The Resolution weirdness was supplied in full measure by the Auditor, who summoned a junior staffer to the table with no apparent signal then took a seat across from Kiem and Jainan and stared at them. Kiem assumed he was staring. It was hard to tell.
“I am role four-seven-five,” the Auditor said, apparently as a polite introduction. “My committees are Renewal—sub-chair; Low-Population Sectors—member; Artifact Nonproliferation—member. I have 0.0052 voting shares, currently suspended for duties.” He gestured to the staffer next to him. “My colleagues on this assignment are un-roled.”
The staffer who sat next to the Auditor was more normal: a young, official person with a checklist and an intricately bordered collar that probably had some meaning for Galactics. “I am about to ask you some personal questions,” the staffer said politely, without offering a name. “I apologize for any offense caused.”
“I can’t imagine what offense you’d cause,” Kiem said, nonplussed. “Er. Jainan?”
“I have nothing to hide,” Jainan said, looking straight at the Auditor’s nauseating lack of a face.
It turned out neither of them did. As the staffer worked their way down the list, Kiem and Jainan answered with their full, official titles, their birthplaces and dates, their precise position in the governing hierarchies of their respective planets. The staffer wanted to know about Taam, and Jainan gave his details in a careful, emotionless voice. The checklist dwelled on their right to speak for their planets: Kiem described his meeting with the Emperor, and Jainan gave them a copy of some document from the Thean president. They gave their biometrics—the handprint scanner felt odd and clung to Kiem’s palm in a way he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. The Auditor watched them, unmoving, but the swirling shell clinging to his face moved whenever either of them spoke.
“And your genetic parentage?” the staffer asked.
“This is going to take a while,” Kiem said cheerfully. “Prince Alkie and Sarvi Tegnar were my principals—there’s a statutory minimum from the royal side for inheritance—but I’ve got ten gifters, and you’ll need my genome record for who gave what. My mother even got General Fenrik to donate some pairs,” he said as an aside to Jainan, “that obviously didn’t take. I think he’s still embarrassed about it.”
The staffer entered that on a screen. “And Your Grace…?”
The Auditor spoke, his head angled toward Jainan. “I believe Thea has a cultural taboo against discussing genetic inheritance—you should have the background downloaded.”
“Ah,” the staffer said, after a pause. Their eye-screen flickered. “You can pass us a redacted version.”
Kiem finally looked at Jainan, who was showing some emotion for the first time in this whole meeting: he was visibly mortified. It was starting to dawn on Kiem how much he didn’t know about Thean etiquette. “No,” Jainan said, after clearing his throat. “My parents are core Feria. You may have my full genetic record, but you will have to request it from my clan.”
The staffer nodded and entered something on their checklist. They gestured to the Auditor, who leaned forward.
“Have you ever been involved in the study of remnants?”
“What?” Kiem said. He remembered the glowing shard on the Emperor’s display table. “No. I’m not an archaeologist.”
Jainan shook his head. “My field is deep-space engineering. I believe Thea has given you a list of every remnant discovered since the last renewal.”
Kiem was starting to get a handle on the Auditor’s body language, he found. At least, he could tell when that cosmically unpleasant attention was landing on him rather than Jainan.
“Iskat has found a relative abundance of them this time around,” the Auditor said. “Some remnants were inexplicably missed on the last few contacts you had with the Resolution, but fortunately they have come to light in recent years. Including a notable major remnant, which you seem to have used to construct a therapeutic machine.”
“Have we?” Kiem said.
“The list refers to it as powering a ‘Tau field.’”
“That’s not for therapy,” Kiem said blankly. That was a nasty part of Iskat’s history in the previous century, now something from low-budget war dramas. “It’s—I don’t know, some sort of interrogation field? I thought it had been dismantled. I didn’t know it had a remnant in it.”
The Auditor’s lips flattened in what Kiem realized was a smile, as if Kiem had sidestepped some sort of difficult question. The assistant noted something down.
“Taam—Prince Taam—was your cousin?” the Auditor said, with a slight, almost undetectable emphasis on cousin.
