And when they invoked his name, they sounded uncomfortably like me trying to convince Vice Admiral Stoff of what Cobb would do if he were here.
Stars, was this what I sounded like? Like I was merely trying to win a scudding argument, making the specter of Cobb agree with whatever I said?
Jorgen, Alanik said again, are you okay?
I’m fine, I said, and I cringed, glad FM couldn’t hear me.
You aren’t fine, she’d said. You can’t be fine.
She knew. Stars, everyone probably knew. I was trying to hold everything together, but it was all slipping through my fingers and—
Help us! the voice in the nowhere said again.
Stars. It didn’t sound like Gran-Gran. Who was that? Didn’t they know I couldn’t help anyone, not my flight, not even my parents?
“Our lives are stable here,” a greying kitsen said. His skin was loose around his face, and he carried a small cane that he leaned on while he sat. “Why would we risk angering the Superiority? We should be working with them, or we will end up hunted like the humans have been, and we will have no one to blame but ourselves.”
Damn it. The kitsen might have easier lives than we did. They might be able to choose to go play on the beach in the afternoon, or have feasts, or duel each other needlessly because they were squabbling and bored, but if it drove them to that kind of thinking then it was a luxury that bred carelessness. My parents had wanted that kind of luxury for me, for us, and they’d reached for it—and that was why they were dead.
I saw my mother’s face behind the glass, resigned to her fate.
Do better than we did.
But we weren’t doing better. We were having the same damn argument again.
Help us! the voice said from the nowhere. No, voices. There were many of them. Maybe they weren’t real. Maybe it was my own mind conjuring up all the people I was failing—Cobb and my flight and all the people on Detritus who were going to die because I didn’t know what I was doing.
I can’t do better, I thought to my mother. She couldn’t hear me. She wasn’t here with us. She wasn’t in the nowhere. She wasn’t anywhere. She was gone, and soon the rest of us would be too and it would be all my fault.
I tried to take a deep breath, but I couldn’t. The room was stifling, and the walls were closing in, and that Superiority ship exploded and contracted again and again in my mind, the bits of debris flying outward into the void. There was a hollowness in my chest where my soul used to be, where the part of me that loved my parents—that cared and felt—had been kept. Now it was nothing but emptiness, and for the first time I was glad Spensa wasn’t here. I didn’t want her to know. I didn’t want her to see. The shame of it all coiled inside me and then exploded outward like the Superiority ship—
Boom.
Bits of the nowhere ripped through my mind, coalescing into physical waves and bursting out like shrapnel from a bomb. The explosion caught the platforms on which Kauri and Goro were hovering and pitched them to the side, dumping the kitsen to the floor. Adi’s cup tilted wildly, bits of the sides chipping off. The force of it knocked several of the kitsen in the front rows back in their seats.
Alanik grabbed me by the arm. She seemed unharmed but—
What just happened?
Snuggles and Boomslug suddenly appeared at my feet. “Boom!” Boomslug said. The senators were all staring at me, and many of them began to talk at once. The pin couldn’t parse what they were all saying, but I gathered that not one of them was happy with me.
“What the scud was that?” FM asked.
“Mindblades,” Alanik said. “Jorgen, how did you—”
“I didn’t mean to,” I said. “I didn’t mean to.” Saints and stars, I’d just been talking about peace and now I did this in the middle of a diplomatic meeting?
“Boom,” Boomslug said again, and he started to nuzzle my ankle as if in sympathy.
He hadn’t done this. He and Snuggles had felt it through the nowhere and had come to comfort me. I’d somehow manifested mindblades in the middle of a room full of scudding diplomats and now—
“Order!” Adi called. “The house will come to order!”
Goro regarded me with satisfaction. “Now you see!” he bellowed from the floor, close enough that the pin managed to pick him up. “The humans speak only the language of violence! It is the only means they’ll respond to!”
I couldn’t catch all of it, but several of the kitsen raised their fists in that gesture of solidarity.
Stars, I’d ruined everything. “That’s not true!” I said. It came out louder than I wanted it to, my voice overpowering Adi’s as she called for order.
“That’s not true,” I said again, and the senators began to quiet. Several of them had scrambled over the backs of their seats to use them as shields. “We’re not here to hurt you,” I said. “We only want you to understand that we have tools to fight the Superiority. It is possible for us to beat them, but only if we work together.”
That was a lie on two fronts. I hadn’t done that on purpose as a display of power and I didn’t know if we really had the power to defeat the Superiority, even together.
But Saints and stars, I was in it now. “I understand. It’s a lot to ask for you to side against the Superiority. I know they have better ships and better technology. But that’s been true since long before I was born, and my people have been successfully resisting them for eighty years! We don’t know anything about you or your culture, but we know about them, because we have fought them and we have survived. We don’t want what happened to us to happen to anyone else. We don’t want anyone else to be hunted, to have to live in hiding, to be killed in droves every time you so much as stick your heads out of the ground.”
The kitsen’s eyes widened as they watched me, and several of them laid their ears back in what I thought might be fear. I didn’t know if it was still me they were afraid of, or the Superiority, but I’d made this mess. I’d insisted on coming here. I’d scudding lost control in the middle of the most important diplomatic meeting I’d ever been in, and stars, I had to fix it.
“You may feel like you have peace and prosperity here, but Kauri is right. The Superiority is trying to make a deal with the delvers, and they’re going to come for anyone who opposes them. This might be our last chance to resist before they have the power they need to control every planet in the galaxy. How long do you think your planet will last without allies?”
FM put a hand on my arm, and I startled. Scud, was I messing this up? But beside me, she smiled and nodded.
Keep going, Alanik said in my mind. You have to convince them.