Winter's Orbit

by Everina Maxwell

  Kiem raised his hands in front of him. “Hold up. Go back.” He looked at Audel. “You said next step, Professor. Does that have anything to do with Agent Rakal saying you planned to hack into the refinery while you’re on the habitat?”

  Gairad gave his inactive wristband a suspicious look. “Are you sure you’re not recording?”

  “My dear, making any kind of attempt now seems like a nonstarter,” Audel said. “Gairad and I suspected we had flags on our accounts. Yes, I had a plan to try connecting from a geolocal orbit and seeing what we could find. I used to work on the refinery plant equipment; I know some ways in. But that depended on Internal Security not tracking all our outgoing connections.”

  Like Internal Security had done to Jainan. It seemed natural for Kiem to say the next thing. “So use my account.”

  “What?” Gairad said.

  “I don’t think mine’s flagged,” Kiem said, “and I want to know what’s going on.”

  He didn’t let himself think too much about the implications. Of the three of them, he was probably the safest when it came to a real treason charge. It would be embarrassing for the Emperor to have a member of her family arrested. Of course, that might not stop her, but he could cross that bridge when he came to it.

  “Well, in that case,” Professor Audel said, a gleam in her eye that Kiem had started to recognize in Jainan whenever he had a new data source. “If you’d link up your wristband, Your Highness.”

  The atmosphere changed immediately. After a suspicious glare at him, Gairad started bustling around the screens, bringing up scripts Kiem didn’t recognize. Audel was totally focused on her screen. Kiem had thought it would be complicated, but once he’d linked up his wristband to the input sensors, Audel attached a data coin, and that was it. The screens flickered through interfaces too fast for Kiem to watch. Gairad kept cross-checking the displays with her own wristband and occasionally said things like, “Looks like they took Model 5 offline.” Audel just watched.

  “Can anyone learn to do that?” Kiem said, forgetting that now was not the time to be fascinated.

  Audel blinked, coming out of a trance. “This?” she said. “Sad to say, Prince Kiem, we’re doing very little. Most of this is a Kingfisher admin script I took with me when they discharged me. You’d need a Sefalan systems breaker to do this manually. Ah. Here we are.”

  Kiem looked up at the screens as they began to fill with the square branches of a data map. Gairad handed Audel another data coin, which must have had another script on it, because the data started to flicker and Audel muttered. Gairad was scowling.

  “Well, we can’t get what we wanted,” Audel said, looking up at the screen. “They’ve rotated the keys.”

  “But that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Gairad said, pointing at a string of numbers that meant nothing to Kiem. “That’s a commanding officer. Who is it?”

  “I believe that’s General Fenrik’s code,” Audel said, with an unseemly satisfaction. “How careless. He must have a local storage module. I wonder what he doesn’t want to keep on his personal systems?”

  Gairad started to grin. “Can I have a look?” Audel gestured for her to go ahead.

  Kiem finally realized what they were doing when Gairad started to open things. They were … personnel dossiers. Some of them had vids. They were all from officers whose names Kiem didn’t recognize, all at colonel rank or above.

  “This isn’t right,” Gairad said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with the refinery.”

  They didn’t. The one she had open was about an officer’s conviction for petty theft and the affair he was having with a subordinate. Kiem felt dirty even skimming it. “Why would General Fenrik have this?”

  Gairad shrugged and moved to the next one. Kiem took a moment to realize this was Aren Saffer’s file. “Close it,” he said, but Gairad didn’t. Instead she expanded it to fill both screens. Aren had been busy, Kiem realized, with a slightly sick feeling. He had gambling debts going back ten years.

  “This is blackmail material,” Kiem said.

  Professor Audel nodded, apparently unfazed. “So there must be a reason Fenrik needed to keep his senior officers in line.”

  “Here’s a file on Prince Taam,” Gairad said suddenly.

  “Don’t look at that,” Kiem said, but she’d already opened it.

  It wasn’t a file. It was a vid. Gairad’s expression changed as she opened it.

