by Reese Hogan
Klara Yana took stock of her surroundings. Fifty soldiers present, give or take, though sleek helio-celled Belzene trucks with those huge sand tires came and went frequently, both in and out of the city. The closest building was no more than a pile of rubble, pouring half into the street and forcing the vehicles to pass singly around it. A pair of men, stripped down to their shirtsleeves, loaded broken adobe bricks and steel rebar into carts. Next to that was a four-story structure, still standing but with its sun-baked surface blackened and broken, multiple windows busted out. One hulking monstrosity, just beyond it, was so wracked with gaping black holes that it seemed nothing had survived except the interior construction. The city smelled of lingering smoke and dust, with a subtle undertone that might have been decay.
Klara Yana took off her beret, shaking the wrinkles from it. She was in a full naval dress uniform now – silk neckerchief, black jacket, piping, and a sleeve patch with Belzen’s blue and yellow moons symbol embroidered on a tiny flag. Her uniform differed from Blackwood’s only by the thin pair of fingerless black gloves she wore, to hide the mark on her palm. They’d been given one night to clean up, rest, and change – in individual rooms rather than barracks, by Vo Hina’s good grace. Klara Yana had been able to say the Synivistic Oaths with Bitu Lan’s rising, instead of barely mouthing them in fear of the submariners hearing her. She’d been able to wash and dry her breast wrap, and move her dekatite pendant to an inner pocket of the uniform’s jacket.
Should have gotten rid of it, she thought for the hundredth time. It had been too close a call. Captain Rosen getting ready to search the crew, Klara Yana faking illness so she could get out and flush it down the head, Vin stopping her… but Rosen had found the chain in time. In the nick of time. If that wasn’t Vo Hina telling her to hold onto the Broken Eye, she’d be an axolot’s lunch.
But she wasn’t out yet. If the Belzene government discovered she was a female masquerading as a man, the first thing they’d think would be Dhavnak. The very thought of such a disguise would never even occur to a Belzene. With any luck, they’d just look at her hand. With any luck, Cu Zanthus will extract me before I even get close. She slipped the beret back onto her short black hair, pulling the brim low so she could peer through Ellemko’s broken buildings circumspectly. He’ll get me out. He promised.
The door of a nearby vehicle opened and a soldier jumped out, trotting over to meet them. He was about thirty cycles old, with a silver bar on his collar and a tobie clamped between his dark lips. “You must be the sailors,” he said as he reached them. He pulled the tobie out as an afterthought, blowing smoke into the warm morning air. “Which one of you is Officer Blackwood?”
“I’m Chief Sea Officer Blackwood, sir.” Blackwood stepped forward and put her fist to her chest in salute. Klara Yana did the same.
The soldier gave a quick nod. “I’m Lieutenant Nicholls. I’m here to bring you to Admiral Farring at the FCB.” He turned and waved for them to follow. They fell in step behind him.
“Has there been a ground invasion yet, sir, or is this all just in preparation?” asked Blackwood.
“In preparation, thank the moons. The air raids are bad enough.” Nicholls came to a stop at the back of his automobile. It was an open-topped vehicle with a long body and three axles. Its helio-cells were built into its sloped sides. The front section had room for a driver and passenger, and the back part had space for another six or so. A Kohut-something, Klara Yana recalled from her studies.
Nicholls turned and tossed something back. Blackwood caught it. A pack of tobies. “Help yourselves, sailors,” he said. “I have to grab something, then we’ll be on our way.” He jogged toward the border.
Blackwood pulled one out and passed the packet to Klara Yana. “Need a light?”
“I got one, ma’am.” Klara Yana pulled a lighter from her pocket. Authentic Belzene issue and everything. She pulled a tobie and put it on her lips, then passed the rumpled package back. She was grateful for the deadnettle-infused skijj, even sour and spiced as it was. She stuck her other hand in her pocket and relaxed her hips, letting a natural boredom take her body. With the hand holding the tobie, she rubbed her wrist across her forehead under the beret, wiping away a layer of sweat. Shon Aha even looked bigger up north from the equator. How did they stand the heat here?
“Got a question,” said Blackwood.
“Go ahead, CSO.”
