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And they were off. Dafyd spent the next half hour echoing back everything Llaren Morse said, either with exact words or near synonyms, or else pulling out what Dafyd thought the man meant and offering it back.
Dafyd listened because he was good at listening. He had a lot of practice. It kept the spotlight off him, people broadly seemed more hungry to be heard than they knew, and usually by the end of it, they found themselves liking him. Which was convenient, even on those occasions when he didn’t find himself liking them back.
Later, when he stood in the eye of a storm that burned a thousand worlds, he’d remember how it all started with Else Yannin’s hand on his arm and his need to give her a reason to keep it there.
Looked at in a wide enough frame, maybe her problems weren’t so large. They just seemed that way when she held them up against her eyes where they’d block out all the light.
Ravens hopped along the branches of the pecan tree just beyond Nöl’s yard, conferring with each other on the mysterious business of corvids.
“It’s his pathological move. I get it.” “I don’t know the term.” “It’s the thing people do when they’re working on instinct. When they’re stressed and overwhelmed, there’s something they go to by reflex. Tonner focuses down on something small enough to control. Campar makes jokes. Jessyn withdraws. Everyone has something.”
It was a crisis, and in a crisis you did what needed doing. Stopping to think was a short path to panic. He didn’t have time for that.
“I think some important scientific questions have finally been answered. Alien life exists, and they are assholes.”
“You’re joking.” “Of course I am,” Campar said. “It’s how I keep from spending all day screaming. What do you do?”
It felt like an accomplishment, and an accomplishment felt like a little sip of power in an ocean of powerlessness. Nothing could be normal, but work could sustain them.
The spiritual knives she’d carved herself with for as long as she could remember became a weapon looking for someone else’s blood.
“Go inseminate your Sovran, we aren’t going to tell you feces eaters anything.”
Rekt
When I can’t make fun of it, I can’t do anything at all,” Campar said.
For a moment, her eyes met Jessyn’s. It was a look that she would remember for years. For the rest of her life. The peaceable old woman who had worked, her lover at her side, in Tonner Freis’s labs on Anjiin was gone. The angry, grief-stung woman was absent as well. In that moment—that fraction of a second—Synnia had become something regal. Something more than human, or else what humans can become when they face the universe and refuse to look away. There was no fear and no pleasure and no hope. Maybe serenity, if serenity could sometimes be terrible.
The Carryx had made him their high priest, the only voice between them and a vicious, capricious god. So, he needed a prophecy, then. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to us all,” Dafyd said. “But I just want to say while we’re still in the same place, while we’re here together, that I’m going to find a way to kill them.” The faces in the circle were sober, filled with doubt, but yearning to believe. “I’m going to learn everything about them. I’m going to figure out how to get in their heads. And I’m going to kill them all and burn their fucking towers to the ground. It’s my war now.”
