Break the Chains

by Megan E. O'Keefe

  Yisson glanced at Garlt, who was too busy chugging ale to see the question in Yisson’s eyes. The big man thumped his drink down on the table and belched. “The Remnant’s no pretty place, but it’s better than a hanging.”

  Detan’s heart kicked up its beat, and he didn’t bother looking at whatever card he lay down. Yisson chuckled and clucked his tongue, but Detan didn’t pay him any mind. So the Remnant housed rogue sel-sensitives. A nice, juicy bit of bait to stick on the end of the lure he wanted to lead out to Pelkaia.

  “Sounds like a sweet gig, minding the ole bars,” Detan said. “The Fleet hiring?”

  “For the island?” Garlt grunted. “Wish they would. Way it works now, we only get one day o’ leave time. Can’t get far from the Remnant in just a day, it’s Petrastad or one o’ those little fishing villages.”

  “Pah,” Yisson tossed down a card. “They call ’emselves fishing villages but we all know they’re smugglers. Pearls, mostly, I think. Dunno why the empire doesn’t shut ’em down.”

  “Probably because they like the cheap pearls and aren’t keen on doing the labor ’emselves.”

  “When are they ever?” Detan interjected, winning a laugh and a thump on the back from Garlt that was, he suspected, designed to make him lose his grip on his cards again. He clung on, just to spite.

  “You’re all right, Wenton.”

  He took a swig of ale and grimaced. “Mind pointing me towards the bathroom?”

  “Gotten to you already, has it?”

  “Through me like piss through cheesecloth. Tastes like it, too.”

  “Hah, that it does. Bathroom’s down the hall, but I warn you, the reason it’s called a bathroom is because the only thing you’ll want after visiting it is a bath.”

  “A boiling one,” Yisson added.

  Detan rose, effecting a sway, and left his cards face down on the table with full knowledge they’d peek at them the moment he was out of sight. He pretended an orientating glance, making it look as if he was searching for the door. Spotting Tibs in the corner of the room, he paused long enough to let him feel his gaze probing his back, then swaggered out into the hall.

  He used the bathroom. Yisson was, it turned out, being kind.

  When he returned to the hall the bouncer ducked into the card room, drawn by the sound of raised voices. Tibs waited, one dead-caterpillar eyebrow arched in question. “Win anything?”

  “Pits, no. In fact, we better scuttle before they come out here looking to see if they can squeeze any more out of me.”

  “Thought we didn’t have grain to lose?”

  “Bah.” Detan slung an arm around Tibs’s shoulder, wiping a sticky substance he’d acquired from the bathroom off his hand onto Tibs’s coat. “Your short-sighted, pocket-pinching ways never fail to distress me, old friend. It was not the proliferation of grains I was after, but the information.”

  “Really. And did you manage to lose some information, too?”

  “You wound me.” He stepped aside as a broad-shouldered man spilled out of the card room’s doorway into the hall with them. The man staggered, obviously having stomached more ale than Detan could manage, and rammed his shoulder straight into Detan’s chest. With a grunt and a forced laugh, Detan nudged the man upright and steadied him.

  “You all right, mister...?”

  “Buncha cheats in there,” the drunken man muttered and tugged at his rumpled collar. He pat Detan’s chest with one sticky hand. “You’re all right, though.”

  The man dragged his hand free of Detan’s shirt, turning to struggle his way down the stairs, and the harsh rip of fabric tearing filled the hallway. Everyone froze, staring at the spill of cards that Tibs had dealt Detan to keep his hands busy while they were locked in a cabin on the Larkspur, splayed out across the stained hallway floor.

  “Err,” Detan said.

  “Cheater!” the drunken man roared, and grabbed Detan’s rumpled shirt in both meaty fists.

  Detan attempted a protest, but with his feet dangling off the ground and his collar ratcheted up tight around his throat all he managed was a pale imitation of a dunkeet squawk. His back struck the wall and dust rained down upon him, filling his eyes with grit and tears. On instinct he kicked out – more of a flail, if he was being honest with himself – and struck the man hard in, what he was disturbed to realize, was the man’s crotch.

