Jane shook her head. “You should have seen her dive, just an hour or so ago,” she pointed out. I had, I just hadn’t thought about it. Goddammit. We were on our own.
“Go,” I told her. “Take up position.” I had an idea. “Sho, come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“To take our new abilities for a test drive.” Sho obediently wheeled after me as I made my way through the halls of the villa to a ramp leading up to the second floor; we crouched just inside a shuttered window of one of the outlying buildings, that side of the structure in shadow thanks to the sun being past its zenith somewhere behind us. I opened the shutters and looked out over the beach, Sho just behind me, already building a current.
There was nothing moving on the sands, nothing moving in the trees beyond the natural shift and sway of the leaves as the ocean breezes passed through them. Mo must have already made his way inside—he wasn’t visible, though I could see his tracks in the sand. The shadows of the rings made ribbons of shade across the beach; I sat in a crouch and held up one hand, my palm flat, creating a kind of . . . vessel in my palm, just like I had during the training Sho and I had been engaged in a little bit ago.
“All right, Sho,” I told him. “This is the real thing, now. Give me a slow trickle, just a little bit.” In my left hand, I formed a teke spear, the “weight” of it offsetting the sphere in my right. As Sho fed his current to me, I fed it into the sphere, and kept the other weapon at the ready as well. If it really was the Cyn that came setting down on the beach, he’d get the sphere full of energy; ballistic weapons didn’t seem to threaten him, but he had been contained by the burst of lightning from the shattered transformer on Valkyrie Rock, so at least some forms of energy had an effect.
If it was anyone else—and they were threatening—they’d get the spear. The “thrown” weapon wouldn’t likely kill them—my fine control over my telekinesis didn’t extend to giving sharp edges to my projectiles—but it would put them on their ass long enough for us to figure out who the hell they were, and what they wanted here.
I felt Sho’s energy climbing over my skin like a line of hot ants. Grimacing, I kept feeding it into my sphere, a single mantra passing through my mind: Please don’t catch on fire. Please don’t catch on fire. Please don’t catch on fire.
The ship appeared, matching its course to the rising arcs of the planetary rings—meaning we couldn’t make out its form against the shadow. Clever captain. The sphere in my palm was slowly filling up with energy, like a cup filling up with water; I had about as much as I could hold, so I whispered “enough” to Sho, and he cut the flow.
Now I just had to kneel there, holding it, like a glass ball full of molten fire. Fun times.
There was something familiar about the whining of the ship’s engines, but I couldn’t quite place it. It was definitely slowing down now, almost coming to a stop, hovering—but not quite setting down—over the beach where moments ago Sho and I had been training. As it descended, its form became clear, and I realized where I’d seen it before—
“Don’t shoot!” I shouted through my comms at Jane; I could only hope Mo was close enough to his comm station that he could hear me as well. “It’s a friend!”
The ship’s ramp opened, and a form stepped out, making the twenty-foot drop from the craft to the beach with the kind of nonchalant disdain for gravity that only a species made entirely of metal could manage: a Barious.
“Got your message!” the Preacher shouted at the villa, raising one hand to shade her eyes from the sun. “You were supposed to be back in Sanctum days ago; what the hell are you doing out here?”
CHAPTER 11
I didn’t know what to do with the orb of crackling energy Sho had fed me, so I wound up just hucking it as far out to sea as I could, where it made a lovely waterspout.
There were introductions all around after we all descended to the beach: Mo, the Preacher, and Sho all very politely pretending like none of them had been prepared to kill the other just moments before. It turned out that, since we’d been overdue to return to Sanctum, the Preacher had already been on her way to our last known position—Kandriad—when she’d encountered our message; she did that sort of thing, she was way overprotective.
From there, she’d tracked the signal back to its origin, rather than heading directly to the rally point we’d set for the Justified, like the message stated she should: for all that the Preacher was with the Justified now, she didn’t really consider herself a member of the sect, and so considered Justified commands more of “polite suggestions” than anything else.
