“You know the answer to that.”
“I do. But I’d like to hear you say it just the same. If it’s not a problem.”
The one-armed man looked distracted by the conversation. A few centimeters would put his hand on the pistol. The angle made it awkward to draw. Biryar shifted his weight a little to make it easier, and the one-armed man shook his head like he was reading his mind.
“Misappropriation of Laconian funds is at best larceny, at worst treason,” Biryar said. “One is a prison sentence. The other is death.”
“What about a governor’s pardon? You can do that, right?”
“No Laconian is a
bove the law,” Biryar said. “That is what discipline means.”
“That’s what I thought,” the old man said. His eyes locked on Biryar’s as he drew a handheld from his pocket. “For what it’s worth, I am sorry about this.”
He held it out. Biryar’s gaze flickered down to it, and then back up, ready for the attack. It took a few seconds for what he’d seen to register. Mona Rittenaur. Almost against his will, his eyes drifted back down. The old man kept holding it out, and this time Biryar took it.
The financial records were marked as Xi-Tamyan, and the spreadsheet listed Mona’s name. And monetary amounts. Budget levels and outflows. There were other names, and one rang a bell. Carmichael. The woman whose research had been unfairly canceled. The one they’d fought over. The one-armed man forgotten, he shifted through the files. Mona’s name was highlighted. And the words cooperative government programs. If programs like that existed, he would have known about them. He would have had to approve them. He hadn’t.
The storm had grown worse, the wind so terrible, it was shaking the building itself, making the walls shudder, only it wasn’t any louder. And the beige surface of the coffee was smooth and still. Something else was shaking. Biryar put down the handheld.
“What do you want from me?”
“Nothing,” the man said. “I’m just letting you know that one of your own stepped a little off the path.”
“Blackmail?”
“For blackmail, you need an ask. I don’t want anything from you. I have this information. I’m giving it to you. That’s all. I’m being the good guy here.”
And now it was his duty to tell what he’d learned to Major Overstreet. And it would be Overstreet’s duty to arrest Mona. Biryar would have to recuse himself, so they’d send her back to Laconia for trial. His Mona. The woman whose fingers he kissed in the morning. He tried to imagine what it would feel like to see her sent to the Pens. It was like trying to imagine being dead.
Or he could hide the information, make her scrub away all sign of it. Cancel the projects. Erase the financial trail that led to her. Then, when Overstreet found them, they would die together. His sternum ached like he’d been punched there. Everything under it was hollow. He could hardly draw a breath.
It was perfect. Even if he could pull his pistol and shoot the one-armed man dead, there was still a bullet coming for him. Worse, it was coming for Mona, and there was no way to stop it. He couldn’t even die to protect her. He tried to move, but he was made from clay. He saw sympathy in the other man’s eyes.
“Truth is, if Xi-Tamyan found out about this, they’d probably praise her initiative and give her a raise. Those guys just do business that way. But she’s one of yours, so…”
“Discipline,” Biryar said. There was no way out. The end of his world had come. There was nothing to do but welcome it.
It wasn’t a thought, it wasn’t considered. Like water moving down, it was simply the way things worked. The way they had to be. Natural. Biryar drew the pistol, lifted it to his head, and pulled the trigger. The old man’s eyes barely had time to widen.
His false arm, though, had a mind of its own, and it was faster than either of theirs. Before the trigger came back a full millimeter, the gun wrenched away. The old man cried out, clutching his real hand to his chest. The metal hand held Biryar’s pistol, its barrel visibly bent.
“Jesus fuck, but I hate it when it does that,” the old man said. Then, with heat, “Fuck is wrong with you, kid?”
Biryar didn’t answer. He wasn’t there. Governor Rittenaur, the voice and face of Winston Duarte, didn’t make sense here, and without him, Biryar was like a vine whose trellis had collapsed. He had no form. No structure. He couldn’t even die.
The one-armed man put the ruined pistol on the table, picked up Biryar’s cup of coffee, and sipped from it.
“Okay. I get it.”
“I can’t lose her,” Biryar said. “I can’t stay with her, and I can’t lose her. What else is there to do?”
“They really do a fucking job on you people, don’t they?” the one-armed man said. Then after a long moment, he sighed. “Listen to me. I didn’t lose my arm in a fight or anything. I was born wrong. Something about not enough blood flow. Stunted development. Whatever. It was like a skinny little baby arm. Mostly I just kind of curled it up against my chest here and forgot about it. I did fine. It was nothing big. I kept meaning to get it seen to, you know? Take it off and regrow it from gel? But one thing and another, I just never seemed to get around to it. You know what I mean? People would give me shit, and I’d laugh and say how, yeah, it would be a good idea. But I didn’t do it. Then maybe fifteen years ago…”
He raised his metal hand, rotating it in the light.
“This,” the old man said. “It’s fucking badass. Basically a built-in waldo with virtual intelligence and pattern matching. It’s not networked, so it’s unhackable. And it’s strong as shit. Bends steel. Stops bullets. You know what else it does? Plays piano. No shit. I can’t, but it can.”