The portable ambulance chair she sat in was within reach of a discarded IV line. She wore not her normal conservative outfits but a loose medical gown covering a bulkiness that suggested dressings on her torso underneath. She was alive. She had conscripted Tennal, planned to murder Surit, been shot by Oma, and she was alive, and Tennal should have bloody known. You didn’t just lose the bane of your life as easily as that.

She tried to sit up, and her breath caught in pain.

Tennal had gone from zero to overwhelming fury in less time than it took to turn on a light, only to be hit in the chest with that.

The legislator drew a great heaving breath. “Don’t even fucking think about it,” she said, as she levered herself up with the arm of the chair. Tennal hadn’t realized he’d started forward, his hand out. “I’m not an invalid. This will pass.”

Tennal let his hand drop.

It was only then that he realized what the room was. The legislator might be in an ambulance chair, but that had been brought in here; it wasn’t a medical bay. There were powered-down game boards against the wall and faded soft furnishings. It looked like the rec room on the Fractal Note.

It was a rec room. This must’ve been where she and her unit had lived when they’d stayed here and had their brains irradiated by remnants, some twenty years ago.

He said, “So how much of your act back on the station was fake?”

“You’re going to have to be clearer than that.”

“I thought you were dead.” It was easier to say if he didn’t look at her. “But I was just an afterthought, wasn’t I? The point was to make Oma think you were dead. And now you’re here. How many layers deep do your plans go, Auntie dearest? How many of us are just pieces?”

The legislator opened her mouth in the same way as when she was about to verbally annihilate a rival politician in a Convocation session. Then, for the first time Tennal could remember, she hesitated.

“I didn’t see it coming,” she said. Tennal felt shock prickle down his back. The legislator never admitted she was wrong. She lifted a hand and made a tired gesture at the med machines, at her own exhausted form. “I suppose I should be flattered at the thought that this was intentional, coming from you. But I’ve gone to ground, Tennalhin. I’m here to lick my wounds. I have a very good extraction team, and I was wearing protective armor under my clothes, and those are the reasons I’m still alive. If that shot had landed five centimeters up, I would be dead.”

Tennal said nothing. Something was blocking his throat.