“That mark of yours. Does it bother you?”
Klara Yana rubbed her fingertips over her palm within her pocket. She kept one eye on Nicholls, now chatting with a pair of soldiers by the anti-aircraft gun. “Still hurts, ma’am. Just a distant ache, though.”
“Mine’s tingling,” said Blackwood. “Kind of numb. I don’t like it. Bad enough there’s a layer of dekatite in our skin. What in Xeil’s name is it doing to our nerves? Our muscles? Our blood? With what we know about it now… what it can do in combination with arphanium… I’m not real comfortable with the idea of carrying that around in my body. You know?”
“I do, ma’am,” Klara Yana muttered. The thing that had grabbed her hand from outside the submarine suddenly surfaced in her mind again, and she suppressed a shiver. “We’re lucky we’re alive. Let’s just remember that.” The mark was tingling; she didn’t think it had been before, but now that Blackwood had brought it up, she couldn’t think of anything else. She took another drag on the tobie, long and deep, grimacing slightly at the foreign taste.
What if Cu Zanthus gets me home and the Dhavnaks want to study me? Maybe Cu Zanthus won’t ask what’s under the glove. Maybe I don’t even mention it. But then would he wonder why she’d been sent back to Ellemko for questioning in the first place?
She blew out the smoke slowly. Just think about the promotion. Her ama’s face flashed vividly in her mind for a second. It was an image Klara Yana revisited often, because it was one of the few times she’d seen her smile. She’d just been chosen as part of Dhavnakir’s initiative to employ more females in prestigious jobs. This is a sure sign things are changing, she’d said, her pale face flushed in excitement. Someday, all women will be able to choose whether to work or stay home.
I believe it, ama, Klara Yana thought. But that’s not what you should’ve been worried about. Her ama had disappeared during a diplomatic mission outside of Dhavnakir less than a cycle later. Dhavnakir wasn’t the enemy here. It was the countries hoarding resources from them and cutting off their trade. It was countries that would take innocent envoys as political prisoners. It was countries like Belzen.
“I never saw your mark,” Blackwood said, oblivious to the dark turn her thoughts had taken. She looked at Klara Yana curiously as she put her dark ringlets up in a ponytail, completely unhindered by the tobie she held.
Klara Yana watched as some desert creature slithered under the tires of the Kohut – like a highland snake, but with claws and a sharp curving tail – and did her best not to cringe. She wrenched her gaze up to Nicholls instead, purposely taking as long as possible to blow out the smoke from her last drag. The lieutenant was on his way back, a couple rifles slung over his shoulder. He was on his own. It appeared it would be only the three of them for this trip back to the base.
Klara Yana waited until he’d almost reached them before answering Blackwood. “Yes, ma’am. I’m afraid it’s not impressive compared to yours, though.” She started to pull out her other hand, as if she intended to show Blackwood, but Nicholls arrived, interrupting the moment.
“Here you are, sailors,” he said. “EMI rifles. Admiral’s orders.”
Blackwood dropped her tobie and ground it out with her heel before reaching to take the gun. “What for, sir?”
“On any given day,” Nicholls said, “we might face planted explosives, snipers, deserters, you name it. There are already Dhavvies in Ellemko; they’re just not advertisin’ themselves yet. You need to be ready to take one out the second you see ’em. Things around here can go ass backwards faster than you can blink.”
Klar
a Yana kept up a constant assessment of the city as the Kohut drove through its battered streets. It was bigger than she’d expected. The buildings were flat and wide, but they towered overhead to much the same height as the ones in Dhavnakir’s capital. She knew the population to be only a little over half of Corvenyon, but the hulking structural style gave Ellemko a feel of massiveness… almost heaviness. They had as much steel as buildings back home did, but were designed with the old-fashioned adobe sand bricks as inspiration. If not for the jagged chunks out of them, the crumbling facades, the burned faces, the shattered windows, they might have held a touch of beauty, despite their broadness. But now they just felt confining, and all too capable of collapsing with a breath.
