The mother of the Palari, Uncle had said. No mother should see her children hunted so…
“Meeting one’s idolized ancestors only to find them inferior would be disappointing, to say the least,” said Tristic. “It was wise of First to recognize the threat that the Humans’ inferior genetics posed. They bred with the wild abandon of parasites, threatening the Eugenes careful honing of dynasties through genetic manipulation and selection. They carried the dangerous genes that made their kind susceptible to the influence of the Sceeloid.”
“You speak of sight-jacking?” Erelah replied, her disbelief blossoming.
“You have heard of this ability, then?”
It was a thing of legend, a story Old Sissa would tell to frighten Erelah and Jon as young children. Beware the Sceeloid who can drain the wills of lesser men and misbehaved children. He will make you a slave and command you to do his bidding.
“Yes. But how does—”
“And yet, Helio Veradin risked the power and holdings of his Kindred to defend the Humans, the Palari. For defying First and for speaking against their annihilation, your Kindred suffered, did it not?”
“It did.”
“A pity.” Tristic clucked her tongue. The vox in her neck made it sound like click of insects. Erelah shuddered.
“Defensor, I apologize for taking your time.” She realized how desperate her voice sounded and didn’t care. Anything to get free. She took a step back, beginning her retreat. “Perhaps we may discuss the Jocosta project later…”
Tristic ignored this. “Did you know I met your uncle once? Well… ‘met’ suggests an air of something more… social. More like I was presented. My makers, the genetics masters, were so proud to show me off. I was the only of my brood to survive, you see.” Tristic’s mouth split into a grin. There was no amusement in her eyes. “So lonely being the last of your kind… is it not?”
“I… uh…imagine so, ma’am.”
“I had proven myself so much more useful than a simple test subject, even then,” Tristic continued. Her gaze seemed to turn inward, voice pulled soft in reflection. “Your uncle was a towering figure in his prime. You should have seen him, draped in his cloak of office, crest of his Kindred gleaming. And he looked upon me like some… thing.”
Tristic frowned at Erelah. Her voice pulled into a growl, made more alien by the vox device. “The abject pity on his face.”
“I’m sure he did not mean to insult—”
But Tristic was not listening. Her pacing quickened. “ʻWhat have you done? Destroy this thing. End its suffering. This is an affront to the Three.’ That is what your cherished uncle said of me.”
Her damning gaze turned on Erelah. “Something like that leaves an impression, wouldn’t you agree?”
Erelah chewed her lip. She took another cautious step back.
“But that was not all.” Tristic stopped pacing. Her voice flattened. “By the graces of my Sceeloid heritage, I could read the energies of warm bodied species like the Eugenes… and similar races. Your skin flushes when you lie. Your heart races to betray your secrets even if you remain silent. I could truly see right through him as I do you, Lady Veradin. Your righteous uncle with all his preaching of mercy and virtue, held secrets. Little did I know one of his secrets would one day grace me with her presence.”
With this Tristic leaned closer, her face mere inches away. She reached out and caressed Erelah’s jaw with a gloved fingertip. “And such a lovely one.”
“Defensor Tristic.” Erelah stepped away and tried her best to force the fear from her voice. “I am sure I do not know what you mean.”
Tristic watched her face, studying. Again, her reply was distracted and off hand. “Ah. You speak the truth. How odd that he never told you. Your uncle knew there are Humans living among us, masquerading as Eugenes.”
Insanity. And Erelah found herself mired in it with no clear means of escape.
“Veradin, you are no more Eugenes than I. You are Human.”
“What?” Erelah choked. “What are you talking about?”
Tristic regarded the interface station once again. The holoweb display coalesced to a new configuration. Erelah recognized her profile.
“Those are my personal records—”
Tristic was deceptively fast and strong as she clutched the front of Erelah’s tunic. Like a doll, she felt her body flung toward the display. Her forehead struck the glass. With her face pressed against the screen, she saw her own profile: Medical history. Genetics.