  Wheezing and grunting, the drunken man dropped Detan with a thud and staggered back, folding up upon himself like flaccid sail. Detan wanted to harangue the man for his uncalled for assault, but Tibs grabbed him by the sleeve and jerked him toward the stairs.

  Shouts sounded from inside the card room. The big man’s cries of cheater must have been overheard. Which was really unfair, considering this had been one of the few times Detan hadn’t had any intention of cheating.

  With a weary groan he scurried after Tibs, tromping down the creaky steps and out into the strange streets of Petrastad. A fine mist ensconced the city, bitter cold and obscuring, as night crept in across the waves.

  “I blame you for that.” Detan propped his hands against his knees, huffing the chilly air. Tibs rolled his eyes.

  “Blame me all you like, you still owe me a new deck of cards.”

  “Preposterous! I could not have foreseen that brute’s–”

  “There they are!” The singular window of Lotti’s Cards sprouted two heads. One of them hurled a lantern. The glass shattered and splashed burning oil a mere few paces from where Detan hunched. He yelped and jumped aside.

  “Now that was uncalled for!”

  “Come on.” Tibs took off down a side street, and with a muffled curse Detan sprinted after him, boots slipping on the mist-slick cobblestones.

  “Why,” Tibs demanded through harsh breaths, “didn’t you change your shirt?”

  “It was clean enough! Do you have any idea where you’re going?”

  “Away from them seems the best course,” Tibs replied as he twisted down yet another street. Detan jogged along, beginning to notice a disturbing pattern. This city, just like its rectangular buildings, was laid out in grids. Nice, wide, easy to follow grids. Not a simple city to hide in, not at all. And it didn’t help matters much that their boots smeared mud with every step they took.

  Detan sighed. “I hate this city.”

  “Didn’t take you long,” Tibs called back over his shoulder.

  “Never does.”

  Shouts sounded somewhere behind them, echoing off the neat, straight stone walls, and Detan forced his legs to pump a little faster. He told himself it could be worse. It could be the local watchers hard on his heels, but the thought didn’t much soothe when his knees ached and the damned mist was clogging up his eyes.

  “Fucking Petrastad,” he said to no one in particular.

  Chapter Eight

  As the shrill whistle tolled, the guards grouped the sparrows for work details. Ripka caught sight of Enard over by the trestle table they’d taken their first meal on, lumped together with a handful of other male sparrows. They held wire brushes for deep cleaning, and were being handed rusty wrenches. Despite her uneasiness with Clink, she was glad she wasn’t in that group.

  “This way,” Clink said, waving an arm toward the edge of the rec yard.

  Ripka followed, hesitant but with her head up, waiting for the guards to yell at their little party for moving without permission. To let loose with those too-casual crossbows. Not a one so much as twitched an eyebrow their direction.

  Clink stopped at a doorway leading into the dormitory on the western edge of the rec yard. It was huge and arched, thick planks of darkwood banded with iron kissed by rust. She pounded twice on the door with her fist and, after a moment, it swung open. Another guard stood framed by a long hallway, eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, her shirt half tucked and a deep scowl on her lips.

  “Didn’t you hear the whistles?” Clink asked, a little too firmly for Ripka’s liking. If Clink had been a prisoner in her jail, she’d be scolded for that.
Of course, Ripka doubted a scolding would do much good against a woman like Clink, but at least an attempt at decorum would have been made.

  “Aren’t you an industrious little bee?” The guard sneered and stepped aside, gesturing them through the door.

  “We don’t farm, we don’t eat.” Clink eyed the guard. “And we wouldn’t last long if we were forced to eat the local wildlife. They’re all so spindly.”

  The guard snorted and pointed to the wall. Hanging from the grey, unfinished stone were five buckets stuffed with hand spades, claw rakes, pruning shears, and leather gloves. Ripka stared, dumbstruck. Every last piece of equipment could be fashioned into a deadly weapon.

  “Grab a bucket,” Honey whispered, nudging her forward. The pale-haired woman hugged her bucket against her midsection with one arm, a spade clutched in the other hand. She brought the spade up to her cheek and brushed the cool steel against her skin. All the while smiling with those big, doe, eyes at Ripka.