“Yes. Through the Emperor. My grandmother.”
“And you were put in the chain of responsibility via your wedding,” the Auditor said. “Which was when…?”
“Yesterday,” Kiem said. As he said it, it sounded uncomfortably thin. He realized he was tapping his foot and stopped himself. This couldn’t be pleasant for Jainan either.
The junior staffer looked at the Auditor at some signal Kiem didn’t catch. “Thank you,” they said formally. “That concludes the interview.” It did? Kiem felt he should have added more detail, but the staffer was already dismissing them. “If you could wait outside the privacy screen?”
Jainan was on his feet before they’d finished speaking. Kiem didn’t blame him. The privacy screen parted around them again—Kiem couldn’t help shutting his eyes as he stepped through it—and left them in the main room, with a sea of moving visualizations on the walls around them.
“That was fun,” Kiem said. “Sorry about the genetics part. Do you think they’re grading us?”
“I don’t know,” Jainan said. He glanced around the walls with a tense, hunted look. Kiem couldn’t make head or tail of the displays. The Auditor seemed to be collecting data like a magpie—one section had extracts from modern history articles; another, population estimates; this one, some paragraphs from the Foundation laws. Another one was about electromagnetic space fluctuations in the Outer Belt—Jainan’s attention lingered there—and another seemed to be about stage magicians and hypnotists. There was no pattern.
Kiem was diverted by a flicker of movement. “Hey, it’s us,” he said. “Finally.” The web of treaty representatives on one wall shifted to make room for pictures of Kiem and Jainan’s faces, filling the last two gaps.
The tag that flashed up beneath them said UNCONFIRMED.
“Looks like they didn’t like us,” Kiem said. It was meant as a joke—this was probably just a paperwork delay—but Jainan didn’t seem to take it as a joke at all. He had gone still in a way that reminded Kiem of someone standing on the edge of a cliff.
The privacy screen dissolved once more as the Auditor stepped through, trailed by his staffer. “Thank you for your time,” the staffer said serenely. “You may go.”
“Excuse me,” Jainan said. “What does our status mean?”
“Your Emperor will—” the staffer began.
“Wait,” Kiem said. The Auditor, standing coolly separate from his own staff as if he were another species, was starting to get on his nerves. Kiem gave a polite nod to the staffer and stepped past them, putting himself in front of the Auditor. “I think you owe us an explanation. The treaty renewal is in three weeks. How long does it take to confirm us?”
Kiem was now standing disturbingly close to the swirling shell across the Auditor’s face. Kiem’s eyes suggested urgently that staring at it was bad for him, so Kiem tried looking at the embroidery on the Auditor’s shirt designs, at his ear, and finally at the wall beyond. The Auditor focused on him.
“One purpose of the audit is to ensure the parties are authorized to speak for their planets,” the Auditor said, his voice as calm and rational as a textbook readout. “The Resolution cannot confirm Iskat and Thea are entering into the treaty voluntarily when the designated Iskat representative was murdered last month.”
The silence was like sudden pressure on Kiem’s hearing.
“Murdered?” he said. “No. Wait. That’s not—that’s not what happened.” He glanced over at Jainan, who had a strange, calm look in his eyes, as if his whole world had just cracked and there was nothing he could do about it.
“The aggregated data suggests otherwise,” the Auditor said, as precisely and unemotionally as if he were talking about the weather. His face shell was moving constantly now—Kiem had the feeling it would be changing color, if he could recognize any of the colors in it. “Thean news sources show discontent from multiple angles. Official communications have broken down. When the Thean representative requests sight of the investigation into the death of a politically bonded partner, and is denied…” He shrugged, an oddly human motion. “I cannot instate either of you at this point.”
“Denied what?” Kiem said. He’d missed something.
“No,” Jainan said, as if he understood.
The Auditor turned away. His shell had stopped moving, as if he had lost interest in further conversation, and the staffer smoothly stepped in front of him to prevent Kiem from following the Auditor behind the privacy screen.
“The instation process is not up for debate,” the staffer said. They sounded perfectly reasonable. Kiem might have felt less off-balance if they’d shouted.
