Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

She didn’t know, and she needed to.

Peer class was in the State Building’s museum. Wide, pale walls with white lights that showed every color in the paintings and sculptures without making them fade over the years. The air was controlled here, neither warm nor cold, neither humid nor dry. Colonel Ilich shepherded them past the great works of other ages like it would be impolite to wake them. He had murdered Timothy, fought with Trejo, carried the weight of the empire on his back, and his smile and voice were exactly the way they always were. She wondered what else he’d hidden from her over the years.

Connor and Muriel were standing next to each other, looking at a canvas of a man painted almost life sized. His hands were open at his sides, his face lifted as if he were staring at something in the sky. Instead of clothes, a silver sheet was pressed to his body, concealing nothing. Teresa stood with her arms crossed. The painting was so detailed, she could see the individual hairs on the backs of the man’s hands. It was too perfect to be a photograph.

“It’s called Icarus at Night,” Ilich said. “The painter was a man named Kingston Xu. He was the first great artist of Mars. When this painting came out, he was almost deported back to Earth. Can anyone tell me why?”

Teresa felt the others glance at each other and at her. She didn’t know and she didn’t care. Her mind felt like it had been sandblasted. There wasn’t anything there.

“The sheet?” Shan Ellison said, tentatively.

“Yes,” Ilich said. “That’s what old medical graft material used to look like. And the man, you’ll notice, is dark skinned. The early history of Mars had a great deal of proxy conflict between the nations that had founded different colonies. This model that Xu used was from a place called Pakistan. The artist was from a place called China that was its enemy at the time. The two were at war. Showing an enemy in an explicitly healing and erotic context was very dangerous, politically speaking. Xu’s work could have put him in jail. Or in forced labor.”

Or the pens, Teresa thought, but that wasn’t right. They didn’t have pens before the protomolecule.

“Then why did he do it?” Teresa was almost surprised to hear her voice.

“He thought it was important,” Ilich said. “Xu felt that all humanity was part of a single family, and that the differences that divide us are trivial compared to the deep uniting factors that bring us together. That’s why your father brought this painting here. The unity of the human project is a Laconian ideal.”

It was a strange thought. They were torturing Holden right now over political differences. They’d killed Timothy, and maybe Timothy had come to Laconia to kill them. And now here they were, all pretending that a long-dead man’s barely concealed penis was a symbol of how much they were all in it together. This was stupid.

It was worse than stupid. It was dishonest.

Ilich, maybe sensing her mood growing dark, started moving the seminar on to a collection of sculptural abstracts that had only recently arrived from Bara Gaon. Teresa was just starting to walk toward them when Dr. Cortázar appeared, smiling, around a corner.

“Colonel!” the older man said. “Here you are. I was wondering if I could borrow Teresa for a few minutes. Routine medical scan.”

It caught Ilich off balance. His carefully built demeanor shifted, and she saw the flash of annoyance in his eyes. Even anger. It made her want to side with Cortázar.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I can review on my own later.”

Ilich’s smile slid back into place. “I don’t know that—”

Cortázar took her hand. “It won’t be long. Right back. Everything fine.”

As she let herself be led away, she felt something like joy or anger. A little ember of rebellion still red and hot in the ashes of her world. She tried to hold on to it. Cortázar was humming to himself. He seemed so pleased, he was almost skipping. She waited until they were safely out of earshot before she spoke.

“Is everything okay?”

“Perfect. Lovely. I have some ideas about what happened. You know. With the high consul. There are some tests I want to run.”

“Baselines?”

Cortázar’s smile widened. “Something like that, yes.”

They walked together through the State Building and to the private medical wing. The guards all knew them. There was nothing that would rais

e an alarm with anyone. Teresa had to trot to keep up with Cortázar’s long strides.

Nothing felt at all off until they walked into the medical suite—the same one she’d been going to for her annual checkups and occasional maladies for longer than she could remember—and Elvi Okoye was sitting at the doctor’s station. Even then, Teresa didn’t know what was wrong except that Cortázar’s mood soured instantly.

“Dr. Okoye. I’m afraid this isn’t a good time.”

“I found some notes I need to clarify with you,” she said.

“This isn’t a good time,” Cortázar said again, his tone of voice growing harder. The rebelliousness and warmth in Teresa’s chest shifted into something more like dread. She didn’t understand it, but she trusted it. You should keep an eye on me, Holden said sometime back in her memory. It was connected to Cortázar’s voice. Nature eats babies all the time.

“If there’s something critical going on with Teresa,” Elvi Okoye said, “maybe we should let Admiral Trejo know about it.”