So I say, “Princess, I have an idea—”
A sizzle of heat blasts in off the platform and through the open doors, accompanied by clatters and thumps. The heat slams into us in a cloud of toxins. My vision darkens. Sun keels over, barely catching herself on her hands. Ti sags backward, eyes fluttering as she coughs raggedly. Hetty holds a hand over her mouth and nose as she pulls a breather-gill from the emergency kit and presses it on before digging back into the bag to find another. The Gatoi flares so brightly I can’t help but look straight at him. He turns and sees my face.
It happens like a switch flipped over. One moment he’s making ready to fling himself into the fray to protect the princess with his life, all brilliant nobility that is the stuff of great tales. The next his eyes glaze with a sullen, oily amber gleam. His features congeal into a rigid inhumanity more frightening than any mask as he targets me.
Me.
I yank the skeleton cloth down to conceal my face. His shoulders droop, his chest heaves, his eyes roll up in his head, and he collapses atop one of the fallen gendarmes.
Hetty presses a second gill over Sun’s nose, then rises.
I pull the cloth mask back up, leaving it tucked atop my head. My vision hasn’t clouded as I’d thought. All the lights have gone out. I can breathe perfectly well, but Ti struggles to suck in air, and she’s clearly about to pass out.
I lunge for the emergency kit, but Hetty is there before I am, efficiently adjusting a third gill over Ti’s face. The smart fabric molds itself to her skin, providing a filter. Her breathing steadies. My panic settles. That’s when I see that Hetty has used the commotion to get hold of my knife.
Sun steps over the bodies to kneel beside the still-unconscious Zizou. Night has overtaken us, and all the lights on the platform have gone out. A pair of beams advance on the car and pause by one of the open doors.
“To the fortune of the queen-marshal we swear our service,” says a robust female voice.
Sun stands, stinger raised, as the maintenance worker takes one step into the car. She sweeps a light beam up and down the car to illuminate the limp gendarmes. Beyond the open doors gendarmes sprawl on the platform. The light’s intensity dims while widening the lens to create an aura that surrounds Sun like a halo.
“Who are you?” Sun asks.
“My name is Naomi Solomon. I’m accompanied by my nephew Hekekia.” She displays both hands to show herself unarmed. “You’ll find a small black disc over by that window. I wonder if one of your people would pick it up for me.”
Sun nods. “Not you, Hetty. Tiana, you do it.”
“I’ll get it,” I say, because Naomi Solomon’s broad shoulders, square-shaped face, and thick black hair look very like those of my good friend Solomon.
“You don’t touch it, Persephone Lee,” the woman says sharply. Her beam stabs into my eyes, forcing me to deploy the nictating membranes.
Ti looks at me for permission. I’m so grateful she trusts me.
“Give it to her. I’ve got nothing to hide,” I say, though I hear how defensive I sound. Ti hunts around until she finds the disc where it’s slid beneath a seat into the corner. With the deliberate movements of a person painstakingly trained not to make any sudden moves that might trigger a violent reaction, she steps around Hetty, negotiates a path through the fallen gendarmes, and extends her arm.
The woman takes the disc.
I say, “My barracks-mate Solomon gave that to me so I could call for help if I needed it. Are you part of his family? Is that why you came when I activated it?”
Another worker steps into the car, a burly young man about Solomon’s age. Sun twitches but doesn’t otherwise react as he opens the black toolbox he’s carrying and the woman drops the disc into it. He snaps it closed, and they both exhale with obvious relief.
“That will kill the tracker,” says the woman.
“The tracker?” Sun holds the stinger calmly, ready to use it. Not a flicker of doubt or fear disturbs her expression. The intensity of her focus is a second presence hovering around her.
“The disc is ours. An unknown party embedded a foreign tracker into one of our emergency alerts. You can understand why we would be quick to investigate when we discover our gear has been tampered with.” The woman points at me.
I’m stunned. I kept the disc with me the entire time at Lee House. It was never out of my sight, and no one touched it except me.
“The toolbox blocks the signal so they can’t track us now, but they have your last point of contact, right here,” the woman adds as a final thrust to my heart. She turns to Sun. “More will be on their way.”
