Part 24 (1/2)
like worms, boring through her thoughts and making her s.h.i.+ver with the feeling that this moment was not, somehow, real. The silence was so thick it seemed to push away the rain. Shjams cleared her throat. ”So,” she said uncertainly.
”So,” Tsia repeated.
”So, how are you?”
Tsia stared at her for a long moment. ”G.o.ddammit,” she breathed finally. ”It's been six years since
you've seen me, and all you can say is how am I?”
Shjams did not change expression, but Tsia felt suddenly that she was looking at a mask.
”What are you doing here?” she asked slowly.
Shjams's voice was strained. ”Me?”
”You. Shjams. My sister, who should be up at a docking hammer, not down at a freepick stake-”
”You're the one who shouldn't be here,” the other woman said harshly.
Tsia stared at her. She took a half step forward, but the point of the laze did not waver. ”Shjams, put the
laze away.””No.””I'm not blackjack. I'm with the meres-” Her voice cut off abruptly: Shjams did not look surprised.
”You know that.”
”Yes.”
”You're one of them.”
”Yes.”
Tsia's face paled so that her skin looked almost like her scars. She reached back unconsciously to steady herself on the s.h.i.+p. ”You came for the biochips.” It was not a question. ”You helped them get the biochips.”
”Yes.”
Tsia stared at Shjams. Her sister's green eyes, shuttered and shallow with some kind of inner mask, stared back. Tsia tried to sense Shjams's biofield, but it was as if her person had been cut up in strips or shredded. There was only a dark center, thick and pulsing with some rhythm that was not Shjams... A blackness that ate at her heart so that she, herself, became hollow as an old grudge.
”The laze-put it down,” she whispered.
”Please...” Shjams's voice was not steady, and there was an anguish in her eyes that rippled like a shock wave through Tsia's biogate. But the hand on the laze did not waver. ”Please,” she breathed. ”Don't force me to use it.”
The shadows grew closer in Tsia's gate. She took another half step forward. The point of the laze was blue-white, with purple tints, and seemed to fill her sight with a burning, fiery light. Her gaze rose to the face of the other woman. ”You would laze me. Me: Tsia. Your sister.”
Rain spattered the ground and ran against their feet. ”Yes.”
”G.o.ddammit-”
”I will do it, Tsia.”
Tsia felt as if some edge of her world had crumbled. Her lips curled, and her hands clenched at her sides. All of a sudden, anger flared up in her guts and burned in the acids of her stomach. It bunded her eyes. In her mind she saw her brothers' faces, closed against the hurt, as they realized that Shjams would not return their corns, would not accept their visits, would not return to see them. Her mother's face, where lines seemed to have etched and age seemed to have settled overnight the day Shjams disappeared... Her father, who somehow seemed to shrink and draw in on himself while he threw himself into the training of new guides. And her grandmother, whose blue eyes faded more with every year Shjams had been gone...
”Six years,” Tsia said slowly. ”Six years, and you finally did come back.”
Shjams cleared her throat uneasily. ”You didn't use to be so concerned with time.”
”You call more than half a decade a little bit of time? Daya, Shjams, it's been six years with no word from you at all. Six years of wondering how you were. What you did. If you were sick or unhappy or just off finding yourself, as you claimed. Wondering if we could possibly help. You finally did come back to Risthmus. But not for your family.” Her voice grew sharper with every word until it seemed to strike out like claws. ”No,” she almost snarled. ”Six years, and you don't bother to seek your family at all. You just come for a set of biochips. You come back, not as the daughter of the guides Bayzon and Ellyn; not as the woman who worked her own way through the certification boards; not as a full inspector from the only working docking hammer in orbit around this world. You come as a criminal. As a zek. As a thief.”
Shjams took a half step back.
Tsia followed her. ”Forget me-your sister. Forget your family. Just look at what you're doing. Do you know what blackjack will do with those chips? Do you understand what can happen-to this world? To any other world in human s.p.a.ce?”
”They won't be used against our worlds.”
”Who told you that?” Tsia demanded. ”And how could you possibly believe such a thing even if you heard it? The Shjams I knew wouldn't fall for such a lie. How could you have changed so much-”
”It's you who have changed, not I.”
Tsia threw her head back and snarled, and Shjams froze. For a moment, neither one moved. ”I have changed,” Tsia said in a startlingly quiet voice. ”I've begun to know myself again. But you-you're like a ball of water, spinning without a center.”
”You don't know what I am-”
”I can feel you,” Tsia snarled. ”I can feel your intent like a knife already cutting my throat.”
”Then go,” Shjams almost shrieked. ”Go. Run. Get away from here. I won't laze you. Just go...”
Slowly, then more strongly, Tsia shook her head. ”Who turned you into this?” she asked, almost gently.
”Who is using you?”
”No one. No one-”
”It is a friend? A lover who has this control over you?”
”No. Yes, but he's- No- No one uses me.”
”Is it the one you ran away with?”