Making Peace, page 26
I stayed outside the cell but leaned against the iron bars, resting my head against one of them, and let her cry. The light from my candle announced my presence clear enough. After a while had passed, she turned ever so slightly and said, “Come in, if you want.”
Her eyes gleamed in the darkness, and I realized she didn’t need the light. Someone had paid good money for that gene therapy: one of the few ways on Sivern to have the benefits of technology without its actual presence. I wondered what other genetic modifications she’d been given.
I took the invitation, sliding the key I’d snagged into the lock and giving it a turn. Metal clinked and ground as I slid the cell door open. I left it ajar, walked in, and lowered myself slowly to rest on the three-legged stool.
Despite the door being wide open and unguarded, Ina showed no interest in it whatsoever. I was hardly surprised. This was no hardened criminal, but a confused young woman. A young woman who had committed atrocities, I reminded myself. But a young woman who had also shown us mercy when she hadn’t had to, and had surrendered herself to the people perhaps most equipped to stop her reign of terror. But what had made her do all these conflicting things and set her on such a dark path in the first place? This was what I’d come to find out.
“We’ve been tracking you for months,” I said.
Ina sniffled, her head hanging between bent knees. Uncombed hair veiled her face from me, sun-bleached blonde ends pooling in the dusty hay on the floor.
I considered what to say. “I’ve been at the site of each of your kills. I had never seen anything like that before. That first bedroom crime scene made one of our hardened soldiers puke his guts out. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since.” My hand clenched into a fist, and I forced it to relax, drawing a deep breath. “But then you surrender like you don’t have an alternative. You act scared when you’ve got us tied up. You shake when I talk about your crimes.” And she was shaking; I could see her little shoulders shivering with jerks and spasms, as if she sat in a cell made of solid ice instead of warm stone. I considered her profile before asking, “Why do it?”
Her shivering continued. I knew she was a criminal, had killed… well, my mind didn’t want to recount her crimes. But then, I had to face it, didn’t I? She had not only killed women, but pregnant women. The babies had been killed, their lives snuffed out before they’d even had a chance to be born. A tiny soul snuffed out before it had even tasted sunlight. She knew, as a mother, what it felt like to have that happen. “Why inflict on those women what you yourself had endured?” Her shoulders gave a large jerk at that, but she kept her face hidden, drawing her legs tighter together and wrapping her arms around them, hiding her face in her knees. It was a wretched sight, but my heart was torn.
My mind kept puzzling at it, trying to fit the pieces together. Women, all from the First House, all family members. Babies. Her baby. The Hegemon. The women, all of his bloodline. But the children couldn’t all have been his, not even in the most depraved of imaginings. I considered the possibility anyway, but discarded it as unlikely. What, then? Of his bloodline, but…
I stopped. I thought about that again. Of his bloodline. A woman who had lost everything to a man who had everything. A woman with nothing left, and a monster she can’t hurt. An old monster.
“This wasn’t revenge,” I asked the girl huddled in the middle of the floor, “was it?”
Her shoulders stopped shaking. I heard her draw a ragged breath. “No,” she answered in a small voice.
“No, you wouldn’t kill children in revenge. Maybe some women could, but not you. Not the kind of girl who flinches away when I bring it up.” I leaned back on one hand and tapped my finger against the side of the stool, thinking. I remembered something else. A tiny bundle wrapped with care and hidden under a bed. A gentle act of shame. Someone ashamed of the crime they’ve committed. “You hate what you’ve done. But you’ve done it more than once, which means you’re determined.”
She didn’t answer, but I didn’t need confirmation. “You don’t get the kind of money to hide out and use a warehouse and sustain yourself without some help. And you had plenty of contacts in that brothel willing to protect you. That’s not the sort of thing one cultivates as a servant.”
Again, no answer. I’d been hoping for one this time, but that was all right. My boots scraped across the stone as I stretched out my legs, massaging a cramped muscle in the right one.
