“So you want revenge, basically.”
“Don’t you?”
The question unfurls a dozen images that begin to surface in my mind. My first battle with the Karekins. The first time I shot a man in the head. Pulling down my sweater cuffs over bruised arms around my parents. The endless training in Camp Bonneville where I had to punch my friends and all the punches I got in return. Silent dinner table conversations where I made myself small, into nothing, a grain of salt so that I wouldn’t have to lie. The ticker tape of my DNA scrolling along a SenMach wall and the anguish of learning I wasn’t all human. Yes. I want revenge, that’s undeniable, but more than that, I want justice. I want this to stop. I am a killer, a weapon, a liar, but I’ve never been a hypocrite, not until tonight. Because Ezra is right. It’s his life. I refuse to let anyone control me. I don’t know why I thought it should be different for him.
“Fine,” I relent. “You can stay—but, please, for everyone’s sake, recognize your strengths. You’re most effective behind a computer. That doesn’t make you any less threatening, it just makes you a different kind of soldier.”
“I can agree to that, to staying out of the fray,” Ezra tells me as he walks toward the door, “on the condition that you let me do some basic combat training with the Faida. I won’t walk into a fight, but if the fight comes to me, I want a real chance to be able to defend myself.”
“All right, that’s smart.” I stand up myself and walk over to him. “You know, I am sorry that . . .” My voice trails off. I’m not sorry for anything I did really. I’m just sorry we won’t ever get a real chance. I’m sorry he’s from another Earth. I’m sorry that there is no way for us to be together and that I just assumed our feelings would be enough to make the impossible somehow work. I am a liar. I just forget sometimes that the person I tend to lie the most to is myself. But I have to stop that now. I can’t hide from the truth. The truth is here, it’s arrived, inside a mountain, thousands of feet up. Reality is right here in this room.
Ezra puts a hand on my cheek and I nuzzle into it. This is hard, this knowing when something is wrong when so much of you remembers when it was just right. “Maybe things worked out exactly the way they were meant to,” he whispers softly and the smell of him, still the forest and weeks-old campfires, hasn’t gone away completely. “I do believe that I was supposed to meet you.”
A small laugh escapes from my closed mouth. “You can’t really believe in God or whatever, after everything we’ve seen.”
Ezra moves his hand away from my face. Away from me. “I don’t know about that. I just know that I’m never going to be the same. I’m different. And I’m glad.”
“Me too,” I tell him, and then I push the door handle outward. I need to go. Things are okay between us now, but it’s fragile and I don’t want to ruin it. When I get to my room, I lie down on my bed. I close my eyes, but it takes hours for me to fall asleep.
Chapter 10
For all his talk of staying away from the action, Ezra finds a way to make it onto the intel mission going to the Daithi Earth. To be fair, it was Navaa that really pushed for it. I have to assume Arif told her about our conversation and I believe that this is her not-so-subtle way of hammering the point home. What she doesn’t know is that I have made peace with Ezra’s choice. I don’t feel responsible for his safety, not anymore, and if he does get hurt, it will be her fault, not mine. Well, hers and Ezra’s. And maybe a little of mine. But it doesn’t matter. If he wants to put himself in harm’s way because he believes that the time he spent on the original Roone Earth has made him some kind of Citadel expert, then that’s on him. I’ve advised him enough. If he doesn’t want to listen to me, I have enough to deal with. On that front, Arif was absolutely right.
Ezra isn’t the only civilian here. Navaa insisted that a Faida named Lujinn join us. He is apparently a professor at a university here (I ran for almost a hundred miles and never saw so much as a village, let alone a town big enough for a college, but I guess it makes sense that the compound would be isolated) who’s been studying the Daithi. Even though he looks well into his fifties, he’s still a strikingly handsome man with a full head of graying copper hair. There is also a Faida named Daresta who is a linguistics expert. Both Levi and I are fluent in Daithi, but she understands the nuances that we might miss given that we just basically memorized a lexicon and verbal structures over a period of hours. Neither one of these two are Citadels.
