A rock exploded near them, just blew up as it sat on the hillside. Babs took the slot beside a narrow waterfall and struck out uphill among stones the size of houses, higher and higher into the mountains.
Sniper, sanity said. They were still in range.
But he followed Ilisidi, slower now, more sheltered among the boulders, and he had time and breath to realize the foolishness he’d just committed, that he’d pushed himself next behind Ilisidi, that Cenedi was at his back, and that Nokhada was sensibly unwilling to slow down now and lose momentum on the uphill climb.
Fool, he thought. He’d lost his good sense on the mountain. Knowing the responsibility he carried, he’d risked his neck because he carried it, and because of the things he couldn’t do and didn’t have, and he didn’t care, didn’t damned well care, during those few selfish highspeed minutes that were nothing but now, risking his life, damn them all, damn Tabini, damn the atevi, damn his mother, Toby, Barb, and the whole human race.
He could have died. He could easily have died in that crazed course. And he discovered so much bitter, secret anger in him—so much rage he shook with it, while Nokhada’s saner, more reasoned strides carried him up and up among the protecting rocks. What sent him down a mountain wasn’t, then, the delirious freedom he told himself it was, it was what he’d just experienced: a spiteful, irrational death wish, aiming his own destruction at everyone and everything he served—that was what he was courting.
Not damned fair. The only thing in his life he enjoyed with complete abandon. And it was a damned death wish.
He hated the pressures at home on Mospheira, the job-generated pressures and most of all the emotional, human ones. At the moment he hated atevi, at least in the abstract, he hated their passionless violence and the lies and the endless, schizophrenic analysis he had to do, among them, of every conclusion, every emotion, every feeling he owned, just to decide whether it came of human hardwiring or logical processing.
And most of all he hated hurting for people who didn’t hurt back. He didn’t trust his feelings any longer. He was drained, he was exhausted, he hurt, and he wasn’t dealing with either reality sanely anymore.
It was the second personal truth he’d faced—since that dark moment with the gun at his head. It told him that the paidhi wasn’t handling the job stress. That the paidhi was scared as hell and not sure of the people around him, and no longer sure he’d done the right thing in anything he’d done.
You didn’t know, you didn’t damned well know with atevi, what went on at gut level, on any given point, not because you couldn’t translate it, but because you couldn’t feel it, couldn’t resonate to it, couldn’t remotely guess what it felt like inside.
They were on the verge of war, atevi were shooting each other over what to do about humans, and the paidhi was coming apart—they’d taken too much away from him last night. Maybe they hadn’t meant to do it, maybe they didn’t know they’d done it, and he could reason with himself, he knew all the psychological labels: that there was too much unresolved, that there were even physiological reasons behind the sudden fit of chill and fear and the morbid self-dissection this morning that had their only origins in the business last night.
And, no, they’d not been playing games last night. It had never been a false threat they’d posed; Cenedi was damned good at what he did, and Cenedi hadn’t weighed his mental condition heavily against the answers Cenedi had to have.
It didn’t change the fact they’d shaken things loose inside—ricochets that were still racketing about a psyche that hadn’t been all that steady to start with.
He couldn’t afford to break. Not now. Ignore the introspection and figure out the minimal things he was going to tell atevi and humans that would silence the guns and discredit the madmen who wanted this war.
That was what he had to do.
At least the gunshots had stopped coming. They’d passed out of earshot of the explosions, whatever might be happening back at Malguri, and struck a slower, saner pace on easier ground, where they might have run—a more level course, interspersed with sometimes a jolting climb, sometimes a jogging diagonal descent—generally much more to the south now, and only occasionally to the west, which seemed to add up to a slant toward Maidingi Airport, where the worst trouble was.