Somehow, standing in the same little house, he was out of everyone else’s reach.
“I’ll come back,” Lochlan said softly, then he went to the door and was gone.
I love you, Adam thought, perhaps called after him, but he was never sure. The door closed, and he was left alone with Lakshmi, with a wind rising inside himself. Out the window, the sky was lightening toward dawn.
Sinder gazed at the main screen, where Peris hung bright and green and soft blue in the dark. Not long ago, its blue sun had risen over its curving rim, and now that sun was behind them. He imagined the shape of their ship silhouetted against the star, bathed in radiance. Blessed by the heavens.
“You’re prepared?”
Alkor nodded without a glance at Sinder. He had already known she would be. But it was good to ask her anyway. Good to make such things clear.
“Ma’am, we’ve picked up their signal. It’s coming from the southern continent. It’s … under some heavy tree cover. They must have thought that would hide them sufficiently.”
“Excellent. What’s the status of the other ships?”
“Stationed in lower orbit around the planet as you ordered. They’re awaiting commands.”
Alkor met Sinder’s gaze directly, confidently. You see. Now we can be done with it. “No sense in waiting,” she said. “Tell them to launch their landers. Launch our own too. Converge on that signal. Make sure they’re armed, armored, ready to do whatever it takes to get Yuga and the other two into custody.” She looked back at the officer. “Remember. Everyone else who was on that ship is expendable. More than that, none of them can be left alive.”
Sinder inclined his head, satisfied. She was clearly still uneasy with the order, liked nothing about it, but first and foremost she was a soldier in the service of the Terran Protectorate, and she would do her duty.
More couldn’t fairly be asked of anyone.
“I want minute-by-minute updates,” she continued. “Stay in constant contact with the surface. The second they see anything, I want to know about it.”
The view on the screen didn’t change, but Sinder could practically feel the ship disgorging its small collection of personnel shuttles. No more than ten people aboard, but that would be more than enough.
Except that didn’t entirely ring true, did it? There was something here beyond the obvious, something that he couldn’t quite see. Show me. It wasn’t a prayer to any deity, any conscious entity, but he sent it out into the universe and hoped that the universe would answer. Show me what to do.
“Captain, stay on high alert.” She shot him a scowl, but he ignored her. “I have … a feeling. I’m not sure. Just stay sharp.”
She gave a final nod to her officers, then turned to him, stepping close. “I’ve trusted you, Sinder. More than maybe I should have. More than I had reason to.” There was a pause, and her jaw tightened. “You trust me, now. All right?”
She had lowered her voice and didn’t sound angry, but there was a firmness in her tone that he didn’t altogether like. He met her gaze evenly. Calmly. In these final moments, he wasn’t going to lose himself. “All right,” he murmured. There was something beautiful about her. Something weathered, like a stone shaped by years of wind and water. “I trust you.”
The thing was, he did.
Lochlan shifted in his perch on the branch, and as the tree rustled, the shuttles screamed overhead, then pitched into a deeper hum. They were descending, setting down. Close.
This is it, Lochlan thought. If this was going to work, the peacekeepers couldn’t be allowed a hint that anything was amiss. They would be ready for trouble. They might have taken the bait, but they weren’t stupid.
A few more minutes. Nothing. Then, at the edge of the wood came bird cries, the flapping as a flock of them leaped into the air. The creak and rustle of the trees as people pushed their way in.
These are the cousins of the Arched Halls. It came to him as if from outside, sent by something other than himself. This is your territory, not theirs. Your ground.
Breathless, he waited. He had hated fighting to kill, feared it, been ready to stand against it with everything in him. Now he was focused only on doing it as quickly and as lethally as possible. He had been trained for taking lives, though not for taking joy in it. He could do it when he had to. He was ready. He would.
For Adam.
Now he saw white bodies moving in the dimness only ten feet or so below. Their rifles were raised, their footsteps deliberate, but they were still too confident, too convinced that they had already won.