  At first Kiem couldn’t make sense of what he saw. Then his eyes adjusted, and he realized it was a view of a corridor from the static angle of a security camera. It wasn’t a place he recognized, but it had the white walls and polished opalescent flooring of—no, he did recognize that flooring pattern, that must be somewhere in the palace. It looked like the Emperor’s Wing.

  Taam and Jainan stood outside the door of their quarters. Too close to each other, Taam furious, Jainan blank. Somewhere in Kiem’s head, the floor gave way.

  Blackmail material.

  “I … maybe we shouldn’t,” Gairad said uncertainly.

  “Give me the vid,” Kiem said. He held out the data coin.

  Gairad looked at him and did a double take, as if whatever was on his face wasn’t worth arguing with. She downloaded the vid and hastily came out of the program.

  “We’ll carry on looking, then,” Professor Audel said, scrutinizing Kiem as if he were a research subject. “You’ll want to take that … outside.”

  Kiem wasn’t listening anymore. Kingfisher didn’t seem important. Nothing seemed important except the slim disc of cool metal he held in his hand.

  The door shut behind him. He was aware of passing other people in the corridors, but he didn’t see their faces. He realized he was walking too fast; he was probably drawing attention, and attention was the last thing he wanted right now. He stopped in a corner where two little-used corridors met and took the coin out of his pocket. It was warm from his hand; had he been holding it that tightly? He attached it to his wristband.

  The security camera feed ran for a handful of seconds without any movement. Kiem focused on it like the mountainside under his falling flybug.

  The screen moved, and two distant shapes came into view. Kiem’s stomach lurched as he recognized Jainan’s slim, straight figure again. Beside him was a man the same height in a gold-braided uniform with close-shaven hair—Taam.

  Even though there was no sound, it was clear something was wrong the minute they came in the picture. Taam was saying something with his face distorted into a scowl, and the expression Jainan wore was completely closed-off. Kiem checked the time stamp in the corner—late at night. Both of them were in formal dress; they must have been coming back from an event. Jainan said nothing as Taam pressed in close to him, clearly angry from his jerky strides down the corridor. Taam seemed to grow more and more irritated as they drew closer to the camera, and finally something he said seemed to resonate with Jainan, who turned his head and replied with something short and clipped.

  In the next second, Taam had grabbed Jainan’s arm, twisted it behind his back, and shoved him against a wall. Jainan said something else. Taam backhanded him across the face.

  Kiem’s fingers clenched on the insubstantial sides of the projection. He froze it with a violent, instinctive jab, but then couldn’t move his hand again. It felt like he had ripped a scab half off.

  In the frozen vid, Jainan’s expression was one of pure shock. He wasn’t even looking at Taam but past him, to the corridor where they’d come from. He was checking if anyone had seen.

  The prickling down Kiem’s spine wasn’t going to stop if he didn’t get this over with. He unfroze it.

  Taam said something only inches away from Jainan’s face. Jainan was fully focused on him now: he held his head stiffly and said something in the gap between whatever Taam was saying—from the shapes of his lips, and because he was expecting it, Kiem could make out public and not here. Jainan jerked his chin to the door opposite.

  Taam stopped. His lips dre
w back from his teeth, but Jainan had carried the point. He adjusted his grip on Jainan’s arm—Kiem let out an involuntary hiss—and shoved him toward the door. Jainan put up little resistance, only shook his arm as Taam let go as if dislodging something unpleasant. The door opened and he stepped through it. Before Taam followed, he looked around, and his eyes fixed on the security camera. Kiem had the urge to draw back, as if he’d been seen. But he carried on watching as he saw Taam call over Jainan’s shoulder to someone already in the room. That—delete—Kiem couldn’t make out any more.

  Kiem recognized the place now. That must be their rooms.

  The vid—the security camera footage Taam had called out to delete—ended and shrank back to a dot. That was it. The data coin held nothing else.

  Kiem didn’t feel shock. That was the worst part. He felt surreal, headachy, as if his muscles weren’t under his control, but not shocked. He gestured the replay command by mistake. It started to play again; he jabbed it to stop, and then to start, and then to stop again a second later when he couldn’t bear it. His wrist-screen shut off.

