acknowledgement. “Unfortunately, I have my duties, and two other apprentices who I’ve been told need me. She can stay on the ship while I go down to Olar, if she needs to.”
Halen nodded.
“How sick will she be, and how long will it take for her to recover?”
“Very, for the first tenday.” He rubbed Aymon’s back. “After that, to completely be free of it, I don’t know.”
“You don’t think I should just let her stay on it, then, do you?”
“No,” Halen said. “She’s known that this couldn’t continue. I think this proves it well enough.”
“What does she take it for, anyway?”
“You’d have to ask her.”
“Is this going to cause more problems than it solves, is what I’m trying to ask.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Halen said. “But the other ones can’t be solved until this one is, so it’s a place to start, if nothing else.”
Aymon closed his eyes. “Why did I have to pick apprentices with so many problems?”
Halen laughed aloud, and his genuine amusement at Aymon’s frustration made Aymon crack his eyes back open.
“Don’t tell me I should be more grateful that they’re all still alive,” Aymon said. “I am.”
“You’re tired,” Halen pointed out. “And you will feel less annoyed at Kino once you’ve spoken to her.”
“I’m not annoyed.”
Halen smiled.
“Regardless—” Aymon cut himself off and took a breath. “I don’t know what I am supposed to do with them,” he said.
“Are you asking for my advice?”
“Do you have any?”
“None that I’m sure you don’t already know,” Halen said. “Kino won’t take whatever you say to her the wrong way— she’s not that type. But Yan might, and Sid will deliberately.”
“Comforting.”
“Have patience with them.”
“I will.” He changed position and laid down on the bed, so that he could look at Halen more easily. “I’ll try to. I’m afraid that whatever I was supposed to remember from my own apprenticeship that would make me compassionate, I’ve probably forgotten.”
“Yours was nothing like theirs.”
“Do the three of them even like each other?” Aymon asked suddenly, rolling onto his side.
This, too, made Halen laugh. “Yan and Sid do, at the very least.”
The relief of being back on board the First Star , with Kino safe and sound for the moment, had put Halen in a very good mood, unusually so. He was smiling at Aymon, despite the tiredness in his movements as he shrugged off his jacket and pulled his socks from his feet. This kind of cheer was strange to see on Halen’s face— his joys were usually so contained, no matter how strongly they were felt. Aymon stared at Halen, watching him. Halen didn’t alter his pace in peeling off his day clothes in any way, but he met Aymon’s eye, still smiling.
“I’m jealous, you know,” Aymon said.
“I know.”
“You should ask me of what.”
“I’ve always known you to be a jealous man,” Halen said. “I don’t think the specifics have ever mattered much.”
“Perhaps.”
Halen finished undressing, and laid down in bed beside Aymon. The lights in the room were dim and warm, mainly the table lamps at the bedside. Aymon could have turned them out with a thought, and he would momentarily, but he was enjoying looking at Halen’s smile, which remained even as he teased Aymon.
“It’s easy for you to love them,” Aymon said. “I’m jealous of that. It’s not easy for me.”
Halen was silent for a moment, and he touched Aymon’s jaw with one finger, delicately tracing towards his chin. “That’s not true,” he said.
“No?”
Halen’s finger kept trailing along his skin, feather-light despite its weight. He said nothing. Aymon closed his eyes. He heard the lights in the room click off, and the distant red glow behind his eyelids faded into darkness.
“I know your heart better than you do, Aymon.”
“What is it about them that makes you love them?”
“They remind me of you.”
Now it was Aymon’s turn to laugh. “Don’t lie to me.”
He could still hear the smile in Halen’s voice. “They’re yours. How could they not remind me of you?”
“I could snag a pigeon from the street and you’d love it because it was my pet, then?”
“I might.”
“I’m not so free with my affections.”
“With admitting them, no.” Halen paused, but was sure to continue, so Aymon gave him time. “You would have torn apart the planet for Kino today, if it would have done you any good. And when we get to Olar, and back home to Emerri, you won’t let the other two leave your sight for months.”
“And?” Aymon asked. Halen had always had the upper hand in this conversation. “You act like I’m soft rather than practical. It wouldn’t make sense for me to send them out again. Not for a while, at least. And I don’t have anything urgent— the next travel I have planned is for the colony consecration—” He yawned, and Halen took the opportunity to cut in.
“You could stand to be softer.”