The Defensor’s voice became a deep wet growl against her neck. “What do you know of your true parents?”
“Please stop! Let me go,” she howled.
“Your parents!” Tristic demanded. Her fingers twisted against Erelah’s neck, sending a cascade of painful needles down both arms.
“Nothing. Uncle’s servants. Father died of hard fever before I was born. Mother was infected even as she bore me.” Her reeling brain floundered.
“Lies! Helio Veradin was a traitor to the Eugenes and a Human sympathizer. He kept you and your brother hidden.”
“Uncle would not lie!”
“I know it is by some accident that you even came to be here. Your uncle forbid military service, did he not?”
This was a mistake. Titus had tried to warn her. Now her pride had driven her directly into the path of madness.
Neither the Regime, nor Fleet would for a moment allow a Human to survive in its midst, let alone serve in high security research. Tristic was clearly paranoid. Erelah had to find a means to reason with a lunatic.
“It would be impossible for a Human to be inducted. The Regime would certainly know.”
“The Regime knows nothing!” Tristic spat, releasing her. “There are tens of thousands of personnel on a single carrier. Dozens of carriers in a single battle group. How could First track them all, know the secrets of them all? That council is populated with complacent fools!”
Tristic spoke outright treason without fear of reprisal. No one knew Erelah was here. Only Titus and Maynard. Surely Titus would say something? Do something, when she did not return soon? But there had been such finality in his voice. The fear in his expression had told a different story. And Maynard was clearly Tristic’s creature.
The Defensor’s attention snapped to the holoweb interface: “Display thermal imaging.”
The visual representation changed. It was Erelah, but not. Her shape was outlined in tremendous pinks and searing white-hot color.
“Like a full-blooded Sceeloid, I glimpse heat and emotion as complex patterns of color. This is what I see when I look upon you, Veradin. This is a Human thermal image. You are not Eugenes. You are inferior. You are Human.”
“No! This is madness!”
“Think! You knew you were different even as a child. You observed other children grow sturdy and tall. How different they were. Granted, it spurred you to greater intellectual accomplishments, perhaps overachieving in time. But always you existed in the protective shadow of your uncle. You and your brother were his damning secret.”
Her brain reeled.
Tristic may command the respect of the Council of First, but she was clearly unstable. Why create this fantasy? Until this encounter, Erelah had been a stranger to her. She was one of many on the NeuTech installation and not worth a second glance. Only her foolish pride had brought her here.
“I’ll wager your brother is of the same ilk. It was his hurried induction into infantry that allowed him to go undetected. Oddly, I cannot obtain his records. An interesting coincidence, no? Perhaps the hand of your uncle. One last reach of power before his death?”
Something like jealously entered Tristic’s tone. “But you are their beloved Kindred class. Who would even question your breeding, your pedigree? I am sure they were more than happy to invite you both into their ranks. After all, full genetics screening is for breeders and low-born conscripts.”
Erelah’s legs folded and she slid down the console to sit upon the floor. She
watched Tristic rage on in what seemed like a rapture.
“Your so-called uncle and his compatriots altered you both. It was enough to fool a cursory examination by a dull-witted country physician or a simple gene culling mech for recruitment. Oh, but look closely and there you are, hiding in plain sight. I almost envy the simple elegance of it.”
“Manipulation of genetics is forbidden.” The words spun in Erelah’s head. It was hard to pluck them from the air, tumble them into order.
“A tenet of Miri your uncle chose to ignore in the case of you and your brother. How special you must have been to Helio Veradin for such great lengths to be taken. How truly loved you must have been by this man to betray his own kind,” Tristic purred, standing over her.
Erelah shifted, pushing her body back in a crab-like crawl along the gleaming dark floor, trying her best to distance herself from the hybrid that no longer seemed sickly or weak.
