by Ann Denton
“I’m arrogant because I’m right. I’m right because I don’t just believe anything that comes out of someone’s mouth.”
“Well, guess what? I found the ritual about blood sacrifice in a book, too. Or Ges did. Does that make it more real for you?”
“That shit’s barbaric. Some Erlender book by some guy who thinks spit and shit will heal you. Would you take medical advice from someone like that? Come on, Mala! That’s crazy.”
He’d said it. The word she hated above all others. The word she’d feared for years. I’M NOT CRAZY. Her hand swung of its own accord. Ein blocked it, but she launched herself at him and soon they were grappling on the floor, making the hut roll as each of them kicked and punched and pinched.
Mala was biting down on Ein’s hand when he suddenly went deathly still. She froze, alarmed.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered.
There was a faint growling sound. And then a subtle gloop: the sound of a sub slipping under the surface.
“Muck!” Ein bolted out the door, knocking Mala down as he barreled for the main platform.
She followed, confused. “What’s going on?” she asked as she reached him.
Ein was staring forlornly at the spot their sub had occupied. “She must have hidden in there. She’s been waiting for someone to take the sub so she wouldn’t be seen driving it off to nowhere from the Center.”
“Who? What? Ein, what are you talking about?”
He turned soberly to her. “Mala, I came after you because the hour hand’s now missing from my clock. I thought you’d taken it.”
“I already said I didn’t.”
“I know.” He turned back toward the water, watching the silver sub race away. “Alba did. She’s making a break for it.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mala’s jaw dropped. “We have to tell someone. Do something.”
Ein walked away across the platform. “Well, we took the first sub up here. Everyone else is down in the Center … it’s almost dinner.”
Mala took long strides to catch up with him. “But we can’t just let her run off to the Erlenders … we have to try and stop her.”
Ein rolled his eyes. “No. We do? Really? Stand back.” He waved her away and pulled up a trapdoor in the middle of the platform. Beneath it bobbed a small canoe. Ein explained as he hauled it up and carried it to the edge of the platform. “We use them to maintain the huts… sometimes to haul in supplies.”
“I was kind of hoping for some kind of alarm. I mean, we can’t be the first people ever to get stranded on the platform, right?”
Ein sighed and walked back toward the trapdoor. With nothing better to do, Mala trailed after him like a lost duckling.
Ein grabbed some oars, tossed them aside, and tugged a rope that had been coiled beneath the canoe. “Little help?” he grunted.
“What is that?”
“This is your alarm,” he muttered. “Pull it taut and we ring a bell down below. Supposed to be used for outsiders, really. But it will work.”
Mala put her burly body to work. They pulled on the rope, backing across the platform. It was slippery and heavy with water. It made Mala melt back into her own skin, so she was little help as they struggled. The fibers cross-hatched Mala’s hands with tiny stinging cuts. Finally they met what seemed like resistance.
“Got it,” Ein panted. He immediately dropped the rope and ran for the oars. He scooped them up and was back at the canoe, sliding it into the water before Mala could fully register what he was doing.
“What’s this?”
“We have to try to figure out which direction she’s going,” Ein grunted.
Mala looked dubiously down at the canoe. She shucked off her boots and pants, which would only weigh her down if they flipped. Better to freeze in the air that in the water.
Three seconds later, she and Ein were rowing furiously in the direction they’d seen Alba disappear, into the pink sunset. We’ll never catch her, Mala thought. But if we can get everyone pointed in the right direction at least ...
Mala heard the gloop of the sub surfacing. She shouted to Ein and pointed. They turned their little canoe and rowed furiously. Smack. The sub crashed into a rocky bit of shoreline. Mala stared as she rowed. Alba forced open the hatch and stumbled through the shallows to the shore. She carried a backpack that looked nearly as big as her eighty-year-old frame.
As they rowed close, Mala caught her breath. Alba’s silhouette limped painfully toward the trees. Her old body clearly hadn’t handled the wreck well.
“Alba!” Mala shouted.
The silhouette turned. Alba’s stooped figure peered at them. “Mala?”
“Yeah. Don’t do this!” Mala called.
“I can’t let them shock me!” Alba’s reply echoed across the water. She hiked a travelling bag further up her bony shoulder and turned to leave.
Instinct fizzled in Mala’s mind. I have to slow her down. Keep her here. As they had before, her hands acted of their own accord. She found herself staring down at a silver gear. She stood, balancing carefully in the canoe, took aim, and threw as hard as she could.
A dull thwack confirmed she’d hit her target, though on the shoulder and not the head. Alba dropped her pack and turned. She pulled a gun from her belt.
“Back off, Mala,” she threatened. “I have to find Blut. He said he’d help me.”
“Blut’s dead,” Mala shouted. “I killed him. You know that kill I got on the way here? It was him. He’d gone rogue.”
“Liar!” Alba screamed.
“Ask Lowe,” Mala replied.
Alba’s face twisted and her limbs started to contort. Her skin bubbled. And suddenly, Alba didn’t look like herself anymore—at least, not the self Mala had grown to know. She became tall and muscular. Her waves of strawberry blond hair glinted in the final rays of the sunset. She looked every bit the warrior when she trained the gun on Mala. She fired.
