“I anticipated a revelation,” she says, couching her intuitive sense of Rehhd’s actions in future-searching terms. “Some additional evidence of her Heterodoxy.”
“And?”
Niamh’s stern voice grates at her. She frowns, her core heating with a flare of returned antagonism.
“And I found a Trainee Peacekeeper tied at wrists and ankles.”
“How did it happen, Anaiya? How did it happen without you knowing about it?”
The blame is heavy in his voice. The fire at her core burns a little hotter.
“The same way it happened without you knowing about it. Without Jenna knowing about it. Without his shadow Peacekeeper knowing about it.”
Niamh closes his eyes tightly and briefly shakes his head.
“The Trainee said he heard more than three voices. That you ordered someone out of the room.”
The barely repressed aggression turns to a colder fear. “They weren’t important.”
“Who wasn’t important?”
“They weren’t important. The two Elementals I found sneaking into the basement.”
Niamh’s frown deepens and all Anaiya feels is the sudden urge to leap from the wheelchair and wipe it from his too-pretty face with a full-force roundhouse kick.
“To do what, exactly?”
“How the fuck should I know, Niamh? I didn’t exactly engage them in a delightful repartee about whether they were there to suck face or sneak some extra alcohol. I was kind of focussed on the Heterodox Air Elemental and her prisoner.”
“Lose the attitude, Ani.”
“Stop interrogating me.”
The weight crackles like static between them. Locked in this standoff, Anaiya knows instinctively that she can’t be the one to look away first. To drop her gaze would be to announce her guilt. So, she maintains her hash gaze, drawing on the fire in her belly to sustain it.
Eventually, Niamh sighs and looks away. “This isn’t over, Ani,” he says softly.
He doesn’t need to say it. She knows it, whatever it is, is far from over.
TWENTY-NINE
ANAIYA RUBS AT HER TEMPLES, fingers pushing deep to erase the throbbing that has started up again. She closes her eyes, shutting out the Last Defence room that strangely feels less like the prison now, and more like a refuge.
A week of daily interrogations by Niamh has left her tired and fragile – as if the constant questioning has weakened her, has created a stress fracture that makes her more and more susceptible to breaking.
Every time, it is the same questions – different words, different tones, different threats, but always the same line of enquiry. Always the same intention. To break her.
Anaiya answers them and doesn’t answer them – spinning her own truth and giving Niamh only glimpses of what she knows. Constructing half-truths, creating subterfuge, keeping secret what must stay hidden – it all pulls energy from her. She worries constantly she will fumble, will present an inconsistency or will give away a vital piece of information.
Give her away.
Give Seth away.
And with the worry comes the headaches, the constant throbbing that sees her sitting cross-legged with her eyes closed on the cold floor of her room.
Slowly, the throbbing eases. She opens her eyes to the immense vista framed by the floor-to-ceiling window before her. Balancing her glass screen atop her knees, she plugs in her earphones. Her fingers hover above the dashboard displayed on the glass, tingling.
The dusk landscape of Otpor stretches before her. She imposes a mental grid over it – administration buildings fill the foreground to her right, residential apartments line the far bank of the river and water distribution facilities dot the in-between. She waits patiently in the silence imposed by her earphones, watching as the sky grows darker.
Tonight it is a water distribution facility, located in one of the closer grid cells, whose lights flicker on first. Automatically, her finger taps at the screen, generating a vibrant, low-pitched chime that continues to resonate in her ears. Seconds later, a third-floor window in a nearby administration building lights up. Three quick, successive taps sound like hollow pipes crashing together – dull, short pops that peak in the lingering residue of the chime. As the succession of lights quickens, Anaiya’s melody becomes more complex.
A heavy weight in her stomach indicates her unease, her vulnerability to this strength of emotion, but she pushes it down – burying it like she did the razor of her realignment. She feels it resist and then falter as her brain yields to the intense concentration required by her developing symphony.
For hours she sits and plays as lights wink on and off, celebrated and mourned by the music Anaiya taps and swipes on her dashboard. Eventually the visual melody slows and her hands still. She unplugs her earphones and lifeline and lies back on the cold, hard floor.
Sleep comes easily, but ends harshly – the first rays of daylight rob her of it, even when she has only just closed her eyes. She opens them now, regarding the room from her strange vantage point on the floor.
The door to her apartment slides open. Niamh never bothers to knock.
She regards him with a sigh. There had been a time when she had looked forward to seeing him.
“Good morning, Niamh.”
“Get up, Ani.”
Get fucked, Niamh.
She closes her eyes again.
“Now, Ani.”
She doesn’t move. Satisfied with her small act of resistance.
Footsteps advance, echoing loudly with her ears so close to the hard floor. She prepares herself for another lecture, another barrage of questions.
Not for the sharp prick of a needle.
Her eyes fly open, but it is not Niamh standing crouched over her, but the Water Elemental from her early days of realignment.
A flash of warmth rushes through her.
“What are you doing?”
Her voice sounds fuzzy and distant.
The Technician stands and walks over to Niamh. She sees Niamh nod and speak something in return, but the voices are lost beyond a wall of soft static in her ears.