She’d made her way past the war satellites thanks to what she called a “conversation” with the Jaliad AI; I had to wonder if that conversation hadn’t involved the Preacher hacking her way into the Jaliad defense network and writing her own ticket as a long-lost member of the very, very dead monarchy. There were very few networks in the galaxy that could stand up to a determined Barious when it came to hacking or decryption.
“A Cyn.” The Preacher shook her head, sitting at a table on the deck that stretched out from the villa over the sea. “It’s . . . hard to believe.”
“But not impossible,” Mo put in. “They went somewhere, after all.”
“So did our creators,” the Preacher said mildly. “It’s not as though I ever expected them to show up again. And you have no idea why he’s trying to capture gifted children? Are there . . . specific gifts they have, some sort of further criteria? Something to do with energy, perhaps? Which—well done, by the way.” She nodded at me. “Your gifts are coming along well.” Then she frowned. “Also, what happened to your hair?”
I rushed past that part. “You seem less . . . thrilled than I’d thought you’d be, Preacher.”
“About what? The fact that you think this . . . being . . . can consume pulse radiation? About the fact that the key to the survival of my people—my species—might lie in the hands of some sort of carnage-happy predator who has been butchering his way across the galaxy? You expected I’d be thrilled by that?”
“I mean . . . ‘enthused,’ at least?”
“I’ll be ‘enthused’ when we learn how to reproduce what he is capable of—divorced from his rampages of death.” That was fair, probably.
“I said this to Jane, and I’ll say it to you as well, just so there is no confusion,” Mo put in, his words directed at the Preacher. “Trying to take this . . . creature alive . . . will not be possible. Containing him on the asteroid was one thing, but getting him to the point where you can study him, interact with him—I would not suggest getting your hopes too high on that measure.”
The Preacher narrowed her eyes at him, her irises dilating in a spiral like a camera lens. “My lack of ‘enthusiasm’ aside, that thing may well hold the answer to the question I’ve been studying for a century, Mohammed. Whatever risks are involved—”
“You misunderstand,” Mo told her. “I’m not saying it will be difficult to take him alive, I’m saying you can’t. Not if he doesn’t want you to, and he will not want you to. You’re focused on what he is—a being made of energy, a Cyn, something that eats away at the pulse. You’re forgetting who he is; namely, a zealot, a believer, one seeking a kind of . . . rapture through his violence. Even if you were to attempt to transport him back to Sanctum, back to your scientists, he can manipulate energy. That sort of manipulation starts from within.”
“You think he’d snuff himself out rather than fall into our hands.” Jane nodded, leaning back in her chair. “That tracks. For all we know, he may have done so already.”
“For what he’s offering—for what his existence offers—we have to try,” the Preacher said stubbornly. “There must be some way to . . . incapacitate him, to prevent him from—”
“You honestly don’t understand, do you?” Mo shook his head. “You’re not getting the old galaxy back, Barious. These are the worlds we have now, pulsed or not. We must make our peace with that.”
“Easy to sa
y, coming from a species not barreling toward extinction.” The Preacher glared at him.
“We’ve got time, still,” I interjected, trying to cool tempers all around. “Time to think up our best approach. He’s stuck on that asteroid, so unless he has . . . snuffed himself out—in which case, we can’t do a damn thing about it anyway—we have the advantage.” I turned to Jane. “Has Schaz made any headway decrypting the drive I managed to copy from his systems? Or pulling apart the mask?”
“Not the last time I spoke to her, no.” Jane shook her head. “That was an hour or so ago, this morning, before she dove back into the deep.”
“What’s all this?” the Preacher asked.
“When Esa broke into his ship to plant the bomb—”
“You let Esa do that? Alone?”
“We didn’t have a hell of a lot of choice, Preacher.”
“I can take care of myself, you know,” I told her, a little stung.
