“You hacked her room’s systems?”
“No,” Long Chau said. “I did that when I first came in. I’m just showing you what I’ve been seeing since.”
“All right,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I can ask, but you’re aware I don’t know every shipmind in the belt.” She put out a query to Sharpening Needles into Steel, asking them about Hai Anh.
“I need a point of entry, not a personal introduction. All her things still seem to be here—books, vids, tangerines. Nothing in here indicates she was about to leave for a trip of some duration.” She knelt, picked up the book on the top shelf. “Love in the Time of Mulberry Seas. One of those mythical romances that’s been all the rage in the belt.” Her tone was dismissive.
“I’ve read it,” The Shadow’s Child said, sharply. And many of the other titles as well—she and Hai Anh obviously chose books in similar ways.
Long Chau had the grace to relent. “It’s well-written. This one is bookmarked.” A bot crawled up her hands, settled on her fingertip. “And she’d been making regular progress through it the last few days.”
The Shadow’s Child’s sensors had been trying to flag up something for a while: it finally climbed up the pile of priorities. In the doorway, behind her. She turned and saw the girl who’d accompanied them there—Tuyet?—standing in the narrow doorway, staring open-mouthed at Long Chau.
“You’re a medium,” she said.
Long Chau’s face didn’t move. “I don’t speak with the spirits. Or the dead. Or only for a very narrow range of definitions of ‘speak’.”
Not very social. The Shadow’s Child bit back a curse, and said, “Was she your friend? Hai Anh?”
Tuyet bit her lip, dancing back and forth. She was young, and thin. She barely looked old enough to have been allowed to join the sisterhood. “She kept to herself, a lot.”
“Books and games,” Long Chau said, nodding. “She was shy, wasn’t she? Not very confident.”
“Grandmother Khue said—” Tuyet stopped, and visibly changed what she’d been about to say. “It’s a thing that happens to a lot of us. Thinking we’re alone and that we don’t matter.” It sounded like a lecture she herself had been given. “That’s why we have the sisterhood.”
The Shadow’s Child only had a rough idea of what obligations comprised the sisterhood, or of what use Long Chau could possibly think she’d be. Sharpening Needles into Steel was, in typical fashion, rounding up all the younger ships and asking about Hai Anh, or sending them to check manifestos. Nothing seemed to stand out: Hai Anh herself never seemed to have been a passenger anywhere. But she had plunged, alive, into deep spaces. There had to be a connection.
“She didn’t get on with Grandmother Khue, did she?” Long Chau said.
Tuyet looked startled, but said nothing.
“She locked her communications to the sisterhood, and there was some pretty strong encryption on parts of this room.” She made a gesture, and a chessboard appeared on the table, its pieces still scattered in the midst of a game. “It could have been a general quarrel, but nothing else in said communications indicates that. More likely she no longer wanted Grandmother Khue to monitor her.”
“She doesn’t spy on us!” Tuyet’s face was flushed. “You don’t understand what it’s like. Everyone in the Inner Habitats families would love to tear us apart. If it means slightly fewer secrets...” She shook her head.
The Shadow’s Child bit back a curse. If that was Long Chau’s way to solicit witnesses... “The sisterhood were the ones who got you out of trouble.”
Tuyet didn’t speak. She was watching the chessboard, with an unreadable expression on her face. One bot rested on her wrist, trembling, as if aching to be let loose into the room.
“I’ve met her kind before,” Long Chau said. “She rules. She has to, because disunity is weakness, and the sisterhood can’t afford to be weak.”
Tuyet was shaking now. “You’re making it sound... dirty.”
“I proffer no moral judgment.” Long Chau picked up one of the chess pieces, looked at it. “A good game, but her opponent was far weaker than her. Did you come here often?”
“Disaster” might be too weak a word for how the interview was turning out. The Shadow’s Child gave up on all subtlety, and went on the offensive. “You said you’d met Grandmother Khue’s kind before. During the uprising?”
Long Chau looked mildly surprised. “I didn’t serve, if that’s what you’re asking for.”
The Shadow’s Child had, but of course mindships weren’t given a choice about whether to enlist. “Can you answer the question?”
Long Chau raised an eyebrow. “I worked for someone very much like her, once.” She looked, again, at Tuyet. Her voice was kinder. “Escaping one cage for another?”
“You don’t understand anything,” Tuyet said. “She cares. My family didn’t.” Her accent was rough: Outer Habitats, and not the social class that ever saw much of examinations or rising in the world.
A long, uncomfortable silence. At last, Long Chau stretched. “I apologise. I wouldn’t want to see you hurt.”
“I don’t see what makes you think I’d be hurt.”
The Shadow’s Child was sorting out threads—a low priority one, sending a search query for anyone of Long Chau’s age working for an Inner Habitat family; and a higher one, reading through the report Sharpening the Steel into Needles had sent through.
In the heartbeat that it took Long Chau to turn towards the table, The Shadow’s Child read and digested the older