And then the Technician is gone, the door securely shut, and Niamh smiling the self-satisfied smirk that pushes all the wrong buttons in Anaiya’s core.
“Time to talk, Ani,” he says, sitting down on her bed.
She slowly, almost drunkenly, sits up, her body suddenly heavy and unwieldy. With her back resting against the massive window of the room, she tries to collect her thoughts.
“What were you doing when the Peacekeepers arrived at the izakaya?” Niamh asks.
“I was dancing with Rehhd and Eamon.”
The words flow out of her mouth effortlessly, thoughtlessly.
No…No…This is not…right. Not…right…
Her thoughts are thick and sticky, like the paint on the recycler surface.
“Who else was there?”
Careful…careful…
“I was there and…”
No…Careful…More careful…
Her mind strains with the effort of concentrating, of trying to push back the heavy haze that envelopes it.
“And?”
Niamh leans forwards, his forearms at right angles across his thighs. The position hunches his shoulders, puts his gaze more on a level with hers. A thin, ruddy scratch cuts above his left eye.
“You have a scratch.” Her tongue feels furry, her mind sleepy.
Wasn’t…Haven’t I…Didn’t I just…wake…up…
Niamh’s smirk fades just a little.
“Courtesy of Rehhd.”
His voice sounds distant, the vowels and consonants fuzzy like audio feedback. Darkness beckons. So sweetly. She just needs to reach out. Reach out and…
“Rehhd…is…a fucking moron.”
There is nothing else to be said. The darkness brushes against her. She snuggles up to it, erasing Niamh and his questions.
* * *
ANAIYA WAKES UP HOURS LATER, cocooned in the
thin blanket of her single bed. Through the apartment window, the limbo sky, caught between light and dark, disorients her. She checks her wristplate, blinking in surprise at the dawn hour.
Her mind blurs at the edges, fills with stale static. She lies there, staring at the ceiling, trying to fill a hole in her memory. The dimensions of the hole are vague and slippery – she remembers brief moments of her music composition, lights and melodies flashing cryptically in her memory, but not retreating to the bed, not falling asleep.
The click and metallic rustling of the door breaks the silence. A familiar-looking Water Technician enters the room, the sight scratching at the fuzziness of her mind.
He offers no conversation, simply striding to the bed and plugging Anaiya’s lifeline into his glass screen. She studies his face, looking for any sign of surprise or concern or frustration. He taps and swipes away regardless of the scrutiny, giving nothing away.
“You were the Technician during my alignment, weren’t you?” she asks.
“Realignment,” he corrects, head still bent over the screen.
“Yeah, realignment,” she echoes. “You thought my mind could have been broken.”
“Mmm,” he mumbles, squinting at the screen.
“Was it?”
He doesn’t answer straight away, still consumed by the screen. She repeats the question, a little louder, a little more urgently.
“Hmm?”
Anaiya’s fingers twitch, keen to rip the glass screen from his hand and throw it against the wall. She takes a deep breath, clenches her hands instead, and asks again.
“Broken,” she says slowly through tense lips. “Was my mind broken?”
He finally looks over the screen at her, a small frown toying with the creases on his face.
“Why?” he asks, providing no relief. “Does it feel broken?”
The returned question catches her unprepared. It is a strange question.
No stranger than asking if it is broken…
“What would broken feel like?” she asks, playing the Technician at his own game.
His face lights up, his screen forgotten.
“Hard to say. The mind isn’t corporeal like the other parts of the body. Not really, anyway. The mind is bigger than the brain – some say entirely distinct from it.”
His voice rises in pitch and his words spin out faster with each new thought. “There are no veins to probe, no cells to examine, no beats to monitor. Yet we feel it keenly, know intuitively its resting position, understand when it is challenged, or pushed, or damaged. There is a wrongness when the mind is out of balance. The more out of balance, the closer to breaking, the more palpable this sense of wrongness.”
Anaiya drinks the words in, sucks the marrow from them, turning the empty bones across her tongue. She knows this wrongness. The battle between the hot fire of her heart and the cold fire of her core. The conflict that keeps her awake at nights – yearning for Seth and hating herself for it; satisfaction at her resistance towards Niamh, guilt at her betrayal; elation at the memory of that clear snap that accompanied Rehhd’s broken arm, incessant itching on the skin of her guilty hand.
“The dual alignment of your brain could definitely cause some imbalance,” the Technician says, pulling her back to the conversation, ejecting her lifeline from the glass screen. “But, no. It doesn’t seem that your mind is broken.”
He exits the room perfunctorily, leaving Anaiya to ponder his words and their specific meaning for her situation. Minutes later, when the door opens again and he reappears, she opens her mouth to ask more questions, demand more answers, but the sight of Niamh at his heels causes them to dry on her tongue.
“Hello, Ani,” he says, his face set in a grim expression.
“Niamh,” she replies, extracting all the emotion from her voice so that the syllable comes out dry and dead.
The Technician advances towards her again, Anaiya expecting him to plug her lifeline into his screen again.
“Let’s talk,” Niamh says, drawing her gaze away from the Technician.
“OK…”
The unexpected needle finds its way easily into the jugular vein, bringing with it the warmth and frayed thoughts of the previous, forgotten night.
