Dark Space - Marianne de Pierres [2]
Tonight is graduation, she explained.
Insignia sighed and Mira Fedor felt it as a pressure in her chest, a slight involuntary lift of her shoulders.
I have been alone for a long time. . .
Since my father died, said Mira.
She hoped her words might prompt it to say more but the biozoon’s presence subsided back into an irregular drone. As always, Mira felt its withdrawal keenly, and yet today would be the last time.
She inspected herself in the gilded mirror. Today, for graduation, she wore her familia’s traditional five-thousand-gold-thread fellala with its blood-jewelled silk velum. The velum’s rubies burned under the chandeliers. Faja had sent it to Mira from their villa in Loisa as a sign of her sisterly pride—for only one ceremonial robe remained in their familia now. It was heavy and stiff, and restricted her movement, but it gave her belief.
Smoothing loose tendrils of her dark hair under the headdress, Mira allowed excitement to twist her lips into a smile. It was said that for Fedors, first union with a biozoon was like a wedding night. The moment of her life’s purpose had finally come, and it was not too soon, for dark, impulsive thoughts lurked near.
Her need for union with the Cipriano Clan’s organic pilot ship had become a craving, a hunger in her mouth that she could not satisfy, an ungovernable heat in her lower belly. Such feelings were improper for a Baronessa—but then, a Baronessa had never harboured the Inborn pilot gene before: indeed, a woman had not.
The Studium bells tolled, jolting Mira from her reverie: the formal ceremony was beginning. She gave her room the barest of glances despite knowing that she would not return. Her years here had been at best disagreeable. She had detested the sly behaviour of the other aristos and the way they hung off the young Principe, Trin Pellegrini, as if he granted meaning to their lives.
‘You are different,’ Cochetta Silvio had drawled loudly enough for all at one dreary patrizio soirée to hear. ‘So sombre, Baronessa. So thin.’
And, of course, there was the unspoken thing, the thing Cochetta was too refined to mention but which stood between her and the other aristos in the way that an infectious sickness created its own distance—her hereditary talent.
‘Different? Si, thank Crux,’ Mira had replied. But the sting of the snub stayed with her.
She dragged the heavy doors of her room closed with two hands and stepped out into the vast portico. The nano-filtered baroque arches lent Mount Pell a soft, almost benign appearance—so deceptive when the real Araldis sweltered under intolerably dry heat.
Mira let the view down to the Studium menagerie calm her: All their taunts will mean nothing after today. Straightening her shoulders, she sealed her velum and set the filter to hide everything but her eyes. Then she descended the central helicoidal staircase to the grand ante-room.
The entire Studium attended graduation, even the untitled Nobile. Now, as she entered, they jostled for position alongside the patricians like a gaggle of ornately feathered birds. Threading her way between them, Mira took her place on the dais to the side and a step behind the young Principe, Trinder Pellegrini, and his cousin Duca Raldo Silvio.
‘Bonjourno, Baronessa,’ said Raldo. He stroked his stiff moustache with practised affectation and gave her a smirking sideways glance.
‘Duca,’ she acknowledged with suspicion and the barest curtsy. Since when did Raldo Silvio use his guile on her?
On her other side Trinder Pellegrini dipped his head—enough to satisfy courtesy—but did not speak. In fact, he had not spoken to her for months now, not since…
‘Patrizios, please be seated.’ The Principe’s maestro appeared at the edge of the dais. The ante-room’s smart acoustics dispersed his command as if it were a whisper spoken directly into each person’s ear. When satisfied that the audience was settled, he announced simply, ‘The Principe.’
Utter silence fell as Franco Pellegrini, dressed in sweeping olive-velvet Studium regalia,