Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil

For a moment Borika just stared at her. Then, slowly, she lowered herself back onto the couch. “No,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “You’re lying. You can’t possibly know that. Those records are sealed.”

“You have Syndic Thrass’s data,” Thalias reminded her, nodding toward Borika’s questis. “Take a look.”

Borika held her pose another few heartbeats. Then, slowly, she raised her questis and looked at the display, scrolling through the pages. Thalias waited, not daring to move, watching the play of emotions across the other woman’s face.

Finally, reluctantly, Borika raised her eyes again. “That’s not supposed to happen,” she said. “We’re not supposed to … they don’t want us to know where we came from.”

“Why not?” Thalias asked. “Is it like how senior flag officers have to give up their families?”

“No, it’s—” Borika broke off, and Thalias could see her fighting a quiet internal battle. “They don’t want us to remember our families because too many of us would have quit.”

Thalias frowned. “You’re joking.”

“You think so?” Borika countered. “You’re five years old. You’ve just been taken from your parents and the only world you’ve ever known. You wouldn’t be homesick?”

“Well …” Thalias thought back to her first awkward meeting with Che’ri, and how touchy and uncertain the girl had seemed. And that was just the girl changing caregivers, not the far bigger trauma of having to say goodbye to her family forever. “All right, I might have been a little homesick,” she conceded.

“Then you’d have been the exception,” Borika said, her face and body sagging with a sudden weariness. “Too many of the girls cried themselves to sleep for weeks at a time. Too many of them were too miserable or frightened or just too distracted to learn how to use their Third Sight. There were never many candidates to begin with, and now the program was losing them like water from a tipped bucket.”

She took a breath, exhaled in a long sigh. “So the decision was made to … remove … that distraction.”

A shiver ran up Thalias’s back. “They wiped our memories?”

“The term they used was faded,” Borika said. “But basically, yes.”

“But I remember the packbulls whinnying,” Thalias protested. “I remember—” She looked around them. “I think maybe I remember this room.”

“The fading process wasn’t perfect,” Borika said. “There were always pieces left. But the family memories, the ones that were getting in the way … those were gone.”

“Che’ri mentioned a carnival once,” Thalias said slowly, thinking back to a long-ago conversation. “I was playing some music, and she said it reminded her of what they’d played there.”

“That would have been the Thearterra center,” Borika said. “I spent some time there before getting married and settling here. The caregivers used to take the girls to that carnival as a break from their training. I wish they could do that on Ool, but there’s nothing close enough.”

“But some of those things happened during training,” Thalias objected. “If they were just trying to take away memories of our homes and families, why did we lose that, too?”

“I don’t know,” Borika said. “They talk about fading creep, but I think that’s just their way of saying they don’t know, either. All I know is that the system has been in place for the past couple of hundred years. Every time a new Patriarch of the Nine comes to power, it’s brought up again for a special confirmation. So far, they’ve always voted unanimously to keep it in place.”

“And then—oh,” Thalias interrupted herself as an old puzzle suddenly resolved itself in her head. “And that’s why they don’t want former sky-walkers acting as caregivers, isn’t it? They’re afraid we’ll compare notes and realize we both have the same memory loss.”

“Very good,” Borika said with a touch of black humor. “I don’t think even the people who are running the program right now realize that’s why that particular protocol was originally put in place. You said you got in as a caregiver by accident?”

“More or less,” Thalias said. “Patriarch Thurfian—he was just Syndic Thurfian at the time—had a private agenda going. When he found out I wanted aboard the Springhawk, he saw me as a way of achieving it and pulled the necessary strings.”

“What did he want you to do?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Thalias soothed her. “I dumped the whole thing off my back a long time ago.”

“Does he know that?” Borika asked pointedly.

“I’m sure—” Thalias broke off as the comm at her waist signaled. “Just a second,” she said, frowning as she pulled it out. Who could possibly be calling her here? “This is Thalias,” she said.

“Mid Captain Samakro,” Samakro’s voice came back. “Are you still on Ool?”