Klara Yana also studied the dark-skinned pedestrians. They favored patterned fabrics, with knee-length skirts for the women and button-downs or vests for the men. Most of the women wore their curls piled on top of their heads. The ones in nicer clothes often had wide-brimmed hats over the hairstyles, with satin coneflowers on their bands. Impossible not to notice how many of those women walked alone, or in pairs without men. Equally impossible not to notice how few people were around for such a big city in midmorning. Those she did see talked with heads huddled together, if they talked at all, and looked up at the sky often.
“When was the last air strike, sir?” Blackwood said. Her voice carried easily to the lieutenant over the vehicle’s impossibly quiet motor, so different than the biodiesel engines in the Dhavnak rovers Klara Yana was used to. Belzen, she reflected, was the first place she’d ever been that seemed somehow too quiet to be at war.
“We were struck three days ago,” Nicholls called back over his shoulder.
“Why are the streets so empty? Are folks hiding?”
“Everyone’s been fleeing to the east or west. Trying to cross the borders into Criesuce or Sohos, while they still can. ’Course Criesuce’s civil war’s heated up to the point they’re not sending aid anymore, and both Sohos and Descar have been part of Dhavnakir’s empire for going on seventeen years now. Maybe folks think they can get to northern Atrary. Wouldn’t count on it myself, though.”
Klara Yana kept only half an ear on the conversation. She scanned every pedestrian she could – the sweeper in front of the shop, the man on a bench with a periodical, the couple sharing a smoke at a street corner – hoping she’d see Cu Zanthus look up and catch her eye. Folks did glance at them, from time to time, but their faces were exhausted – or worse, empty.
It was strikingly different from the atmosphere back home in Corvenyon. All the fallen buildings and broken streets would have been swarmed over with workers by now. There’d be an industry line of people stretching out of sight, a rollicking chant started to bump up cheer and productivity. There’d be women in that line. Children, too. And instead of despair, there’d be bolstered hope that they’d get through it together again, like they had once already. There was no hope here, no banding together, no sense of kinship at all. Just a depressing air of isolation. It made her ache for home in a way she hadn’t in a long time. Cu Zanthus, where are you?
“You’re not from Ellemko,” said Blackwood. “Are you?”
“What?” Klara Yana returned her gaze to Blackwood. Nicholls, in the front, was speaking into a handheld radio now, and Blackwood was looking at her.
“The way you’re gawking. It’s like you’ve never seen it before.”
“No, ma’am,” said Klara Yana. “Artora. To the east. Small town.”
“Near the border?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Still doesn’t explain the light skin. You are part-Dhavnak, right?”
Klara Yana flashed back on Vin punching her in the face. “My mother was from southern Descar,” she said firmly. “Not Dhavnakir.”
She caught the subtle relaxation of Blackwood’s shoulders. The CSO had defended her well on the submarine, but there was still a part of her that felt uncomfortable associating with a Dhavnak. I vowed I’d do whatever it took to keep their legacy out of Dhavnak hands, she’d told Captain Rosen.
Klara Yana shook Blackwood’s words from her head, annoyed with herself. Lose the emotions. They’ve done the same thing to us. They sent a spy to rob the Synivistic Sacrarium, by Vo Hina’s grace!
“What about your father?” Blackwood asked. “Part-Criesucan, I’m guessing?”
“Oh. The eyes,” said Klara Yana. “Yeah, I’ve heard that.”
“It’s not true?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. Maybe. I never knew my real father. Disappeared when I was a baby.”
“Oh.” Blackwood’s eyes crinkled in sympathy. “Sorry to hear that.”
“It doesn’t matter, ma’am. My mother… remarried. It was a long time ago.” She tensed, hoping Blackwood wouldn’t follow up with questions about the abusive husband her ama had been assigned.
But Blackwood went in a different direction. “So which one of them had that eye color?”
Klara Yana barely held back a flinch. Because there it was. It wasn’t such a strange color that people stopped and stared – most of the time – but they did notice. And being noticed meant being remembered. How could a spy blend in and disappear if people remembered her?
“My mother, ma’am,” she said with an offhand shrug. Curse Cu Zanthus for not warning me I’d be swimming in the gods-damned ocean
on this mission! I could’ve brought a backup pair of optics and avoided all this. She cast about for a change in subject – how in Shon Aha’s name had this conversation become about her, anyway? – when something glinted across the street, five stories up. She jerked her attention toward the building, pulling her rifle up.