  All of a sudden, he couldn’t stand still anymore. He paced to a viewport and back to the corridor wall. It felt like there were stinging insects moving under his skin, crawling inside his rib cage and pooling in his chest. This made no sense. He raised his wristband, spun through to Bel’s contact, and then violently canceled the action. He couldn’t call anyone. This made no sense.

  Jainan had loved Taam. Yes, he had dropped a hint or two that their marriage wasn’t perfect, but no marriage was, and the only times Jainan had spoken sharply to Kiem were when Kiem had sounded like he was disrespecting Taam’s memory. Would you do that for someone who had acted like that? Jainan hadn’t fought back in the vid. He could take out a charging bear with a tree branch, but he’d done nothing. His partner was an Imperial Prince.

  Kiem compulsively started and stopped another sliver of the vid. The two figures hung frozen at the far end of the corridor, inexorably headed to their room. Jainan had loved Taam.

  No, he realized. Jainan had never said that.

  It hadn’t been grief that made Jainan gaunt and drawn when Kiem first met him. He had looked the same in the vid: pinched and strained and entirely focused on Taam. Like—fuck—like he’d been entirely focused on Kiem the first few days after the wedding. Those odd pauses. The messages linked to Taam’s account. The way Jainan had never said no.

  If Kiem had known him as he did now, he would have noticed that. If he’d had the intelligence of a block of wood, he would have noticed it. He was the most unobservant, most world-shatteringly useless—

  His wristband chimed with a reminder. His arm jerked as if it had burned him.

  Tiny lettering projected itself over his wrist, reminding him he and Jainan were nearly late for the Advisory Council dinner. He stared at it for a long time. The stinging feeling under his skin made it a punishment to hold still.

  He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned around. He needed to talk to Jainan.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jainan dressed for dinner and set off a few minutes early, hoping to catch Kiem beforehand; he must be told immediately about Jainan’s conversation with the Auditor and should also know about the refinery. Through the open doors of the station’s banqueting hall, Jainan could see there was already a crowd of people at dinner, none of whom he knew. He slipped into one of the empty, elegantly decorated anterooms off the corridor and checked the messages on his wristband while he waited. Nothing from the Emperor’s office yet.

  When Kiem arrived, one look at his face made everything run out of Jainan’s mind like water.

  “Kiem?” Jainan dropped his wrist and the screen disappeared. The chair he was in skidded back an inch as he scrambled to his feet, stumbling in the lower gravity. “Is something—what’s wrong?”

  Kiem didn’t answer. He was standing in the doorway, so the door couldn’t close.

  “Are you ill?” Jainan took a step forward. The lines on Kiem’s face were tight and strained. “I’ll—I’ll call someone.” Sit down, he wanted to say, but Kiem’s expression stopped him.

  Kiem tried to speak, but had to clear his throat. “I—Jainan. We need to talk. About.” He stopped.

  Jainan froze as his mind crowded with all the things he could have told Kiem but hadn’t. Some minor transgression—someone he had spoken to or some way he had embarrassed both of them—no, that couldn’t be it. He struggled to remember that Kiem wasn’t like that. “About what?”

  Kiem stepped in so the door shut behind him. “You and Taam.”

  Jainan had never heard Kiem’s voice sound like that before. It could still be anything, he told himself. The air around him felt sticky. It terrified him that he was falling back so often on his last line of defense—I don’t want to talk about it—but he started framing it anyway. “I—”

  “I found out how things were between you.”

  No. Jainan’s next words dried up on his tongue. Cloying shame filled his mouth, his throat; it bound his feet to the floor.

  “Jainan?”

  “It’s not true,” he managed.

  “What’s not true?” Kiem said. There was a pause as if, in the natural flow of conversation, he expected Jainan to reply. “Jainan, I saw it!” He must have caught Jainan’s flash of panic, because he frowned and said, “You were—you were arguing. It was a security feed.” It was obvious he didn’t want to say the next bit, but Kiem had never learned to hold the slightest thing back. “He shoved you into the wall.”

  It’s not what you think. It was less than a handful of times. That sounded so pathetic Jainan discarded it. He shook his head, fighting a wave of nausea.

