Oathbound

by S W Clarke

  Justin’s jaw twitched. “If we lower our weapons, do I have your promise you’ll save her?”

  “Absolutely.” Serena’s eyes twinkled.

  Hercules’s fist relaxed. Justin gestured to the Cupids, who slowly lowered their bows.

  “Take them,” Serena said. “Careful with her.”

  Behind me, one of the Cupids hissed as the World Army came forward. I knew it was my Cupid—he was the only one who would do such a thing.

  I dropped back, stared into the sky as Justin and Hercules and the three Cupids allowed themselves to be restrained. Car doors were opened, slammed shut. They echoed across the canyon each time.

  Finally, it was Daiski’s face who appeared over me. “Ready?”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  He slid his arms under me anyway, lifted me with excruciating quickness off the ground. I was walked to a black SUV, where he sat me upright in the back seat. No Justin, no Hercules, no Cupids.

  And even though Daiski slipped in next to me, I was alone.

  Chapter 17

  Our driver, laden with muscle and the capacity for quiet, hadn’t spoken since I’d gotten in. He followed the winding road away from the Grand Canyon with two precise hands on the steering wheel. I spotted a wedding ring and wondered what he told his partner about his work days.

  Just another day of abduction, honey.

  “Faster,” Daiski instructed him as he set one hand to my shoulder. “Russo wants us there ASAP.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  A warmth seeped from his hand. “Burning time off the end of my life to slow your bleeding.”

  I went silent, hating that I didn’t lean away. He was pouring his life into me, and I felt myself gaining strength. Consciousness. Becoming lucid.

  We had sped up, the SUV swinging hard and fast around the curves. In the opposite lane, cars and RVs plugged up the incline. I saw a family with two kids, and for a second, I thought they saw me, too.

  Different lives, different fates.

  In the back seat, Daiski watched me. His hand was still set to my shoulder. “You look different. But I can still tell it’s you.”

  I refused to meet his eyes. “Of course you could. Who else would be out in the desert with Justin, Hercules and three Cupids?”

  “It’s not that.” He paused. “It’s how you breathe.”

  My eyes flicked to his. “How I breathe.”

  “Fast. Always faster than normal.”

  I was suddenly conscious of it, my breathing. Inhaling any slower felt wrong, like a movement toward mortality. “Bullshit.”

  “You’re anxious. My guess would be you were anxious before all this business began.”

  He was right. I hated that he was right. Who else would have noticed such a thing? Of course, the man who would had to be aligned with darkness.

  Instead of pressing the point, he passed me a water bottle. It sweated in his hand with perfect iciness. “Do you need help opening it?” he asked.

  I swiped it from him with my remaining hand. “No.”

  He watched me anchor it between my thighs and twist the cap off. “It’s strange, isn’t it? The suddenness of missing a limb.”

  I flicked away the cap, upturned the bottle and drank until the brain freeze hit me. I kept drinking anyway. Then I dropped the bottle and turned to him. “Strange? That’s your word?”

  Those dark eyes glittered. “Strange encompasses a lot.”

  “Does it encompass horrific?”

  “If you like.”

  I turned toward the shaded window. Outside, I could see two other SUVs following us in a convoy. Justin, the Cupids and Hercules were inside. “You didn’t kill them.”

  “I didn’t need to.”

  “I thought it would serve your ego.”

  “It would have.”

  “But Serena told you not to kill them. I bet that didn’t serve your ego.”

  He chuckled. “Sometimes the ego’s got to be subsumed for the greater cause.”

  I turned back to him. “You don’t believe in a greater cause. If you did, you would have listened to the Oracle of Delphi. And I wouldn’t be in this car right now.”

  “You talk like there’s only one greater cause, Isa.”

  “There is. Serena? The World Government? They don’t serve any greater cause, either. They’re selfish.”

  “They want to save an entire species.” One of his elegant fingers lifted, pointed at me. “The Oracle of Delphi just wanted to save you.”

  “The Oracle of Delphi …” I began. How to put this without sounding as egotistical as Daiski? “She never wanted to save me because of me. She did it for every other Other species in this GoneGod World.”

  “You’re their savior?” His eyes flicked once—so briefly I might have missed it—to where my left hand should have been.

  I rarely felt anger. Of course, the last six months had developed that emotion in me quite a bit. “You ableist ass.” I breathed deep. “People seem to think I’m one of them. The Oracle of Delphi was another.”

  I expected a spat quip, like “She’s dead now.” But silence only returned from Daiski’s side of the seat. Then, gently, “What happened in the garden?”

  What garden? I thought. Then I understood. “You mean the Garden of Hera?”

  His eyes remained steady on me.

  “I’m sure you heard,” I said.

  “The only person—besides you—who came out of there alive was Serena Russo.”

  “And you can’t ask her?”

  “I’m a clandestine agent, not her intelligence. Not her friend, either.”

  An image pushed to the fore of my mind. Pythia next to the enormous tree, both hands clasping the staff she would drive into the ground. A vortex of pasts and futures bursting from her chest. At the end, the wisps of who she’d been dissipating like bits of smoke into the sky.