And it was going to kill them.
There was no way of being sure how many of them there were, and it didn’t matter. Someone was simply first, opening fire, and then everyone followed. Lochlan picked his shots, fired, picked more. Beneath him, the white bodies were falling among the trunks and roots and moss, birds were shrieking, shots were going wild. There were cries, yells, and under it all Lochlan’s vision narrowed to a single sharp point as he aimed, fired, aimed, fired.
There was a pause in the chaos, though perhaps he imagined it. Then a shout went up from some distance deeper into the wood.
“Pull back! It’s an ambush! Return fire and fall back; we can’t see a fucking thing in here!”
He didn’t see them retreating so much as he saw the white bleeding from the green and brown, retreating toward the meadow, and his middle clenched with fierce, awful joy. But as cheers rose, their shots rang out, and first there was one scream and then another, and the thump of bodies tumbling to the forest floor.
“They’re in the fucking trees! Fire into the trees!”
Bullets whizzed past his ear and he ducked, dropping close to the branch. Here he had cover, but here he was also trapped, and it was only a matter of time until he would have to emerge. As had happened on the Plain, as happened every time he fought—even in training with Kae beside him—panic descended on him, covered by a detached calm. He had a choice, and neither option was good, so he had to take the less awful of the two. He swung down from the branch and dropped the short distance to the ground, gun still in his hand.
It was ridiculous, but he wished so much for his jambia. It was back on Volya.
“Everyone push forward!” Aarons, not far away. “Get them back into the meadow! Remember the plan!” All around Lochlan, more people were dropping down, starting after the retreating peacekeepers, ducking for cover behind the wide trunks. It was incredible, really—these were no more soldiers than Adam was, but they were moving well, responding to commands, apparently keeping their heads.
But they weren’t Adam. He stepped over a prone body and knew that, though it hurt to see it, the hurt wouldn’t last. He took a second to reflect on his own essential callousness.
Then he was shooting again, heading toward the morning light, watching more and more bodies fall, and fall, and fall.
Adam stood at the window. From here, he could see the wood and the rocky ridge opposite. He could see too much, and it was all he could do to keep still.
“Calm, child.” Lakshmi spoke levelly from behind him, and he smelled the soothing aroma of her tea. “You can’t do anything down there.”
Adam gritted his teeth and didn’t answer. In the green bowl of the meadow, where the grass was still dark and flattened from the transport, approximately twenty Protectorate shuttles sat like a clutch of white eggs. A swarm of peacekeepers had headed into the wood. Far overhead, he could hear more descending. Now, distant gunfire.
“You can’t always keep your love safe,” Lakshmi said, more softly. “Just as he can’t always protect you.”
“I know that.” He turned, arms folded over his chest. Through the open window, the morning breeze held a chill. “But you know how hard it is. Don’t you? You know that it’s impossible.” He stepped forward. Over the terror and the deep frustration, many things were finally becoming clear. “Ama. That’s her, isn’t it? The woman you were exiled for. You never saw her again.”
&nbs
p; “No, I did not.” He had thought she might be angry, even offended; however, she simply regarded him patiently, her blind gaze sweeping over him. “But I saw her every night in my dreams. It was pain beyond imagining. Don’t you think I wondered, every day after that, whether she had been worth it? Would it be a better love story if I said I was sure that she was? It wasn’t an easy choice, perfect boy. In the end, my heart made it for me.”
“You lost her anyway. You lost everything.” Adam took a seat across from her. Suddenly, she didn’t look so old. He could see a young woman in her, in love and in pain and very afraid. Aalim weren’t special, that was the thing. More was asked of them than most. That was all. They still had to choose for themselves what to give.
What to sacrifice.
