Freedom, Humanity, and Other Delusions (Death's Handmaiden Book 3) by Niall Teasdale (best summer reads txt) 📕

The door Mitsuko and Melissa had come out of led into the lounge. It was large enough to double as a dining room if you wanted, but it seemed that the two women had decided on more of a Japanese feel. Sort of. If you squinted. There was a large sofa arranged to face the main entertainment screen which occupied the opposite wall, but between sofa and screen was a low table that seemed to be the only surface suitable for eating on. To Nava’s right as she entered was the big picture window which, she noted, could be entirely blocked out by heavy blinds. Decoration was light: the walls were painted in a soft, creamy colour and that was about it. It turned out that the same decoration had been applied to all the rooms except the sento; paintbrushes could be seen in their future.

In the middle of the back wall was a door which opened onto a corridor. To either side of this were the bedrooms. Mitsuko had claimed the one on the right closest to the lounge and Melissa had selected the one on that side at the back. This turned out to be because those rooms had windows. They also shared a shower room; connecting doors from the bedrooms let into the smaller room between them. Smaller, but with a fairly large shower cubicle, and Nava could already see how her evening was going to start tonight. The bedrooms on the other side were set up in the same way and Nava selected the room opposite Mitsuko’s to be hers, even if she was not going to be sleeping in it very often.

At the back, through another door off the corridor, was the kitchen. That had a window overlooking the rear garden, a door out onto the garden, and all the usual appliances. The garden was pretty bare, just grass which did not appear to have been maintained well up until now. Mitsuko had plans to get one of the gardeners from her parents’ estate to come down and do something with it.

Then there was the door to the sento. Nava revised her estimation of the way the evening might go on seeing a small pool raised a metre or so off the ground but also clearly sunk into it. A pair of hand-shower stations for washing let you get clean before plunging into the temperature-controlled bath which almost certainly was big enough for four. Yes, sex in the sento seemed like a high-probability event. Since the outer wall of the room was a window, floor to ceiling, you could do it in semi-public, if you wished.

That left a mudroom – as Melissa described it – in the corner of the building with another door out onto the garden there. Opposite that door was the inner door onto the corridor from the entrance hall. You could get from front to back without entering any of the private rooms.

‘There’s a void,’ Nava said, looking at the inner door. ‘The corridor doesn’t fill the space between the bedrooms and the outer wall.’

‘Services room,’ Mitsuko said. ‘Air conditioning and the house computer and stuff like that are in there. Room might not be the word to describe it, but it’s the best I’ve got. It’s full of pipes and electronics, but there is an access door and you can move about in there.’

‘I can’t,’ Melissa said. ‘Not easily.’ She tapped her expansive chest. ‘You need to be able to fit into fairly narrow spaces and I’m badly equipped for those.’

‘Speaking of fitting into things,’ Mitsuko said, ‘you should change for the ceremony, Nava. Oh! Are all your uniforms in the boxes?’

‘I think I got whiplash from that change of topic,’ Nava replied, starting for the corridor that would lead her to the entrance hall, ‘but I foresaw this very situation when I left after the New Year celebration. I have a uniform in my case. I’ll go and change into it now and we can all watch Kyle graduate.’

~~~

There was quite the array of outfits on show at the banquet after the ceremony. Obviously, there were SAS2 uniforms; a substantial number of graduates were wearing their uniforms for the last time before they went off into the wider world. However, there were also ASF uniforms because a lot of students went into the ASF following their time in education, especially those on the combat side. The ASF did not wait for graduation to employ them either; most of those wearing the black uniforms were on a day’s leave from basic training. There were also people in the school’s faculty uniform – rust red instead of blue – and there were the visitors in a variety of clothing ranging from the very casual to the strictly formal.

Nava watched the people celebrating with her usual somewhat disinterested demeanour. The banquet was a buffet; some twelve hundred and seventy students were graduating, plus guests, plus faculty, and a sit-down meal was a logistical nightmare. In fact, there were multiple banquets spread across several refectories around the campus. Nava had eaten sufficient food that she could make do with something light in the evening, and now she was following Mitsuko around as the student president ‘pressed palms.’

Mitsuko had actually described what was going on in that way. Various higher-ranking citizens and students had an expectation of personal congratulations from the president, and Mitsuko was endeavouring to meet that expectation. However, the president was also the daughter of the leaders of one of the most prestigious clans in the Alliance. More people wanted to meet her than might be expected of other graduations. Added to that, she was being escorted by the newest member of the secretive but very influential Greyling family. Plenty of people wanted to get a close-up view of Nava too. Nava had concluded that her role was that of an escort: part girlfriend, part bodyguard.

Melissa was getting off