Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,51

ready to move in less than an hour. I spent the rest of the day delivering gifts to our temple attendants, who were all home. School had been canceled, and hardly anyone came out onto the streets. “Lieutenant Awn doesn’t know,” I told each one, “if the new lieutenant will make different appointments, or if she’ll give the year-end gifts without your having served a whole year. You should come to the house anyway, her first morning.” The adults in each house eyed me silently, not inviting me in, and each time I laid the gift—not the usual pair of gloves, which didn’t yet matter much here, but a brightly colored and patterned skirt, and a small box of tamarind sweets. Fresh fruit was customary, but there was no time to obtain any. I left each small stack of gifts in the street, on the edge of the house, and no one moved to take them, or spoke any word to me.

The Divine spent an hour or two behind screens in the temple residence, and then emerged looking entirely unrested, and went into the temple, where she conferred with the junior priests. The bodies had been cleared away. I had offered to clean the blood, not knowing if my doing so would be permissible, but the priests had declined my assistance. “Some of us,” said the Divine to me, still staring at the area of floor where the dead had lain, “had forgotten what you are. Now they are reminded.”

“I don’t think you forgot, Divine,” I said.

“No.” She was silent for two seconds. “Is the lieutenant going to see me before she leaves?”

“Possibly not, Divine,” I said. I was at that moment doing what I could to encourage Lieutenant Awn to sleep, something she badly needed to do but was finding difficult.

“It’s probably better if she doesn’t,” the head priest said, bitterly. She looked at me then. “It’s unreasonable of me. I know it is. What else could she have done? It’s easy for me to say—and I say it—that she could have chosen otherwise.”

“She could have, Divine,” I acknowledged.

“What is it you Radchaai say?” I wasn’t Radchaai, but I didn’t correct her, and she continued. “Justice, propriety, and benefit, isn’t it? Let every act be just, and proper, and beneficial.”

“Yes, Divine.”

“Was that just?” Her voice trembled, for just an instant, and I could hear she was on the edge of tears. “Was it proper?”

“I don’t know, Divine.”

“More to the point, who benefited?”

“No one, Divine, so far as I can see.”

“No one? Really? Come, One Esk, don’t play the fool with me.” That look of betrayal on Jen Shinnan’s face, plainly directed at Anaander Mianaai, had been obvious to everyone there.

Still, I couldn’t see what the Lord of the Radch had stood to gain from those deaths. “They would have killed you, Divine,” I said. “You, and anyone else they found undefended. Lieutenant Awn did what she could to prevent bloodshed last night. It wasn’t her fault she failed.”

“It was.” Her back was still to me. “God forgive her for it. God forbid that I may ever be faced with such a choice.” She made an invocatory gesture. “And you? What would you have done, if the lieutenant had refused, and the Lord of the Radch ordered you to shoot her? Could you have? I thought that armor of yours was impenetrable.”

“The Lord of the Radch can force our armor down.” But the code Anaander Mianaai would have had to transmit to force down Lieutenant Awn’s armor—or mine, or any other Radchaai soldier’s—would have to have been delivered over communications that had been blocked at the time. Still. “Speculating about such things does no good, Divine,” I said. “It didn’t happen.”

The head priest turned, and looked intently at me. “You didn’t answer the question.”

It wasn’t an easy question for me to answer. I had been in pieces, and at the time only one segment had even known that such a thing was possible, that for an instant Lieutenant Awn’s life had hung, uncertain, on the outcome of that moment. I wasn’t entirely sure that segment wouldn’t have turned its gun on Anaander Mianaai instead.

It probably wouldn’t have. “Divine, I am not a person.” If I had shot the Lord of the Radch nothing would have changed, I was sure, except that not only would Lieutenant Awn still be dead, I would be destroyed, Two Esk would take my place, or a new One Esk would be built with segments from