Carnival

“Because the city is esthelich,isn’t it?”

“That can be no revelation, Vincent Katherinessen.”

“No,” Vincent said, aware of Michelangelo shifting a half‑step closer to him, a warm pressure at his elbow. “I’ve known that for a while. Since it helped me hide from the kidnappers. If it’s esthelichby your standards, it must have an aesthetic. And its aesthetic is…comfort? The care of its inhabitants?”

“Would you create a domicile that thought otherwise?”

“No.”

Lesa had looked away from Walter and was now sitting curled forward, the bedclothes dragged over her lap as she stared at Vincent. “And of course,” she said, “even if you were Transcendent, there’s always the chance that something could go wrong with the system, isn’t there?”

Smart woman. Which was no more a revelation than House’s taste in art had been. “The possibility exists,” Kii said, hunching between its wings.

Vincent said, “And if you needed physical bodies again? Could you read your…personality onto an organic system?”

“The possibility exists.”

“The khir are a failsafe.”

“The khir are not disposable,” it answered, contracting again, pulling itself back on its haunches.

“Kii,” Michelangelo said. “If you had to translate esthelich. What would you say it meant?”

The Dragon hesitated. Its head swung side to side, the tongue flickering through a gap in its lower lip. “It does not translate into merely one of your words.”

“Try.”

“Fledged,” it said, with no weight of emotion on the word.

If Kii were human, Vincent would have scrupled to press. He would have known he was millimeters from a moral pit trap, a bit of doublethink that would expose a violent defensive reaction when triggered. But the Dragons had Consent. They were as physically incapable of experiencing moral qualms about following orders as Vincent’s own hand was of rebelling when his consciousness instructed it to pull a trigger.

He said, “They’re not a separate species, are they?”

And Kii shifted, its wings furled tight against its sides, and blinked slowly. “The khir? They are not.”

“They’re young Dragons. Neotenous. With their growth and intellectual development intentionally retarded.”

“They are not esthelich. They have no Consent. We provided for them, and they protect us.”

“That’s horrible,” Lesa said. She dropped the bedcovers and climbed to her feet, wincing as her bandages touched the carpetplant. “You…engineered your own children into slaves?”

“Pets…no, domestic animals are not slaves,” Kii insisted. “They are without aesthetic. They are not people. Your infant creatures are immoral–no. Sociopathic. They are not people.”

Vincent reached behind Angelo to put a hand on Lesa’s arm, steadying. She shook it off. “But they could have been.”

“Not these, no. They were conceived to this purpose, and they breed true. They are animals, and would never have been born, otherwise.”

“Unless you remove the, what, the chemical inhibition? And then they transform into adults. Only with the minds of Transcended Dragons downloaded into their skulls, rather than whatever they might have become?”

“It is,” Kii said, “the Consent.”

Lesa might have wanted nothing to do with Vincent, but Michelangelo stepped closer, shoulder to shoulder, and Vincent leaned on his warmth, their wardrobes melding. “What if we lobotomized girl babies,” Angelo said. “Kept them as cattle. Destroyed their higher functions–”

“They would not be esthelich,” Kii said. “They would be as domestic animals, as the khir. But it would be immoral to destroy the potential to be people in one born with it.”

“But the Consent finds no ethical failing in creating the khir?”

“The Consent finds no ethical failing in the selective breeding of domestic animals.”

“Lesa,” Angelo said, “please sit down. It hurts to watch you.”

She stared at him, head drawing back as her neck stiffened, and then she nodded and sank down on the unmade bed. “I have another question for the Consent,” Vincent said.

Kii lifted its chin, ear‑feathers forward to cup sound. Alert and listening.

“If you can reprogram Michelangelo’s docs, can you rewrite other code?”

“We can.”

“The Governors,” Vincent said.

And with a careful, human gesture, Kii shook its head. “It is discussed. The Consent is that it is unwise. And also that the Governors are not esthelich,but that they are art. And not to be destroyed.”

“Fuck,” Michelangelo said, and Vincent didn’t blame him. “Then it’s a war.”

24

THE MALES LEFT SHORTLY AFTER THE DRAGON DID, LEAVING Lesa alone in her bedroom with the sleeping khir. Michelangelo wouldn’t let her rise to see them to the door, his stern glower as effective as a seat belt, but hiding a striking chivalry that Lesa wouldn’t pretend not to chafe at and couldn’t understand how she’d earned. It still carried a taint of chauvinism, but Michelangelo seemed to think it indicated respect.

It didn’t matter. He was trying to learn, to accommodate. And she’d have fought for him even if he wasn’t. Her own honor was at stake now.

When the door spiraled closed behind Vincent and Michelangelo–and stayed closed; Lesa was wise to that trick–she pried herself off the bed again and settled wearily on the carpetplant beside it. The pain was bad enough, though analgesics and anti‑inflammatories were some use–but the vertigo was truly incapacitating.

She could live with pain.

Her citizenship piece was still missing. Lost to her forever, probably, along with her daughter and her mate. But she had more than one weapon and it wasn’t as if she could go about unarmed. There was a pistol and an old holster in the bottom of the nightstand.

Lesa pulled the box out, inspected the weapon–clean and smelling muskily of gun oil–and strapped the soft, worn leather of the gunbelt around her waist. Then she loaded the honor, safetied it, and laid it on the bed. It took the same caseless ammunition as her citizenship piece.

Standing was unpleasant. But she couldn’t settle the holster properly while hunched on the floor, and whatever bravado she’d issued to the males about not needing to be able to walk to shoot, she had to be able to stand to duel.

She slipped her new honor into the holster, checked twice to make sure it was locked and no round was chambered, and pulled one of the crutches away from the wall to brace herself on.

“House,” she said, “I need a mirror.”

The long interior wall with no doorways was her usual mirror. It misted gray and glazed reflective as Lesa limped toward it, transferring as much weight to the crutch as possible to keep it off her feet. She paused two meters from the wall and stared at her reflection in true color.

She looked like ragged death. Her face was puffy around the scratches and shiny with antibiotic ointment. Her hands were red‑fleshed and torn, her forearms more scab than skin. She wobbled, and leaned against the crutch hard enough that her whole body canted left. The fingers of her right hand, hovering over the butt of her honor, looked like undercooked sausages, and the gouges on her palm had cracked open again and were leaking pinkish fluid.

“I am,” she whispered, “so fucked.”

The draw was reflex, wired into nerve and muscle by decades of practice. She shouldn’t have to think about it. She should barely be conscious of feeling it happen.

The air dragged at her wrist, thickened around stiff fingers. The hand was slow, the fingers inflexible; they didn’t hook the butt of the honor and glide inside the trigger guard as they should. The weight was wrong, the balance off–

Her honor skipped from her hand, spi