Regardless of status, everyone is wearing a uniform for protection. The Daithi are quick and deadly, but as long as we can avoid a direct hit to the head, we won’t die. Probably. We make the decision to Rift in about three miles from one of the five bases on this Earth. I’m about as prepared as I’ll ever be for this mission. That’s the thing about this sort of work: you don’t know what you don’t know. We can guess and hypothesize, but we’ve never met this race and we certainly don’t know the extent of what the altered Roones have done to them.
All in all, there are a dozen of us. Three civilians, two human Citadels, and seven Faida Citadels, including Navaa, Arif, Yessenia, Sidra, and three others whose names I make it a point to remember. They all look so similar that it’s actually easier to tell them apart by their wings.
The majority of the Daithi Earth is forested. There are villages and even small cities with larger buildings and electricity. I would put their technology at about Earth’s, circa the 1930s. We assume this is the Roonish influence and that without their arrival, the Daithi would still be people who stuck to a clan system. Clans are still important, but now the altered Roones are the chieftains.
We step out of the Rift and we’re a flurry of activity. We sweep the immediate area and when we find that it’s empty, Levi and I send up our drones. We find a village a few miles away, but where the Rift is supposed to be, there is nothing, just an empty field. According to Doe, there are no active Rifts on this planet anywhere.
Well, there aren’t any active Rifts on the Faida Earth, either, so maybe that doesn’t mean so much. Still, according to the SenMach tech, there are no humanoids near the Rift site. Ordinarily, I would think that the place was abandoned. But because this is the Daithi, a race known for stealth and subterfuge, I’m not convinced, and neither is anyone else on the team.
We decide to walk to the Rift’s base of operations and we make our way there as silently as we can, given the civilians in our ranks. When we reach the perimeter of where the compound is supposed to be, all we see is more trees. We look at one another, not sure what exactly is going on. Doe assures us that the base is five hundred yards dead ahead. We remain hidden in a dense thicket, catching glimpses through binoculars, twin periscope views of more of the same landscape. There is no movement, no sound, not even the faint kiss of electricity. I ask Doe if there is Daithi drone activity; he assures me that there is none. Levi wonders out loud about camera feeds and Doe tells him that while they are operational, he can easily disable them. Once again I am left wondering where the hell we would be if we didn’t have the SenMach tech.
I have a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach. Something here is off. We make our way carefully forward, rifles up, our feet slipping over the bracken and damp earth. When we are close enough, I can see exactly what they’ve done.
Clever.
The base is here all right, and so are we, or rather, our reflections. The entire compound is made of mirrors. The sheer enormity of it makes it impossible to gauge in terms of size or architecture, so once again we turn to Doe.
“I need a schematic. Specifically, where the door is. Download it to my tablet, Doe.” By the time I reach around, take off my pack, and retrieve my electronic pad, the drones and the SenMach’s considerable hacking skills have done their work. The entryway is ten feet from our current position. I look over the plans. I had assumed that the base was one squat mirrored structure, but it isn’t. It is a many-leveled square building that fits together like a bunch of Lego bricks.
We find the door, but no
handle, just a thin seam. I push it in, hoping there’s some kind of spring, but no luck.
“We could always just blow the thing,” Levi offers. I know he’s only halfway kidding. There’s no way we’ve traveled through the Multiverse using technology and the combined minds from nearly half a dozen Earths just to resort to explosives.
I turn to the unit. “Ideas?” I ask in Faida and English.
“Well,” Ezra says boldly, “the Roones use sound to activate almost every system they have. Maybe they did that here.”
“Fosgil,” I try, which is Daithi for “open,” and then, “Doreis,” which is the word for “door.” Nothing happens.
Lujinn steps forward and takes a look at the mirror, ignoring his own reflection and the inky black wings tucked behind his back. “No. It would require a password. The Daithi would never make entering their compound so easy.” He begins to say a long string of words, all of which I recognize, but I mean, if there is a password, it’s hardly likely that it would be something even remotely obvious.
