They returned to Cesko in the deepest part of the cycle, when the upper platforms had dimmed to maintenance lighting and the lower districts ran on whatever generators their occupants could afford. Pelu’s watchers had reported nothing. No entries. No exits. The Force-presence at the second-floor window had not shifted in twenty-six hours.
Zannah read this as confirmation. Cognus read it as a problem.
“If he intended to be elsewhere,” Cognus said, as they crossed the alley a block south of the residence, “the marker should have softened by now. Projected presences decay. They do not hold this long without an anchor.”
“The anchor is in the building.”
“Then he is in the building.”
“Yes.”
Cognus did not ask why. She had not asked because she did not yet know the question. The Master had given her the answer to a question she had not posed, which meant the Master had been sitting with the question herself. Cognus held the exchange beside the others.
They moved into the service alley along the north wall. The alley was narrower than the maps had suggested and stank of standing water. A drainage grate at the far end ran wet from the upper platforms; the sound covered movement. Zannah stopped at the rear door and laid her palm against it. She did not speak. Her shoulders settled in the small way Cognus had begun to recognize as the precursor to a Working.
The lock turned. The door opened without sound.
Cognus had not seen the Working before. She did not know whether it was a Rite or one of the things her Master did that had no name. She was not at this moment inclined to ask. She drew Bane’s saber from her hip and held it unignited, the hilt awkward in her hand.
They entered.
The ground floor was a single open space arranged by someone who had not cared to disguise that he lived alone. A table with one chair. A cooking surface with a half-prepared meal on it — protein paste in a pan, congealed but not yet rotten. Cognus estimated the meal at perhaps two days old, abandoned mid-preparation by a man who had apparently decided he was no longer hungry. The air carried the faint sharp tang of recent ozone.
Zannah moved to the stairs at the far end of the room. Cognus followed at the position she had occupied across the city earlier. Half a step back. Slightly left.
Her foresight had returned to its layered uncertainty the moment she stepped through the rear door. She had expected this. She had registered the transition in the alley, the way a swimmer registered the line where warm water gave way to cold. The Master had a radius. The radius did what the radius did. For now there was the staircase, and the second floor, and the room at the back where the Force-presence sat anchored and unmoving.
They climbed.
The hallway above was darker than the room below. A single recessed light at the far end illuminated a closed door. Zannah stopped three paces from it. She did not draw her saber-staff. She rested her right hand at her hip in the loose, ready posture of a practitioner whose primary instrument was not a blade.
Zannah opened the door with a small Working that did not require touch.
Set Harth was sitting at a desk against the far wall. The Andeddu holocron sat open before him, or what looked like it, its red light playing across his face and the surface of the desk and the drawn shutters of the second-floor windows. He had been writing in a small notebook in his own hand. He set the stylus down and looked up as the door opened.
His expression was not surprise.
It was a smile. A wide, loose, uneven smile that did not seat on his face the way Zannah remembered Harth’s smile seating on his face. It was the smile of a man who had heard a joke he could not stop hearing.
“Allia,” he said. The voice was Harth’s. The cadence was not.
“Set Harth,” Zannah said.
The smile broadened. He produced a small giggle, unmistakable and entirely without context, and his head tilted to the right by a degree more than balance required. He returned the head to upright with a small, jerky correction. His hands rested on the desk in front of the holocron, fingers spread.
“Allia, Allia, Allia.” The giggle rose into something that almost became a laugh, and then settled again. He did not seem to register the inappropriateness of it, or to be performing it for effect. It simply was what his mouth did now. “You came. You came. He said you would.”
Cognus, hooded behind her Master’s right shoulder, watched the body that had been Harth. The Iktotchi gift she had not been able to use cleanly inside Zannah’s radius for nine days now produced something new for this body alone. Not interference. Not layering. Nothing. The body in the chair did not have a future for her to read.
Zannah did not move. She studied Harth for the length of a breath. Then a second breath. Whatever she was reading, she did not appear to be enjoying the answer.
“What did he do to you,” she said. It was not a question.
Harth giggled again. It became a real laugh this time, brief and bright and physically wrong. His hands fluttered against the surface of the desk in a way that had nothing to do with what hands were for.
“He said you would come,” the body repeated. “He said. He said.”
Zannah stepped to the desk. She lifted the holocron with two fingers under its base, briefly, and set it back down. The red glow continued. The interior currents did not respond to her touch the way Andeddu’s holocron had responded to Bane’s touch in the years she had watched him work it. The weight was wrong. The harmonic of it was wrong. She knew within a second that what she was looking at had been built by a craftsman of considerable skill to be mistaken for what it was not.
The real holocron was not in this room.
Neither, in any meaningful sense, was Set Harth.
Cognus saw her Master’s shoulders settle into the small, precise set that meant a decision had been made.
Zannah killed him.
She did not use the brainstem Rite. She used something slower. A Working she had not performed in front of Cognus before. She would not have performed it in front of most witnesses she did not own. It required a particular state of mind to do well, and an apprentice did not need to know how easily her Master could occupy that state. Zannah extended her right hand, fingers curled, and closed her fist by degrees.
Harth’s hands lifted off the desk.
