Seven years ago. A year before the uprising that tore the belt apart. So easy for a wayward, suspect teacher to slip away, and to reinvent herself as a dilettante detective—to take on cases to amuse herself, living on blood money.
In fact—
Long Chau still had the money. In all likelihood, she’d used it to pay The Shadow’s Child.
The Shadow’s Child was going to be sick.
“You’ve gone very silent,” Bao said. “She paid you, didn’t she? That big lump transaction you gave me access to the other day—”
Too sharp, but then Bao hadn’t gotten to where she was by being stupid.
“I’ll sort things out,” The Shadow’s Child said, slowly, carefully. She felt, dimly, her core stretch against the connectors in the heartroom, their reassuring coolness against her.
She’d return it. She’d find some other way to earn her living—more customers, or perhaps some deliveries on the edge of deep spaces. Something. Anything.
“I see,” Bao said. And then, with a shake of her head, “You worry too much about morality.”
“Don’t you?” The Shadow’s Child said.
“The tribunal thought she was innocent.”
“Not innocent. Just not guilty. That’s not the same.” Words seemed to have turned to tar—to come, slowly and inexorably, from her physical body, shivering in the heartroom.
“I don’t judge,” Bao said.
“You offered me the office space. To a shipmind.”
“Precisely. You could pay. That was a calculated risk. I didn’t pass moral judgments on what you were or weren’t.”
“I—”
“For what it’s worth, I’d say in your current position, you can ill afford to pick and choose on mere suspicions.” Bao rose, and picked a book from the shelves—an electronic. She held it towards The Shadow’s Child, cover turned up to reveal the flowing calligraphy of a Lao Quy title, with the sharply coloured characters against the background of stars and ships. “You look like you could use a distraction. Here. You’ve probably read it cover to cover ten thousand times, but it’s still good.”
After she cut off the connection, The Shadow’s Child remained in her office, staring at the bookshelves.
They deemed her innocent.
No. They’d merely thought there wasn’t enough evidence to declare her guilty. It was a different set of standards—one to weigh a possible execution against.
Mere suspicions, Bao had said.
But what if it were true? The evidence was just too compelling to be ignored; and Long Chau stubbornly refused to offer any explanation or any justification for what had happened.
As if she didn’t have any defence.
The Shadow’s Child tried to go back to her blends—to the bots-handler and the activity maps she needed to build, the blend she’d have to carefully build—something that would make the handler feel subtly more assured, less fearful—but everything kept sliding off, and she couldn’t seem to focus on anything.
Sharpening Steel into Needles pinged her, once, twice. There was some sort of celebration with other shipminds: an official event with Official Truc, an exiled scholar of the third rank who was going to regale them with his own poems in the presence of most of the high society of the orbitals. Sharpening Steel into Needles was going both to enjoy themselves, and to push forward some of the younger ships in the hopes of getting them positions with officials or families. They wanted The Shadow’s Child to go, of course. It would do her good to get out.
The Shadow’s Child didn’t want to get out. And the last thing she wanted was Sharpening Steel into Needles dragging her around. Her response was terse, and obviously sharp enough that the older ship didn’t even insist.
She climbed back into her own body—curled up in her heartroom, withdrawing from her sensors and letting go of her bots, space stretching around her, vast and cold and unchanging, the wind whispering against her hull like a lullaby—the sharp light of the stars a restful, familiar sight. It was the busy time of day, with many ordinary ships ferrying everything from people to crates of food from habitat to habitat, their coms chatter a soothing presence in the background.
She settled down to watch a vid of The Turtle and the Sword: familiar characters from empress to concubines, caught in soothing, distant drama—questions of who was the real mother of the prince, and whether the disgraced general would ever get their revenge...
Something was blinking, in her notifications. Long Chau. She didn’t want to hear from Long Chau. It was going to be another high-handed request for help, or company, with explanations doled out only when it suited her.
But it wasn’t from her.
The sender was a Tran Thi Cam, a controller of deaths working at the tribunal—shared with both her and Long Chau, with a few layers of obfuscations to make it seem anonymous. Amateur work, and nothing that stood up to The Shadow’s Child’s first few probes.
It was an autopsy report on the corpse they’d found. Why in Heaven had Long Chau or Tran Thi Cam thought this would be relevant? She was about to close it when a line caught her eye.
“Decomposition was, in effect, halted by deep spaces, enabling the recovery of trace amounts of the following.”
The list of compounds that followed was extensive: crushed honeydreamer, ginseng, winged sai seeds, and a host of other familiar things.
A blend. That wouldn’t have been a cause for concern—blends were common—but the ingredients list was odd, considering everything they’d known about Hai Anh.
Her coms blinked again. This time, it was Long Chau. She sent back a message that she wasn’t interested, and of course Long Chau kept calling. She dropped it to a lower priority routine, and tried to focus again.
No use. A centiday later, she’d read just one line of the report, and thought of nothing but the steady blink of that call.
She took it.
“I’m not interested,” she said. And then saw the location from which the call was made.
Long Chau’s voice was cool. “You should be.”
“You’re in deep spaces?”
“In a frozen ship.” A trace of amusement. Her voice was off, but The Shadow’s Child wasn’t sure why. “You were right. Maintenance