“Holland?” said Blackwood.
Klara Yana caught sight of a shadow on the top floor only a split second before a gunshot sounded, its sharp crack echoing off the buildings around them. Blood sprayed as Nicholls took the shot in the head. Screaming filled the air as any pedestrians around cleared out, fast. The vehicle careened sideways, but another shot, right on the heels of the first, took out a tire and sent the Kohut lurching into the sidewalk hard enough to jar bones. Klara Yana, halfway on her feet already, grabbed the side before she was thrown into the front seat.
“Off the truck!” Blackwood yelled. She leaned over the front seat just long enough to snatch the radio from Nicholls’s limp hand.
Klara Yana leapt from the open truck, putting it between her and the building, but her heart pounded with adrenaline. It was Cu Zanthus extracting her. She was positive. She put the EMI rifle to her shoulder and crept toward the back of the vehicle in a crouch. Blackwood landed behind her. Klara Yana heard her speak into the radio.
“Sniper firing on Belzene soldiers, old Highland Bank headquarters. One man down.”
Klara Yana turned her head. “Cover me, CSO. I’m going after him.”
“You’re what?” Blackwood said incredulously.
But Klara Yana was already running, leaping over a crumbled sidewalk curb and into the awning of the building. She tried the handle on the steel door. Locked. She heard another shot, and looked back to see Blackwood stagger with a gasp of pain. She gritted her teeth. She was supposed to cover me, not follow me!
Blood stained the left sleeve of Blackwood’s brown uniform, but she ran just as fast as before, her rifle clutched in her right hand.
“Wait there for me, Holland!” she snapped. “That’s an order!”
Klara Yana caught sight of an object falling a split second before it hit the ground. “Blackwood! Down!” she screamed. She turned her own face just in time to shield her eyes from the shock grenade’s impact, hands as tight over her ears as possible with the rifle still in her grip. The crash of noise still seemed to drown her, throwing off her balance and sending her stumbling against the steel door. But as she’d suspected, no shrapnel tore into her body; Cu Zanthus wouldn’t have wanted to risk killing her. She pulled her hands down and bashed the stock of her rifle against the door handle, giving it three powerful strikes
before the lock broke. She shoved the door open with her foot and bolted inside, rifle at her shoulder again. She could still hear somewhat, though even the clash of her rifle on the door had been muted. Someone yelled outside, but it was too soft to make out the words. Blackwood calling for her again, no doubt. She sped up into a quiet run, taking the first turn she saw and following a hallway deeper into the framework. Stairs. Have to find stairs.
Holes in the floor above let in only a small amount of light, and the blackened, peeling walls of the interior absorbed even that. Many of the doors on either side of the hallway were closed, but a few hung askew and others were gone. Smashed desks and upended bookcases were visible within, as well as what were unmistakably bodies, half-buried in the detritus.
A gunshot sounded up ahead. Klara Yana winced, hoping Cu Zanthus didn’t kill Blackwood. Yes, it would make the best cover story – where would Blackwood think she’d disappeared to, otherwise? – but it was the first time she’d worked with a woman like her, and the thought of being responsible for her death pained her. Cu Zanthus would chastise her for getting too close to her mark if she brought it up, and it wouldn’t be the first time, either
She cursed and increased her pace, finally stumbling across a stairwell that headed up to the right, scattered with broken wood and scorched pieces of wall from a jagged gap overhead. She had just hurtled up to the first landing and swung herself around to the next switchback when a black-clad figure charged into sight above.
Klara Yana stepped back, bracing herself against the wall as she pointed her rifle. She almost fired when she didn’t see Cu Zanthus’s familiar blond military haircut, but remembered just in time that his hair was dark with a straight part now. As always, she was jolted by his youth. She knew he’d been a spy since the tender age of fourteen; now, at nineteen, he still looked to her like he belonged with front line rank-and-files rather than as a kommandir deep in an operation. She knew nothing about the contact that had informed him of the open spot on the submarine, and could only guess the Dhavnak government had needed someone younger to get the intel. She’d seen first-hand how people automatically dismissed an insecure-looking youngster.