“That’s easy for you.”
“Is it?” Halen asked. This time, the smile fell out out of his voice. Aymon remembered the vivid picture Halen had in his mind, while healing Kino’s broken arm.
“You make it look easy.”
“I’m happy it doesn’t look like I’m restraining myself from hurting them.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I could.” Halen’s hand was flat on Aymon’s neck now, heavy and still. His fingers twined through the hair at the nape of his neck. With even the tiniest amount of pressure, Halen could cut off Aymon’s air. Or, with a single thought in the power, could do any number of things.
“I doubt they’re as delicate as you think. You know your own strength too well.”
“I do,” Halen said. When Aymon put his own hand atop Halen’s on his throat, Halen shifted, bringing them closer still. “Don’t tell me that I’m no danger to them because I’m not to you.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.” He was tempted to test the moment, to press Halen’s hand against his throat tightly, but he rejected the idea. That was a game for a different time; he was too tired tonight, and Halen was as well. Surely Halen felt these curious stirrings moving in the undertow between them, but he didn’t move. “It’s comforting to know that I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what I’m doing with them.”
“See,” Halen said. “You do love them.”
“Love isn’t just the fear that you’ll do something wrong,” Aymon pointed out.
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Aymon found Kino about nine hours later. Since they were on the First Star , and the situation was somewhat abnormal, he went to her bedroom rather than summoning her to his office or some other room of the ship. Perhaps there were some cases where it was worthwhile to be informal. When he knocked on her door, it slid open under the touch of her power.
Kino was sitting on her bed with her knees hunched up to her chest, drawn and sweating. She was only wearing her undershirt and pants, the rest of her clothing and bedding having been discarded in a messy pile on the floor. This state of undress revealed the extent of injury to her arm— it was, as Aymon had known it would be, a purple mass of bruises and scrapes that stretched from under her armpit and shirt all the way down to her wrist. Even her uninjured arm was marked— she had been scratching at it incessantly, leaving raw red skin on the soft underside of her forearm. For all that she was the picture of misery, she stared at Aymon with her cold black eyes as he took a seat in the desk chair. And her hair was back in its usual braids, at least, which lent a sense of composure.
“How are you feeling?” Aymon asked, once he had settled himself, and it became clear that Kino was not going to say anything to begin the conversation.
“Fine,” she said. Her voice was flat, but she pulled her knees more tightly to her chest.
“I’m told the withdrawal from vena is rather unpleasant.”
She shrugged and said nothing.
“I’d like to ask what happened on Tyx.”
“Nothing happened.”
“Nothing happened?” He looked pointedly at her arm. “You were gone for hours, separated from your team, and you were seriously injured. I wouldn’t call that nothing. Tell me about it.”
“I thought it was an earthquake,” Kino said. “I saw the rocks falling, and I pushed everyone out of the way.” She looked away from him, up towards the ceiling. “Halen told me that everyone survived.”
“But you didn’t think to hold the rocks back or save yourself.”
She shrugged again.
Aymon reached into his pocket and pulled out Kino’s tin of vena. He held it up. Her eyes followed it, like he was dangling food in front of a starving man. “Had you already taken some, by the time the ‘earthquake’ happened?”
She hesitated, then leaned forward suddenly. Aymon pulled his hand back, thinking she was about to snatch the tin from him, but instead she ended up hanging off the side of the bed, coughing bile into a bowl that had been left for that purpose. When she finished and straightened back up, her eyes glassy and the sweat standing out on her brow even further, Aymon tried to hand her the water bottle on her desk. She shook her head.
He gave her a second more to recover, but when she said nothing, he said, “I’ll ask again: had you already taken vena when the attack happened?”
“Yes,” she said. “Some.”
“More than usual?”
“I would usually take it at night,” she said. “To sleep. I just took it at a different time.” It was unnecessary for her to add that if she took none, withdrawal symptoms would set in sooner, rather than later. Halen clearing the not-yet-absorbed drug from her body had hastened the process along, but she was chemically dependent on it, and it would probably only take about a day or so of abstinence for her to start to feel the effects under normal circumstances.
“Why did you change your pattern?”
She stared at him and said nothing. He remembered that she hadn’t slept at all, during the first night they had been on the planet. She must have been saving her dose to take during the day then, too. He wondered why, but she didn’t seem likely to volunteer the information.
“Well, it obviously impaired your judgment. You could have been killed.”