She inclined her head. “Yes. I did. Did that have to be? I don’t know. What did your Ixchel teach you? That we know so much more? No. Perhaps sometimes we know more, but child, we are sure of so much less.” More gunfire. Adam flinched. He wanted to see. He wasn’t sure that he could bear to see. “Keep yourself at peace. Your time to act is coming soon.”
“I should be with him.” Adam stared down at the fine grain of the table, polished slick by many years of use. “Things keep … pulling us apart.”
“You and he don’t walk the same path.”
He jerked his head up. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t walk the same path, child. Every living thing walks alone. For a time yours might run side by side, and in that time you are companions. But in the end, all paths branch away, and then they end as well.”
Adam took a breath, and then found himself unable to let it out. “What are you saying? Are you saying that he’ll—”
Louder gunfire than before, and screams too. Unable to contain himself any longer, Adam shoved himself up from the table and rushed to the window, hands braced against its sill. Below him, the white mass of peacekeepers was retreating haphazardly out of the wood—
And was being boxed in.
They came from the wood itself, and they came from the ridge, a tide of people, advancing and shooting. Peacekeepers were ducking behind shuttles, returning fire, but they were falling. Not many of them, and there were still over a hundred firing, but they were stumbling, scattered and disorganized, overwhelmed by the men and women rushing at them.
It might work. It might. It was.
But in the mass of bodies, he was searching only for one, and didn’t see it.
“Ma’am.”
The ensign’s voice made Sinder glance up, made him tense with disquiet—and with knowing. Here it finally was, the thing he hadn’t been able to see, emerging into clarity.
Alkor lifted her face from her screen. “Report.”
“It looks like our people have been … ambushed, ma’am. We’re getting reports of casualties.”
Alkor stared. The entire bridge crew stared. Sinder closed his eyes.
Yuga.
Alkor rose slowly and stepped forward. “How?”
“They’re all armed. We don’t know how, but they’re—”
“They’re supposed to be sick. The officers at the quarantine told us they were almost dead. Maybe they made it out, but that was then. How are they killing trained peacekeepers? How is that even possible?”
Again, silence took the bridge. Everything in Isaac Sinder’s body was slowly sinking toward the deck. He had heard Alkor angry, irritated, impatient, exasperated, shocked. But this was the first time that he had heard panic in her voice.
“I—” The ensign stared down at his console, at his hands, at the main screen, at anything but her. “I don’t know, ma’am.”
“So find the fuck out.” She whirled, her fists clenched. “Get me a clearer picture of what’s happening down there. Get me whatever you have. And see if you can send a communique back to the quarantine. I want to know everything they know about this disease. Everything.”
No, you don’t. Sinder clenched his own fists, fighting back the tremors that were suddenly surging through them. But he couldn’t stop what was happening now. It was his fault that he hadn’t foreseen it. He had sworn to not make Melissa Cosaire’s mistake, to not underestimate the danger of the people he was dealing with.
And that was exactly what he had done.
“Send down the fighters,” he said quietly.
Alkor shot him a frown. “What?”
“The fighters. Send them down.” He met her gaze. “Boots on the ground aren’t working. They have people, but they only have one ship, if that. Send the fighters and mow them down.”
“You want to go to that extreme before we know anything more? We’ll lose Yuga.”
“Do you really care, Captain?” He cocked his head. “Do you think we have the luxury of caring about that right now?”
“How can we be sure they don’t have air support? We didn’t think more than a few of them had guns, either.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
She let out a heavy sigh. “No. No, I don’t. Lieutenant.” She turned back to the woman, who swiveled away from her console.
“Ma’am.”
“You heard him. Launch the fighters. Tell the other ships to launch theirs, too. I want everything moving in that area to stop moving, you understand?”
The lieutenant’s brow furrowed. “What about our own people?”
“Tell them to pull back to a kilometer outside the landing zone and take whatever cover they can. Aside from that, they’re on their own.”
“Ma’am.”
Alkor seemed to deflate then, bowing her head and letting her shoulders slump. She was losing people. She would lose others. In a mission that had, once, been about nothing more than sensor sweeps.
