Bren shut his eyes, remembering that height Ilisidi had said rose beside the runway. That snipers could stop a landing.
They could stop a takeoff, then, too.
The door had shut. Engine-sound built and built. Cenedi let off the brakes and gunned it down the runway.
Banichi dropped into the seat next the window, splinted leg stiff. Bren gripped his seat arm, fit to rip the fabric, as rock whipped past the windows on one side, buildings on the other. Then blue-white sky on the left, still rock on the right.
Sky on both sides, then, and the wheels coming up.
“Refuel, probably at Mogaru, then fly on to Shejidan,” Banichi said.
Then, then, he believed it.
* * *
XVI
« ^ »
He hadn’t thought of Barb when he’d thought he was dying, and that was the bitter truth. Barb, in his mind and in his feelings, went off and on like a light switch… No, off was damned easy. On took a fantasy he flogged to desperate, dutiful life whenever the atevi world closed in on him or whenever he knew he was going back to Mospheira for a few days vacation.
‘Seeing Barb’ was an excuse to keep his family at arms’ length.
‘Seeing Barb,’ was the lie he told his mother when he just wanted to get up on to the mountain where his family wasn’t, and Barb wasn’t.
That was the truth, though he’d never added it up.
That was his life, his whole humanly-speaking emotional life, such of it as wasn’t connected to his work, to Tabini and to the intellectual exercise of equivalencies, numbers, and tank baffles. He’d known, once, what to do and feel around human beings.
Only lately—he just wanted the mountain and the wind and the snow.
Lately he’d been happy with atevi, and successful with Tabini, and all of it had been a house of cards. The things he’d thought had made him the most successful of the paidhiin had blinded him to all the dangers. The people he’d thought he trusted…
Something rough and wet attacked his face, a strong hand tilted his head back, something roared in his ears, familiar sound. Didn’t know what, until he opened his eyes on blood-stained white and felt the seat arm under his right hand.
The bloody towel went away. Jago’s dark face hovered over him. The engine drone kept going.
“Bren-ji,” Jago said, and mopped at a spot under his nose. Jago made a face. “Cenedi calls you immensely brave. And very stupid.”
“Saved his damn—” Wasn’t a nice word in Ragi. He looked beside him, saw Banichi wasn’t there. “Skin.”
“Cenedi knows, nadi-ji.” Another few blots at his face, which fairly well prevented conversation. Then Jago hung the towel over the seat-back ahead of him, on the other side of the exit aisle, and sat down on his arm rest.
“You were mad at me,” he said.
“No,” Jago said, in Jago-fashion.
“God.”
“What is ‘God?’ ” Jago asked.
Sometimes, with Jago, one didn’t even know where to begin.
“So you’re not mad at me.”
“Bren-ji, you were being a fool. I would have gone with you. You would have been all right.”
“Banichi couldn’t!”
“True,” Jago said.
Anger. Confusion. Frustration, or pain. He wasn’t sure what got the better of him.
Jago reached out and wiped his cheek with her fingers. Business-like. Saner than he was.
“Tears,” he said.
“What’s ‘tears’?”
“God.”
“‘God’ is ‘tears’?”
He had to laugh. And wiped his own eyes, with the heel of the hand that worked. “Among other elusive concepts, Jago-ji.”
“Are you all right?”
“Sometimes I think I’ve failed. I don’t even know. I’m supposed to understand you. And most of the time I don’t know, nadi Jago. Is that failure?”
Jago blinked, that was all for a moment. Then:
“No.”
“I can’t make you understand me. How can I make others?”
“But I do understand, nadi Bren.”
“What do you understand?” He was suddenly, irrationally desperate, and the jet was carrying him where he had no control, with a cargo of dead and wounded.
“That there is great good will in you, nadi Bren.” Jago reached out and wiped his face with her fingers, brushed back his hair. “Banichi and I won over ten others to go with you. All would have gone.—Are you all right, nadi Bren?”