  That image would remain etched there for the rest of my mortal life.

  Tears hit my eyes. “She burned her life away to save me. She’s bones now. Why do you want to know?”

  For a second, Daiski looked like he might say something soft. That moment passed. He straightened, shrugged. “She was one of the most powerful Others.”

  “You wanted her power.”

  “We did,” he said vaguely.

  Then it hit me. “That’s why you’re riding in the car with me.”

  He turned to me. “What?”

  “Because of the train ride we had together. Because they thought I’d trust you. Tell you things.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  I searched his eyes. He was that man again—that man from Penn Station. That man walking down the aisle of the train. He wasn’t the same one who’d been hit with Philia’s arrow. He was under his own power now.

  “No,” I said.

  “But you did.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Will you tell me what happened on October 14, 1917?”

  A lump formed in my throat. “Absolutely not.”

  “Ah.” He lifted one shoulder. “It was worth a shot. Maybe before we part ways.”

  I swallowed. “Daiski.”

  One of his eyebrows rose, waiting.

  “Are we going to die?” I asked.

  “We?”

  “Justin, Hercules, the Cupids.”

  “And you?” he added.

  I nodded.

  Our driver turned the right blinker on. We decelerated as we came to an unpaved road. Daiski sighed, popped the center compartment and retrieved a black cloth. As he unfolded it, he said, “No.”

  “What is that?”

  “A hood. Perfectly breathable material. It’s just we can’t have you seeing our operation, you know.” He paused—almost as though for confirmation—before he slid it over my head. The world disappeared, and my heart sped.

  I was breathing too fast again.

  “Daiski,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you just sa
y ‘no’ so I wouldn’t be afraid?”

  “No, Isa.”

  “Daiski.”

  “Yes?”

  “Stop calling me Isa.”

  A pause. Then, “All right.”

  ↔

  We didn’t talk anymore. I didn’t mind; even after Daiski’s help, my left arm still felt like the epicenter of the universe, or at least of my universe. It had grown worse—worse, even, than when Hinata’s mother put a hole in my abdomen with a shotgun blast.

  I should say, holes.

  How such a hard woman produced such a soft daughter, I had never understood. But people would be who they would be, regardless of whose womb they’d grown in.

  Of course, softness doesn’t exclude strength. Somehow Hinata lifted me right from the road, carried me all the way to the village healer. I was fortunate that the healer believed in modern medicine and had plucked every piece of buckshot from my belly.

  And it was there, amongst the pain, that the wonder began in me.

  The wonder at what science could do. What it could bring.

  Why should I care? I was a magical being. Immortal. I had spent most of my life in a forest, human civilization slowly encroaching—and I venturing by turns into it.

  But this was my first true encounter with medicine. With science.

  I felt the possibility of it like a living thing. It was there, then, that it coalesced in my mind.

  Every scientific advancement had once been considered magic.

  I had magic. True magic. What if that magic was science, too?

  And what if a scientist could understand the root of it? Map the outlines, the curvature, gain a picture of the whole?

  When I came out of the healer’s home, a bandage around my middle, I wanted to study science. To be a scientist. And when the gods left, I had become one. It had changed the course of my mortal life.

  In the backseat of the car, the hood over my face, I eventually lapsed into a half-sleep.

  I woke when the car’s engine shut off.

  Beside me, Daiski said, “I’m going to open your door, Isabella.”

  Two car doors opened, slammed shut. I sat up, and a moment later the hot Arizona air blew in at me.

  “Step out,” Daiski said.

  I swung my legs out of the car, found his hand waiting to aid me. I took it as I would have taken any hand, and he helped me to stand.

  Then I was leaning against him. What remained of my left arm throbbed with insensible pain, and the dizziness was overwhelming.

  “You need me to carry you?” he asked.

  I screwed up my mouth—which he couldn’t see. “No.” I forced myself to stand on my own. “I just need painkillers.”

  “Those you’ll get.” He led me across the dusty desert, still wrapped in Hercules’s lionskin cape. The sun beat hard through my hood, to the point where I experienced a bizarre, sweating claustrophobia. It was what I imagined you might feel if you opened your eyes in an MRI machine.

  I pushed the feeling down and listened. I listened for the others. Hercules’s heavy footfalls. The Cupids’ yammering. Their hummingbird wings. Justin’s defiance, in whatever form it might take.

  Daiski stopped us. I heard nothing. Only mechanical sounds—and the sensation of the earth moving. No, not the earth … an elevator. An elevator descending into the earth.

  A glorious chill replaced the sun, and everything grew even darker.

  In my mind, I listed the things I knew.

  I knew we were somewhere in the southwestern United States.

  I knew we were in one of the World Army’s bases.

  I knew Serena Russo wouldn’t kill me until she had extracted from my mind all the research I had stolen.

  I knew I would not give it to her.

  When the elevator stopped, I knew something else I had not known before.

  I was with the resistance. Completely, irrevocably with them.

  Daiski led me down a hallway. Already the glorious chill had shifted into an uncomfortable cold, and I shivered as he opened a door and brought me into a room with the last person I wanted to see.