He did not stand. The hands lifted because the muscles in his forearms were contracting against his will, the tendons standing out hard along the backs of his wrists. His mouth opened. The smile did not go. The smile, in fact, widened. His eyes went to Zannah’s closed fist and stayed there, and the giggle returned, faint and continuous, an undercurrent beneath the breathing.
The bones in his right wrist gave first. The sound was small — a wet, muffled crack, more felt in the room than heard. The body laughed. It was not a noise of pain, though the pain was certainly present in the body’s nerves. It was the body laughing at the shape of what was happening to it. Zannah’s fist tightened a quarter-turn. The bones in his left wrist followed. His arms stayed where the working held them, ruined and useless above the desk, and the laugh became briefly louder before settling again into the giggle.
“Tell me anything,” Zannah said. “One name. One direction. Anything.”
The body’s mouth moved. What came out was the laugh.
Zannah closed her fist the rest of the way.
The working that had been pressing inward on the soft architecture of Harth’s chest finished what it had started. His ribs went in the order ribs went when a force pressed evenly through the body cavity from the front. The lower first, then upward. The small bones snapped in sequence. His chest collapsed in on itself in the practiced manner of a body whose interior had been instructed to occupy less space than the body’s frame had been built to hold. Blood came out of his mouth and his nose at the same time.
The laugh did not stop until the chest was finished.
Then the head fell forward and struck the desk with a small, neat thud, missing the holocron by perhaps four centimeters.
The body did not move after that.
Zannah lowered her hand. She held the position for another two seconds, the way a craftsman held a tool in place after the cut, confirming the cut was complete before letting go.
The kill was complete. The Rite she had used was older than the brainstem application Bane had taught her. She had chosen it deliberately. She had wanted answers. She had wanted to give him time to give them. The body had given her laughter. The body had not been capable of giving her anything else.
What she had not yet set aside was the wrongness.
It had nothing to do with the kill. The kill had been clean by her standards and brutal by any other, exactly the kill she had intended once she had registered what was waiting for her in the chair. The body was dead. She had verified the death personally.
But there was an absence she could not name. Not in the body. Around it. Through it. The body had been Harth. The bones had been Harth’s bones. The fear in the last second, for there had been fear beneath the laughter, in the small protests of the nervous system that could not have been faked, had been Harth’s fear. The blood had been Harth’s blood.
Something else had not been Harth’s, and she could not name what it was.
The wrongness she set aside. There would be time for it later.
Cognus had not moved during the kill. She had registered the working as it operated, registered Harth’s registration of it, registered her own foresight producing nothing where the future of the immediately-after should have been. The body settling. The room quiet. The departure of two figures down the stairs. These were resolved facts the moment the kill landed, and they should have read clean.
They read absent.
She set the absence aside. She did not know yet whether it was the Master’s radius doing what the radius did, or whether it was a thing that belonged to the body on the desk. She would consider it later. She would, in fact, consider it for some years.
Zannah crossed back to the desk, lifted the false holocron without touching its base directly, and set it into a containment case she drew from inside her coat. The case sealed with a soft pressure. The red light cut off. The room dimmed by a third. She would have it taken apart on Ciutric. The forger would have left traces. The forger had been Harth, or someone Harth had paid, and either way the artifact carried a record of hands and intent that might yet point her where she needed to go.
She looked at the body once. She did not look again.
“We leave,” she said.
“Yes, Master.”
Cognus did not glance back as they moved past the desk toward the door. There was nothing on the desk now that was hers to consider.
They descended in silence. The ground floor was as they had left it. The protein paste on the cooking surface had not moved. The rear door admitted them to the alley. The alley delivered them to the avenue, and the avenue to the lift. The lift carried them up to the platforms. A hired skiff waited at a freight pad three blocks from where they had landed. Zannah paid the skiff’s pilot in cash. They were aboard the hauler within forty minutes of leaving the residence.
Cognus stowed Bane’s saber. She had not ignited it. She had not needed to.
Zannah stood at the workbench in the cargo bay, the containment case set before her, both hands flat against its surface. She did not speak. The Working she had performed twice before in Cognus’s presence, the still attention and the slow breathing, she now performed over the sealed case for almost a full minute. When she lifted her hands the case was unchanged. Whatever she had checked for, she had either found or had not. She did not say which.
The spirit had been silent through the entire encounter.
This was, Cognus would only later understand, the single most significant detail of the evening. The spirit who never stopped speaking inside the Master’s head had said nothing when Zannah killed Set Harth.
What Cognus did not see was the small set of her Master’s shoulders as Zannah lifted her hands from the case. Zannah had reached, internally, for a voice that should have been there and had found that voice deliberately withheld. She considered, in the second after, whether to press for what the spirit was choosing not to say. She decided against it. Bane’s silence was the silence of a teacher refusing to correct a student who had not yet seen what the lesson was. She would not give him the satisfaction of asking.
The hauler lifted at dawn. Bilbousa fell away beneath them in its layers, the haze swallowing the upper domes within minutes. Cognus settled against the bulkhead of the cargo bay with Bane’s saber across her thighs and waited for the next instruction.
Zannah did not give one. She carried the containment case back to the cabin and the door slid closed behind her.
Cognus closed her eyes and did not reach forward. She had no particular interest in what the next several minutes contained. She had three observations now, and the three did not yet relate to each other in any way she could name. She would let them sit.
She slept.