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Jedao’s new theory involved Nirai experimentation that he didn’t recall agreeing to. Of course, in the heptarchate they didn’t need to ask your permission.
“All right,” Jedao said, “you win. I don’t have any useful arguments against the insane. If this is a training exercise, you can fail me on it.” Which was going to suck, because he’d been having difficulty with his math classes. “I will have to work hard for the rest of the term to make up for it, but I’m not afraid of hard work.”
“She wouldn’t have done you much good,” Mikodez said briskly. “What she and Jedao have in common is that their vocabulary for fixing problems is mainly limited to shooting them. That’s all very well when you’re on the battlefield. It’s not very useful in the rest of the real world.”
The bigger question was, why would the average Kel go along with what sounded like mass brainwashing? One more thing he didn’t remember.
Sieve, on the other hand, presented Hemiola with a touching and entirely impractical sculpture of bent wires and other scraps. “In case the real hexarch wants some extra decorations once you find him,” it said.
“That file format is unspeakably old,” Jedao said. “Kujen was a stickler for backwards compatibility. Still, it means we can read the records without trouble. I never thought I’d be grateful for his obsessive insistence on standardized formats.”
That’s something we only get to confuse them with once, but since it’s lying around it’d be stupid not to use it.”
Jedao was starting to like Talaw as well. So what if they hated him? It might be good for him to have someone to keep him from getting sloppy.
It hurt him that cold-blooded murderer appeared to be a valid subset of strong as far as the Kel were concerned.
“The presence of atrocity doesn’t mean you have to put your life on hold. You’ll arguably be better at dealing with the horrible things you have to witness, or even to perpetrate, if you allow yourself time to do the small, simple things that make you happy. Instead of looking for ways to destroy yourself.”
If this was what formation instinct did for you, Jedao wanted some for himself.
He’d already been notorious after assassinating two of his own cadets years back; assassinating the hexarchs had only cemented his reputation. It worked against them as often as it worked for them.
His immortality—his ability to inhabit other bodies—was an exotic effect. It only worked within the high calendar’s sphere of influence.
He knew the lie was a good one because he wanted so badly for it to be true.
The surprise review was as much a surprise to him as it was to them, which made it the best kind. Jedao set his uniform to full formal.
“You thought it was going to be some horrible moment in a trench, or someone dying in my arms, didn’t you?” Muyyed said. “No. It was the surreal experience of being a Kel with a gun that I wasn’t going to use. As it turned out, most of my life was spent hanging around not using my gun, but as an excitable young Kel you never think about that.”
In the meantime, it distracted itself by reviewing footage of assassination attempts from its least favorite dramas and replacing the existing scores (and sometimes the dialogue) with its own creations.
Inesser’s attention returned to the tactical map. The most maddening part of any battle was the waiting. They’d laid in their preparations long before.
“That’s not because I care about hurting people. I order my share of assassinations. It’s because it doesn’t work in an interrogation context. I don’t believe in doing things that don’t work. It’s wasteful.”
The straightforwardness of the transaction, even the pragmatism of offering him a way out—even if it later proved to be a lie—was, in its way, better than Kujen’s elaborate pretense of kindness.
Learning the language of her mother’s people wouldn’t bring back all the Mwennin who’d been slaughtered, and teaching mathematics to schoolchildren wouldn’t unknot the centuries of damage the high calendar had done to society. But that didn’t mean those things weren’t worth doing. Someone had to carry on with the small acts that kept civilization moving. And this time it was her turn.
