They took her weight.
Stefan dropped out of sight. Lesa heard scuffling, but couldn’t turn her head. A moment later, he reappeared, sliding from under her log with her improvised club in his hand. He weighed it across his palm, and then took good hold of it and smashed at the ground with a croquet‑mallet swing.
Whatever he was doing, a few blows satisfied him. He whirled the club overhead, and slung it tumbling deep among the trees. Mikhail stared down at his feet, and flinched when Lesa couldn’t hold back another whimper.
“Right,” Stefan said, grabbing the woman’s wrist in a liberty that would have shocked Lesa under other circumstances. “Come on,” he said, and paused long enough to smile up at Lesa. “Pleasant dreams, Miss Pretoria.”
Then he herded his companions away.
They were out of sight, and Lesa considering her options for the least painful method of breathing, when she felt the first savage, stinging bite on the edge of her foot and jerked stupidly against the thorns, and cried.
Stefan had broken open a nant’s nest. And while they might not think humans were good eating, they were more enthusiastic about driving off something that might be the predator that had attacked their home.
Except this predator didn’t have anyplace to run.
22
KUSANAGI‑JONES WAS STILL AT IT LONG AFTER SUNRISE, but he thought the staple might be loosening. He heard a faint clicking now when he rocked it against the wood. When it went, it would go all at once, and he’d find himself sprawled flat on his back in the dirt. At least the chains and the staple were steel, unlike the manacles. They’d make a reasonably effective weapon, once the other end was no longer bolted down.
The clatter of the door lock left him plenty of warning that somebody was about to enter, if the murmur of voices hadn’t been enough. He released his grip on the chains and began pacing, wearing out the brief arc permitted. Two steps and pivot, two steps and pivot the other way. Exactly what Vincent would have been doing in his position.
He had less than a meter of slack.
Light spilled in when the door opened with the brilliance of midmorning. Kusanagi‑Jones averted his eyes, staring toward the darkest corner of his domain, and waited until the door banged the frame again and the brightness dimmed.
“Michelangelo.” Robert again, standing by the door, his left hand cupped beside his thigh as if he held something concealed in the palm.
“Breakfast already?” Kusanagi‑Jones asked. “Seems like you just left.”
Robert’s smile was tight. “Do you remember what I said about the Right Hand not being the barbarians we’re painted?”
Kusanagi‑Jones folded his hands in front of him and nodded slowly, the chains pulling against his wrists.
“I was wrong,” Robert said, and flipped something through the air.
Kusanagi‑Jones caught it reflexively. A code stick, the sort that worked as a key. He held it up inquiringly, the shackles stopping his hand before it came level with his face.
“Go ahead,” Robert said. He crouched, and began digging in the capacious pockets of his vest. Objects piled on the packed dirt before him. Kusanagi‑Jones recognized emergency gear, a primitive datacart of the sort that seemed ubiquitous on New Amazonia, a two‑foot knife that Robert pulled from under his vest, a pocket lighter, and the crinkly packaging of a sterile med‑kit.
He didn’t stand and gawk. He skipped the code stick over the manacles and pried them open with a sigh, careful not to let the chains clang against the pole when he lowered them. He dropped the code stick on the floor and kicked dirt over it, and stepped toward Robert.
“You’re helping me escape.”
“We’re going together,” Robert said. “The team that went after Lesa came back.”
“Without her?” Kusanagi‑Jones sank onto his haunches and began picking items out of the pile and slipping them inside his gi, where the belt would hold them in place. Robert had also provided socks and a pair of low boots, which Kusanagi‑Jones jammed his feet into.
“Stefan and Mikhail said they found no sign of her.”
Kusanagi‑Jones was not Vincent, but even he could read the irony in that tone. He hefted the knife–he would call it a machete–and shoved it through his belt like a pirate’s scimitar. The hilt poked him under the ribs.
“There was a third with them. Medeline Angkor‑Wat. The tracker. Who told me the truth, after Stefan and Mikhail went to get coffee.”
Kusanagi‑Jones waited.
Robert lifted his head, fixed Kusanagi‑Jones with a look that froze his throat, and filled the silence, the way people did. “We might have a chance to get to her while she’s still alive,” he said, and shoved a water bottle into Kusanagi‑Jones’s hand. “There’s a GPS locator and a map in the datacart. If we get separated. Medeline’s best‑guess location for where they left Lesa is plotted. It won’t be off by more than a few hundred meters. She’s good.”