  Ripka cleared her throat. “They let us use this stuff?”

  The guard said, “Only to do your work. Cause any trouble out there and you get thrown in the well. Try and sneak anything back in, you get thrown in the well. Sneak anything back in and use it, you get thrown to the sharks. Clear?”

  “As the skies,” Ripka said as she took a bucket from a hook.

  “Now hold still.” The rumpled guard jerked a patch from her pocket, spilling a few more to the floor, and kicked the fallen ones aside. Thick stalks of grain were embroidered in the middle of the patch, a gleaming bucket alongside them. Her face pinched with concentration, the guard pressed the patch against Ripka’s arm. She tugged a folded card from her pocket and flipped it open to reveal a set of pre-threaded needles. Tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, the guard leaned over the patch and Ripka held her breath as the woman drew a few sloppy stitches through, then broke the thread and tied off a knot.

  “There. You’re official. Don’t fucking lose it.”

  Ripka pulled on the leather gloves she found in the bottom of the bucket. Once the guard’s small group was prepared, she ushered them out into the sun. The bright glare was nothing compared to Aransa’s oppressive heat, but Ripka took a moment to stand still, soaking in the warm rays. The warmth also did a fine job of spreading a rotten-sweet stench.

  Shoved up against the Remnant’s exterior wall, a gaping pit wafted vile clouds into the air. She cringed away, turning her head so that she wouldn’t have to breathe in the moldering heap.

  Clink laughed and chucked her in the shoulder. “Better get used to it. That’s our midden heap. Come fertilizing day you’ll get real acquainted.”

  “Oh good, something to look forward to.” She sighed, glancing back at the mound of refuse. A narrow pipe poked through the stone wall above it, something slimy and unctuous dribbling into the pile. She shivered and trudged onward.

  Outside of the grey confines of the prison, the island was, she grudgingly admitted, quite beautiful. It offered nothing of the brutal beauty of the desert or the scrublands, but its rocky ground and patchwork gardens gleamed beneath the soft kiss of the sun. While the daylight was high, the sea breeze didn’t feel quite so bone-biting. The salty tang in the air mingled with a darker, earthy aroma was almost refreshing.

  A packed dirt path lead them away from the stone arms of the prison, winding through patches of vegetable gardens. A gravel path would have made much more sense at a prison, then the guards could more easily hear footsteps, but Ripka was beginning to expect incompetence, or at the very least laziness, from her surroundings.

  She followed the sinuous line of another, thicker path through the plots with her eye. It twisted toward the shore, then looped back toward the prison. At the apex of that twist, she thought she could see a smaller building – right in the center of a field she’d been certain was empty from her vantage in the bird’s nest.

  The building was low and squat, its flat roof gleaming with a faint sheen under the sunlight. Something seemed... off, about it. Something with the shadows, or the wideness. She couldn’t quite tell. Even the color of the walls looked wrong. They were yellowstone, the same rock that made up most of Aransa’s buildings, but there wasn’t a quarry for that stone anywhere near the Remnant, so far as she could recall.

  “Got sap in your boots?” Forge hissed in her ear, giving her a shove.

  Hiding a flush by turning her face back to the track, Ripka hurried to close the small gap that had opened between her and Clink. At least the guard didn’t seem half so annoyed as Forge did.

  They passed a triangular plot of land dotted with a few dozen beetlenut trees. Half the inmates assigned to work the trees had climbed them, and were busy shaking the branches to drop nuts onto blankets held out by those waiting below. One of the climbers nearest the road shook his grey hair to clear it of leaves and sucked deep on a rolled cigarette. The cloud he exhaled was sweet, acrid. Like nothing Ripka’d smelled before.

  “The guards let us smoke?” she asked, not bothering to hide her incredulous tone.

  “Not exactly,” Forge said, eyeing the grey-haired man. “But he’s puffing mudleaf. Keeps you calm, you know? Normally they’d make you snuff it if you were smoking out in the open, but that’s Sasan. He’s been here thirty years, and will stay until the day he dies. If the older lifers need a little extra to take the edge off, everyone looks the other way.”