Ein yanked Mala sideways and flipped the canoe. Ice water flooded her nose and lungs. Mala surfaced spluttering and shivering. Ein pulled her behind the canoe as bullets peppered the water around them. She treaded water while he stood easily on the lake bottom.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I’m trying to delay her.”
“Oh. Thought it was another suicide attempt. You seem fond of those.”
“Shu-u-u-ut it,” Mala’s teeth chattered.
“Think you can last another minute in this water?” he asked, peering around the edge of the canoe. Another bullet. He hissed as he ducked back, clutching his shoulder.
“I think you might have ticked her off,” his light tone belied by the blood streaking down his wetsuit.
Mala’s shivers prevented her reply. The cold was so intense she felt as if her bones might splinter, like she might turn to glass and shatter. She was about to swim for the shore, bullets or no, when she heard it. The soft creshhh sound of a sub breaking the surface. And then another. And another. And another.
Mala peered around the edge of the canoe. Alba had disappeared.
It was nearly an hour later, after she and Ein had been dried, warmed, checked by the medics, and recited their story to Tier, Fell, Neid, and Lowe, when Mala finally felt she could relax. Wrapped in a blanket, her feet curled around a lantern to absorb every tiny bit of heat, she sat back in a velvet chair in a meeting room at the Center as she watched her companions debate possibilities.
Ein, for once, was silent. Mala wasn’t sure if it was blood loss or hypothermia that was making him quiet. His shoulder had been grazed by Alba’s bullet. And while the wound wasn’t life threatening, Neid kept glaring at Mala in a way that made her feel as if it was.
“They’ll find her,” Tier reassured the group.
Fell seemed more doubtful. “I don’t know. She melted back to her younger form. She always passed every test I threw at her with flying colors. I don’t doubt she’ll be able to hole up somewhere and hide.”
“When you find he
r, what will you do?” Mala asked the question, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear the answer.
“She’s a traitor,” Tier replied.
“Suspected traitor,” Mala responded, not sure where her audacity was coming from. Maybe it’s the near-death experience. “We don’t have proof.”
“She was in secret communication with Blut.”
“We don’t know if she was aware he was a traitor. She didn’t know he was dead; that meltdown was from shock. She said she left because she didn’t want you to fry her brain.”
Tier’s jowls quivered angrily. “A deserter is still a traitor.”
“Completely different kind,” Mala replied.
Lowe interrupted their standoff. “At least she dropped this. It could be our way in.” He fingered a hand-held radio. He’d been fiddling with it ever since one of the sub teams had returned to report after scouring the shoreline and towing back the battered sub.
“Blut’s dead,” Mala looked at him. “What good’s that gonna do?”
“But she told you he was going to help her.” Lowe glanced up, fire dancing in his eyes. “That means someone’s been using this thing. Someone’s pretending to be Blut. And whoever that is, they most definitely know Blut was a traitor.” He turned the radio over in his hands once more, and started fiddling with the dials. Staccato static filled Mala’s ears.
After several minutes Fell said, “Well, I do think this accelerates our timeline.” Every eye in the room locked onto her. “With a potential spy on the loose, and no idea what knowledge she may or may not have about this mission, we need to get it under way before she has a chance to report. We’re about three hundred kilometers from the nearest human inhabitance, Erlender or Senebal. And she’s injured. But still. I’d say we need to move out in two days, to be safe.”
Tier nodded. “Agreed.” He stood and stretched. “The cover story will be that Wilde has a suspected traitor. Close enough to your reality that it should work. Keptiker will tell the King he’s set a trap for the traitor but needed to leave to give it time to work. Lowe, you can fill in the details. If you can take out one of Keptiker’s confidantes with this, that’s a bonus. Okay, everyone: dismissed.” He strode toward the door. He pulled it open and turned back. “And Mala?”
“Yes?” she asked.
“Watch your mouth.” The door slammed shut behind him.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
They stayed up through the night, working in the meeting room. Reviewing endlessly. After a kiss from Ein that made Lowe frown, Mala was back in Keptiker’s body.
The table was shoved aside and Mala, Lowe, and Neid reviewed Erlender combat positions. They reviewed Keptiker’s specific techniques as a lefty, making her punch southpaw until her shoulder burned like someone had set a torch to it.
When Lowe noticed Mala couldn’t lift her arm any longer, he switched tactics. He had Mala and Neid review interactions between slave and master, and for the first time in her life, Mala had to fasten a rope around someone’s neck and lead them as if they were a pack mule. It took an hour before Lowe was satisfied with her confidence and dominion over Neid. It was longer until he believed Neid’s submissiveness. The blonde had a hard time keeping expressions off her face, particularly disgust.
At least that attitude will work when we’re in disguise, Mala sighed internally. She’d given up hope of the blonde ever easing up on her. After all, she’s Ein’s sister. And little though she knew Neid, she knew Ein’s boiling-hot temper very well. If they’re at all the same, we’ll be enemies for life. She tugged on Neid’s rope, forcing the girl to crawl. Who knows how long that will be, though.
