“I think you hurt xist feelings,” Talis said to Meran. “But xe’s not wrong. You are strange, and I need to understand what you can do.”
“This world is strange,” Meran said, an icy edge to the words. Everyone’s pride had taken a hit in the last few hours. “But it is built on the power that was stolen from me by those you would worship for the act.”
“You’re as ancient as that ring.”
“More so. Will you seek the others?”
Talis leaned a hip against the side of her desk and crossed her arms. She had thought about the other four rings. It wouldn’t do to let anyone else get to them first, but the interested buyers didn’t hold much appeal to her any longer. For her and her crew there was little profit in pulling them from their hiding places. “Figured I’d wait and see how things go when we get to Nexus,” she said.
Meran pursed her lips at that and looked disappointed. Which only reinforced Talis’s fear of what all five of those rings would make the woman capable of.
“I called you in because I need advice,” Talis said, desperate to change the subject. “I realize you’re far from an unbiased opinion, but only you understand what it would mean if I put on that ring.”
Meran inclined her head slightly, almost with curiosity. “You fear that if you take control of me, I will take control of you.”
Talis felt the skin next to her nose twitch. That hadn’t been exactly how she imagined phrasing it, but Meran had the gist of it. She shrugged, as much an affirmation as false bravado.
“It is a thing that has been owned before.” Meran held up a hand, fingers splayed, and rotated the wrist to look at the muscles moving beneath the skin.
“I noticed a pattern. Doesn’t sound like anyone really survives the experience.”
Meran curled her fingers into a fist. “One man covets what another man possesses. In my case, the ring brought much devastation, even though none managed to free me from its confinement.”
Talis held up the empty box where the ring had been before their unexpected altitude adjustment.
“Not something I should be leaving out on my desk, then,” she said, by way of a confession.
Meran rose from the table in a sudden movement, like a crouching predator flinging itself into motion. “Certainly not.”
“All right, I know, that was a bad idea. Help me look. It’s in a pouch.”
They searched for a while, mostly silent aside from Talis’s low grumbling. The great cabin was minimal in its furnishings, but there were still far too many items that a small object could be flung under or behind.
“Tell me, Talis,” Meran said, interrupting a string of expletives that Talis was directing at the missing object. “Why do you choose not to wear the ring? You could trust me to follow your will implicitly so long as it touches your skin.”
Meran searched the fore half of the cabin, where the heavy hardwood table was bolted to the floor beneath a rough-hewn chandelier.
“I know that,” Talis began, and picked up the blanket and cushions that had slipped off her bunk, shaking them to be sure the ring hadn’t been gathered up within their folds. “How can I expect you to align yourself with me if I don’t trust myself to make the right choices for this ship? For Peridot?”
Meran stalked across the floor, leaving no inch of the deck unexplored. Talis considered whether she ought to light more candles to help them see, or whether the soft blue glow of Meran’s tattoos was enough to search by. Then the woman made a small ah noise and crouched, disappearing beneath the table.
Talis stopped what she was doing to rub the back of her neck and watch Meran. It occurred to her to wonder what an intact Meran would be like. This one went from royal haughtiness to crawling on her hands and knees under the furniture in a matter of minutes.
The simula reappeared on the other side of the table, pushing a chair back to give her room to get up. She held the pouch by its cord, gripped lightly between her fingers.
“You have a good instinct,” Meran said. “Possibly your intent—to rid this world of its foes—is enough.”
Talis let out a breath in relief.
“Is that my intent? Don’t I really just want to get my crew and my ship through this, long enough to make use of that payload in cargo? Don’t I really just want things to go back to the way they were?”
“Do you?”
She accepted the pouch when Meran dropped it onto her open palm. The weight of it, though small, was reassuring.
“Things can’t go back, I know. Some things either can’t be the same again or shouldn’t be. But to change it? It’s too big of a call for me to make.”
“Whatever you decide, Talis, please at least do not lose that again. There are those with whom I would prefer not to align my will.”
“You’ve got my word on that.” Talis pictured Hankirk, how hungrily he had watched Meran. And now he knew the ring would control her.
Talis crossed to her berth, climbed up onto the mattress, booted feet crushing the blanket she had just replaced and smoothed, and depressed the panel that revealed her small wall-mounted safe. She turned the low-profile brass wheel in the proper sequence of dextral and back to chamber the locking pins and swing the door open, then tossed the pouch in, where it fell against the collection of other important items she kept.
When the safe was secure and hidden again, she turned back to Meran.
“So tell me,” she said. She crossed back to the table and sat down opposite where Meran had resettled herself. “If there was no ring. If your will was your own, what would you do?”
Meran’s eyes sparkled, and the blue glow of them seemed to go transparent. They became fathomless, like