Sinder’s heart broke for her, a little. Then he returned his gaze to the deceptively calm surface of Peris, and knew that, for now, he couldn’t have a heart to break.
Nkiruka sat in the softly lit council chambers as organized chaos churned around her.
There was no panic, no worry. There was simply a lot of movement: people hurrying from one console to another, consulting with council members, carrying crucial messages to other parts of the ship. The center of all the movement was Adisa, overseeing and delivering instructions, but Nkiruka knew that, though she remained silent, the center of the ship and its people was herself, seated toward the rear of the curving room with her skirts gathered around her and her hands folded in her lap.
She needed no screen to see Peris. It was right in front of her, a tiny jewel in a black setting. Death sat on its surface like a dark flaw.
“The fighters will launch as soon as we’re in orbit,” one of the council was saying. “Ying and her staff have been alerted to receive casualties. We can see three Protectorate ships in low orbit, and we think it’s unlikely there are more.”
“How are they armed?”
“Not heavily. From what we know of this ship class, it’s smaller, primarily for reconnaissance, and they have no orbit-to-surface guns or large missiles aboard. They do have fighters, and they’re launching them now.”
Ashwina was close, but Nkiruka could get closer. She tilted her head back, sending herself out through the lines and the orbits of everything that lay between Ashwina and the world they were rushing toward at nearly the speed of light. Because she was light, twining herself around the planet in the same bright dance.
And she could feel all of it. The wood and the grass, the rising sun, the warming rocks, the bloodstained moss, the terror, the gunshots, the screams, the stench of death. She felt it pierce her; her core twisted in sudden pain and grief. This was another part of the price she had paid and would pay for as long as she lived: no one’s pain was closed off to her, and there was no agony that she wouldn’t come close to and share. She felt all their hearts: how they would suffer, children who would never see them again, husbands and wives and lovers who would soak their pillows in tears, confusion at what was happening to them, the helplessness of feeling their lives slippi
ng away. She shot through and among them like one of the bullets, hunting for what she needed. What Ashwina needed. What the people dying below her needed.
And then she found it, in the front room of a little house on a hill. Two faces, two dances, which she had joined with in a dream. At last.
Hello, Adam.
It hit him so hard that for a moment Adam was sure that he had been shot.
He felt his whole body wrench backward, away from the window and toward Lakshmi. Her arms curled around him as his knees folded, and she bore him up. His body felt all of this, but it seemed to have nothing to do with him. It was merely a body. It didn’t matter.
Not when she was finally standing before him, holding out her hands.
He took them. The flesh that had held him down might be sliding to the floor, but he was barely aware of it. He was at once above and over everything and deep in the roots, held and cradled by them, soaring higher than any understanding of high. It was like being Named, and it was like being healed on the Plain, and it was like neither of those things. Then, he had been alone with himself. Now, he was in the company of others: Lakshmi and the other Aalim and also everyone, their dance joining with his, their orbits intertwined.
Lakshmi took his other hand and the three of them formed a circle, and the universe took a breath around them.
Was this what the Aalim felt, each second of their lives? Even a fraction of this? This joy, this terror that ripped through the fabric of existence and nestled into his heart like coming home? Somewhere the fighting was continuing, and somewhere evil white bullets were hurtling downward and carrying death with them, but he could hold them in the palm of his hand.
He wasn’t special. Anyone could do this. Anyone.
He was simply one of the first.
Guide them, Lakshmi said. We must guide them. All together, we can. There—and there. Can you feel them? All the birds of Ashwina in flight.
Yes, there they were. Wings upon wings of them, swarming from Ashwina’s bulk not like birds but like angry bees from a hive. They descended on the hanging Protectorate ships, pelting them with fire, and others broke away and chased the smaller Protectorate fighters. Adam saw all this and was pleased, even as the pain of it lanced through him like a blade.
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