sister Sophia.
Also, the other brown-haired man from the party turned up—the one who had left the party at the same time as Roan. He turned out to be someone that I knew or, at least, that I was aware of. He was Hiram Majors sym Preston, and his scent had not been on Theodora. I was relieved to know that once I knew he was with the Gordons. He came to me on his own when he heard that I was looking for Roan . . . and heard why I was looking for him.
“I was talking to Jack last night,” he told me when he caught up with me as Joel and I were leaving the office complex. “Turns out he and my sister both went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh at the same time. He knew her. Saw her in some play—she was a drama major—and then ran into her the next day and invited her to have coffee with him.” Hiram shrugged. “I’m cut off from my family out here. It was good
to talk to someone from home.”
“Did he leave abruptly last night?” I asked.
“Yes,” Hiram admitted. “I think he had been watching your . . . Theodora?” “That was her name.”
“I hadn’t really noticed her until she walked past us and out the door, and Jack looked at her and said he had to go do something for Katharine. Said he’d forgotten until that minute.” Hiram shook his head.
“That’s why I remember him so clearly.”
“God,” Joel said. “What a stupid thing for one symbiont to say to another.” “Why?” I asked, not thinking.
They both stared at me. Joel answered, “You don’t forget something your Ina tells you to do. You can’t. That’s one of the first things you learn as a symbiont. Jack Roan was—I guess—so eager to go after Theodora that he told a really stupid lie.”
I asked Layla Cory, Preston’s first, to let me know when he was awake. Then I went back to the guest house to talk with Wright, Brook, and Celia. “Jill Renner saw Jack talking to Theodora,” Brook said when I told them about Jack Roan. “She recognized him because he’s so short,” Wright said. “She’d noticed him before.”
“Where were they talking?” I asked.
“Outside,” he said. “Near Hayden’s house. It was around two thirty or three this morning. She was on her way home.”
“Jill said she couldn’t hear what they were saying,” Celia said. “But it didn’t look like anything bad was happening. I mean, Jill said he wasn’t touching her or anything.”
As soon as Layla Cory phoned me, I left my symbionts at the guest house, went to Preston, and told him what had happened and what I had learned. We talked in his den, next to his bedroom. The den was a windowless, wood-paneled room with leather-covered chairs, oriental rugs on the floor, and many shelves of old, leather-covered books. It felt, somehow, like a cave—the cave Preston was born from each day.
“Katharine Dahlman,” he said, and he shook his head. “I’ve known Katharine for three centuries. Her family and mine . . . well, I can’t say we’ve been friends, but we’ve usually gotten along. Are you sure?” We sat facing one another in the vast leather chairs. I had slipped off my shoes and curled up in the chair because it was easier than sitting with my legs sticking straight out or sitting forward on the edge with my feet dangling well above the floor. It was a comfortable chair to curl up in.
Under different circumstances, I would have been completely content there.
“I’m sure my Theodora is dead,” I said, “murdered by being hit so hard that part of her skull was broken. I’m sure Jack Roan sym Katharine Dahlman followed her from the party at Philip’s house after lying about why he was leaving the party. Jill Renner went to the same parties as Theodora, and she said early this morning she saw Roan talking to Theodora near Hayden’s house. Sometime after that, Zane Carter saw Roan leaving Punta Nublada. I can’t claim to know more than that, but that should be enough.”
Preston looked at me for a moment, then shook his head.
“I loved Theodora, and she was mine,” I said. “She came to me willingly, eagerly. And now, because she loved me, she’s dead.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“I can’t prove it,” I said. “But I know it. So do you.” I took a deep breath. “I promised Martin Harrison I wouldn’t kill anyone before I talked to you or Hayden. And because the Council goes on tonight, I can’t try to track Roan.” I took another breath. “Preston, what can I do? She trusted herself to me. I want a life for her life. I will have a life for her life.”
Preston turned his face away. “Roan’s life?” “Katharine’s life!”
“No.”
I said nothing more. I would have Katharine Dahlman’s life. We would not play the game of killing off one another’s symbionts as though they weren’t even people, as though they were nothing.
