Ancillary Sword (Imperial Radch, #2)

by Ann Leckie

Oh, how I missed the rest of myself. I couldn’t rest or comfort one body while sending another to do my work, not anymore. I slept alone, mostly only mildly envying the common soldiers on Mercy of Kalr their small bunks where they slept all together, pressed warm and close. They weren’t ancillaries, it wasn’t the same, wouldn’t be, even if I’d abandoned any pretense to dignity and climbed in with them. I knew that, knew it would be so wholly insufficient that there was no point in wishing for it. But now, this moment, I wanted it so badly that if I had been aboard Mercy of Kalr I’d have done it, curled up among the sleeping Etrepas Ship showed me, and gone to sleep myself, no matter how insufficient it would be. It would be something, at least. A terrible, terrible thing, to deprive a ship of its ancillaries. To deprive an ancillary of its ship. Not, perhaps, as terrible as murdering human beings to make those ancillaries. But a terrible thing nonetheless.

Seivarden’s tears had never wetted any of my uniform jackets, when I had been a ship. “Are you jealous?” “I think I am,” she said. “I’d rather have cut my right arm off than shown weakness, when I was seventeen.” And when she was twenty-seven, and thirty-seven. “I regret that, now.”