the console, in its always even voice, “is in the Security office on sublevel nine.”
“Excuse me?”
“There was a fight,” said Station. “Normally Security would have contacted her family, but she has none here.”
I wasn’t her family, of course. And she could have called for me if she’d wanted me. Still. “Can you direct me to the Security office on sublevel nine, please?”
“Of course, honored.”
The office on sublevel nine was tiny: nothing more, really, than a console, a few chairs, a table with mismatched tea things, and some storage lockers. Seivarden sat on a bench at the back wall. She wore gray gloves and an ill-fitting jacket and trousers of some stiff, coarse fabric, the sort of thing extruded on demand, not sewn, and probably produced in a preset range of sizes. My own uniforms, when I had been a ship, had been made that way, but had looked better. Of course I’d sized each one properly, it had been a simple thing for me to do at the time.
The front of Seivarden’s gray jacket was spattered with blood, and one glove was soaked with it. Blood was crusted on her upper lip, and the small clear shell of a corrective sat across the bridge of her nose. Another corrective lay across a bruise forming on one cheek. She stared dully ahead, not looking up at me, or at the Security officer who had admitted me. “Here’s your friend, citizen,” said Security.
Seivarden frowned. Looked up, around the small space. Then she looked more closely at me. “Breq? Aatr’s tits, that’s you. You look…” She blinked. Opened her mouth to finish the sentence, stopped again. Took another, somewhat ragged breath. “Different,” she concluded. “Really, really different.”
“I only bought clothes. What happened to you?”
“There was a fight,” said Seivarden.
“Just happened on its own, did it?” I asked.
“No,” she admitted. “I was assigned a place to sleep, but there was already someone living there. I tried to talk to her but I could hardly understand her.”
“Where did you sleep last night?” I asked.
She looked down at the floor. “I managed.” Looked up again, at me, at the Security officer beside me. “But I wasn’t going to be able to keep managing.”
“You should have come to us, citizen,” said Security. “Now you’ve got a warning on your record. Not something you want.”
“And her opponent?” I asked.
Security made a negating gesture. It wasn’t something I was supposed to ask.
“I’m not managing very well on my own, am I,” said Seivarden, miserably.
Heedless of Skaaiat Awer’s disapproval, I bought Seivarden new gloves and jacket, dark green, still the sort of thing that was extruded on demand, but at least it fit better, and the higher quality was obvious. The gray ones were past laundering, and I knew the supply office wouldn’t issue more clothes so soon. When Seivarden had put them on, and sent the old ones for recycling, I said, “Have you eaten? I was planning to offer you supper when Station told me where you were.” She’d washed her face, and now looked more or less reputable, give or take the bruising under the corrective on her cheek.
“I’m not hungry,” she said. A flicker of something—regret? Annoyance? I couldn’t quite tell—flashed across her face. She crossed her arms and quickly uncrossed them again, a gesture I hadn’t seen in months.
“Can I offer you tea, then, while I eat?”
“I would love tea,” she said with emphatic sincerity. I remembered that she had no money, had refused to let me give her any. All that tea we had carried with us was in my luggage, she had taken none of it with her when we’d parted the night before. And tea, of course, was an extra. A luxury. Which wasn’t really a luxury. Not by Seivarden’s standards, anyway. Likely not by any Radchaai’s standards.
We found a tea shop, and I bought something rolled in a sheet of algae, and some fruit and tea, and we took a table in a corner. “Are you sure you don’t want anything?” I asked. “Fruit?”
She feigned lack of interest in the fruit, and then took a piece. “I hope you had a better day than I did.”
“Probably.” I waited a moment, to see if she wanted to talk about what had happened, but she said nothing, just waited for me to continue. “I went to the temple this morning. And ran into some ship’s captain who stared quite rudely and then sent one of her soldiers after me to invite me to