Blindfold

The Guild Master blinked at her, preoccupied for a moment, then suddenly seemed to remember who she was. “Ah, Kalliana,” he said, “thank you for coming.” He set his lapscreen on the side of his command chair, stood, and stepped away. She followed him into his private ready room, dreading his reasons for summoning her. He sealed the door and turned to her with a casual expression. “How are you recovering from the Strone case? You’ve been keeping a low profile for several days.”

She glanced away to avoid his scrutiny. “Reading the prisoner was a very … unsettling experience. The pain is still there, but it’s lessening.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” the Guild Master said. “You are very valuable to us, Kalliana. Every Truthsayer is. But if you feel that your abilities have been worn thin by this ordeal, I’ll do my best to see that you’re reassigned in some appropriate manner. Toth Holding has requested a new Magistrate, and I don’t have anyone qualified to send them.”

“No!” she said a little too quickly. “I mean, that won’t be necessary.” It frightened her to think she might lose her status as a Truthsayer and be weaned from the Veritas drug. That would be the end of everything she knew, everything she had been born to. Her embryo had been grown here in the Guild, and she had been raised for no other purpose, given no other training. That was how it had to be. “No, I’m fine.”

“Good,” Tharion said. Behind him, the stained glass window filled his ready room with rainbows. “We’ve taken care of sentencing Strone—he’ll spend the rest of his life up on OrbLab 2.”

Kalliana could not hide her surprise, considering the overwhelming violence of the murders. “I would have thought he might be executed.”

Tharion looked away, then sighed, staring at his twined fingers. “Yes. I gave it thorough consideration—but there are extenuating circumstances. Eli Strone served the Guild well for many years. His record is one of the most exemplary of all the elite guards we’ve ever had. Until he left us.”

Kalliana nodded, unconvinced, but she could not argue with the Guild Master’s decision.

He sat down behind his desk. “I wanted to ask you again about my request to check for possible sabotage or a larger plot among the landholders. Did you see any deeper motivation behind the killings?”

“There is nothing,” she said, shaking her head vigorously.

“You’re sure Strone was acting alone?” Tharion pressed. “You detected no possible connection inside his mind?”

Kalliana shivered. “No. If you don’t believe me, feel free to look in his mind yourself. If you can get around the nightmares.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Tharion said. “I’ve looked in his mind before, when I was younger. Even before he committed his crimes, it was … unsettling. So rigid and sharply defined.” He looked at her with concern narrowing his eyes. “Are you positive you’ve fully recovered? You seem … shaken.”

Kalliana drew herself up, pretending that nothing was wrong. “I’m fine,” she said. “I can do my job as a Truthsayer.”

He turned in his chair to look wistfully out the stained glass window. “I had always thought I would be a Truthsayer myself for many more years, until Klaryus died.” He tugged the blue sash at his waist tighter. “But circumstances don’t always cooperate with our convenience. I vowed to do the best job I could.”

“I’ll do the same,” Kalliana insisted, with a conviction she did not feel. She wondered what this pep talk was all about, wanting just to run back to her quarters and be alone again.

Tharion’s face was stony as if he had come to a deep decision. “Fine. Then we have a new case for you to read, another accused murderer who claims he’s innocent. He may also be involved with … other crimes. You will verify that for us.”

Kalliana went rigid, as if a spear of ice had shot down her spine. “Another truthsaying?” she said. “So soon? But there are so many other Truthsayers—”

Tharion forced a smile. “I have no control over how frequently crimes are committed, Kalliana. It is your turn again. We’ve caught this man, practically in the act. The evidence against him is strong, but he claims he’s innocent—and I have reason to believe he may be telling the truth. We must grant him a swift trial. I would like you to handle this one in particular. Consider it a test.” He paused, apparently seeing her alarm. “Are you saying now that you’re not ready?”

Kalliana tried to weigh the shades of terror in her mind. “When will the reading be?”

“In three days,” he said.

She opened the ready room door and faced the turbolift on the other side of the command center so the Guild Master wouldn’t see her trembling. “I’ll be ready.” Kalliana left the bridge.

iii

Tharion sat back in the command chair and watched Kalliana leave, masking his expressions until the ready room door had slid shut. Deeply troubled, he tried to distract himself with other Guild duties for the rest of the afternoon … but he continued to come back to Kalliana’s haunted afterimage.

