Outcaste

by Fletcher DeLancey

  Then she thought of Pria, giving his life to save a scholar and dying with such courage, and her hand strayed to her weapon. She would gladly shoot every Voloth in this ground pounder and consider it a service to her world. They were invaders who had come here with no provocation; they deserved their fate.

  Her team had walked their ground pounder all the way into the city when Shantu put a general call through to all units. The battle was over, not just in Whitesun but across Alsea. All enemy units had been neutralized, including the aerial fighters that comprised the second wave of the invasion.

  He ended with an order for team leaders to contact Central Command and provide their current location, number and status of Voloth prisoners, and the names and statuses of their own casualties.

  Rahel reported in. “One fatality,” she said at the end. “Guard Pria. My surviving warriors brought his body to Whitesun Base while I rode in the ground pounder with the scholars.”

  Isolated in her own corner of the battle, she had no idea how fortunate they had been until the warrior taking her information told her that many teams had lost multiple warriors or scholars, and quite a few had been wiped off the battlefield altogether.

  She remembered the rapidgun tearing up the ground and did not doubt it.

  It was another hantick before they could offload their prisoners. She was exhausted by then, both from lack of sleep and the adrenaline drain. What she wanted now was a hot meal and a bed, not necessarily in that order.

  More than that, though, she wanted to hear Sharro’s voice. The hillside neighborhood had sustained heavy damage, and it would be days before the civilian fatality lists came out. Her frantic calls to first Sharro and then her mother were repeatedly dropped. The com channels were overwhelmed by tens of millions of Alseans trying to find their loved ones; Rahel’s fear was just a drop in the ocean.

  The call from Shantu came in on a protected military channel. “Rahel,” he said warmly. “I was so glad to see your name on the survivor list. And with only one fatality on your team; well done.”

  “Thank you. It feels strange to be congratulated for losing a fine warrior, but—”

  “But many others lost far more. You fought intelligently. It’s what I expect of you. Your team was lucky to have you leading them.” He paused. “I wonder if you might do one more job for me.”

  She closed her eyes and envisioned her bed vanishing in a puff of smoke. “Yes, of course.”

  “We’ve had reports of Voloth fighters crashing into several inland villages. I’m sending a transport to your location. Your assignment is to verify one of these reports and coordinate rescue services if necessary.”

  Her empty stomach contracted, making her nauseous. Why would Shantu want her to verify . . .

  “No. Not Brasalara.”

  That he hesitated before responding told her all she needed to know.

  41

  BRASALARA

  Rahel had not been back to her home village since running away at the age of fifteen. After twenty cycles, she wasn’t sure if she would recognize it.

  When her pilot banked so she could see the smoking remains, she thought that twenty more cycles would not have been enough to prepare her for the sight.

  The fusion cores in Voloth fighters were normally very stable, but a high-speed impact—such as a fighter going straight into the ground—would rupture containment. The sudden release of heat and pressure was the equivalent of several Alsean missiles.

  Half of the village was obliterated—the eastern half, where her parents’ shop and house had once stood.

  Her mother had spent the battle there, waiting with her family for news. She had told Rahel that they were all going to gather, just like old times before her siblings grew up and moved out. Rahel was the only one missing, the only one in danger.

  Now she was the only one left alive.

  The pilot ran a thermal isotope scan while flying over the destruction, looking for organic materials and temperature differences. When it was complete, he shook his head and confirmed what she already knew. “No live bodies in this mess. Rescuers need to focus over there.”

  Residents were working around the outskirts of the damage, putting out the fires that still smoldered and digging through the rubble, but their efforts were hampered by a lack of equipment or experience. Brasalara’s small firehouse and healing center were inside the blast zone and completely demolished.

  With com channels so overwhelmed, Rahel doubted that any calls for outside help had gone through. Her transport had access to the protected military channels, and her pilot could airlift experienced rescuers and portable equipment from surrounding villages.

  With her local knowledge, she quickly tracked down the nearest sources of aid and put the calls through, connecting her pilot to the people who could make the best use of his services. Then she asked him for a favor.

  “Prime Warrior Shantu commanded me to do whatever you asked.” His voice carried considerable awe, though he was a high enough empath to front it from her.

  “I just need to, um, tour the damage over there.”

  He turned the transport in the direction she pointed. “Someone you know?”

  “My family.”

  He made a slight course adjustment, then held out his hand.

  It was a kindness, allowing her to feel his sympathy yet not requiring her to speak or meet his eyes. She squeezed his hand and cleared her throat. “As close as you can get to that broken tree. The tall one.”

  The blackened trunk of what had once been a magnificent tintinatalus tree marked the location of her mother’s remains.

  They landed in the street a hundred strides away, the nearest open space the pilot could find. “Here, you’ll need this,” he said, holding out a filtration mask. “Call me when you’re ready. It will be seventy ticks before I can get back.”

  She thanked him, fastened the mask over her nose and mouth, and stepped back from the transport. With a wave she sent him off, keeping her head down and eyes closed as his departure raised a cloud of dust.