“There must be an appeal,” Jainan said, something desperately controlled in his voice. “Or a process for—for replacement. We must have a treaty.”
He wasn’t wrong. Kiem started to realize how serious this was. The Resolution treated each comma of its interplanetary agreements like a law of nature. If Iskat and Thea couldn’t provide representatives that satisfied them, there wouldn’t be a treaty. And if there wasn’t a treaty, Iskat’s peace terms with the rest of the universe would have all the formal weight of something scrawled on the back of a napkin. Surely this was some sort of temporary setback, though. Everyone wanted a treaty.
“The Auditor is still processing the political context,” the staffer said. In the first flash of personality they’d shown, they glanced at Kiem and said, “Your partner has apparently not been entirely honest with you.”
“Jainan?” Kiem said, nonplussed. Jainan just shook his head. Kiem filed that away as ask later. “Look,” he said to the staffer, “you have to do something. The Emperor isn’t going to be happy.”
“The Auditor will discuss it with your Emperor,” the staffer said politely. “You are, of course, free to do the same.”
Kiem would have paid money to see the Emperor and the Auditor trying to out-stonewall each other under less important circumstances. “All right!” he said. “All right. You talk to the Emperor. We’ll ask the palace about Taam’s accident. And then we can fill in your form Thirty-Four B or whatever and get this sorted.”
“We appreciate your cooperation,” the staffer said. The data on the walls moved around, patternless and chaotic. The UNCONFIRMED tags beside Jainan’s and Kiem’s pictures didn’t change.
The door shut behind them as they left. There were officials passing in the corridor, but a sharp right turn took them to a landing on a quiet staircase, where an arched window looked out on the dome of the palace shrine and the grand entrance hall behind it.
Jainan stopped as soon as they had some privacy and immediately turned to Kiem. There were lines of tension around his eyes. The shrine dome framed his head and shoulders, making his figure seem smaller. “I have not held back anything of significance.”
“What are we talking about?” Kiem said plaintively. “Jainan, I have zero idea what the Auditor meant. Surely someone would have told us if Taam was murdered. And what did he mean about you and the investigation?”
Jainan ran a hand across his face, the first visible sign Kiem had seen of his control cracking. “It was nothing. Nothing important. I asked Internal Security for the crash data after the accident—Taam’s flyer was army-issue, but I know the military gave them the flight logs. I was told only the investigators had a need to know. They were right. This is irrelevant. There is no way Taam could have been murdered.”
Kiem leaned against the bannister next to him and frowned, trying to make sense of this. “Internal Security said you didn’t have a right to know about the investigation?”
“It was an accident,” Jainan said, though more as if he was trying to convince himself. “This is a mistake. The Auditor must confirm us.”
“Internal Security refused to give you the crash data?” Kiem said. “The crash your partner died in? You’re an engineer, aren’t you? You could have helped them read it.”
There was a pause that Kiem couldn’t parse at all. Then Jainan touched his newly fixed wristband and said abruptly, “I am not making this up.”
“I didn’t say—” Kiem broke off as Jainan, suddenly intense, brought up a light-screen in front of him and started spinning through his messages.
The stairwell had no display screen. Jainan turned to the wall instead, which was inlaid with the brushed-steel crest of the Hill Enduring, and projected his messages on top of it. Kiem wished he would stop doing that. He was prepared for Thea to have different notions of privacy, but it felt wrong to see all of Jainan’s correspondence. He tried to glance away surreptitiously until Jainan found the one he wanted to display.
“Here,” Jainan said. Kiem looked back. Jainan had put up a conversation with several officials: Internal Security, palace civil servants, some military bureaucrats. “I would not bother you with this,” Jainan said, his voice sounding as if his control was fraying, “except you should know what he was talking about. I don’t know how the Auditor brought this into his data set. I thought it was private.”
