She has already met this terrifying intelligence, thank the goddess. This is Mer, who carried her up that freezing ladder like a toy when she first got here. She remembers him going on about freedom and gratitude and…food? She really wasn’t in a good place to remember, emotionally speaking.
“Don’t tell me: it’s your instincts again,” says the android. “How could this thing kill Hood?” he asks, pointing a black finger her way without bothering to look at her. “You couldn’t kill Hood, from what I hear. Not for lack of trying.”
Mer makes a big movement then, a huge rippling of fur and muscle that travels down every one of his—what is that, four?—no, six limbs. Four arms, two legs. Her Network unit would probably tell her that’s a shrug, but without it the gesture is terrifying. He leans back, making it obvious that he is mostly chest. His enormous arms support his weight, while his legs appear to serve mainly as a kickstand. He flexes and scrapes talons against both walls. “I could have killed him, easy,” he says. He pauses, tapping a talon against the floor like a nervous tic. “I just…decided not to.”
The android folds his arms and looks at Mer without speaking.
“Anyway,” says Mer, still tapping. “The suit claims she’s Human, Roche.”
Roche, that’s it. Thank the goddess, now she can carry on a conversation because hey, shiny guy was not going to fly for long—and then the full impact of Mer’s statement thumps her in the chest and raises the hair on the back of her neck.
The suit claims she’s Human.
And now Mer’s face, which was mainly teeth, sprouts dozens of eyes. They blink in waves and patterns, looking in all directions, and then every one of them focuses on Sarya. She grew up with a Widow, which means she recognizes a hunter when one parks its massive bulk outside her quarters and pins her with its predator gaze. But this is something more. These eyes don’t match the rough and simple voice. They pierce her in ways she doesn’t understand. Where her mother used fear to hunt, these eyes employ something even deeper. They hypnotize her. They speak to her, tell her to come closer, to trust them…
“Its registration says Spaal,” says Roche, but his voice has become indistinct. It’s somewhere far away, in a much less important place. “Perhaps the suit is confused. That happens with low-tiers.”
The eyes blink in a wave from the center to the outside. Maybe it’s her imagination, or maybe they are gazing at her with a curiosity more intense than anything she’s ever seen. Tell me, they say without words. Tell me everything.
“Then how did she kill Hood?” asks Mer. He’s talking to Roche, but his eyes are on her. His voice is distant enough to be irrelevant, like the silent roars of the lightning on the planet below.
Roche presents a theory and Mer rebuts it. Mer submits an alternative and Roche rejects it. Sarya hears nothing more than a gentle buzz in her ears. She is caught by the eyes, and there is nothing she can do about it.
And then she becomes aware of an expectant silence, as if she’s been asked a question. She knows what it is. So what are you? Or something like that. She doesn’t remember which one said it, which is odd because their voices are so different, but it doesn’t seem to matter so much. She pulls herself up as if she’s been underwater, but her mind responds slowly in the gaze of the eyes. Still, she forms her lie easily. She has lived her entire life under a false low-tier identity, and the phrases and signs come without effort. She can say, with awkward halts in exactly the right places, phrases like please forgive your friend the Spaal and pardon, my tier is low.
“I’m…” She takes a breath. “I’m Human.”
And then she claps both hands over her mouth.
The dozens of eyes snap closed instantly, as if they are satisfied. Only a solitary pair remain open on Mer’s face, down by the teeth. Unlike the rest, these host a simple, almost bestial expression.
Sarya is breathing hard through her fingers. Her eyes dart between these two witnesses, who are staring at her with expressions she cannot interpret. What the hell did she just claim? Did she really, in the presence of these strangers, say what she thinks she said?
“So you assert,” says Roche, his voice now clear and present in the absence of the eyes, “in spite of the evidence of an extremely unimpressive Network registration, that you are actually a member of an extinct, highly dangerous species.” He tilts his head with the click of multiple lenses.
“I thought a fake registration was impossible,” says Mer. Without the eyes, he is a completely different intelligence. If she met him now, she would assume him to be one of those simple barely legal intelligences you see every day on the lower levels of a mining station. It’s almost like he’s two people in one.
“Illegal, yes,” corrects Roche in a thoughtful murmur. “But I’ve never heard of anything that is impossible.”
Sarya’s heart rate is returning to normal. This isn’t nearly the reception her mother warned her about. No one is trying to hurl her out an airlock yet, for example—though the fact that this seems like a victory may mean that her standards are lower than they should be. And anyway…she can still hear it in her head. I’m Human. A warm and delicious shiver rolls down her spine. So that’s what it feels like. “Well,” she says, feeling as if she is getting her blades back under her, “believe what you want.”
“Then why are you registered as something else?” asks Mer.
Sarya shrugs, Widow-style, with fingertips in lieu of blades. “My mother did that,” she said. “I don’t know how.”
“Was your mother also…?” Even Roche seems unwilling to say the word. Human.
“My mother was a Widow,” says Sarya.
The effect on the other two is exactly what she’d hoped. Now that the eyes are off her, she feels like she can direct the conversation where she wants it. The two glance at each other, probably communicating on some private Network channel. Mer’s fur bristles, making him look even larger, and several talons scrape against the metal of the floor.
“A Widow,” Roche says. “A Human, raised by a Widow.”
“Maybe she did kill Hood,” muses Mer.
“Um,” says Sarya, raising a hand. A question she had been considering in Eleven has returned to the front of her mind. “Speaking of Hood. Didn’t he have a—”
And then Mer’s head falls off.
Sarya shrieks a Widow obscenity and leaps backward into her quarters. The head comes after her, sprouting its own set of arms and legs and looking like a twenty-kilo eye-covered version of the furry behemoth currently crouched in the corridor. She has just decided that she is going to go down swinging when she is stopped by a full-throated roar.