She needed to keep Tuyet busy during that time. A young girl, an infant by shipminds’ lives, who looked away from her, who didn’t enjoy strangers invading her spaces. Whose prickliness hid a deep unease. Guilt? Not quite that, either—The Shadow’s Child had seen more than enough guilt in the years of the uprising, more than enough soldiers who’d killed or caused to be killed.
Time for a stab in the dark. “You know how she died, don’t you? Or think you do.”
No answer.
“The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen,” The Shadow’s Child said. “I wasn’t aware you had a mindship as a member of the sisterhood.”
“He has a past,” Long Chau said, unfolding from her trance. “The mindship.”
“You read it?” The Shadow’s Child said. It had been pages and pages of data, none of it in formats friendly for humans. “It was—”
“Long, and hard to digest. I know. I’m fast.” Her smile was tight; her movements now fast, with none of that drawn-out languidness, but rather those of a tiger on the trail. “Do you have other questions you want to ask her?”
“I—”
Long Chau unfolded. “We’re leaving.”
“I don’t understand—” Her other search, the one on the Inner Habitat families, was yielding too many results to be of use. Even if she’d known Long Chau’s date of birth it would have been useless. Curses.
“I told you before: I don’t make guesses,” Long Chau said. “But I can read patterns, and I don’t like what I’m seeing here.”
“You were the one who told me to look up mindships!”
“Yes.” Long Chau looked mildly irritated again, as if pausing to explain things to a five-year-old. “Can you trust me for a moment? I know what I’m doing, but I don’t have the leisure to explain.” She looked, again, at Tuyet. And then, to The Shadow’s Child’s surprise, she stopped by Tuyet’s side, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. “Be careful, will you? With the mindship.”
The girl looked as Long Chau as if she was mad. “He’s not a killer.” She held herself taut, and behind her was the glimmer of something else—scales and mane and snout, with fine lines showing the gradients of temperature and pressure maintained for her safety and comfort—her own shadow-skin, her life insurance.
“That’s not what I said,” Long Chau said, shaking her head. She moved away, as if the rest of the conversation was of little import.
The Shadow’s Child looked, again, at the small room, the remnants of Hai Anh’s life. Tuyet’s shadow-skin had vanished back into her clothes, but a hint of its presence remained, darkening the planes of her face. What was Long Chau up to? “I’m coming,” The Shadow’s Child said, finally, though she wasn’t sure if that was the right thing to do.
* * *
Outside the House of Saltless Prosperity, The Shadow’s Child caught up with Long Chau. “Are you ever going to bother explaining?”
Long Chau waved, irritably. “Let’s find a teahouse. I don’t suppose you do blends outside of deep spaces?”
“You’re drugged enough as it is,” The Shadow’s Child said. How did Long Chau manage to get her angry so quickly?
“Not very much,” Long Chau said. “That’s part of the issue.”
At this hour of the afternoon, the teahouse was deserted, people having left the heart food and tea in favour of dinner in restaurants. Long Chau relaxed back in her chair, her bots clinging to the back of her hands—even without bothering to look, The Shadow’s Child could see the needles slipping into her skin. By the time the food had arrived on the table, Long Chau was languid once more. The bots didn’t vanish. They remained on her hands, their surfaces shining in the teahouse’s shifting light.
They were in a private booth. The overlays had been altered by the habitat’s Mind to create walls that would muffle most sounds. The Shadow’s Child had been offered a choice of music, but wanted none: no possible distraction.
“The Sorrow of Four Gentlemen,” Long Chau said. “Did you ever hear of the Church of Blissful Atonement?”
“No,” The Shadow’s Child said. The words were outsider parlance. “An outsider one?”
“It was outsider-inspired. I doubt whoever set this up really was a believer in their religion.” Long Chau hesitated. “They sent their members into deep spaces as part of their services. It kept them humble.”
Alone and crushed by unreality—knowing that there were no rules, and that nothing they did or thought would matter, out there—that time was an illusion, death or madness a certainty... Bad for her, considerably worse for humans. The Shadow’s Child shivered. She sipped at her tea—even if it was merely sensory memory heated up and served to her by the teahouse’s network, the taste cleansed her palate. “The mindship.”
“Yes. And unreality suits. Mindships, no matter how illusory a protection they might be, stand against deep spaces. Remove that comfort, and you’ll have people scared out of their minds and grovelling before you.”
She could have looked it up; could have asked the network to tell her what had happened. But she’d have had to look at pictures, at vids, at events. “You used the past tense. I presume something went wrong,” she said, slowly. If only her blends worked on herself, and outside of deep spaces.
Long Chau looked at her, for a while. When she started speaking again, her words were slow and measured. Considered. “They left a ten-year-old girl in deep spaces for some time. As a punishment.”
“They—” She had no words. At least she was a mindship. At least she could endure it all—even if it wasn’t true, even if the thought of diving in deep made her feel cold and squeezed. “The girl—”
“She survived,” Long Chau said. “It may not have been a kindness. You’d know this better than I, but the deep spaces altered
