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Cipher Nine's aura is grey, and chilly, and far too quiet. He uses his face and voice and body like musical instruments, like surgical implements, like weapons, and Vector can't tell the difference between a truth and a lie. Maybe it's all lies. Occasionally he'll see a flicker of something brighter—but only a flicker. It's like talking to something only half-alive.
Cipher Nine did not consume the membrosia that Vector gave him. He thanked Vector in the moment, coolly polite as ever, but the next time they met, he wasn't carrying it, and there was no lingering familiar scent. Vector suspects he destroyed it rather than risk even the slightest exposure.
Because Cipher Nine is afraid of him, of the Nest, of the Joining. Vector knows this, could smell it on him every time he walked into the Oroboro hive; Vector wonders why someone so sanguine about what Intelligence did to his mind would fear a kinder change.
Vector remembers his own fear, when he was taken to the deepest part of the Oroboro nest. He remembers how the air was warm and heavy, how his wracking, terrified sobs and pleas turned to softer weeping and then to silence, how his body began to feel feverish and strange, how every breath and every thought-that-was-not-his eroded the fear until at last it crumbled away, and the Song of the Universe poured in like the sea.
He wishes that Cipher Nine could share in the Song. It would be good for him, Vector thinks. Something beautiful, something magnificent, something more than what Imperial Intelligence took away.
But Vector remembers House Cortess, the way Cipher Nine's fingers tightened on the hilts of the knives, the coiled tension in how he stood, the way his quiet grey aura went sharp and cold and focused. It's not a gift.
How can it not be a gift? How can the Joining be anything but a gift, when the fear is temporary but the Song is eternal?
What gives you the right to decide on their behalf?
The Song of the Universe is everything. Those who cannot hear it don't know what they're missing, can't understand just how limited and isolated and lonely they truly are.
It's not a gift if they can't say no. I will not allow this, Ambassador.
Vector hesitated, and the Song faltered, and Cipher Nine killed a swarm of Oroboro Killiks in a flickering blur of blasterfire and darts and grenades and knives, deathly quiet slipping between notes of the Song like a blade, and Vector ... helped him.
Vector stood beside a fellow servant of the Empire and felt the Song turn dissonant and pained and sour with death and loss and silence where once there was music, and in the end they left House Cortess littered with insect and Joiner corpses, and Vector did not know what to think, how to feel, what it meant.
For all that the Nest survives, for all that individual Killiks are only parts of the whole, Vector can sense the distance between him and that whole, more keenly than ever. He can sense the confusion, the pain his choice caused, discord where before there was harmony. Oneness, fracturing into otherness. Perhaps it would have eased, given time to sink back into the Song, but Dawn Herald is a position of isolation as much as of honor. The individuality he retains is of use to the Nest, for facing the unknown—but he chose to defy the Nest, to act against its interests, to ... to harm it. Self, separation, is a terrible burden, for a Joiner. It's his sole saving grace, as an Imperial diplomat.
And now—he works and fights and lives with an Imperial spy. One who hates Killiks, and fears them, and feels no regret for slaughtering them.
Vector sometimes wonders if Cipher Nine is capable of feeling regret at all, or if Intelligence took that too.
The Joining took nothing, and gave everything. Changed everything. It was a gift. Vector said no, and it was given regardless. Is that not generosity? How can it be wrong, to change a life with unconditional kindness?
Cipher Nine would have killed him, if he'd chosen the Nest, and would have regarded his death with the same dispassionate detachment as he regarded the deaths of every other drone and warrior and Joiner and larva he—they—killed.
Vector hopes he doesn't have to choose again. He is Dawn Herald; he is Ambassador Hyllus. He is both. Both have value, to him-as-himself, but he is only valuable to the Empire as one, and to the Nest as the other. But after feeling the sick crunch of chitin beneath his warstaff and scenting the fear of another Joiner bleeding out at his feet ...
No. Vector does not want to have to choose again. He doesn't know what he would choose.
It's not a gift, to be forced to choose.