  The explosion had blown debris everywhere, in a pattern easily discernible from above but nearly impossible to navigate on the ground. She climbed over shattered building stones, splintered trees, and piles of grit that had once been bricks, all while blinking away a quiet, unending stream of tears.

  Though the heavier dust had settled, she could still smell its dryness, along with the sharp scents of superheated stone and burned wood. Bitter smoke drifted from the smoldering fires at the edges of the blast zone. Here, closer to where the fighter had impacted, the pressures had been so high that the fires had blown out before they could take hold.

  She tried not to think about the odor of charred meat.

  An eerie silence hung over the destruction. She remembered this street being alive with residents and their children and pets, everyone in motion from dawn until well past dusk. All was still now. Even the breeze made only a faint noise as it blew over broken stones and twirled up an occasional vortex of dust. There were no leaves for it to rustle through, no trees to sway under its passage.

  From beyond the edge of the blast zone, a faint bird call drifted to her ears. It made the silence seem louder.

  She reached her family home and found it diminished from two stories to less than one. The front was inaccessible, so she circled around to the back. Her mother’s workshop had been here.

  When she saw the shining, jagged base of what had once been a metal sculpture, her dull grief metamorphosed into a searing agony.

  “No!” she screamed. “No! No, no, no, no . . .”

  She dropped to her knees, clutching at broken stones to keep herself from collapsing altogether. The sobs tearing out of her chest seemed as if they should break her ribs. She could not get enough air and she could not control her body, which was determined to shake itself to pieces.

  All those cycles her mother had come to Whitesun and then Blacksun, and not once had Rahel ever come here. She had r
efused because she didn’t want to see her father, but now that seemed like such a poor excuse. She was a shekking First Guard who had spent twenty cycles walking through the worst parts of two cities, and she was afraid to come home? It would have meant so much to her mother. It would have been such a simple thing to give her so much happiness.

  She wept for her blindness, for her cowardice and regret, for the pain she knew she had caused. She wept for herself, for the loss of her greatest supporter and the one person in the world who had loved her from birth. She wept for the loss of her mother’s talent and skills, for her kindness, for the way she had let Sharro convince her that the taboo on warmrons should be ignored.

  She wept until her arms gave way and she collapsed into a sitting position, uncaring of the rubble that poked through her uniform. Her siblings had died here, too, and she wept for them as well, though she had never really known them.

  Finally, she wept for the loss of any more chances with her father. Only now did she realize that somewhere deep inside, she had always hoped he would tell her he was sorry, that he had been wrong and he really did love her. Only now did she understand that she would have forgiven him if he had just said the words.

  When her body had exhausted its ability to grieve, she sat for a while longer, trying to clean up enough to meet the pilot with some modicum of dignity. Crying in a filtration mask was something she hoped never to do again.

  It occurred to her now that Shantu had done her an enormous favor. In the immediate aftermath of the biggest battle Alsea had ever seen, he had personally arranged a transport to bring her here because he had known she would want proof.

  The commander of an entire continent’s worth of battle groups would not have done that for a single warrior. But Shantu had done it for her. How many times had he told her she was family? This was the greatest proof of all.

  In this moment, she hated him for it. Had he not seen the name Brasalara in a report, had he not remembered it was her home village, had he not arranged for the transport, then she could still be oblivious right now. She could still believe her mother was alive.

  At last she rose and stumbled over the rubble to her mother’s workshop. She would not leave without taking something tangible with her.

  Fifteen ticks of increasingly desperate searching passed before she uncovered a small sculpture of a woman embracing a child. The figures were stylized, all curves and no edges or details to be destroyed by the blast. It had come through nearly unscathed, marred only by a few scratches in the patina of the metal.

  She wiped off what dust she could, an effort hampered by her filthy hands and the tears that blurred her vision. Here was something solid, something her mother had touched and brought to life. It was heavy for its size, and that seemed appropriate, for Ravenel had always been more than she appeared.

  A memory stirred, and for a moment Rahel was not standing in the wreck of her childhood home. She was in a detention cell, weeping tears of joy into her mother’s shoulder. In all the cycles since, she had never forgotten Ravenel’s words after telling her they would go to the warrior caste house.

  With a tremulous smile, she ran a finger along the smooth curve of the mother figure’s shoulder. “We got there, didn’t we?” she murmured. “I always had you.”

  Clutching the sculpture to her chest, she began the laborious climb over the ruins. Her body protested the effort, the earlier exhaustion returning with a vengeance. By the time she reached the street, she had already fallen twice.

  But she never lost her hold on the sculpture.

  The call came while she was passing the broken remains of the tintinatalus tree. Expecting to see the pilot’s name, she checked her wristcom and staggered against the trunk, overcome by the glorious truth that she had not lost both her mother and Sharro on the same day.

  Her hand shook so badly that she almost dislodged her earcuff trying to activate it.

  “Sharro,” she croaked.

  “Oh, thank Fahla! You’re alive!”