“That night in the izakaya,” his voice floats to her, seeming to cover kilometres. “The night we detained Rehhd and Eamon. You were in the basement…”
* * *
EVERY NIGHT for the next four nights she is drugged by a Water Technician and interrogated by Niamh. Every morning she wakes with a slight headache. Sometimes she remembers dream-like fragments, but mostly the nightly operations are a deep void in her memory. The light is always a little brighter, a little harsher when she awakes, and so she lies there silently, eyes closed, feeling no different. Only more tired. More empty.
When the sound of the door sliding open whispers in her consciousness yet again, she ignores it. She is not ready to face Niamh or the Technician again.
“So, it’s true.”
It is a voice that she cannot ignore.
“How did you get in here?” she asks, breaking her self-imposed darkness.
Kaide stands just inside the doorway, hands slung casually in pockets, arms and eyes tense. “I know who to trade favours with.”
He leans against the wall and stares at her. She sits up under his steady gaze, resisting the urge to pull the thin sheet up over her exposed torso.
“I wouldn’t have believed it, you know,” he says softly. “There was this crazy story I heard weeks ago, about some insane experiment to realign a Fire Elemental to an Air Elemental. I had laughed at the time, passed it off as the usual Water fetish for manipulating the world just to prove they can. Even with all of your quirks, your strange beats and atypical actions – I had just thought you a sad victim of hypoxia. Damaged. And maybe you are damaged. But it’s not because of hypoxia.”
“Kaide, you don’t know what –”
Kaide has pulled his hands from his pockets and pressed the playback function of his wristplate.
“I’ve found it.”
It is her voice that echoes through the room.
“The piece that can link Rehhd to the Resistance. That confirms her as the leader.”
She doesn’t have to ask Kaide how he obtained the communication. He reaches into his pocket once more and withdraws a familiar black cube.
“I was worried about your influence over Seth. Concerned he was divulging too much information or wavering from the course. I needed a way to see beneath the subterfuge. The original plan was to give the cube to him, but when you came to the Lavoir the other afternoon, looking for a device to help you match sounds, it was the perfect opportunity.”
Anaiya looks at the small facets of the cube, trying to see if she is reflected in its surface. “It’s not a soundmatcher, is it?”
“Yes and no,” Kaide replies, rolling it around his palm with lightning-quick fingers. “It can soundmatch, and the soundmatching is a very useful function, but I developed it to record lifeline data. Once the cube was plugged into your lifeline, it downloaded five terabytes of the wristplate’s most recent data – transactions, geospatial coordinates, recordings and communications. At first I was concerned about the complete lack of new music files. And then I wondered about your frequent trips to the Western Cardinal Area.”
His voice falls deeper.
“But then I got to your comms data. And I realised two things. First, incredibly, that you were the crazy Water Experiment. You were the Fire Elemental they reshaped with an Air alignment. And secondly…”
His voice breaks and he looks away from Anaiya.
“…Secondly, that you never suspected Seth.”
With that final breath, he looks up at Anaiya. And they are back in that izakaya basement again, connected only by their gaze, a wasteland of blame and hurt and betrayal and co-conspiratorial guilt stretching between them.
“It’s not safe for us to talk here,” she says finally. “Not safe for you
to be here.”
To her surprise, he merely nods. The exchange has challenged them both and stripped them bare.
“I have nothing left to say,” he says and walks out of the room.
* * *
ANAIYA LIES IN THE SILENCE, controlling her breathing as the seconds tick by, bloated into minutes.
Kaide had been right. She hadn’t suspected Seth. Had never contemplated that he could be the Resistance leader.
What signs had she missed? All she can remember are the quiet smiles, gentle touches. And once again she is at a loss to match the Elemental she desires with the Resistor she knows.
When the sound of the door breaks the sound void, Anaiya’s body stiffens, wondering what confrontation Kaide will bring with him this time.
But it is Niamh that walks into the room. “You’re awake,” he says.
As always, an uneasy silence settles between them.
“How are you feeling?”
Confused. Lost. Guilty. So very, very guilty. “Tired,” she says.
Niamh nods, as if that were to be expected, and leans against the wall. “We’ve concluded your interrogation,” he says, folding his arms across his chest.
Anaiya sits up slowly.
“Data matching is inconclusive. We’ve run your lifeline location proximities, terminal engagement and transactions, cross-referenced them with the Elementals detained at the izakaya and with the data we pulled from communication intercepts on Rehhd, Eamon, Kaide and Cressida. Rehhd and Eamon were the only targets at the izakaya and the data contains no outliers to suggest an additional Elemental of interest.”
He stares at her. “Data says you’re clear, Ani.”
It isn’t the reprieve she has been hoping for. His eyes are cold, his stance intimidating.
“You thought I was lying to you?”
“I think you still are.”
It is a slap in the face. A sharp, solid crack. Not unexpected, but not welcomed, either.
“In any case, we’re done with this stage.”
Anaiya wants to shrink under his scrutiny, his condemnation. His gaze is unrelenting and it takes all her discipline to not look away.
Resistance: Divided Elements (Book 1) Page 25
