Katherine looked at me for a long moment. Not saying a word, she poured me a glass of vodka and slid it towards me. I wished more than ever that I could get drunk.
‘It took us a week to find her body. He’d have come for us, too, but Kasia was smart enough to use a false identity. We overheard Szymanski boasting about killing her to his mates when he thought no one was listening. Everyone knew he did it.
‘On New Vladi we don’t bury our dead. We leave their bodies on the mountain for the animals. Only one family member is allowed to take them up. I was the one who did. But she deserved better than to have her body torn apart by animals.’ My words were thick and raw, catching in my throat. ‘I dug her grave out of the frozen dirt with my own hands, right on top of the mountain where we’d go sometimes to sit and watch the view. There’s no sight like it, Katherine. Not in the entire Common. Fields and snowcapped mountains and vast, empty tundra as far as you can see, no sound but the wind in your ears. It was our one place of peace. And she’s buried there for ever, right in our spot. I’m the only one who knows where it is.’
‘How old were you?’ Katherine asked quietly.
‘It was my thirteenth birthday. The day Kasia promised we’d be free to live a new life together.’
Katherine set her glass down very carefully. ‘Vak … I don’t even know what to say. Some folks wouldn’t have come back from that.’
I managed to plaster on a tight smile. ‘We’re a different breed on New Vladi. Everything’s tough there. If you want justice for a crime, no matter how big or small, you go to the Five Courts. If they cannot reach an acceptable settlement, you fight to the death. I’ve seen people butchered over land disputes and reach a settlement agreement for war crimes.’ Even thirteen-year-old me knew I’d never have enough evidence against Szymanski: with his family name and privileges he would always walk. ‘Or, you go to the one person on New Vladi who has authority above all others: the Babushka.’
‘I remember you telling me. Babushka means grandmother, right?’
‘By title only.’ I’d heard of folks unhappy with her authority who’d tried to take her out. They tried once. Only once. ‘She decides whether to remain neutral, mete out justice herself, or allow you to take it into your own hands with no consequences.’
‘And that works?’ she asked, as if I’d told her we used death by stoning as a capital punishment.
‘It’s worked for hundreds of years, ever since the first settlements,’ I said. ‘We’ve got about half a dozen crime families running the show on New Vladi. They only have one thing in common: they all respect the Babushka.’
‘What did she do for you?’
‘She allowed me to decide Joon Szymanski’s fate, and helped me deliver it.’ The stormtech was cycling through me now, stirring up the old wounds like a storm dredges up the ocean floor. I let it. I needed to say this, needed someone to hear it. ‘She gave me a toxin to mix with his synthsilver. It made his body dependent on the drug. It also meant that, over time, synthsilver would become deadly to his system. If he didn’t use it, his system would slow down, his organs would fail and his motor functions gradually decline.’ I swallowed, my throat parched but unable to raise my glass to drink. ‘So he had a choice. Use it and poison himself slowly. Or don’t use it and suffer as his bodily functions shut down one by one.’ I stared into the vodka, shimmering like mercury in my glass. ‘I don’t know what he decided or how long he lived. But I never saw or heard from him again.’
Katherine said nothing. Not intruding, not questioning, just letting me speak.
‘Everyone told me to forget it, always forget,’ I said. I felt myself drifting down the backstreets of my mind, dark places I swore I’d close. ‘To leave Kasia behind. Get some sort of closure out of moving on. But she made me who I am. She’s part of who I am. It’s not such a terrible thing, grief. It means you carry a bit of them with you. Forgetting her would be forgetting that. Forgetting how I got here, who I am. I can’t do that to my sister. I can’t imagine anything worse than drifting off, unremembered and forgotten. She deserves better than that. Even if no one else remembers her, I will.’
Katherine reached out to me, holding my hand, allowing my fingers to fold into her’s. She wore a sad, tight smile on her face. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m glad you told me.’
‘So am I,’ I said, and realised how much I meant it. How glad I was that Katherine knew this about me. ‘So am I.’
27
The Kaiji
Everyone tries at least once to out-drink a Reaper. And everyone learns that it’s impossible and never to do it again. Everyone except Grim. No matter how many times he drank with me, he never learned his lesson. He was roaring drunk as he sagged between me and Katherine, his breath smelling like a gin-distillery and moaning that he felt like death. Katherine wasn’t looking so great, either.
We were in some kind of small parkland. Miniature greenhouses growing tropical fruits and vegetables were scattered around us. Rinds glistened behind chainglass walls, streaked with condensation. Globes of white light were strung above the trees as we stumbled down the pathway. But the scenery was lost on the other two. I grinned at both of them, not so much as tipsy. ‘I could go for a few more rounds. What do you guys say?’ I raised my voice. ‘Vodka?