Kiem scanned the messages with a growing sense of indignation. Jainan was right, he had asked for information, and he’d been refused. “This is ridiculous,” Kiem said. “You could have genuinely helped—even if this murder stuff is rubbish, it could have given you some closure—” He fumbled in his pocket for his seal, which, for a miracle, he hadn’t lost. The lump of gold, engraved with Iskat’s crest, hummed as he brought up a small screen on his wristband and tapped the seal against it. The seal bled a golden patch onto the screen, forming a miniature version of the royal crest. Kiem signed some text across it—a quick demand Internal Security find the data and hand it to Jainan—and sent it to Jainan to add to the message chain. “There. See if that helps.”
“Oh,” Jainan said. He sounded startled, as if Kiem had broken some sort of rule. Kiem admittedly didn’t pay a lot of attention to palace legislation, but he was fairly sure asking Internal Security for some information wasn’t against the law.
“The Auditor can’t be right about Taam,” Kiem said, dropping the seal back in his pocket. “Someone would have told us.”
“I would just like to know,” Jainan said. The lines around his eyes hadn’t disappeared. He glanced out the window toward the shining dome of the shrine where Taam’s Mournings had all been held, shook his head slightly, and pulled his messages off the wall in the manner of someone determined to be businesslike about things. “Perhaps we should get back.”
“Yes—we should brief Bel,” Kiem said, galvanized into action. He fell in beside Jainan as they started down the stairs. “She might have some ideas. Honestly, this is absolute nonsense. A Galactic from the other side of the universe telling us we can’t speak for our own planets.” At the foot of the stairs, a glass door led outside. Kiem waved it aside and gestured Jainan ahead. “Maybe Bel will find it funny. Taam might have found it funny.”
Jainan gave him an odd look as they passed through the door and into the cold sunlight outside. “No,” he said. “Taam would not have found this funny at all.”
CHAPTER 7
A week passed. Jainan felt suspended, like a fragment caught in the force between two fields. The idea that Taam’s death might have been murder was farcical, absurd, but the memory of the Auditor saying it circled around his head until he was banishing the thought dozens of times a day. He could do nothing about it. No Iskaner was obliged to tell h
im anything. Internal Security failed to reply to Kiem’s nudge; even Taam’s old colleagues were quiet. Nobody had a duty to interact with Jainan except Kiem.
Kiem was—in public and in private—friendly, considerate, and good-humored. This had nothing to do with Jainan: Kiem was friendly and good-humored to everyone Jainan ever saw him with. Kiem was the person everyone knew, and it showed wherever he went. He walked into a crowded room and three people would immediately greet him like an old friend. Jainan had trouble remembering people’s names; Kiem remembered their children’s names. Every time Jainan thought about how he must look to Kiem—with his awkwardness, his stiff speech, his painful inability to say the right thing in the right situation—he felt a part of him try and spiral into self-pity again. He didn’t let that happen.
His first appointment with Professor Audel was at the Imperial College, on a clear and sharply cold day that dawned free of snow. Even taking a flyer to the College felt more intimidating without Kiem there. Not only had Kiem known where to go, but his easy confidence also attracted people’s attention. By himself, Jainan had to shake the feeling that everyone was staring at him instead. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a reason to leave the palace grounds alone.
Jainan got lost twice in the College’s twisty buildings, a couple of which were unheated and already below freezing. Professor Audel’s office, when he reached it, was in a corridor as stuffy as a sauna. There was a better-kept section adjoining it—Jainan passed three lab entrances, and glanced in with curiosity, and away with regret. The professor’s room had a nameplate and a doorbell. He gave it his thumbprint.
The door opened. The person behind it wasn’t Professor Audel, but one of her students.
The student stared as if Jainan had just landed there on an incoming meteor. “Sweet God, you came.”
Jainan knew that accent. The student was Thean. Jainan fought the urge to step back. “Is Professor Audel in?”
“Professor!” the student yelled behind him—no, her. The way she’d tied her clan neckscarf was definitely female. Jainan had spent so long on Iskat that he was looking for the wrong signals. An unwelcome memory rose from his first few weeks: How do you not understand what a woman is, Jainan? Do they not have them on Thea? At the time, Jainan had laughed. Now he blinked as the student called, “You were right, he’s here!”
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