Chapter 165
The child hung in my arms the way a cat hangs when someone lifts it by the scruff—limp, halfway through being carried. The pain had taken even the strength to twist.
"Why are you asking Tori that?"
Meriwether looked at me as if I'd said something odd. I glanced around. Fear, confusion, anger; the frustration of not daring to speak; irritation; boredom. Plenty of people were watching, and every face held something different.
"Here, the only one who pities the child and can still bring herself to speak to me is Victoria."
What I was really doing was forcing a verdict on the child's fate. If it was Victoria—sympathetic as she was—she would never leave that arm the way it was. Becoming a Harvester must never be my will. Were I famous, I could simply ask whether they wanted something and let them choose it for themselves, but no such look was mixed into this crowd. That was why, when I made the first Harvester in the Brightshin Slums, that once I had to force it.
"And if Tori says to leave it? What are you going to do then?"
The phrasing was spiteful. Even so, she meant to make a Harvester of the child while claiming the child had wished for it.
Then the child would have to be left cut off, wouldn't they?
I put in my mouth the sort of thing a monster would say.
"I won't do anything."
I didn't add that I wouldn't act unless they wished it. If every word I spoke had to be the truth, I had no choice but to be careful with them.
I turned from Meriwether—her face bright with interest—and looked at Victoria. She wasn't following the talk. She was using her ability to stop the blood coming from the child's hand. Then something seemed to occur to her. She looked down at her own hand and gave it a wave.
The hand lying on the ground rose into the air. It flew to the child's wrist and stopped a little short, and liquid drew out of both sides in straight lines. For a moment I thought she meant to kill the child, wringing out still more fluid, and I watched. She turned the hand gently until the columns shooting from the two cut faces lined up perfectly, and the instant they did, they joined.
"God. You can use healing magic with that as the starting point?"
Light welled up from inside the cut, as if she were welding the severed place, taking the moisture there as her origin. A moment later the light died, and what was left was a hand without a single scar.
"My arm?"
The child rasped it, nearly voiceless, and looked down. A vicious way to join something. Closer to repairing a machine than treating a person: fit the joint, then weld it shut. And a person is a biological machine.
"Whoa. This actually works."
Victoria stared at what she'd done with the look of someone who had never believed it would succeed. A murmur ran through the people around us. She stepped in and felt the arm all over.
"Yeah. It's on. The arm was more complicated than I thought."
She lifted the child out of my arms, set them down, and gave their back a pat. My Harvester candidate fled into the alley and vanished. I was still watching the fish that had gotten away when Victoria's eyes found mine.
"This is the right thing. Isn't it?"
I answered, letting the deep sigh out only on the inside.
"Yes. It is."
For all of you, that is what's right. Victoria Vett. But remember this: the favorability I hold for you has dropped straight down.
"I thought Bell was a good person. Guess not?"
Meriwether sidled up and asked. At that, Victoria started to speak and then shut her mouth. She seemed to know I wasn't good by nature.
"By a human measure, I'm evil."
I said it knowing full well it wouldn't sound truly evil. Declaring what you are almost never does any good. A good person doesn't act because they've judged the act to be good. They act because they take it as the thing that obviously ought to be done. Living kindly is simply ordinary. Which is why a society that honors individuality can so easily become a place where the wicked thrive. If you can't bind people to the ordinary, you lack the strength to catch whatever sticks out.
Anyway. It means there is no liar quite like the person who says they are good. Even a fact that plain, Meriwether would know. So, having called myself bad, I pointed at her this time.
"Meriwether was bad, too."
"Because I cut the kid's hand off?"
"No. Victoria came out to have fun, and now her mood is ruined. Take responsibility."
Too much kindness is hard to use. No one fails to know what end the prophets of a universal religion tend to meet. You have to be moderately vile. Then the one using you can think you're the same as they are—or a hypocrite worse than they are—and use you at ease. Like the idiots who say they hate anyone too perfect: fools who find their own lack by comparison are easy to read. Fearing gods, loathing strong AI—that's the same thing. They're afraid of a being better than themselves in every way, because until now they found their worth by comparison, and they can't bear being worth less in all of it. So you leave an easy weakness where they can see it. Is that what they call a human touch?
"Hmph. Aren't you looking after Victoria a little too much? Or is it that? Dependence?"
"Meriwether Allcat. Are you actually a bodyguard?"
Whether she was trusting in some cognitive distortion, or simply jabbing too openly, I asked it once, as a warning. She took a step back and apologized.
"Sorry, sorry. Guess I'm just that interested in you, Bell. I can never tell what you're thinking."
As a sentence, it wasn't a real apology. If her cognition were dulled, she wouldn't feel how wrong it sat. Even if the ability wasn't that strong—even if an ordinary person ought to notice something off, right here.
I decided to pretend I hadn't.
"Yes. All right."
That was when it came.
"It's her. That's her."