Tharion sympathized with the ordeal each one of his carefully trained telepaths went through with every criminal mind-reading—but it concerned him that Kalliana might be unstable. He pressed his lips together and hoped he was doing the right thing by assigning her to the case of Troy Boren. It might help her heal if she could read the mind of a man he knew to be innocent. An easy verdict that would restore her self-confidence without risking further exposure to murderous memories.

He prayed that Franz Dokken wasn’t wrong.

The distracting thoughts made Tharion less productive, and it took him an extra hour to review all of the recent disputes brought before the Guild. The numbers of filed grievances were increasing as the population on Atlas expanded.

Tharion found himself alone when he finally finished and walked quietly down the metal corridors to his own suite of rooms, which had originally been the SkySword captain’s quarters. The cabin was dim and empty; the evening lights at floor level suffused the room with a comfortable yellow-orange glow.

“Qrista?” he called, but heard no answer. Then he remembered that a long and complex meeting of the Landholders Council was being held in the lower briefing chambers, and his wife would probably come back frazzled and disgusted at the uncooperative representatives.

Servants had placed the evening meal on the metal dining table. Tharion lifted up the thermal cover and sniffed at the meal of rice and chopped vegetables. He was just debating whether to sit down and begin without Qrista when she came in, heaving a weary sigh and closing her ice-blue eyes.

He got up to greet her, ready to offer comfort and support. She sealed the door to their suite with great pleasure, as if she were blocking off the problems of the day. She straightened her white robe then untied the crimson Mediator’s sash and came to embrace him.

“A long one?” Tharion asked.

She nodded, resting her chin on his shoulder as if she wanted to melt into sleep standing in his arms. “Same old problems,” she said. “Different names, different details.

“Toth claims that Dokken Holding is irrigating their kenaf fields too much and thereby depleting an underground aquifer that feeds the springs watering his pine forests. Bondalar and Carsus have jointly issued a formal grievance against Koman, alleging that the raw materials the mines are shipping for their mag-lev rail project are defective, resulting in months of lost work. The Koman representative brought out quality inspection sheets to prove that the raw materials had been undamaged when they were shipped from the Mining District, but Bondalar brought out their own analysis to show the flaws in the material as received.” She drew a deep breath. “And so on and so on.”

Her pale hair was the colorless blond of all Guild members, done up in a long braid that spiraled like a helmet around the top of her head. “I can give you the mental details if you like, but frankly I’d rather spare you the misery.”

Tharion laughed. “Let’s sit down before our meal gets cold.”

She slumped into her chair and closed her eyes. Her sash hung loose, and her white robe fell open. “So how was your day?” she remembered to say, keeping her eyes closed.

“Murder,” he said.

Now she blinked and stared at him. “What? Another one?”

Tharion nodded soberly. “I’m beginning to suspect the Veritas smuggling goes deeper than I thought. More than just a few stray capsules that somehow managed to trickle into outlying villages.”

“And this murder had something to do with it?” Qrista said.

“I believe it’s a vigilante killing, removing one of the smugglers. But Franz says our problems are all over now.”

“Franz Dokken?” Qrista scowled. “If he’s behind it, I’m sure it’s not all over.”

Tharion took a mouthful of rice and vegetables, chewing slowly to grant himself time to think. “I never said he was behind it, Qrista. He’s trying to help. Don’t be so hard on him.”

“Give me the details,” she said skeptically. “I want to know what he really said.”

Tharion raised his head, and she reached over the small table to stroke his forehead. She closed her eyes and gently ran her fingers through his thoughts, enhancing them with her telepathic abilities.

“Convenient,” Qrista said. “And Dokken decides to play his own games with you, getting rid of your only direct connection before a Truthsayer can interrogate him. What about his suppliers?”

“That information is lost. But if it cuts off the Veritas smuggling, I think it’s for the best,” Tharion said. “Otherwise, we’ll raise a lot of questions we don’t want answered. How could the Guild lose control so badly? Think of the outcry.”

“Think of the outcry if people find out that we’re holding a man in the detention chambers who is almost certainly innocent! Dokken supposedly knows the identity of the real killer, but you never bothered to ask him. Are we supposed to ignore the unsolved crime?”

Qrista was visibly upset, turning away from him. “It goes against all our ethical training. We can’t just ignore a crime.”