“Shegail . . . Rugav Shegail,” Lujinn purrs and miraculously the door swings open.
“‘Shadow born’? That is some serious high fantasy shit right there,” I say to him with astonishment. “How could you possibly have guessed that?”
“I did not guess.” He corrects me in the way that only a professor could, eyebrows raised, head tilted. “The term came up three times in the material Ezra Massad disseminated to us when he first arrived. They were the first Daithi turned into Citadels, the most elite of their warriors that survived the altered Roones’ invasion. Interesting that the Roones would allow them to continue to use this term in the vernacular. In most cases of a conquering race, all references to opposition would have been forbidden.”
“Well,” Levi says as he gently pushes the door forward, “maybe they got a chance to change the password. Maybe they fought another civil war of their own and won.”
“If that were true,” I say, stepping inside the echoing, empty main room, “why would they be here still? There is no Rift.”
“Munitions,” Levi says as if it’s obvious. “And because it’s a hell of a good HQ considering that it’s practically invisible.” I don’t even bother to mention the flaws in his logic, of which there are plenty. The biggest one is that if we ever manage to get away from ARC’s stranglehold, the last place I’d ever want to be is Camp Bonneville—at least without a complete renovation to exorcise the majorly significant ghosts that would haunt me there.
We enter a large, open space that reeks of abandonment. There are rows of desks and sleeping monitors. Papers litter the floor. There are spatters of blood on different walls, as if a kid was having a go with red paint.
Something here is very, very wrong. A space can give off an impression. Plaster and concrete can cling to misery and joy. There is no joy here, only the oppressive weight of melancholy and the eerie feeling that, somehow, this pain will reach out from the carpet fibers and gut you whole.
“Doe, you’ve gotten access to the files in here, correct?” I say. I can tell that my speaking English annoys Navaa, but I’m not about to worry about that. I’ve learned her language, the least she can do is attempt to learn some of mine.
“I have. The firewalls were surprisingly easy to work through.” Nothing with the altered Roones is ever easy, though. They either wanted us to see these files or didn’t care if we did.
“Transfer the most recent altered Roones’ logs to both my tablet and the Faida’s,” I say quietly. I really don’t think there is anyone here, but for some reason, it feels wrong to speak too loudly in this place.
We all read the logs at the same time, and each Roonish word is a rock in my stomach.
“This says that the altered Roones believed an insurrection was imminent. That’s all. Did they stop it? Who won?” Navaa asks out loud. I’m about to suggest that we fan out in groups so that we can hopefully find some answers when I hear it. It’s faint, but fast. I close my fist below my lips so that they all know to keep silent. Levi has now heard what I have and he nods to me.
There is someone here, someone scared and probably about to make a run for it. The Daithi are fast, so if we lose this person, whoever it is, we might never get any answers. I keep listening, straining my ears to hear the tiny, fluttering heartbeat. It’s so rapid and small it reminds me of a human baby.
When I think I know where it’s coming from, I motion to the others to continue talking. Levi and I silently make our way farther down the room on the balls of our feet. I go one way and he goes another. There is a kind of dais, with a large screen behind it, presumably for making speeches and giving briefs. Levi and I whip around, coming at it from opposite sides. Our suspicions were not wrong. There is a tiny person lying flat on his stomach behind the platform. Just as Levi is about to grab his leg, the Daithi leaps and begins to scramble up a post as fast as a lizard on a tree trunk. There is a second-floor balcony and this small person, whose arms and legs are moving as fast as an eggbeater, is going to have to make a pretty giant leap to get to the railing.
Two seconds before the Daithi has to go for it, I crouch down and use the momentum of that position to send myself up, jumping ten feet in the air. It’s enough to grab onto the Daithi. I wrap my hands around his tiny frame and let myself fall back down again. In a neat trick of heroics, Levi catches both of us. It’s an impressive feat—even though we have done about a thousand of these exact kind of drills back in Battle Ground.
I almost want to go “Ta-da!”