A mutter, strangely foul. I looked toward the sound: farther in, where the alley narrowed again. Midsummer. Unless the sun stood at the zenith, no light reached that stretch, and from it a gaze was fixed this way. Exactly the same kind of person as the poor who had been in Brightshin. Only the gaze wasn't on me. It was on Victoria.
Pulling their voices out of the noise that filled the background wasn't hard. I can hold a great many thoughts at once. They were murmuring words like these.
They knew only fragments. Gathered up, those fragments could be me, or they could be Victoria. There was also the girl in the slums who had awakened a healing ability. But that one was not yet that person. She had never used the healing on anyone outside her family, and she had used it two days ago.
A Harvester, the moment they gain a power, understands at once what they hold. I don't know until they use it. Even if they handle it with some familiarity from the start, everyone has a first time. Trial and error. They always test how far the ability will go, and only then do I learn that the Harvester has gained it. If that girl had hidden hers for quite a long while, there might still be powered people I hadn't grasped. I would have to watch that more carefully from now on.
That was that. The ones in the alley, the moment our eyes met, ran. They could have let a little more hunger show.
Meanwhile Victoria looked around and sighed. Already too many people were staring straight at her.
"So much for ever coming back here."
"Victoria made the wrong choice."
I stepped in front of her. Had this been Choseol's body, I would still have been a small girl. This one was, too. I reached out, took her hand, put strength into it until she bent at the waist, and caught her head in both hands.
"What do you mean, I made the wrong choice?"
Even with her face held, she asked it without letting the sulk go.
I said what I wanted to say, with Meriwether as the excuse.
"From the moment you took my hand there, you have been choosing wrong, straight through."
I pulled both her cheeks out hard, let go, and turned my back. Meriwether was watching me with interest. I walked toward her.
"It's the same even now."
Meriwether was turning my words over. With high probability, someone working in a place like the kingdom's intelligence service. The king I had met last time had been suspecting me as well. What I was. Probably for Aurora's sake. From the moment they contracted with me to save Aurora, it was already too late for everything. And yet.
"Let's go, Meriwether. No one here is calling for me."
"Well, well. Did Tori do something you hate? If it's my fault, I'm sorry, so how about the two of you make up here before we go?"
Mm. An easy malice, right out where I could see it. Force a reconciliation here, and the relationship would twist even further. That was the intent. Interesting.
Very well. We would do it that way.
"She says so, Victoria."
"You've lost your damn mind."
"I think so too."
A handling of the matter that took feeling into account not at all. An act meant, by the look of the context, to break a bond.
"Are you going to make up?"
At the question Victoria stared at me. And the air went bone-dry. Dry air, without a trace of moisture, pulled the water out of a body. Mine, by contrast, was damp. Feeling the cold, I scratched at myself.
"You need help?"
"No."
Victoria stared a moment longer, then walked past me. The air went back to what it had been. She didn't so much as glance at Meriwether. She passed her, too, and left the alley.
"Yeah. This is a mess. But Bell, you were pretty harsh too. However much something bothers you, you should've made up like a grown-up back there."
At once she split the world into adult and child and shoved me into the weaker place. Mm. Gaslighting, easy to read. I meant to pretend I was falling for it, so I shook my head.
"Victoria's the one who did wrong."
I'm not bad. Someone else is. The sort of denial a child would make. See? Meriwether's smile only thickened.
"Tori was being weird, I'll give you that. Getting on me just because I cut some slum kid's wrist. And then brushing you off, when you were the one trying to treat them. Almost like she meant to take your place."
The threat to where I stood was so obvious I had to hold in a laugh. Worry on the surface, and underneath a wedge driven between us.
"Is that so?"
"But you've got to make up, right? It's not like you don't want to. Today's just a little much, so let's think it over after a day."
In short: pour your troubles out to me. And pouring out troubles meant pouring out my thoughts. An intelligence officer, indeed.
The answer she would like best, here, was to be ignored. I gave her none and started for the lodging. Meriwether, working to hide how pleased she was, soothed me as we went, and here and there slipped in a whisper fit to push Victoria and me apart. Like someone under a charm, I began to answer a little at a time, and we returned to the lodging.
Meriwether didn't seem to know.
In that last moment with Victoria, the air had gone bone-dry, and my stomach had been wet. Victoria had said Meriwether was strange, and that if I understood, I was to scratch my arm. When she asked whether I needed help, I said I didn't.
Sorry, Meriwether.
Victoria is probably smarter than you think. Don't underestimate someone who, because she had to, and alone, slaughtered the sahuagin, killed the one who summoned the great wyrm, and then meant to blow herself up along with their nest. Victoria is strong against adversity. She can spot a nasty trick and answer it.
The warmth I could have right now would come from taking Meriwether's side. This time, I mean to take hers. The moment I can have that warmth has moved farther off, but so long as I don't cause an accident, a plentiful future is waiting. You could say that. It feels less like fast food and more like a hard health regimen—nutrition and nothing else—stretching on from here, and that hurts.
What matters is that the plan to build the Automatic Warmth System is proceeding without any great trouble.
So in the meantime. A few hundred years.
Play with me, and enjoy it.