  “I am. I made it.” She looked around at the destruction and tightened her grip on the sculpture. “I’m all right.”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you every tentick for the past two hanticks, ever since Whitesun Temple rang the all-clear. Sweet shekking Fahla in a moonbeam, it’s good to hear your voice. You have no idea how much we worried.”

  The world ground to a shuddering halt. With suddenly sweaty hands, she pulled the sculpture away from her chest and stared at it. “We?”

  “Hold on, let me get your mother. She’s been frantic all day, and even worse since the battle ended. I swear her hair is the color of mine now. She’s out in the garden. Give me just a piptick.”

  “Sharro, wait! Don’t get her!”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  She could barely process this miracle, but one thing hammered at her brain: her mother had made a choice.

  “Before you give her your earcuff, you need to know—” She stopped and took a gasping breath that still wasn’t enough. “I love you. I love you like no one else in my life and I don’t even have a name for what you are to me. You’re not my lover and you’re not my mother, but you’re a little bit of both, and my dearest friend, and I will love you until the day I die.”

  There was a shocked silence. “Rahel.”

  “No, please, don’t say anything right now. I just needed—”

  “No, you don’t get to say that and then tell me to be quiet. Do you think you’re still a prime?”

  The laugh that ripped out of her was nearly as chest-destroying as the sobs had been.

  Sharro was still speaking. “I’ve loved you since the day Mouse brought you to me. You were a fierce little warrior wrapped around a heart as big as Alsea. Now you’re a fierce big warrior and your heart is just the same.”

  My heart is broken, Rahel thought. Broken with happiness and grief.

  “Sharro . . . Mother is going to need you. I have to tell her something, and when I do, she’s going to need you like never before. I know she chose you, and I’m—oh, Fahla, I’m so glad she did.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re not making sense.”

  “I’m in Brasalara. A Voloth fighter crashed here. There’s nothing left of Mother’s house.”

  The channel was so quiet that she thought they had been disconnected.

  “Oh, no,” Sharro whispered. “This will kill her.”

  “No, it won’t. She still has you.”

  “You think she’ll want me after I cost her her family?”

  “You’re her family, too. She chose you, and she’s alive because of it. I still have a mother because of it. Just remember that.”

  She listened to Sharro’s breathing and the distant clatter of some precarious bit of debris falling.

  “I don’t want you to tell her. If she doesn’t know, she can still believe.”

  Rahel nodded, though Sharro could not see it. “I know what you mean.”

  She waited while Sharro walked out into the garden and heard her say “Rahel.” There was a cry of joy, a rustle as the earcuff was transferred, and then the most beloved voice on Alsea came through.

  “Rahel! Fahla was watching over you again, wasn’t she? Tell me you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine. No injuries except for a bruised rib. And I’m hungry enough to eat a whole fanten.” She listened to her mother’s unrestrained laugh and felt sick at the news she had to impart. It would be a long time before she heard that laugh again.

  “Mother . . . I have to tell you something.”

  42

  REUNITED

  The pilot took Rahel to the next village and dropped her off at the best inn available, according to the rescuers he had transported. She walked inside and asked for a two-bedroom suite.

  The innkeeper took one look at her filthy uniform and informed her that she would not be paying for a thing during her stay.

  “I might be here a while,” Rahel said.

  “We saw
footage of those ground pounders. And the damage in Whitesun? Great Mother, what a horror. What you saved us from—you’ll stay here as long as you want, warrior.”

  She was too tired to argue.

  After asking for a key chip to be made available for Sharro and her mother, she walked into the tavern and ate, if not a whole fanten, at least two servings of it. Then she dragged herself upstairs, stripped off her uniform, and stepped into the hottest shower she could stand.

  The food and hot water sapped her body of what little energy it had left. She wrapped herself in one of the soft robes provided by the inn and did not have enough strength to pull back the bedclothes. Instead, she collapsed on top of the bed and thought she would just rest for a few ticks before climbing under the covers.

  When she awoke, the darkness outside told of the passage of several hanticks. She felt rested and calm, soothed by the presence at her back before consciously recognizing it.

  She must have been beyond exhausted to have slept through their arrival. As for not waking when her mother came onto the bed, that was unbelievable.

  She sat upright and confirmed what her senses had already told her. There was Ravenel, sound asleep.

  “She drove almost three hanticks to get to me,” Sharro said softly from the bedroom doorway. “And then spent half the day panicked about you. Then we drove three hanticks back here. When she saw you . . .” She blinked back tears. “You’re all she has left.”

  “I’m not. She has you.”

  “She didn’t say one word to me on that drive, except to give directions.”

  Rahel slipped off the bed, made sure that her mother hadn’t woken, and ushered Sharro back into the living area. “She’s in shock. You can’t think she blames you.”

  “I wish she did. She blames herself.”

  “For not dying? I’ll have a few words to say about that when she wakes up.” Rahel drank in the sight of her. She was well dressed as usual, her hair streak a vibrant blend of dark blue and red, the colors of the two castes that had fought the battle. Like Ravenel, she looked drawn and weary . . . and utterly beautiful.