“I have two other people in the Wheelhouse, and I won’t leave without them,” says Sun. She’s not looking at me, as if my treachery has sunk me beneath her notice. Marked me as the outsider I am.
“We can get them out. Meanwhile, there are three Hummingbirds—”
“Five,” says the young man.
“—five Hummingbirds incoming. These gendarmes will wake up in about seven minutes. Come with us if you want to live.”
22
Leave No Companion Behind
Emotion will impair your reason if you let anger or pleasure control you, Octavian had taught them.
Sun watched as Persephone Lee allowed herself to be blindfolded alongside Tiana. Was Persephone lying? Naomi Solomon thought she was.
They transferred to an underground maintenance shunt. Encased in an equipment hauler their group rolled along deep underground beneath the passenger and freight tiers. Dull red lights flashed past at intervals. The air that puffed through the vents had a musty stink. When Naomi Solomon approached them with leather bands to bind eyes, Sun raised a hand, palm out.
“I go with my eyes open, or not at all. If that’s not acceptable, then drop me and the Honorable Hestia and my bodyguard off wherever you wish, with our thanks. You may do as you wish with those two.”
“I’ll wear the blindfold if it’s needed. Sun!” Hetty gave a warning shake of her head. “Consider mine an act of trust. That’s fair.”
“I will take offense to any treatment of the Honorable Hestia that suggests she can be treated in any way different from me,” added Sun.
Naomi Solomon did not bow or scrape, nor did she look intimidated. She merely nodded at Hekekia, who passed a wand over all five of them to make sure no other illicit tracking devices clung to their persons.
“It’s not protocol,” objected the young man. “Can I at least bind the arms of the Gatoi while he’s still unconscious?”
“No,” said Sun. “He will obey me in all that I ask. Do you not trust me?”
“Hekekia, Princess Sun will be queen-marshal, through her mother’s womb, and owes us the same respect we show her.” Naomi’s tone caused her nephew to shuffle his feet and heave his shoulders but say nothing.
Not everyone knew when to keep quiet. The Lee girl sat cross-legged in the corner, gauze skeleton mask still pulled down over her face and a leather blindfold hiding the pearls that gave her eyes. The near disaster had not chastened her.
“Princess, I should warn you that however polite our captors may seem, they make their living as thieves and criminals.”
Sun smiled at this unexpected attack. “Is that true?” she asked Naomi.
“We work outside the restrictions the law places on the poor and dispossessed, Your Highness. Some call it thievery. We call it survival.”
“How are you dispossessed?” Sun asked.
“We can talk story later,” said Naomi as the hauler slowed.
The vehicle lurched to a halt. A rusted door that looked as if it hadn’t been opened in a hundred years was set into the tunnel wall. A beam of light lanced out from a virulent patch of rust and scanned Hekekia’s face. With a pneumatic cough, the door popped open into a vault of darkness.
“No way am I touching that beast, Auntie,” Hekekia said, indicating Zizou’s limp body. “They have snake poison in their skin, for real.”
“
I do not fear what is not poisonous,” said Hetty. She knelt and slung unconscious Zizou over her shoulders through the open door. Octavian had trained them all to be able to carry a heavier person in time of need. Leave no companion behind.
As Naomi sent the hauler on its way and sealed the door, Hekekia guided the still-blindfolded Persephone and Tiana up concrete steps in a darkness alleviated only by the two beams of light, his at the front and Naomi’s at the rear. It was a long way up, but Hetty did not flag even with the weight of Zizou pressing her down. Sun carried with her a hundred questions, but Naomi’s silence was all the hint she needed. Even Sun could be patient when it suited her.
The stairwell ended in a broken ladder that did not reach the ceiling hatch, rendering the exit useless. Naomi tilted the remaining lower rungs to create a horizontal platform. The hatch above slid open on a hiss of icy air.
Balanced on the rungs Naomi rose, elevator fashion, vanishing through the hatch like a celestial messenger transported into the court of heaven. The air in the tomb-like space had a musty, metallic scent that made her eyes itch. The young man’s gaze darted from Sun to the unconscious Zizou, whom Hetty had settled on the ground.