The Daithi struggles and roars in my arms. He even tries to bite me, the little shit. I hold him fast and look him square in the face. I know the Daithi race is short, but this guy is barely four feet tall. He has black matted hair covered in mud and sweat. His large blue eyes are sunken in his face. This is a kid. That doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t a Citadel, too, but by the way he’s wildly swinging, it’s obvious he has no real training.
“Eshtad!” I say to him calmly. Stop. “Chenn aeill a’thol ohm streon thu.” We are not going to hurt you. The boy slowly winds down and eyes me warily. I put my palm on his cheekbone, which is as sharp as cut flint. His black linen shirt looks two sizes too big, and his pants are being held up by a frayed rope. His scapulae and chest bones are a congregation of speed bumps on a newly paved road and his wrists are so tiny I could wrap my thumb and index finger around them with room to spare.
“Ezra, bring me some water and some protein bars,” I tell him, keeping my voice steady and my eyes on the boy. The others make their way to us gingerly, knowing we must all keep our movements deliberate and open the way you should when approaching a scared animal. Ezra hands me his canteen and a bar that he has unwrapped. I keep one hand on the Daithi’s shoulder and with the other I grab the food and take a small bite, proving it’s not poison. I give it to the boy, who eyes it like a bar of gold that might also be an explosive. He looks at me and the bar and then at me again. He probably thinks that taking anything from us is dangerous, but he’s fighting a war with his stomach and losing.
Finally, he snatches the morsel and devours it in two seconds. I give him the water, which he swigs. Navaa hands me another something, some kind of Faida cracker or cookie, and I give that to him, too. Tears leak from his eyes as he eats. I don’t think he’s crying because he’s sad or scared, he’s just . . . relieved.
War.
People always think that it’s the soldiers who have it the worst, but I know better. I’ve been at this for years. Death hovers. If I die, more than likely, I’ll just be shot or stabbed. I might be tortured first, but I’d probably find a way to do myself in before it got very far. In other words, my suffering would be relatively quick. For soldiers, it’s black or white. But for those left behind? Mothers. Children. The elderly. Their pain is constant. Their job is to simply wait and scavenge and starve and grieve.
“What are you doing here? In this place?” I ask him gently, but with enough authority to let him know I mean b
usiness.
His eyes dart back and forth behind my shoulder. Finally, though, he says, “I was checking the kitchen again even though my mom said there wasn’t any point. I thought there might be something, somewhere, I could take home to my family. Do you have any more food?” he asks brazenly.
War does that, too, strips pride away. If I made him beg for it, he would. He would do anything. The thought sickens me. “I’ll give you all the food and supplies we brought if you can tell us where the Citadels went that used to live here.”
“If you give me everything you all have, I will take you to them.”
I nod my head. “Fine. You can have all our combined supplies. Lead the way.”
The boy, a skeletal Peter Pan, folds his arms and locks his legs. For someone who looks about as strong as a brittle winter branch, he seems determined to call the shots. “Food first. Then I’ll take you.” I purse my lips, but he remains steadfast. I could play hardball with him—we could find them on our own—but what would be the point. Besides, I was always going to give him our supplies anyway.
I dip my hand into my pack and search for the small bag I keep for clean bras and undies. I empty it out in the backpack, keeping my eyes on what I’m doing. I think the rest of the team feels as awkward about looking at my underwear as I do about having them see it. Better just to pretend that it’s not actually happening. Soldiering is 50 percent training, 40 percent luck and instinct, and 10 percent good old-fashioned denial.
I put my food rations in the bag and hold it out for everyone else to do the same. Navaa even produces another small plastic bag to hold more food. When this is done, I hold the bags out to the boy. He snatches them up and heaves them over his shoulder. Without saying a word, he leads us around the room to an odd door that is actually a corner. It kicks out from the bottom, opening like a mitered hatch on a spaceship. We walk through it and are outside again. The boy begins to move with alarming speed. He darts in a zigzag path, his feet nimbly leaping and pivoting over tiny rocks and gnarled roots.
The Rift Coda Page 11