“You’re a child.”
“Not for a while now, actually,” I shot back.
The Preacher and I glared at each other for a bit; we always seemed to wind up doing that. For a being with theoretically perfect recall, the Preacher always seemed to have a bit of a blind spot for my capabilities. No matter how often I proved that I could take care of myself, she always seemed to want to treat me like I was made of glass, a fragile, delicate thing that needed to be protected at all costs.
When I felt like I’d glared enough to make my point—the Preacher could glare all day without moving a muscle, but I was just human, I’d get tired eventually—I turned back to Jane. “Did Schaz say how much longer it would take?” I asked. “Maybe there’s something in those files, something about the mask, something that can tell us . . . I don’t know, but something we don’t know now.”
“Just that she wasn’t particularly close,” Jane said mildly, pretending like the Preacher and I hadn’t interrupted the conversation to just stare angrily at each other for a little bit. “The systems the Cyn used are almost entirely foreign to her—almost, but not quite. That means it’s taking a great deal of work.” I thought of the strangeness of the drive on board that alien ship—the only piece of tech I’d even vaguely recognized, wired into foreign systems with a definite lack of delicacy. “Almost, but not quite” sounded about right.
The Preacher stood, her hands still on the table. “When she resurfaces, have her give me access to the network on which she’s running her decryption algorithms,” she said.
“She’s not going to do that—she’s not doing it on a network at all,” Jane told her. “Our encryption’s been hacked one too many times lately.”
“So have her come here, and let me on board.” The Preacher didn’t actually have any teeth to grind, but her jaw was still tensed, as though she were still trying, very, very hard. “I have much more advanced intrusion packages than your shack . . . than Scheherazade.” Oh, good. If the Preacher reverted to referring to any non-Barious AI as “shackled,” she and Jane were really going to fight, and I don’t mean that in a “shouting match” kind of way. Barious or not, I didn’t know if that was a fight the Preacher was going to win. “In the meantime, I need to speak to you. In private.” She was still glaring daggers at Jane; great. It looked like they were going to fight anyway.
Without another word, they stalked off into the villa. “So that’s another Justified,” Sho said. “She seems . . .” He groped for a term, probably looking for one that didn’t include a rude phrase or two, for politeness’s sake.
“Yeah, I know,” I sighed. “But she means well.” That was part of the problem.
“You think they’re fighting about you?” Sho asked.
“Well, they’re sure as hell not fighting about you,” I replied. “You might not have noticed, but the Preacher doesn’t really care who she offends.”
“Unless it’s you. So they’re definitely fighting about you.”
“That would be my conclusion, yeah.”
“They seem to have gone into one of the upstairs rooms,” Sho said. Then, with something like a grin: “I’ve noticed over the last few days that there’s a central maintenance area for what used to be the villa’s climate-control system. If you’re in there, you can hear someone speaking from almost anywhere in the main villa, through the ducts.”
I grinned in return, standing from the table. “You just happened to notice that, did you? Want to show me where it is?”
“I should probably stop the two of you,” Mo said mildly. “To protect Jane’s privacy, and all that.”
“But you’re not going to, are you?”
“No, I’m not. Jane is teaching you spycraft, after all, or at least she’s meant to be. Gathering intelligence is part of your education. Have fun snooping.”
We went to do just that.
CHAPTER 12
Sho and I made our way through the servants’ quarters to the maintenance areas—Mo hadn’t cleaned these rooms out, probably because he couldn’t even fit back here; the Jaliad had been Reetha, after all, and the vaulted ceilings and wide open spaces of the villa proper notwithstanding, the Reetha were a small people. We ignored the detritus of lives long abandoned and squeezed into the climate-control access area, where we could hear Jane and the Preacher, clear as a bell, their voices echoing through the ducts.
Of course, we probably could have heard them from anywhere in the villa; their “private conversation” had already moved into shouting territory.