“You may have continued for decades, living this lie, floundering in your imperfect Human container. You may have excelled still, dwelling right under the very gaze of First. Perhaps even counted among their leaders one day. Your uncle did not anticipate you encountering me. I am an anomaly, the product of a chance unhappy encounter with the questionable blessing of my… talents. Ironic, really.”
“This cannot be,” Erelah croaked. Truth or not, it was clear that Tristic believed it. That was the gift of insanity: anything could be justified. Any evidence to the contrary could be easily twisted to support the Defensor’s argument. That was a lesson Uncle had tried to impress long ago. It was as evident in the actions of First as it was in this strange monstrosity before her.
“Think of it, Lady Erelah. Of all the choices and possibilities, the things that had to go just right, to place you in my Path. Well. It’s as if the Fates designed it.” Tristic turned a frightful grin upon her. “You are perfectly… imperfect.”
“Why do this?” She grasped for the right words to offer up in protest. “If this is true, why I am I still here? Why have you not reported me?”
The silence that followed was filled by the roar of blood in her ears. Tristic tilted her head. With everything in her power, Erelah wished that she had never looked upon this monstrosity.
“I have use for you, my lovely child.” Her smile was hideous.
12
Time came apart. Occasionally, Erelah realized it as a whole, spread out in a logical progression. The remainder was fragmented nonsense. Just as time moved slowly near the event horizon of a collapsed star. That was what Erelah circled. Time moving on, tortuously slow. And all the world she left behind moving on with ignorant normalcy.
Instead she counted time by the number of different brilliantly lit rooms, smelling of antiseptics and filled with the detached curiosity of barely glimpsed others. At first there had been relentless questioning, sleep held at bay for eternities. She tried reasoning, pleading, threats: all to no avail. The thought of escape was an impossible fantasy.
After all, there were rules. Told to her only once, but delivered by Tristic with a firm expectation of absolute obedience:
“Do as you are told, comply, and your brother’s secret is safe. Disappoint me and he will perish. Do not doubt my ability to enact this. I stand with his heart in my hand and all I need do is squeeze.”
Erelah would daydream that Jonvenlish had found out what was being done to her. He would come to rescue her. Appearing like a warrior from the early days of the Expanse, he would break into the cell. Together they would run to safety.
Sometimes she would go for long stretches without hearing another voice. There would be blissful darkness after the pinch of needles and the whisper of rough fabric against her body. Then the true pain began. Glinting steel of machines and instruments that measured and tested. Injections of things that made her curl into a tiny ball of agony and seek to claw her brain from her very skull. It became a cycle. Her fear rose and fell like tides governed by an ellipse.
The scientist that Erelah had once been knew in a hazy, formless way that she was the subject of study for Tristic. That it was not random curiosity or blatant cruelty that motivated their acts. She had fit some kind of criteria: Perfectly imperfect. There had been others before her. None of them had survived this far, she came to understand from overheard snippets of hushed exchanges. It made her valuable, in a sense.
“Today is an anniversary of sorts for us, my love. Two years.”
Maynard paced around her in another nameless room of gleaming metal and rough white. It was common for him to appear and whisper his petty torments. Then-Erelah, the one that came before, would have rankled at how he addressed her. Now they were just words, permitted to eddy past. Words could do no harm. That was left to other things.
Two years? Had it been that long? Why would he lie?
“Perhaps, Lady Veradin, if you had taken me up on my offer… things could have been different.” He ran a hand over the oily hood of his slicked hair, preening in the reflection of a polished surface.
She could laugh at him, if she wanted to surface and actually listen. As if he could have enacted something that would have changed this. She had realized that everything Tristic did had had been planned long ago. The Defensor could foresee every outcome, every variable. It was not the product of a preternatural gift, but a horrifyingly cunning intellect.
In truth Maynard was just as afraid of Tristic as anyone else. Erelah could sense all over him. But instead of shrinking inside his fear, Maynard wore it like a camouflage, the way a sand dragon used bits of rock and debris to burrow into its surroundings. Maynard would have been dangerous in any time, any place. This place of monsters was ideally suited for him.