I jumped down from the chair, grabbed my shoes, and started to walk away from him.
“Who will protect the rest of your symbionts if you kill Katharine?” Preston demanded. “Her family will come after you. You’ll have stepped outside the law, and they will be free to protect themselves. They’ll kill you, and they’ll kill your symbionts, too, if they try to help you. And of course they will try. Do you want the rest of your people dead?”
“The Dahlmans are the ones who stepped outside the law!”
“I agree with you; they almost certainly have. But that isn’t yet proved.”
“My family is gone!” I said, turning to face him again. “My memory of them is gone. I can’t even mourn them properly because for me, they never really lived. Now I have begun to relearn who I am, to rebuild my life, and my enemies are still killing my people. Where is there safety for my symbionts or for me?”
“Go on with the Council of Judgment.”
If he had been anyone other than Preston, I would have walked away without bothering to comment. But
Preston had become important to me. It wasn’t only that I liked him. He was Daniel’s elderfather. And he favored a mating between his sons and me. “Why?” I demanded. “Why should I wait?”
“Think about why this was done, Shori. Think. You were very much in control of yourself last night. If your memory were intact, you wouldn’t have been, you couldn’t have been so calm as you sat in the same room with the people who probably had your families killed. I don’t think you were expected to be calm. I think the Silks and perhaps the Dahlmans expected you not only to look unusual with your dark skin, but to be out of your mind with pain, grief, and anger, to be a pitiable, dangerous, crazed thing. We Ina don’t handle loss as well as most humans do. It’s a much rarer thing with us, and when it happens,
the grief is . . . almost unbearable.”
I looked away from him. “I know what the grief is like!”
“Of course you do. You stand there hugging yourself as though you were trying to hold yourself together. They did this to you, Shori. They want you this way!”
I found myself leaning against the wall, wanting to slide down it, wanting to dissolve to the floor. “What can I do?” I said. “How can Katharine be punished when the Silks are the only ones everyone is paying attention to?”
“The facts are what the Council is supposed to pay attention to.”
“But Katharine Dahlman is a member of the Council.”
“Challenge her tonight. Tell the Council what has happened just as you told me. Facts only. Let them draw their own conclusions. Let them question you. Then ask that Katharine be removed from the Council.”
“And they’ll do it? All I have to do is ask, and they’ll do it?”
“Yes. They’ll question her. Then they’ll do it because they’ll know you’re telling the truth, and they’ll decide her guilt or innocence as well as her punishment—if there is to be punishment—tomorrow night, when they decide what to do about the Silks. But once she leaves the Council, someone else will have to go, too. Chances are it will be Vlad.”
If there was to be punishment? If? If they didn’t punish her, I would. I would kill her. I would find a way to do it, a way that would not leave my symbionts unprotected. Perhaps I could find a human criminal—a murderer—and have him kill her and then die himself before he could be made to say who had sent him. Katharine’s people would know as I knew, but if she could get away with it, so could I. I had to do something. What I wanted to do was tear her apart with my teeth and hands. Maybe it would come to that.
Then my mind registered the other thing that Preston had said. Vladimir Leontyev, my advocate, one of my mothers’ fathers, off the Council. “Why?” I demanded.
“Numerical balance. All Councils of Judgment must have an odd number of members. If Katharine were to leave the Council because of an injury or an emergency at home, her sister Sophia would take her place. Under the circumstances, I don’t think you or your advocate would find Sophia any more acceptable than Katharine.”
“I agree,” I said. Who knew whether this was something both sisters had agreed to do or something
Katharine had thought of on her own.
“Also,” Preston said, “it will strike people as reasonable that both you and the Silks lose your advocates.”
“It’s as though they’re playing a game. After all, I’m not trying to get at her because she’s the Silks’
advocate.”
“It’s not a game, Shori. The Council will know why Katharine must go. But it will be best for you if you do this according to custom.” He frowned, looked at me, then looked away. “You, more than anyone, must show that you can follow our ways. You must not give the people who have decided to be your enemies any advantage. You must seem more Ina that they.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“You know enough. When
