Ninefox Gambit

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHERIS WOKE TRANSFIXED by splinters of a ghost’s carrion glass: invisible and insubstantial, but they hurt as though they pierced each nerve. Carrion bomb, she thought, dredging the memory out of the long-ago briefing. As an exotic weapon, it would have killed Jedao, leaving her free of him.

She remembered the protocol she had read so long ago through a haze of pain: In an emergency, if the general withholds necessary information, the carrion glass remnants can be ingested by a volunteer. Although this procedure is experimental, this will give the general a body so he can be tortured.

The cindermoth was a chrysalis of hard light and heavy fractures and empty spaces where people had been. Every time she moved – to breathe, to blink, to scrabble for purchase on the bruising floor – she felt splinters go into her brain and pin her to Jedao’s memories.

She had a choice. She could take the splinters out and leave them behind. Refuse to look at them.

Or she could scavenge what she could from them. Try to understand Jedao.

The New Anchor Orientation Packet seemed to be from a time long ago and far away, but she remembered Jedao’s warning, when she had first read it, that eating the splinters would drive her mad. Having him around to talk to her all the time had been bad enough. Having him inside her head would undoubtedly be worse.

On the other hand, her world had already gone mad. Kel Command had just turned on her. Her situation was dire. Jedao had clearly known more about what was going on. She needed the information he hadn’t had the time, or the inclination, to give her. What game had he been playing with Kel Command, all those centuries? And what had he known about this Nirai Kujen, whom he had been so desperate to warn her about even as he was about to die?

She had always liked ravens. She would peck what answers she could out of the carrion glass and hope that she could find a workable course of action in them. Her turn to gamble, with her life as the stake.

Gravity was reasserting itself. She had to be careful how she moved. For a while she concentrated on breathing. She had good lungs, but her breaths felt too shallow no matter what she did. It was hard not to panic. If she stood up too suddenly, all her bones would dissolve and she would spill onto the floor like ink out of a jar, a Cheris-shaped blot.

She caught sight of her shadow, and the absence of Jedao’s nine eyes hurt her, but there was no time to grieve.

She swallowed a splinter. It punctured her heart on the way down.