Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,80

with. And it’s your money, isn’t it? From the flier.”

Seivarden frowned. “What? What is she saying?”

I resolved to check the contents of my pack as soon as I could. “He’d have won it back playing counters.”

From the look on her face, the girl didn’t believe that at all. “You really shouldn’t go under the bridge, you know. I know someone who had a friend whose cousin went under the bridge and someone dropped a piece of bread off, and it was going so fast it hit them in the head and broke their skull open and went into their brain and killed them.”

“I enjoyed your cousin’s singing very much.” I didn’t want to reopen the discussion about what had happened.

“Isn’t she wonderful? Oh!” She turned her head, as though she’d heard something. “I have to go. I’ll visit you again!”

“I’d appreciate that,” I said, and she was out the door and away. I looked at Seivarden. “How much did this cost?”

“About what I got for the flier,” she said, ducking her head slightly, maybe out of embarrassment. Maybe something else.

“Did you take anything out of my pack?”

That brought her head up again. “No! I swear I didn’t.” I didn’t answer. “You don’t believe me. I don’t blame you. You can check, as soon as your hands are free.”

“I intend to. But then what?”

She frowned, not comprehending. And of course she didn’t understand—she had gotten as far as (mistakenly) evaluating me as a human being who might be worthy of respect. She had not, it seemed, come to the point of considering she might not actually be important enough for the Radch to send a Special Missions officer after.

“I was never assigned to find you,” I said. “I found you completely by accident. As far as I know, no one is looking for you.” I wished I could gesture, wave her away.

“Why are you here, then? It’s not groundwork for an annexation, there aren’t any more. That’s what they told me.”

“No more annexations,” I agreed. “But that’s not the point. The point is, you can come or go as you like, I have no orders to bring you back.”

Seivarden considered that for six seconds, and then said, “I tried to quit before. I did quit. This station I was on had a program, you’d quit, they’d give you a job. One of their workers hauled me in and cleaned me up and told me the deal. The job was crap, the deal was bullshit, but I’d had enough. I thought I’d had enough.”

“How long did you last?”

“Not quite six months.”

“You see,” I said, after a two-second pause, “why I don’t exactly have confidence in you this time.”

“Believe me, I do. But this is different.” She leaned forward, earnest. “Nothing quite clarifies your thoughts like thinking you’re about to die.”

“The effect is often temporary.”

“They said, back on that station, that they could give me something to make kef never work on me. But first I had to fix whatever had made me take it to begin with, because otherwise I’d just find something else. Bullshit, like I said, but if I’d really wanted to, really meant to, I’d have done it then.”

Back at Strigan’s she’d spoken as though her reason for starting was simple, clear-cut. “Did you tell them why you started?” She didn’t answer. “Did you tell them who you were?”

“Of course not.”

The two questions were the same in her mind, I guessed. “You faced death back at Garsedd.”

She flinched, just slightly. “And everything changed. I woke up and all I had was past. Not a very good past, either, no one liked telling me what had happened, everyone was so polite and cheerful and it was all fake. And I couldn’t see any kind of future. Listen.” She leaned forward, earnest, breathing slightly harder. “You’re out here on your own, all by yourself, and obviously it’s because you’re suited to it or you wouldn’t have been assigned.” She paused a moment, maybe considering that issue of just who was suited to what, who was assigned where, and dismissing it. “But in the end, you can go back to the Radch and find people who know you, people who remember you, personally, a place where you fit even if you’re not always there. No matter where you go, you’re still part of that pattern, even if you never go back you always know it’s there. But when they opened that suspension pod, anyone who ever had any personal interest in me