I decided to be more direct about it. “So why’d you do it?”
Ina stayed quiet but she turned her head to look at me, expression barely visible beneath a veil of blonde hair. Her eyes seemed to consider me, or maybe they were turned inward and she didn’t see me at all. She sniffed hard and scuffed her feet on the ground a couple of times before she spoke. “The evil. The evil of him. I had to end that.”
“End the evil?”
“Yes. He’s evil. And even if he dies, it doesn’t end it. The whole thing has to be stopped.”
I considered my words carefully. “This is an idea you came up with?”
Ina hesitated before shaking her head.
Ah ha, I thought, now we’re getting somewhere. “So someone taught you to think like this.”
Another hesitation, then a nod. She was like a rabbit scenting something wrong but with no idea where the trap might be. She wanted to talk her guilt out, but something was holding her back.
“Who taught you about evil, Ina?”
She started lightly rocking her knees back and forth in an idle fashion, clearly thinking. Where might the trap be? Somewhere under these leaves? She decided to take another step. “My teacher.”
Bingo.
“A philosopher? Someone who teaches about evil?”
She nodded.
“And also about how to kill?”
Ina shook her head forcefully. “No, she didn’t teach me that.”
She. She? Interesting.
“So where did you learn the killing? That was some careful work I saw.”
Her knees stopped rocking, unsure if she should take that as a compliment or a rebuke. She came to some decision and resumed the swaying motion. “Someone else.”
Well, clearly. “Someone with practice at killing?”
She glanced around the room, eyes not really seeing, as she thought about that one. There’s a trap here, I know there is. Isn’t there? “Yes, he’s got practice. But he’s not a bad man. He helped me, he really did.”
I thought, hard. A brothel owned by the Second House. Someone with experience in brutality. Extreme secrecy, no room to trust a middleman. “Did Andre Covina teach you, Ina?”
She stiffened up at the name of the leader of the Second House, which was as much of an answer as I needed. I filed the information away. One taught her to kill. Who taught her philosophy?
“This woman who taught you about evil, she sounds like someone very smart.”
Ina nodded, laying her head sideways down against her knees, watching me. Her legs resumed their swaying.
“Was she nice to you?”
Ina nodded again, much more forcefully. “Yes, she is. She’s the nicest lady I’ve ever met. She understood what it was like.”
I considered that, trying not to look too intense. Don’t scare her. She’s smart, but she’s trusting. Too trusting. Who was it who got you all twisted up like this, Ina? Who took advantage of a girl already at the end of her wits?
“What do you mean she understood?”
Ina swiveled her legs toward me, sitting more comfortably. Her mentor was a topic she was happy to discuss, it seemed. She sat with her legs to the side, propping herself up on one hand. “She told me she understood,” Ina said eagerly. “And she really did, all about losing a baby and how hard it is. To have this little thing growing inside you, talking to it. Telling it everything will be all right.” Her voice cracked, and she sniffed. “This precious little thing, the one good thing in the world. Promising you’ll find a better life for it. And then suddenly it’s gone, forever.”
Two women, both with deceased children, went on a rampage against pregnant women in the First House. One was trained to do it by the leader of the Second House. I was starting to get a nasty picture, but things were making a lot more sense.
“Sounds like she came along to help you right when things were at their darkest for you.”
Ina nodded. “She really did. I was sold to that Red Cathedral place. The first night she came in to my room, I was scared and thought she was a customer, but she turned out to be a rich lady. She said she heard my story and wanted my help. I was lucky she bought me out before I had to… do any work there,” she finished, averting her eyes.
My picture was much clearer now. I remembered a woman being very, very kind to Vapor as she flailed her way through a formal social engagement. I’d seen that same woman dancing at the ball, somehow managing to be everywhere she wanted to be at just the right time.
“I think I know who your lady is, Ina.”