Zizou’s foot twitched. Sun nudged him with the toe of her silk shoe. He subsided although his breathing shifted.
Hekekia was no fool. “He’s faking it.”
He unlatched the bottom of the black toolbox to reveal a secret compartment. He raised a snub-nosed stinger, his gaze never leaving the banner soldier.
“It’s illegal for anyone not in the military to possess stingers,” remarked Sun. “Usually they’re traceable. How is it you have one?”
“You’ll have to ask the aunts,” he said. “Or Grandmother, if you dare.”
“Are you Solomon’s cousin?” the Lee girl asked.
“That curdled egg! Always acting like he’s better than the rest of us. But he’s the one who cheated to get into CeDCA.”
Persephone jerked around, homing in on his voice. “Cheated! He never cheated. He’s a star cadet! You’re just envious he got out and you didn’t have enough ambition and discipline to do so.”
“That sounds like his kind of stink talk.” He spat noisily to the floor near her feet.
“Like scrap, you asshole?” Persephone curled up to a crouch and raised her hands to show herself ready to spar.
He snorted. “You can’t even see me.”
“My hearing is exceptional,” she retorted.
He poked lazily at her, and she batted away his arm as if she had sensed it, or made a lucky sweep.
“Stand down, you two.” Although Sun was beginning to find the dispute instructive she didn’t have time for it. “Are you sure that blindfold works, Hekekia?”
“Not even a prosthetic can see through leather.”
“We’ll discuss it later. Let me see the stinger.”
He hesitated, as well he might.
She extended a hand. “Give it here, soldier.”
He handed it over. She ran her hands along its smooth length and examined the angle of the sawed-off barrel.
“Interesting,” she said, handing it back. He received it with a startled expression. “Does that angle skew its aim?”
“Yes. If anyone who hasn’t trained with it tries to use it, they won’t hit what they’re aiming for. Makes people leery of stealing our gear.”
“You can’t just insult Solomon like that,” broke in Persephone.
“Let it go,” snapped Sun. “We’ll discuss your friend Solomon after you’ve pleaded your traitorous case.”
“I didn’t betray you.”
“I’m sure she didn’t, Your Highness,” said Tiana, “and I can prove it.”
“Thank you,” Persephone whispered, shoulders sagging in relief. “At least someone believes me.”
A whistle from above interrupted them. Naomi’s face appeared, haloed by a backlit mist. “Send up the two prisoners and then Her Highness and the Companion. The Gatoi can stay down there until we decide—”
“That’s not acceptable,” said Sun.
“I wasn’t negotiating, Your Highness. I’m up here, and you’re down there.”
“Zizou, can you jump that high?”
He opened his eyes to measure the distance, about ten feet. “Yes.”
Naomi’s face dropped closer as she knelt to get a better look. A frown gave her broad face the look of an incoming storm. “Was he just faking being unconscious?”
“No,” said Sun, who had timed the break in his consciousness and filed the information away for future reference. “But he’s conscious now, and as dangerous as you think he is. We’re allies, not enemies, Auntie. If I may call you that.”
“Clever girl, you are. All right, then. But if he bites, we kill him.”
“As long as we’re allies, he won’t bite you.”
They ascended one at a time into a refrigerated compartment that proved to be attached to the smoky, steamy kitchen of a cheap ramen shop. Naomi handed them grubby cooks’ aprons out of a bin marked for laundry. Cooks and waiters glanced their way with casual interest before being whistled back to work. It seemed people came in from the cold with regularity. In the eating area beyond swinging doors, music trumpeted above the rumble of customers talking, laughing, and eating. It was a brass-and-drum court hymn that marked a queen-marshal’s recessional. Channel Idol must have given up on Alika and returned to the wedding feast. Had so much time passed already? What was her mother thinking as she walked off the public stage into the arms of her bride? Was she sorry for losing her temper with her only heir? Was Lee House using the queen-marshal’s infatuation for a young woman half her age as cover for their own deadly plotting? Or was Eirene playing a complex political game to reinforce her power at the expense of her half-Gatoi heir as well as her Argosy child and the nephew no one talked about?
