keeps me from doing so. I don’t really want to go anywhere, to be honest. I just want to feel like I have some control over my life, if only for a few moments. “I want to see the garden for five minutes. That’s all.”
Stahnyn shifts from foot to foot, visibly miserable. “I could lose my position for this, especially if any of the senior conductors see. I could be imprisoned.”
“Perhaps they will give you a nice window overlooking a garden,” I suggest. She winces.
And then, because I have left her no choice, she leads me out of my cell and downstairs, and outside.
The garden of purple flowers looks strange from this angle, I find, and it is an altogether different thing to smell the star-flowers up close. They smell strange—oddly sweet, almost sugary, with a hint of fermentation underneath where some of the older flowers have wilted or been crushed. Stahnyn is fidgety, looking around too much, while I stroll slowly, wishing I did not need her beside me. But this is fact: I cannot simply wander the grounds of the compound alone. If guards or attendants or other conductors see us, they will think Stahnyn is on official business, and not question me … if she will only be still.
But then I stop abruptly, behind a lilting spider tree. Stahnyn stops as well, frowning and plainly wondering what’s happening—and then she, too, sees what I have seen, and freezes.
Up ahead, Kelenli has come out of the compound to stand between two curling bushes, beneath a white rose arch. Conductor Gallat has followed her out. She stands with her arms folded. He’s behind her, shouting at her back. We aren’t close enough for me to hear what he’s saying, though his angry tone is indisputable. Their bodies, however, are a story as clear as strata.
“Oh, no,” mutters Stahnyn. “No, no, no. We should—”
“Still,” I murmur. I mean to say be still, but she quiets anyway, so at least I got the point across.
And then we stand there, watching Gallat and Kelenli fight. I can’t hear her voice at all, and it occurs to me that she cannot raise her voice to him; it isn’t safe. But when he grabs her arm and yanks her around to face him, she automatically claps a hand over her belly. The hand on the belly is a quick thing. Gallat lets go at once, seemingly surprised by her reaction and his own violence, and she moves the hand smoothly back to her side. I don’t think he noticed. They resume arguing, and this time Gallat spreads his hands as if offering something. There is pleading in his posture, but I notice how stiff his back is. He begs—but he thinks he shouldn’t have to. I can tell that when begging fails, he will resort to other tactics.
I close my eyes, aching as I finally, finally, understand. Kelenli is one of us in every way that matters, and she always has been.
Slowly, though, she unbends. Ducks her head, pretends reluctant capitulation, says something back. It isn’t real. The earth reverberates with her anger and fear and unwillingness. Still, some of the stiffness goes out of Gallat’s back. He smiles, gestures more broadly. Comes back to her, takes her by the arms, speaks to her gently. I marvel that she has disarmed his anger so effectively. It’s as if he doesn’t see the way her eyes drift away while he’s talking, or how she does not reciprocate when he pulls her closer. She smiles at something he says, but even from fifty feet away I can see that it is a performance. Surely he can see it, too? But I am also beginning to understand that people believe what they want to believe, not what is actually there to be seen and touched and sessed.
So, mollified, he turns to leave—thankfully via a different path out of the garden than the one Stahnyn and I currently lurk upon. His posture has changed completely; he’s visibly in a better mood. I should be glad for that, shouldn’t I? Gallat heads the project. When he’s happy, we are all safer.
Kelenli stands gazing after him until he is gone. Then her head turns and she looks right at me. Stahnyn makes a choked sound beside me, but she is a fool. Of course Kelenli will not report us. Why would she? Her performance was never for Gallat.
Then she, too, leaves the garden, following Gallat.
It was a last lesson. The