And for the first time since she’d had that thought—and she’d had it often recently—Mala wasn’t scared. She was set on a path, her feet firmly leading her in one direction. She’d never felt so confident in her life. She felt drawn to this mission, like it was right somehow. Like it fit. The tug of destiny, she thought, then smiled at her own corniness.
Lowe barked at her for smiling and she got back to business.
In the meantime, in a corner away from all of the activity, Ein scribbled furiously on a roll of parchment. Well after midnight, when he sensed a lull in their activity, he called out. “I have forty-three different escape routes. I think we should review them, since we’ll probably need one.”
Mala propped the general’s head on his hand and tried not to doze as Ein pointed out their options using the rough map of the king’s compound he’d sketched. He’d thought of different scenarios, from Lowe somehow tipping off the servants to Mala botching it in front of the king. And he had backup plans for backup plans. Which is all really good, but … how am I supposed to remember this? Mala yawned mentally. Lowe saw her fading, and punched her hard in the burning arm. She sat up straighter, rueful.
Neid had a more pressing question: “We’re all going to be in different parts of the compound. How can we know when we need to use an escape route?”
Ein sat back. “I’ve been working on fixing some pre-bomb communication earpieces. But with our new timeline, there’s no way they’ll be ready. So, in short, you’ll only know when you need it.”
Lowe stepped in. “As the servant, I’ll be going between all of you throughout the day. I’m responsible for keeping everyone in the party fed. So there’s that.”
“That could be hours!” Neid exclaimed. “What if something happens in between?”
Lowe shrugged. “Better memorize your escape routes, then. Because it’s the best we’ve got.”
Mala leaned forward, suddenly quite a bit more awake than she’d been before. She and Neid leaned over the map and started pummeling Ein with questions about the routes he’d just described.
Mala felt confident she’d committed about fifteen of the escape scenarios to memory when Ein brought up a new scenario that made her jolt.
“I think,” he said, “that if something goes wrong directly with the king and Keptiker here, our best bet is magic. If Mala melts into his father, I think the panic that sets off would be enough to get us out. Troe’s stupidly superstitious.” Ein raised an eyebrow at Mala as he said that, indicating his insult wasn’t only for the king.
Lowe held up a hand of caution. “If she melts into his father, Keptiker is going to be labeled a demon. They skin demons alive. If Mala melts while she’s in Keptiker’s body, she can’t melt back into him to escape. Everyone will be after her.”
Ein grinned. “I know. But imagine the dead king striding through the halls, calling for his boat—the shock. I don’t know how much footage any of you watched on Troe, but he has a shrine. He talks to his father daily. And long ago, when he was growing up, he used to have episodes, panic attacks. If his father were to condemn him, tell him he’s a disappointment … I think we might be able to give the mucking bastard a heart attack.”
Lowe shook his head. “Not part of our mission.”
“Nope, just an added bonus,” Ein replied, putting his hands behind his head and leaning back.
“You may be a genius, but if we give him a heart attack, that undermines the entire purpose of our mission,” Lowe’s blue eyes glinted with superiority. “If we kill the king, who’s going to put all his attack plans into place? Our intel goes to crap if there’s a fight for the throne because his sons are too young to take over.”
“Sons? I thought he only had one,” Neid furrowed her brow.
Lowe rubbed his face, exasperated and exhausted. “Is everyone in the Archive useless? Didn’t they go over the king’s paranoia? He only has one true son. But about eight years ago, when his son was five, he brought in two other boys. He dyed all their faces blue, scarred their cheeks so no one can tell the difference between them, and has been raising all three as his sons so that no one knows which one’s the real one.”
Mala couldn’t help her intake of breath. She pictured three five-year-old little boys crying as they were cut with knives and pierced with needles. Who could do that to their own kid?
Ein’s reaction was slightly different. “That’s pretty brilliant. Of course the kids know, right?”
Lowe shrugged. “So far they’ve either been too scared or too brainwashed to ever confess.”
“Well don’t you think that seeing Grandpa’s ghost would get more of a reaction out of the real son than the others? What if we assassinate the real son instead?”
“Again. Not part of the mission.”
“So we’re supposed to go in as mindless drones to fulfill a mission that will most likely get us killed, even if I have an idea that might give us a better chance at getting out of there alive?”
“We’re supposed to complete our mission as part of a greater strategy that you are not privileged to know. So despite your assumption that every thought flickering through your head is pure genius, we are NOT intentionally going to go outside the bounds of our mission.”
Ein rolled his eyes and crossed his arms.
Lowe’s lip curled up into a snarl. “This is why Typicals are nothing more than—”
“Target practice?” Ein interjected, taking a step toward Lowe.
Mala’s eyes flickered between the two men, watching their battle of wills.
Neid put her hand on her brother’s shoulder. He glanced down at her. Her eyes begged. Something passed between them.
Ein shrugged. “Fine. Assassination off the table. I still think the shock value of the melt outweighs everything else. Let’s try it so we can get a few extra seconds to escape.”
Lowe opened his mouth to argue but Mala interjected. “I can at least try it.” She turned to Lowe. “If I can give you guys more time to get out, I’m for it.”
