Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

The observation room was a soothing, neutral green. The air smelled of cleanser and the pepper and vanilla of Laconian flowers. Trejo and Cortázar were at a volumetric display that was spinning a complex data pattern like they were watching waves or weather formations. The guards took their places outside the door, Ilich went to stand with the two other men. Teresa thought about going to a chair, but it seemed too far, so she folded down to the floor.

“What am I looking at, Doc?” Trejo said.

Cortázar shook his head. “His response patterns are always a little off. All this noise is within error bars for him. You see something similar in people who’ve had extensive psychedelics, but usually women. But I’d say changing the questioner didn’t affect his readings significantly at all. Given his baseline, I’d say he’s telling the truth.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“No,” Cortázar said. “But eighty percent confidence. We should try it with Dr. Okoye next. He has a much longer association with her. And they’re friendly.”

“If you want to pull her off her present work,” Ilich said.

Trejo made an impatient sound and pressed his hands into his cheeks hard enough that his knuckles went pale. There were dark patches under his eyes where the exhaustion was settling in. He is the only thing holding the empire together, Teresa thought. It felt like hearing someone else say it. Someone who might be lying.

“Has there been any result on the search for the… the body?” Ilich asked.

“No,” Trejo said. “I’ve given the shoot-on-contact order, but I have bigger fish to fry than alien zombies lurching around the landscape. If he does turn back up, he won’t have access to his supplies. Maybe we’ll get lucky and the drones will decide he’s really a table lamp.”

Something moved in Teresa’s mind. Something small.

Cortázar grunted. “I think you should reconsider that. Having an additional subject would make my work with the high consul much—”

“We’ll wait for Okoye’s report before we change any of that,” Trejo said. “The important thing is keeping the separatists under control.”

“Really?” Ilich said. “I thought the important thing was that something ate our ships and broke Duarte.” He meant her fat

her, but that was fine. It applied to her too, and it made her feel like she was more included in the conversation. Given his baseline …

“That’s our second problem,” Trejo said, “and we’ll get to it. But if I can’t keep this together, there won’t be anything for the high consul to control when he’s recovered.”

The hollowness in his voice seemed familiar. Teresa looked at Trejo more carefully. The hours of questioning still left a coloring of humiliation in her, but his weariness and fear weren’t hard to see. She’d lost her father. He’d lost his leader. His distress almost made her like him.

Like she’d been hauled back in time, the top of Timothy’s head came off. She gasped, and was back in the normal time again. Trauma memory. Ilich had talked to her about flashbacks to moments her brain was having trouble integrating. He’d told her to report if it happened. It happened, and she didn’t. Trejo glanced at her, then Ilich.

“You need to get her back to the State Building in time for her peers to see her.”

Ilich stiffened. “Respectfully, Admiral? There’s more than enough disruption to account for some deviations in the schedule. No one is going to look twice at her being a little bit late to her class.”

“That’s my point, Colonel,” Trejo said, leaning on the syllables of Ilich’s rank a little harder to point out the difference. “When everyone thinks the flood’s coming up, each little bit of normalcy is a sandbag. She may not be the thing that keeps this from getting out of hand, but she can be one part of it. And she’s finished her part in the doctor’s little test with the prisoner. We don’t gain anything by having her here.”

He meant We don’t gain anything by having you here. Ilich kept his composure, and Teresa let herself smile.

This new dynamic had come between the men since the bad night. Teresa saw it, even thought she understood what it meant. Ilich was part of the innermost conspiracy to keep her father’s condition secret. Trejo had trusted him. And then it turned out that that Ilich had been letting her sneak out of the State Building compound to spend time with an assassin for the underground. Trejo had given Ilich his trust and then found that faith hadn’t been justified.

Or maybe it was just that everything looked like that to her now.

“Understood,” Ilich said. Then, to her, “I’ll take you to the class. It will be all right.”

Teresa wanted to burst into tears or scream or drop to the floor and flail like a baby. She wanted to throw a table over and scream the way Elsa Singh had. There were too many years of training and expectation holding her in place. She nodded and rose to her feet. But when Ilich started to walk down the corridor, she didn’t follow.

“Eighty percent,” she said, turning to Cortázar. “You’re sure of eighty percent.”

Trejo’s eyes flashed a sharp annoyance, but Cortázar seemed happy to answer. “Well, of course that’s just an estimate. But autonomic function has been something of a passion for me these last few years, and there’s a lot of very good work done on the brain activity that comes with memory as opposed to the activity associated with inventing new information. It’s possible that the subject created and rehearsed a set of lies so that’s what he’s remembering. But since new questioners and novel questions aren’t finding any areas that deviate out of recall and into the creative functions, eighty is an estimate. Maybe even a low one. Holden is very probably telling the truth as he knows it.”

If he said he was your friend, then he was.

In her memory, Timothy looked up at her the way he always had and said, You can’t have too many tools.

She didn’t know which one she’d been. Friend or tool.