  “Contraband is really that easy to come by around here?”

  Forge grinned. “You’d be surprised.”

  Her heart gave a kick of anticipation as they turned down the path toward the strange building, but she kept her steps steady. Just short of the start of the curve that would bring them to the building, the guard ordered them to disperse into a field of grains. The plants glimmered as the sea breeze stroked them, reminding Ripka of a silvery-backed locust swarm.

  The women were tasked to weeding the ground between the rows, and spread out. Ripka hesitated, spade in hand. Apparently no one doubted that she knew how to weed a garden. She supposed it shouldn’t be too hard – just pluck anything that wasn’t obviously grain and toss it in her bucket.

  Honey leaned close and whispered, “Just a quick jab.” She demonstrated with the spade. “And a little twist. They pop right out. Sometimes you get lucky and can feel the roots break.” She gave Ripka what was probably meant to be a reassuring pat on the shoulder and stepped up to a row. With a vigorous jab, she speared the ground near a green-leafed weed and twisted. A delighted smile lit up her features, and she began to hum softly. Ripka forgotten, Honey disappeared down her row in search of more prey for her spade.

  Left to her own devices, Ripka wandered down the row assigned to her, feeling the sunlight on her back in earnest. Just jab and twist, as Honey had said. Should be easy enough. A small trickle of sweat began across her neck, her shoulders, tickling her sun-tired skin. She wondered if they’d bring water out here for them before the work was through.

  She also wondered how close they were watching her.

  Covering her reconnaissance by pretending to be on sharp lookout for pesky weeds, she advanced down the row, drawing closer to the strange building with every step she took.

  When she reached the end of the line, her bucket half-filled with bruised green plants and her eyes stinging against the sweat that’d rolled into them, she glanced round. No one was watching. She spent a long moment crouched there, marking the rotation of guards across the dormitory roof, and found their timing conveniently regular. Slowly, as to not rustle the deadfall scattering the ground, she crept forward, drawing closer to the house.

  She could make out the faintest details of the building now and, sidling up near the bent trunk of a spineneedle tree, she shaded her eyes with her hand. The door didn’t look very secure. In fact, it appeared quite small and ordinary.

  A laugh burbled up from the grains and she flinched, glancing back toward the small plot. No one came her way. She breathed out, shoulders easing.

  “J
ust what do you think you’re doing?”

  A woman in a guard’s uniform stepped from beside the tree. Ripka jumped, nearly lost her bucket, and caught herself halfway through raising her spade to strike. The guard was slender, narrow boned and narrow waisted, her dark head shorn of hair, even the eyebrows. The guard glanced down at the raised spade and let out a small whistle through the gap between her two front teeth.

  “Wouldn’t bother with that. Attacking a guard’ll get you dumped in the well.”

  “What’s this well everyone keeps talking about?” Ripka said, trying to hide the adrenaline tremor in her voice as she straightened from a fighting stance and put the spade back in the bucket.

  “Best you don’t find out.” The woman smiled a gap-toothed smile and gestured toward the field with the butt of her spear. “Get back to work. Wouldn’t want to lose the grain harvest to a missed weed, now would we?”

  Ripka jerked her chin toward the smaller building. “What is that place?”

  The guard pursed her lips together and angled her body to cover Ripka’s view of the compound. “None of your business, sparrow.”

  “Misol.” The surly guard who had herded them out to their work duty emerged from the end of a row. “What’s this? The sparrow trying to fly off?”

  Misol eyed Ripka, rolled something around in her mouth and then spat black fluid on the grey rocks. “Naw. Just wanted to have a chat with the new bird. You can have her back, now.”

  “Well la-tee-da, aren’t you generous. This is real work these gophers are doing, you know. Puts food on your plate, too.”

  “Calm your shit,” Misol said, her knuckles going pale as paper against the grip of her spear.

  “Want me to tell Warden Radu you’ve been chatting with the scruff when they should be working?”

  “Go ahead. Tell him.” Misol smirked at the guard’s flustered expression, winked once at Ripka, and then strolled off back toward the building.