“This way, Your Highness.” Naomi’s words cracked into Sun’s straying thoughts.
The woman indicated a passage that led farther into the building. Sun’s attention turned to Hetty, who grasped one of the doors before it could swing fully closed and peeked into the room beyond as onto a forbidden paradise. The food hall was packed with customers wearing the work-worn faces and inexpensive garments of provisional citizens who eke out a living with piecework, salvage, and various forms of off-net hustling and gig labor. Hetty’s scholar father had written an economic treatise on the dangers of a provisional class left to churn in a mire of poverty and fenced-off opportunities. But what struck Sun most was the lively roar of conversation and how they ignored the official feed of the royal wedding. They knew it wasn’t intended to offer any real benefit or change for them.
Hetty inhaled, licking her rosy lips as if the scents of ginger, shoyu, and fried rice made the air edible. She had the ability to relax and enjoy the pleasures of the world, a gift Sun found dangerous and always alluring.
“My people haven’t eaten for some time,” Sun said to Naomi.
“They will be fed, as guests of our house.”
She’d come this far and still lived. So she followed Naomi down a passage. A door had been propped open into an alley. A bulky old mechanical of the kind usually only seen in historical shows was half blocking the route to the street as it scrubbed the wall of a neighboring warehouse, whistling merrily. At the open door a small woman in a splattered apron was holding out a bucket. Two customers plucked wriggling strands of spongy pinkish flesh out of it with tongs and deposited them in ceramic jars.
Sun was startled into a double take as she remembered all the marine biology lessons she’d sat through with Perseus and Duke. “Those are the throat cilia of a charybdis. It’s illegal to possess or sell them.”
“Yes,” agreed Naomi calmly, beckoning her on. “If you will.”
She led them up a lightwell fitted with steps. Everything was clean but worn, with faded paint and burnished scuff marks. The metal steps reminded Sun of ships’ stairs inside the mothballed fleet tethered to Naval Command Orbi
tal Harbor Zhēnzhū in Thesprotis System. Footfalls echoing, they climbed past a second and a third floor. At times like this the world grew sharp, each detail amplified: tiny letters carved into the railing by some long-forgotten person; motes of dust swirling in sunlight shining through a round window; the buried rumble of a train passing underground.
Naomi ushered them into an unexpectedly spacious attic room whose stuffy heat was being tepidly pushed around by wheezing fans. A shabby sofa had been positioned beneath a paned skylight cut in the shape of a Titan-class ship. Iced drinks rested on a tray placed on a low table.
Four women sat on the sofa. The family resemblance to Naomi was strong; they were big-boned with brown eyes. At the far end of the attic a table seating at least thirty was being laid by young people.
The women on the couch sized them up. No receiving line of governors or visiting notables had looked as intimidating as this frowning assembly. Most imperious was the tall, stout, gray-haired old woman who sat at the farthest end of the sofa with a straight back and hands folded on her lap.
Sun opened her hands, presenting them palms out. “Warmest greetings, Grandmother and Aunts, to you and to all who live under the sun of Chaonia and within the net of the beacons. I am Sun. I am born beneath the banner Royal, child of João, child of Nanshe, child of Ashur to the tenth generation. I am the daughter of Eirene, queen-marshal of the Republic of Chaonia and descendent of the argonauts who founded this realm. These are my companions, my bodyguard Zizou and the Honorable Hestia Hope. The two prisoners also fall under my orbit and thus my protection. They are the Honorable Persephone Lee and her cee-cee, Tiana Yáo Alaksu. We thank you for opening your home to us in these dire and unexpected circumstances.”
The old woman dipped her chin, a gesture Sun chose to interpret as permission. Coming forward, she offered her hands to each aunt in turn, and they each briefly clasped her fingers. Naomi shadowed her to make introductions.
“My sister Hana. My cousin Lea. My cousin Mikala. Our aunt and commander, Rahaba.”
The old woman held Sun’s hands firmly between her own and examined her closely without speaking.
Unconquerable Sun Page 22