Instead Erelah chose to stare at him silently until he looked away, the sneer slipping from his pointy rat-face. Then the idea took root in her. It was a rarity for her. It belonged to then-Erelah. Usually, she detached herself in the current of time and allowed events to flow around her, like a current buffeting a great stone under water.
Maynard was just a man. Men had weaknesses. She could find his, find some leverage, some crack. Escape was impossible, but just knowing that she could affect her limited world in the slightest would be worth the attempt.
It took energy to pull free from the depths where she dwelled. Courage earned punishment, she had learned. It also put Jon at risk. She had to be cautious.
“Lieutenant Maynard, perhaps I was hasty to dismiss your suit.” Although her voice was rusted from disuse, Erelah addressed him in High Eugenes. It was meant to flatter him, although it was well above his station. He would never merit the chivalries granted to respectable company.
“Too late for that.” Maynard toyed with a long, neat tray of surgical instruments.
“It’s never too late. We can be friends, can’t we? I get so lonely here.”
She leaned forward on the gurney, hoping that she did not look as she imagined: pale skin, red-rimmed eyes, and gaunt cheekbones. This would probably matter little to a man like Maynard. Perhaps to a creature like him, it was an enticement.
“You didn’t want my kind of friendship. Remember?”
He plucked at the plain cloth shift she wore. It was a faded dull blue material.
Blue was never my color. I had a blue fire-silk gown once. Uncle had given it to me for my ascension ceremony at the temple. I was to wear it only on special days because fire-silk was dear, but I wore it into the fields that time to chase scythe cats—
Don’t go away. Focus!
“What if I had a change of heart?” Her mouth twitched with a fraudulent smile.
She leaned further, intimating. There were no restraints. The lab techs had stopped using them long ago. Her obedience had made them lazy, complacent. After all, where would she go? They had left her in the small room. The one where they would give her the injections. But for now they had disappeared behind a glass wall, busy and distracted and probably grateful to not be near Maynard.
“Really.” He sounded larg
ely unconvinced, but amused.
Yet she sensed an edge, even if he was just toying with her. How many others had done this before? Bargained? Tried to offer themselves? It was an entertainment for him, she realized.
Maynard placed his hands on either side of her thighs, trapping her against the hard metal surface. His dark eyes were eager.
“I bring you news of your brother, Jonvenlish.” He watched, thirsty for her reaction.
At the mention of Jon hope sparked and the foggy haze in her brain lightened.
“Jon?” She breathed the word, like a prayer or a wish.
This was Maynard’s game. He loved to ignite that spark of hope and then snuff it out.
“His battalion of mangy breeders was assigned to Tasemar,” Maynard said, feigning sadness. “Stupidly, he chose to go in with the ground detachment. The odds, my lady, did not bode well for them.”
Maynard drew closer, waiting to absorb her hurt. He would lap it up like a thirsty animal. “Even now, the Fleet Captain has been told to withdraw, to abandon the losses there. Your brother is among that number.”
Erelah felt the shuddering sob build in her throat.
“It would be an honor to comfort the last Veradin.” Closer still, he leaned against her. His hand went to her thigh. She recoiled at the feel of his cold skin.
Jon would not die. He had to stay alive.
Part of her had always assumed she would know if her brother had been truly lost. She would have felt it like the shutting off of a lantern. Its light would be suddenly absent and she would feel her universe dim.
Did Jon miss me? Would he mourn me?
The nature of Ravstar’s mission was classified. Even if Jon had petitioned for the right to contact his sister, she knew he would have been denied. Erelah Veradin would have slipped beneath the dark glassy surface of oblivion with barely a ripple in her wake.
Maynard made a hushing sound. This was part of the parody he enjoyed. He played the part of a caring paramour and feasted on her anguish. But he knew nothing of love or compassion. Her reflex was to tear his hand away. She reached for the bare skin of his arm, seeking to injure with her fingernails.
Allies and Enemies: Fallen Page 10