  “Jainan, come on!” Was Kiem raising his voice, or was Jainan imagining it? He couldn’t tell; his ears were buzzing. “I worked out Taam must have been the one who got your security clearance revoked. See, you’re not even surprised. You knew that—oh, for fuck’s sake, Aren knew, didn’t he? Taam’s friends knew how he treated you. It was staring me in the face. Fuck.”

  Jainan stood like a statue, one hand resting on the back of the chair. His eyes compulsively followed Kiem as he paced from wall to wall: he was blurred, a moving shape that Jainan couldn’t focus on.

  “Aren knew,” Kiem said, persevering. “Why did he act so friendly? To—make fun of us or something? To play with our heads? Why didn’t you say anything? I had to find this out from Audel stealing a vid from Kingfisher!”

  Jainan barely understood his last sentence, but it didn’t matter. It blinded him, the sudden, awful image of Audel and Kiem dissecting Jainan’s list of private humiliations, Kiem like this—distressed and disgusted at the same time. You couldn’t love someone when you had trawled through their sordid problems like this. They were only an object of pity. He was an object of pity.

  Kiem was still talking. Jainan couldn’t make sense of it anymore. He imagined the garbled noise as a river below him, and he himself balanced on a dam that was cracking under his feet. Everything he’d built was falling apart. Everything he had tried to do to save the treaty was rendered useless by his failure. He thought he’d been dignified, he thought he’d been brave—really, he had just been in denial about the fact that nothing could save his dignity when people found out. Nothing could make him more than a sob story.

  “Jainan?” Kiem said. He had stopped; he was only a pace away from Jainan. “You look—Jainan!” The name was like a whip. Kiem reached out.

  Jainan pulled away. His failure, his terror was coming to a point in his head like a storm building. He hadn’t even moved consciously. The pressure swelled unbearably, shot through with fury and panic, and what came out of his mouth was, “How dare you?”

  Kiem’s mouth formed the start of what, but didn’t finish it.

  “I asked you not to talk about it! You had no right!” Kiem actually flinched. But he had stopped talking, finally, and Jainan didn’t dare let him start again. Jainan was shaking. “This was my marriage,
my past—did you think you were entitled to it just because I married you? How dare you!”

  “I didn’t—I wouldn’t—” Jainan could barely see Kiem through the haze that blurred everything, but Kiem’s voice was agonized. Sweet God, it was so much easier to be angry than afraid.

  “I have to go,” Jainan said. It sounded lame and faltering. “I have to go and get—I have to go.”

  He struck out rapidly for the exit. Kiem moved as Jainan did, his arm outstretched to catch Jainan’s elbow. “Wait! Jainan!”

  Jainan shoved the door aside and burst into the hallway, now crowded with dinner guests. People were looking at them. They were in the way of the exit; Jainan had to stop for an instant, trapped. He turned his head.

  “I … I understand,” Kiem said. The tight lines at the corners of his eyes were back. “I’m, I’m sorry. I’ll leave you alone.”

  And then he was gone.

  It happened so fast that Jainan didn’t even realize Kiem had really gone until the murmur of chatter started up again. People’s sidelong glances were turning into outright stares. Kiem had pushed through the crowd, not toward their guest suite, but deep into the station in the opposite direction.

  Jainan looked at the floor, reflexively straightened his shirt, and walked through the crowd without meeting anyone’s eyes. The next thing he knew, he was back in their rooms. Their silent, white, empty rooms, with just the ringing memory of what he had done. He crumpled into a chair.

  Who would Kiem tell? With Taam there had always been the safety of knowing that both of them would rather crawl over broken glass than shame themselves in public. Kiem didn’t care about his reputation. Would he talk to the press? Jainan couldn’t stop him. He could not go back to Thea. He pressed his hand over his face and tried not to think about the fact there was no way out.

  He would have to talk to Kiem later and attempt to salvage something. They still had to try to find some way of fixing the treaty—though it seemed more and more unlikely with every hour. Jainan felt the weight of the station atmosphere on his shoulders as if it had substance and mass, pressing down. Was his marriage dissolved? How likely was it that Kiem would keep up the charade after a scene like that?