Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,38

the sort of thing millions of people got as a matter of course, Radchaai or not. And during the last twenty years I’d found ways of concealing the specifics of what I had.

I picked up my own dishes, rose. “I’m Breq, from the Gerentate.” Strigan snorted, disbelieving. The Gerentate was far enough from where I’d been for the last nineteen years to conceal any small mistakes I might make.

“Just a tourist,” Strigan observed, in a tone that made it clear she didn’t believe me at all.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“So what’s the interest in…” She gestured again at Seivarden, still sleeping, breathing slow and even. “Just a stray animal that needed rescuing?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know the answer, truthfully.

“I’ve met people who collect strays. I don’t think you’re one of them. There’s something… something cold about you. Something edged. You’re far more self-possessed than any tourist I’ve ever seen.” And of course I knew she had the gun, which no one but herself and Anaander Mianaai should have known existed. But she couldn’t say that without admitting she had it. “There’s no way in seventeen hells you’re a Gerentate tourist. What are you?”

“If I told you it would spoil your fun,” I said.

Strigan opened her mouth to say something—possibly something angry, to judge from her expression—when an alarm tone sounded. “Visitors,” she said instead.

By the time we got our coats on, and got out the two doors, a crawler had made a ragged path up to the house, dragging a white trench across the moss-tinged snow, its half-spinning halt missing my flier by centimeters.

The door popped open and a Nilter slid out, shorter than many I had met, bundled in a scarlet coat embroidered in bright blue and a screaming shade of yellow, but overlaid with dark stains—snowmoss, and blood. The person halted a moment, and then saw us standing at the entrance to the house.

“Doctor!” she called. “Help!”

Before she was done speaking, Strigan was striding across the snow. I followed.

On closer inspection I saw the driver was only a child, barely fourteen. In the passenger seat lay sprawled an adult, unconscious, clothes torn nearly to shreds, in places all the way through every layer. Blood soaked the cloth, and the seat. Her right leg was missing below the knee, and her left foot.

Among the three of us we got the injured person into the house, into the infirmary. “What happened?” Strigan asked as she removed bloody fragments of coat.

“Ice devil,” said the girl. “We didn’t see it!” Tears welled in her eyes, but didn’t fall. She swallowed hard.

Strigan appraised the makeshift tourniquets the girl had obviously applied. “You did everything you could,” she told the girl. She nodded toward the door to the main room. “I’ll take it from here.”

We left the infirmary, the girl apparently not even aware of my presence, or Seivarden’s, where she still lay on her pallet. She stood for a few seconds in the middle of the room, uncertain, seeming paralyzed, and then she sank down on a bench.

I brought her a cup of fermented milk and she started, as though I had suddenly appeared from nowhere. “Are you injured?” I asked her. No misgendering this time—I had already heard Strigan use the feminine pronoun.

“I…” She stopped, looking at the cup of milk as though it might bite her. “No, not… a little.” She seemed on the verge of collapse. She might well be. By Radchaai standards she was still a child, but she had seen this adult injured—was she a parent, a cousin, a neighbor?—and had the presence of mind to render some small bits of first aid, get her into a crawler, and come here. Small wonder if she was about to fall to pieces now.

“What happened to the ice devil?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She looked up at me, from the milk, still not taking it. “I kicked it. I stabbed it with my knife. It went away. I don’t know.”

It took a few minutes for me to get the information out of her, that she’d left messages for the others at her family’s camp but that no one had been near enough to help, or was near enough to be here terribly soon. While we were talking she seemed to collect herself, at least slightly, at least enough to take the milk I offered and drink it.

Within a few minutes she was sweating, and she removed both her coats and laid them on the bench beside her, and then sat, quiet