She flinched, and her eyes narrowed. Wrong step, her eyes said. Is that it, is the trap going to snap shut? Her eyes darted to the door, which I’d left open. I tried to catch hold of her with my voice before she made a move.
“I don’t want to hurt her,” I said. “I don’t wish her any harm.”
Ina looked back at me, eyes still narrowed in suspicion, clearly unsure of me.
I help up both hands, showing her my palms. “I’m not here to enforce some law or make people go to jail. I’m just trying to keep the peace and make sure there’s not a war.” Wait, when had that become my problem?
She hesitated again. “You won’t… try to punish her? She was just helping me. She was so good to me, she really was. Please leave her alone, she understood how much it hurt and she helped me, she even helped me get a little casket and have a funeral for my baby,” her voice broke, “And I’m just trying to pay her back like he showed me,” she finished in a rush.
Whoa, there.
“She taught you the philosophy, but he taught you how to do the killing, and told you it would pay back her kindness?”
Ina nodded firmly, her eyes pleading with me to believe her story. I did, mostly, or at least I believed this was how she had seen it take place. I remembered double meanings, kind speech to an uncultured teenage girl, and flirtatious laughter at the ball.
Ina spoke up again, in a small voice. “Just thinking about those little things, those babies, being born into that brutal place with so much violence and rape. It was too much to bear. She told me I could save them from all that pain, protect them from him. The things he would do to them, turn them into. I couldn’t protect my little baby, but I could protect them.”
I swallowed from a suddenly dry mouth. I was starting to see the cracks in her mind. These conflicting thoughts were one way she was able to do these terrible things and still seem like a lost little girl. But how had it started? “Ina, you just don’t seem to have it in you to do these things. How did you bring yourself to do it?”
She averted her eyes again. “Master Covina had a special pill. He told me to hold it under my tongue two minutes before I had to kill someone. It makes everything seem not real, makes you angry and everything is sort of hazy. Mostly I don’t even remember the things that happened. He told me it would help her and it was the best way. Only,” she bit her lip, her voice getting quiet, “it hurt, a lot. After, I mean. Hours of being really sick. And trying to wash up from it was awful. And remembering…” She trailed off. Several quick breaths caught in her throat.
I felt my lips pursing and tried to straighten them out, to maintain a neutral mask. The story in my head was that Andre and Sarenna Covina had found a brutalized servant discarded from an enemy House, scooped her up, and convinced her they cared about her. They’d taught her to kill and stuffed her with drugs to make sure she wouldn’t shy away from doing it. Then they’d sent her against their enemies to be useful for as long as possible before she got herself caught or killed. I absolutely couldn’t dismiss her crimes, since she’d been the one who ultimately made the choice to commit them. But I felt a growing sympathy for this poor, broken child who had been badly misused by every person who’d ever held authority over her.
“Would you be willing to say any of this in a signed statement, or as a witness?”
A firm shake of the head: absolutely not. Sweet and gullible, but fiercely loyal.
I sighed and stood up, having got what I came for. Ina watched me walk to the door with a detached sadness on her face. No sign of even trying to escape.
I recalled reading about an experiment centuries ago on Earth. The researchers had locked dogs into cages and shocked them over and over. Eventually, the dogs had simply lain down and given up. Even when the door to the cage was opened, they’d continued to lie there, believing there was no way to escape from the pain. Was it possible for me to hate a girl who had reached that level of hopelessness?
I stopped, one hand holding onto the bars, my back to Ina. I could feel her watching me. “You said in the warehouse you wanted to go see your baby. Could you really face your baby like this, Ina?”
I waited, but she didn’t have an answer.
“There is no way you can ever make up for what you did,” I told her. “If you see your baby again in some afterlife, chances are good the other babies will be there, too, and their mothers. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this planet is about second chances and learning to set things right. The people here, they work hard to make up for crimes they’ve been dragging around. But the people I work with, they’ve tried to make their mistakes into something more, something better. They let their pain fuel a drive to make the galaxy better, any way they can. Maybe after a lifetime of atonement you could raise your head and say you made the world better because of what you learned from these lives you snuffed out. Make them count for something, if you can.”