  Of course, she was exactly the person I’d expected.

  Serena Russo.

  She leaned against a medical bed like we should all feel such casualness. “Come in, Isabella.” She gestured me forward from where I’d been standing in the doorway.

  I came forward. Even under this harsh fluorescent light, she was so beautiful—raven-haired, eyes like lit blue crystal. And she was so smart, and most (worst) of all, like a dog with a bone.

  She never gave up.

  I stood in the center of the room with my hand out for balance. I wanted to lunge at her. As it was, I could just barely keep from fainting.

  “You’ve lost quite a lot of blood.” Serena pointed to Daiski, who came to my side and led me to the bed. “Which, curiously enough, is pink. Or maybe not curiously—you’re still an encantado, even if you do look like a human.”

  Daiski helped me sit on the bed next to Serena. I gritted my teeth with the movement. “I guess you don’t know everything after all.”

  Her expression didn’t change. “That’s one of the foremost tenets of science. It’s why we spend all our time experimenting.”

  Well, she wasn’t wrong. It was hard to forget that, for everything Serena had done in the past six months—and before that, before I’d even known her—she was still a terrific scientist.

  Which made her even scarier.

  “I’m not giving you back the research I took,” I said. “Let’s be clear on that.”

  “It was never mine to begin with,” Serena said. “It was always in your head. And it was always incomplete. The third helix of Other DNA still isn’t mapped.”

  I tried to hold her gaze, but the pain made it hard. “So, what, you’re going to force a one-armed encantado to be your research slave here in the desert?”

  She shook her head. “That never works. You’d inevitably escape—and probably kill me first. And I can’t die right now.”

  “Right now?”

  Her eyes flicked to Daiski. Something silent passed between them, and he left us alone in the room.

  “I can’t die before I do what needs to be done.”

  Another wave of pain came over me, and I nearly dry-heaved. I set my right hand down, trying not to wilt onto the bed. “Exterminating Others, you mean.”

  “No, Isabella.” She raised one leg, turning toward me on the bed. “Your Justin Truly did a fine job with that tourniquet. But you do know it’s the only thing between you and bleeding out.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s an offer.” She paused. “I’ll give you your arm back.”

  I managed a weak roll of the eyes. “Are you going to go into the Grand Canyon to retrieve it?”

  “No—we just need a DNA swab to regrow it.”

  My gaze sharpened. “You have that technology?”

  “You saw what Daiski can do.”

  “He’s not an Other. Human DNA has been mapped for decades.”

  “And Other DNA is partially mapped. Thanks to your efforts.”

  “So you’ll give me an arm … in exchange for what?”

  “An oath.”

  My stomach slid over.

  Oaths.

  I hadn’t agreed to an oath in a hundred years. We Others took them far more seriously than humans, who would break them as easily as they made them. Among Other species, one of our greatest commonalities was this: If you made an oath, you were duty bound to fulfill it. Your oath was your word, and back when Others were immortal, your word resonated through the centuries.

  We remembered oaths. Others always remembered.

  Of course, we were also quite familiar with the fine print of oaths. Many decades ago, one of my encantado sisters had sworn an oath to care for one of her lovers when he became elderly. By the time he became elderly, their love had washed away some three decades earlier. But she was still oathbound to him.


  But then, “caring” for someone was open to some interpretation. Her first interpretation—in the throes of love—had envisioned her wiping the sweat from his brow and feeding him mashed peas. Decades later, her interpretation was much more liberal, more intangible. Caring for him entailed showing up at his funeral with flowers, which she’d set on his casket.

  I hadn’t ever been so callous with my oaths, but like any other Other, I was a master of the fine print.

  So when Serena Russo—a human who had been alive for forty-something years—offered me my arm back in exchange for taking an oath, I couldn’t help the smirk that appeared.

  All right, I thought. Let’s see what you’ve got.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “We’ll regrow your arm,” she began. An uncommon tremor had entered her voice. Even through the haze of pain, I sensed her anxiety. “In exchange, you have to save my son.”

  Chapter 18

  My face fell. Had a Mack truck just driven through the center of the room? “Save your …”

  “My son, Collin. You know his name.” Her tremor had grown. She paused, gathering herself. “I believe you’ve seen him before, too.”

  Save Collin. Save Collin Russo. The boy in the wheelchair.

  “He’s disabled,” I whispered.

  Her eyebrows drew together. “You have seen him.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Cystic fibrosis.” She hesitated, then, “He’s drowning in his own phlegm.”That one hit me in the solar plexus. A human disease. One which, with the technology available to us, shouldn’t have persisted. But it had, and it would.

  Unless I changed that. I could change that with my research. I could make splicing safe enough for sick boys to receive Other DNA and overcome illnesses like cystic fibrosis.

  Serena, for all her money and power, could not.

  “How long does he have?” I asked.

  “Six months. Maybe less.” She clipped off the last word, her hand rising to her mouth. It was as though someone else had said it.

  “You need to splice him,” I said. It wasn’t a question; it was a realization. “All of this—everything you’ve done—is for one boy.”