“Nothing happened,” she reiterated. “After I got out of the rocks, I just tried to find my way back up.”
“And then you decided not to go any further, and just wait for us to find you.”
“I knew you would find me.”
“Halen was the one who did.”
She nodded.
“I think you’re very lucky that nothing worse happened,” Aymon said. “I’m very surprised that you didn’t encounter any of the Adversary.”
She closed her eyes. “They wouldn’t have been able to follow me, even if they had been trying.”
“That, I know very well.”
“Then you didn’t have to worry about me. Halen said that you did.”
“You’re my apprentice,” Aymon said. “I don’t want to see you hurt or killed. I would hope that’s clear to you.”
“I’m not any different than anybody else,” she said. “I don’t need you to care.”
“That’s something I would expect Sid to say, not you.”
She was quiet for a moment. “There once were millions of people on that planet,” she said. “I had to do something to stop thinking about that. My life isn’t worth more than theirs.” She looked straight ahead. “That’s all.”
“In this job you can’t have the luxury of looking away.”
“I wasn’t looking away,” she said. “I asked to go to the front and I knew what would be there. I just was trying not to make it… so much.” Her fingernails dug into her arm, leaving white circles around her fingertips where she had pushed the blood out of the top layer of her skin, and surely heavy nail indentations beneath that which Aymon couldn’t see.
“I appreciate your honesty, if nothing else.”
“Will you punish me?”
“No,” Aymon said. “There’s no need. Most of your choices were rational. This” —and he gestured vaguely at her shivering form— “is more than enough. And I should have done my duty as your teacher and put a stop to it sooner.”
She nodded.
“May I ask you a question?” Aymon asked.
“Yes.”
“Why did you first begin taking vena?”
“It wasn’t vena first,” she said. “It was other things.” She stared off into the distance, somewhere above Aymon’s head. “I used to not be able to sleep, at the Academy, so I would go walk through the city. I would take the same route, most nights. Habit.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen. I would have done it before, but the Academy locked the children’s dorms at night, and I hadn’t figured out how to get out easily.” She cocked her head. “You know the Academy is like that.”
“Someone should have taught you to meditate at night.”
She laughed, and it was a very strange sound. A sound that a person made to disguise a crack in their throat.
“You were fourteen, and you were wandering,” Aymon said, urging her to continue.
“I met Mahmoud. He worked at a bakery, so he was always up at night, and would come out to smoke when I walked by.”
“And you spoke to him?”
“He was worried about me.”
“And this worry led to him offering you drugs.”
She shrugged. “After a while.” Aymon raised an eyebrow, but Kino seemed unaffected by the story. She continued. “He said that since I was walking all over the place anyway, I could earn some money by delivring packages for him. So I did. He paid me well.”
“And you worked for him until you graduated.”
“Yes.” She tilted her head, reacting to the skepticism that was clear in Aymon’s voice. “He was my friend.”
“It strains the imagination.”
“He was kind to me.”
“Perhaps.”
“I never did anything I didn’t want to do,” she said. “The vena helped.”
“I will confess that I don’t understand the appeal,” he said. “At least not on a regular basis.”
She shrugged again. Her eyes found the tin that was still in his left hand. Aymon’s smile was grim. “It helps,” she said.
He slipped the tin back into his pocket. She bit her lip. “If there is anything— other than this— that I can do that will help, tell me,” he said.
“There isn’t,” she said. “Nothing that you can do.”
“Very well.” He looked at her, and she pulled her knees back up to her chest again, curled up on herself. “I do care about you, Kino, very deeply. I want you to understand that.”
“I know.”
“I’m very grateful that nothing worse happened to you on Tyx, and I will take care to make sure nothing like it happens again, if it is within my power to prevent it.”
She was silent, and shook her head. Aymon had no idea what she meant by that, so he was forced to carry on.
“We’ll be at Olar soon, to meet back up with Yan and Sid. You don’t have to come down to the planet if you don’t want to.”
She nodded.
He looked at her for a moment more, then stood. He touched her head, a benediction of sorts, and she stiffened beneath the touch. “God led you to me,” he said. “And I’m glad God hasn’t taken you away from me, yet.”
“Yes,” Kino said. She looked up into his face— her expression was suddenly strange and wide-eyed. “God did bring me here. That’s true.”
Aymon smiled. “Come join me for dinner later, if you’re feeling better.”