Without waiting for her answer, I slid the cell door shut and went upstairs.
CHAPTER 37
UGLY AND I went alone to confront the queen spider of this web, to finally get some answers from Sarenna of the Second House. Vapor and Sen stayed back to guard the base and to help a weakened Shield get back into fighting shape after so much time in bed. Her weakness hadn’t prevented her from getting a crushing death-grip on my arm that she hadn’t released until I’d promised to watch over Ugly and make sure we didn’t have a repeat of the warehouse incident.
The guards standing at attention at the front gate of the Second House stood aside and let us pass without question, stating that they had orders from Sarenna to let us in. It appeared they recognized the Keepers even in our finer clothing and without armor. We were ushered into the house as if we were expected.
In retrospect, after our very public street chase with Ina, word had probably got back to Sarenna that her agent was in contact with Keepers. Ina was many things, but conniving and laconic she was not, so it was only a matter of time until we showed up demanding an audience. Sarenna’s orders to let us pass without challenge, though, did not prevent the guards from giving us ferocious glares. None of them had forgotten one of our number had murdered their leader, Andre Covina, the last time we set foot in this House.
I wondered what Ugly had planned but, as always, he resisted my questions, leaving me to learn from watching events as they unfolded.
A male servant showed us into a drawing room, and to my great relief it was a different drawing room than the one where Tavel had killed Andre. Floor-to-ceiling windows held in delicate wooden frames covered one entire wall, flooding the room with natural sunlight. Chairs and couches matching the light brown shade of the hardwood floor and tables were arranged throughout the room.
Ugly and I were told to sit and partake of refreshments which were already being carried in, but Ugly declined and stood with his hands folded behind his back. Uncomfortable and restless, I did my best to mirror his example. The servants pursed their lips but withdrew without comment, leaving us alone.
The minutes stretched out as we stood in silence broken only by the ticking of an antique wooden clock on the mantel at one end of the room. I scratched my nose and looked sideways at Ugly. He stood at what military folks would call parade rest: feet apart, hands clasped behind him. His eyes were closed but moved behind their lids.
I probably scratched my nose about three more times before another door opened. Ugly’s eyes snapped open, but he made no move to change his stance, only waiting.
Sarenna came walking through the door, her movements slow and measured. She wore a black dress, wide at the hips with heavy skirts brushing the floor. Her hair was covered by a black veil which she wore folded back over her head, face uncovered. She made eye contact with us but did not speak or give any sign as she walked to a large wingback chair placed in the center of the room. With infinite grace Sarenna settled herself, resting one delicate hand on the arm of the chair and the other hand in her lap.
Sarenna gazed at us without expression before gesturing lightly that we should join her on a couch placed diagonally to her chair. I started toward the couch but caught Ugly shaking his head lightly once, a no both to me and to our hostess. Sarenna blinked once, slowly, but said nothing. Again, silence returned with only the ticking of the clock pounding away at my ears.
“You haven’t caught the man who murdered my husband,” she said, her voice quiet but firm.
Ugly inclined his head. “And do you prefer it that way?” Not delivered as an accusation, but light and curious. He may as well have asked how she was enjoying a salad. No honorifics this time, no Your Grace. After so much death, we were beyond such things.
“Why would you say such a thing to me?” she asked with absolute calm, clearly not as shocked as I was at Ugly’s words. I thought seriously about giving him a sharp elbow in the side.
“Tavel’s arrest would mean a reduction in your leverage over us,” Ugly said. “It would mean we could open an investigation into the activities of your House without being accused of bias. Between the First House wanting us dead and the Second House claiming themselves victims without justice, the Council of Three Houses would execute our entire cell if we even considered moving against you without first presenting the killer as recompense.”