“Have you taken a look at her lately, Jane? Have you seen what she’s wearing? Body armor and combat boots; a full set of—”
“Oh, I’m so fucking sorry, Preacher, I’m only training her to keep herself alive; if I had known her sartorial education was more important than—”
“She’s bruised, just—everywhere, she has blood under her nails and all over her clothes—has she even taken a shower since you got here?” I felt a pang at that; I actually hadn’t. I mean, I’d tried to go swimming, but Jane had stopped me. “She doesn’t belong out here, Jane. She doesn’t—”
“What do you want, Preacher? You want me to keep her locked up at Sanctum, stuck in classes with the rest of the next-generation kids?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I want. That’s what’s best for her, Jane, even if you can’t see it—”
“She made the choice to come out here, Preacher. She did, not me.”
“You agreed, and you should have known better—you should have known what taking her out here would do. Just look at her. She’s wearing guns, Jane—multiple guns, including those fucking pistols that your petty criminal of a boyfriend gave her; what the hell kind of a birthday gift is that for a seventeen-year-old girl?”
“Don’t try and drag Javier into this; he’s done more right by her than—”
“Pistols and submachine guns and knives, Jane. Even here, where she’s supposed to be safe. What kind of life are you giving her, where she never feels safe?”
“Better that she doesn’t feel safe and actually is than she feels safe when she’s not and that gets her dead; better that she—”
“Those aren’t the only options; stop pretending like they are! There are safe places in this universe; Sanctum is one of them, where she belongs! And you don’t think that—”
“Tell me something: what’s safer, in the long run? A thing made of glass, locked behind a steel cage? Or a thing made of steel, that can actually defend itself? She’s not suited for classrooms and medical suites, not any more than—”
“Oh, stop projecting your own insecurities on her, Jane. You’re the one who can’t bear to stay in one place; you’re the one who can’t bear to look at yourself in a mirror. Your sins aren’t hers, and she shouldn’t have to carry the weight of them.”
“I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep fucking saying it: she decided to do this, to do good, rather than just sitting around and—”
“She’s seventeen, she was barely fourteen when she made that decision, and you’re acting like
she’s a full-grown adult! She’s not capable of deciding what’s best for her, that’s why she’s still a child!”
Jane didn’t shout her response; instead, her words were low, low enough that Sho and I had to strain to hear, her voice threaded with real rage and something that was almost malice. “You look at her and you see the infant you stole from the station where she was born; you see the toddler you gave away. She’s grown since then, Preacher. You just weren’t around to see it.”
A deep, shuddering breath—from the Preacher, who didn’t need to breathe. Jane had touched a nerve. “I understand, Jane, that where you were born, the people around you had more use for weapons than for little girls, and so that’s what they made you. I understand that you never had a chance to be anything different. Sanctum is better than that; the Justified are better than that. They’re meant to be—that’s the whole point!”
“The point is to do good. She can do more good out here, with me—without her, I never would have gotten Sho out alive, never would have gotten him off of Kandriad. That’s the point. She saved me in that factory, and again on Valkyrie Rock; she’s saved me a dozen times more than I’ve saved her. That’s the point. She’s good at this, Preacher; I don’t know why you can’t see it.”
“She may be good at it, Jane—and if she is, it’s because of your training, I’ll grant you that—but it’s not who she is. It’s what you’re making her. She is not a soldier, not at heart. She is not a killer. You look at her and you see someone becoming something . . . something dangerous, something violent, and you’re proud of that fact—”
“I am; I damn well am! She’s learning how to keep herself alive—”
“She’s killing herself, bit by bit! Every time you haul her back to Sanctum from some godforsaken rock somewhere, she’s different, Jane, and not in a good way, no matter how much you might suggest otherwise! Your ‘training,’ your world, it’s killing her! You just can’t see it because impressing you is so goddamned important to her that she makes sure you can’t—that you can’t see through the brave face she puts on! You can’t see that—”
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