“You don’t appreciate the irony of this?” Naecia said, feeling any empathy for the stringhunter beginning to gutter. “Being enslaved only to become a slaver?”

“Not especially,” said Aptat. “I rather found it to be a natural progression.”

“That’s sick.”

“Depends on one’s perspective, wouldn’t you say?” They chuckled. “You know, there is an odd sensibility among some species – one that you seem to share with humans for instance – to see every person’s story as an arc or a circle where, for some reason, they grow as life grinds them down, become wise and forgive. As if adversity is some kind of fertilizer for the soul. It’s like this fiction they put in their television shows – now those are sick – a million different angles on the theme that suffering is redemptive. Would you believe that some of them actually worship that idea? Perverse, in my opinion. Yet there is a bias to only tell those stories, I think. People love a redemption story and so those are the ones we hear.” Aptat tore out a piece of bad seal and set the suit aside. “I believe the opposite outcome is far more prevalent. Suffering begets suffering. I’m not the exception, Naecia, I’m the rule. That vault wasn’t a forge from which my soul was going to emerge, enlightened. It cast me. I didn’t escape from Mother wanting to change things for the better. What does that even mean, better? Better for whom? A life ground down grows hungry. All I knew is that I wanted to thrive, to get what was mine. And the more I see of the Universe, the more I am convinced that my way of doing things is the only way. To turn my wounds into treasure.”

Naecia remembered the carapace’s control code. “Aureate cicatrix?” she said. “A gilded scar?”

“Scars are reminders, yes? My scars remind me that I have only one interest going forward: Aptat.”

Naecia rolled her eyes. “That doesn’t seem like a life worth living. Being devoted entirely to your own self-interest. Actually, I don’t think that even makes sense. You need others to be happy.”

“Years in a box will change that perspective,” said Aptat. Then they stopped checking the suit and looked hard at Naecia. “I would kill you and take everything you owned if I felt it was in my self-interest, and your wise strategic actions thus far tell me you understand that. Don’t let happy myths about trial and redemption cloud the reality of the way things are. The Universe is life and death. Everything else is a nudge in one direction or the other. In the end, we only have ourselves.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN