He held on to her, her hand, and—when she tipped forward into his arms—all of her. She had to accept this as well. An Aalim couldn’t stand alone. They had to draw strength from their people, accepting their own weakness. They had to be able to surrender to it. She felt Kae’s strength flowing into her, the strangeness of him and everything that tied him to this place, where he had long ago discovered himself. And as the light swallowed Ashwina, it was enough.
It should have been Satya. But it was enough.
Isaac Sinder sat alone in his quarters and studied the pads arrayed in front of him. He was about to commit a blasphemy.
It felt like they’d been plunging aimlessly through slipstream for years, exiting at various points, scanning, looking desperately for any trace of the rogue ship. None had been found so far. There was no telling where it might have gone. Alkor had been coldly angry, then loudly frustrated, then cold and quiet again as they searched. He could feel her giving up, and she had every reason to. There was no way to find Adam Yuga, not now.
Except.
The calm certainty that had settled over him after the escape from the camp hadn’t lifted. Nothing had changed. They were still being pulled toward something, a path laid out for them. For him.
All that remained was to find it.
It hadn’t taken a great deal of research. Little was known in the way of the practical aspects of Bideshi witchcraft, but this much was in what records they had. The reading of stars. And it wasn’t what he had thought—not only foolish astrology. It was something deeper, something that made both less and more sense to him. He could feel how it worked, though he couldn’t have explained it to anyone else. Not that he would have tried.
They never would have understood. They didn’t feel things the way he did.
His hands trembled as he spread them over the pads, and he clenched them, willing them to stillness. A wave of nausea twisted in his middle, and he willed that away as well. It might just be the drug he had snatched from the infirmary when the medic’s back was turned, and injected into his own neck. It was an anesthetic, but taken in the right dose and in the right way, it had slightly hallucinogenic properties. He had known that the effects might be strange. But there was the power of the Bideshi, and once again he couldn’t discount it. It was worth exploring. Every avenue was, now.
If this worked? What then?
Simple. Kill Adam, capture who he could, take what they knew and kill them too. Merely because they had useful knowledge didn’t mean they had earned their right to exist. The Protectorate leaders’ own arrogance might have blocked them from the possibility that some of the Bideshi’s skills were genuinely effective, but that didn’t mean the greater rejection of their nature was wrong.
It wasn’t merely what you knew. It was how you used it.
Sinder closed his eyes.
Adam. He had been with him, had been less than a foot away from him. He had felt the man, had sensed his power and his … the spinning, melodic parts of him. The spaces in between and how full of movement they were. He might not have known at the time what the sensation was, but he knew now. No matter how distant the man was, that vibrating orbit was still there, singing across light years. Space was nothing here. All he had to do was listen and he would find it.
Adam. Where are you hiding?
There was so much. More than anything, he could feel his own body, his own vibration, the impossibly small lines that twisted and danced and composed him. He took a few moments to lose himself in that, fascinated.
But there was something wrong. Something deep.
He shook his head and wheeled away from it, outward again. He couldn’t let himself be distracted. Because all at once, there the pattern was—faint but unquestionably there. He opened his eyes and studied the pads, the shifting images and the snaking sine waves.
Aletheia, faded and yellow but old and persistent. Truth. Allocer. Red and angry, its pulse enticing. Revelation of the mysteries of the sky.
A final one in the center. A blue giant, appearing almost crystalline in the image the pad showed, though its surface churned with endless storms.
Papaios. He knew it. A star around which circled only a few small planets, only one of them habitable by conventional, carbon-based sentients.
Peris.
“I see,” he whispered, lowering his hands. “I see.”
For some time he sat in silence, thinking. Alkor would never believe how he arrived at this knowledge, and in fact it would mean some undesirable consequences if she found out. But lying was easy. Something that Adam had said while imprisoned that he hadn’t attached any significance to until now. Something with enough weight to persuade Alkor, and in any case, what else did they have to go on? Alkor was watching for anything. She was a shrewd woman, but she would be unlikely to ask too many questions at this point.
Slowly, he stood, walked over to his desk and hit the comm.
“Bridge. Let me talk to Captain Alkor. No, I can’t wait. Get her now.”
Adam lunged forward without thinking, but he wasn’t quick enough to catch Eva before she hit the ground. She was limp as she did, and as he reached her, part of him was sure she must be dead. But when he turned her over he felt that fine trembling that he knew so well by now.
Of course she was sick.
Her eyes were half-open, only the whites showing, and the trembling was getting worse. Heading toward convulsions? A wave of anger went through him—Lakshmi had known about Eva’s state? Had let her languish down here? An Aalim possessed of the power she clearly was?
Or was this something that was beyond even her?
No more questions. He didn’t have time. He closed his eyes, put one hand on her forehead and one on her chest, and dropped into her.
She was so much worse than Rachel had been, somehow worse than Naomi had been. It was instant blackness, instant cold. She was almost completely gone, maybe only minutes from death, though only months ago she had appeared whole and healthy. So fast. Blindly he pushed on, shoving his way past the choking tendrils of her sickness, searching for her roots.
But it was too much. The tendrils closed around him and dragged him down, too deep and too fast, and he twisted and tried to scream. There was no one else here to save him if he failed, no one to take his place and finish it. If he got lost inside her, he would never find his way out. He would die with her.
Eva! Eva, help me!
Lochlan should be with him. He should never have been allowed to come alone.
Eva, please.
But inside her own body, she wasn’t alone. There was something, not a mind, not yet, but the possibility of one, the first hints of what it might become. That potential suddenly hit him, stunned him to the point where he forgot the choking blackness. He forgot everything but the tiny light that was reaching for him, almost extinguished in the dark.
And then Eva was there with him.
She was weaker than the light, barely there at all, but struggling to get to him through the depths that separated them, and he could feel the remains of the fierceness that had once been in her. He had only known her for the briefest of times, while they had been sorting through the aftermath of the battle on the Plain, but he had seen that Kyle had cared for her, and Kyle wouldn’t feel that way about anyone without cause.
She was a fighter. Even now, at the last extremity, she was still fighting.
Help me, he gasped. Help me. Help yourself. I’m not strong enough. He never was; he never would be. On the Plain he had needed the Aalim. In the camp he had needed Rachel, and then he had needed her again. Now he needed Eva. He would always need someone.
It was all right to not be able to do this on his own.
He grabbed for her in one last, desperate lunge, and she reached him and held on. Instantly they flared in the dark, and at the same instant they hit the roots, a lurching nightmare of twisting and wrenching that was as terrifying as the blackness had been. But she was with him, fully with him, and if he was w
eaker, she was twice as strong.
Here. This is what to do. I’ll show you.
But of course she already knew. She went into it, fearless, wrestling it free from herself, and though he went with her he could tell that she hardly needed him at all. Instead, he was once again captivated by that tiny, distant light, like her and yet nothing like her at all.
He knew what it was. He had known as soon as he felt it groping for him.
Then, before he had time to process what he sensed, it was over and he was being rocketed upward again, so hard and so fast that it was almost painful. Rising through the brightening world and out, falling back into the dirt as Eva raised herself with a huge, heaving breath.
He managed to meet her gaze in what was now true twilight, and she stared at him—her eyes clear, the color back in her cheeks. She was still far too thin, still trembling as she sat up—but she was there again.
And not only her.
“No,” she whispered. “No, not me. Kyle, you have to help Kyle, he—”
Adam tried to turn over, tried to shove himself up, and dropped down again when his arms simply gave out. His legs didn’t feel as though they were there. “I can’t,” he managed, his voice low and hoarse as if he had been screaming. “You … You know how, you have to—”
“What’re you— No, I can’t.” She shook her head, pushing onto her hands and knees and starting to crawl toward him. The entire thing still had the unreal quality of a nightmare, and he held out his hands, trying to stop her. He was beginning to understand, now, how close he had come to his own death.
“Adam, please, you’re the only one—”
“I’m not.” The world was blurring away as tears welled and overflowed, hot on his cheeks. “You can. Don’t argue with me, Eva, there’s no time. Go.”
She got slowly to her feet, still shaking her head, but with a last, bewildered look at him, she made her way into the house. Adam let his head fall back into the dirt and stared up at the sky.
The first stars were showing. He had seen those stars in a dream. He had stood beneath them, and he had known without a single doubt that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
Was that still true?
If I make it back alive, Lock is going to fucking kill me.
From inside the house there was a cry, long and agonized. Then silence. The stars seemed to pulse and grow dimmer.
I’ve lost them, he thought. I’ve lost all three of them. Then he didn’t think anything else for a while.
The edge of something pressed to his lips, wetness in it. Water. He hadn’t even come fully out of the darkness that had enveloped him, hadn’t even opened his eyes, before he was drinking like he hadn’t had water in days, reaching up to grip the side of the cup as he gulped it down.
“Whoa, shit, Adam. You’ll make yourself sick, cut it out.” The cup was withdrawn, and he grabbed for it, making an embarrassingly childish whine. He managed to open his gritty eyes, blinking painfully in the light, and then something moved into his field of vision, blocking the worst of it.
A head. A face.
Eva.
He stared at her for a moment. Then he struggled to lift himself, every muscle in his body still weak and shaking. “Kyle. Is he…?”
“He’s sleeping.” She laid a hand on his chest and pushed him back down. She was also shaking a little, and her face was drawn and tired, but she was on her feet. And if she wasn’t completely steady, she was steady enough. “I don’t know what the fuck happened, I have no idea what you did, what I did … but he’s alive. He’s all right. I think.”
Finally he could see past her and into the rest of the room—tiny, spare, illuminated by a single lantern and a fire in a stove at the far end, though it was close enough to the small pallet he was lying on to warm him. Against the wall and also close to the stove was a low bed barely large enough for two, and on it lay Kyle.
Or what used to be Kyle.
If Eva was thin, he was even thinner. He was wearing a thick beard that made him appear at least ten years older, and the gaunt lines of his face made him appear even older than that. And as Adam lifted his head and studied him, he could have sworn—though it might have been a trick of the dim light—that he saw gray at Kyle’s temples.
He had been more than sick. He had been ravaged. Adam had seen terrible things in the camp: people wasted and tormented by their own failing cells and corrupted code. But he couldn’t recall seeing someone who had been eaten through like this.
Maybe it was simply because he had known Kyle well before it had taken him. Had known what he was like.
“He got sick so fast,” Eva said quietly, following Adam’s gaze. “After I started to slide downhill, but … A lot more rapidly than me. Before I knew it, I was taking care of him.”
Adam didn’t look away from his old friend. He couldn’t. That Kyle was most likely healed now didn’t, for the moment, dull the horror. “How did you both get here? I mean— Why?”
“Like I said, we were sick. We were trying to find a way to help people, and then to get hold of you, but we lost touch with Kerry, and …” She sighed and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “We got desperate. We heard there was a Bideshi woman living here. That she had powers. We thought she could … But she couldn’t.”
“No,” Adam said softly. “Of course she couldn’t.”
“But she said someone was coming who could. If we would hang on, if we’d help her … prepare.”
Adam’s brow lifted. “Prepare?”
Eva smiled. It was small, still a little weak, but there was a mischievous edge to it that was more like … More like her than anything else he had seen so far. “I’ll show you.”
Adam stared at the crates and pulled in a long, slow breath.
Getting up had been difficult, though not as difficult as he had feared, and with Eva’s help he’d managed it, feeling more steady the longer he spent on his feet. Healing her had taken almost everything he had, but now it was coming back to him with remarkable swiftness. Eva must have been experiencing the same thing: she’d moved ahead of him with strong, easy purpose that spoke of her peacekeeper training, how skillfully she used the weapon that was her body.
And fortunately they didn’t have to walk far. A door behind the stove led to a storage room at the back of the house. He blinked in the dimness, and Eva turned up the lantern in her hand, lifting it high.
The crates didn’t fill the room. There were only seven of them in all, stacked neatly against the wall, plain and nondescript. Adam shot Eva a quizzical glance, but she only smiled again and stepped forward, setting down the lantern and bending to the nearest crate to pull off the top.
Guns.
Adam stared at them for a while. Prepare. Lakshmi was so much like Ixchel, and Ixchel had possessed a hatred and a great fear of war. She was a fighter, and she had gone to her death with her jambia in her hand, but she had never wanted that violence, had never sought it as an end.
And here was Lakshmi, who’d prepared arrival of hundreds of refugees with seven crates of guns in a shed.
“Pretty good, right?” Eva nodded, pride evident on her narrow face. “Took us a while to get them all together, and by the time we got the last one there was no way we were well enough to handle any more, but Lakshmi said it would be enough. Enough for what, anyway? I mean, clearly some shit’s gonna go down …”
“I brought a lot of people with me,” Adam said distantly. He stepped forward, lifted one of the smaller pistols and slid his hand around the grip. It was cold. “The Protectorate are looking for them. All of us.”
Eva whistled. “You got yourself an army of fugitives?”
“I got myself a ship of refugees.” He shook his head. “They’re not soldiers, Eva. A few of them are peacekeepers, but the rest—”
“If the Protectorate is coming after you, you’re either going to have to run or fight.” Eva pointed at the crates. “And even if you run, you’ll need time to do the running in. Or can
you take off right now?”
“We don’t have supplies and we’re low on fuel,” Adam murmured. He was staring at the crates again. “She knew. She sent me here for this.”
Eva glanced at him and followed his gaze, her brows drawn together. “Who, Lakshmi? Yeah, she knows a lot. It’s fucking creepy.” She raked a hand through her hair. “How many are after you?”
Adam shot her a tight smile. “A recon fleet. At least three ships. Maybe more. It’s not as bad as when they were after us before. It’s still bad.”
“How many people?”
“Two hundred? Maybe close to three? I don’t know, we never counted.” He laid the gun back in the crate and stepped away. “They were sick. They aren’t anymore. But it’s—”
“You healed them?”
“No. You saw me, Eva. There’s no way I could heal fifty people without dying myself, let alone three hundred.”
“Like me,” she whispered, and nodded again. “Okay. Okay, yeah. So now they want to pull the rug over all of it. Great, ’cause that worked out so well for them last time.”
“Part of it’s that, yeah. Mostly I think they want me. I think they think I can tell them things. Make this all stop somehow.” He was so tired. He hadn’t fully appreciated how much. But somewhere, Lochlan was waiting for him. “I have to get back to Lakshmi’s. Is there a groundcar? Some kind of transport—?”
Eva snorted a laugh. “About the best people have around here are carts and Terran cattle. A few solar-powered things. We’re definitely not cosmopolitan out this way, my friend, and most people don’t need to do much traveling anyway.” She touched his arm. “You should go in the other room and rest. Tomorrow you can—”
“Lochlan is back there. He’ll be …” It was difficult, all at once, to explain why it mattered so much, why he couldn’t wait. But Eva was gazing at him with comprehension on her face.
“You were with him. I remember.” She frowned as she glanced toward the door. “I don’t like to leave Kyle. And he’d want to see you. But I can help you back up the hill. I feel … It’s bizarre, but I feel pretty good. Better than I have in weeks.”
Fall and Rising Page 29