Unless she’s lying to you. Kusanagi‑Jones pressed his elbow against the pad inside his gi, without voicing the comment. “What about the guard?”
“I brought Chun breakfast,” Robert said. “He should be unconscious by now. And the guards at the gate won’t know you. Here.” He produced a wadded‑up dark green shirt from somewhere, and tossed it at Kusanagi‑Jones’s chest.
Kusanagi‑Jones shrugged it on over his gi. It looked less out of place, and the bottoms were dirty enough to pass for the same sort of baggy tan trousers that Robert was wearing.
Robert stood and rattled the door. “Chun?”
There was no answer. Kusanagi‑Jones breathed out a sigh he knew better than to have been holding, and waited while Robert pulled the chain through the hole in the door and used another code stick to unfasten the lock.
They had to heave Chun’s unconscious body aside to slip through. The sentry had passed out leaning against the door with his plate in his lap. Kusanagi‑Jones carefully reclosed the door, pulled the chain free and slipped it into his pocket, and propped Chun back up as he had been. There was no need to leave the place looking like an escape in progress.
And then, side by side, Robert chatting aimlessly about some sporting event, they headed for the gate.
“Easier to steal an aircar,” Kusanagi‑Jones suggested in low tones. “I can hotwire those.”
“They all have beacons. Besides, it’s only about fifteen kilometers. We’ll be fine.”
The boots were too tight and pinched across the ball of Kusanagi‑Jones’s feet. He could already feel every step of that fifteen kilometers. “I hope you can run,” he quipped, which earned him an arched eyebrow.
He wondered what Vincent would have made of that look, of the jaunty set of Robert’s shoulders.
And if it would have meant anything. Because if Robert had been fooling Lesa for as long as he must have been, the only explanation was that either he was a Liar, too, or he’d been very lucky never to find himself in a context that Lesa could pick up what he was concealing from her.
Of course, it was possible that the New Amazonian women just didn’t talk to their men very much.
The guard at the gap in the zareba barely gave them a glance. They emerged into a camouflaged clearing that extended a few meters beyond the stockade, and crossed it quickly, Kusanagi‑Jones blinking gratefully when they entered the shade of the trees. He slid a hand under the borrowed shirt and retrieved the datacart, wincing at the beep when it activated.
Amateurs.
Something took flight overhead, invisible among the branches.
“What are you doing?” Robert asked.
“She’s east?”
“So Medeline said.” Robert stepped into the lead, using his own long knife to lift vegetation out of the way rather than slashing at it. Of that, at least, Kusanagi‑Jones approved.
The map was easy to use. Lesa’s estimated position was marked by a yellow dot, that of Kusanagi‑Jones and Robert by a pulsing green glow. All he had to do was make the second mat
ch the first.
He’d done harder things in Academy.
Robert never knew what hit him. Michelangelo stepped left, the chain from the door doubled in his right hand, the lock swinging freely. It struck Robert at the base of the skull, on a rising arc that snapped his head forward and sent him crashing forward into the brush. His knife went flying.
Michelangelo had to search to find it, after he straddled Robert and broke his neck.
It was a pity, because Michelangelo had sort of liked him. But he’d already proved he would switch sides over a woman he’d betrayed at least once, and unlike Vincent, Michelangelo didn’t believe in redemption.
And you couldn’t trust a Liar.
Lesa would have taken the night before over the day that followed. At least nants weren’t much for climbing, and few of them bothered to scale the inside of her trousers past where they bunched at the knee. After a while, the scathing agony of each individual bite, like a heated needle slipped into her skin, dulled into consistent pain as her flesh puffed up, honeycombed with lymph.
And when she could manage not to flinch reflexively at every bite, she didn’t wind up imbedding the thorns farther into her skin. Thrashing wouldn’t help her anyway. The wire‑plant’s barbs were backcurved like fishhooks, and every twist impaled her more. But if she could get her hands around the vines…
They were strong enough to take Stefan’s weight. If Lesa could manage a grip on them while she still had the strength, she could lift herself off the barbs. They hurt,but they weren’t long enough to threaten her unless they tore her throat or eyes, or punctured her inner thighs where the femoral arteries ran shallow.
It meant freeing one arm, however, while her entire weight rested on the wire‑plant wrapping her other arm and her torso, and every movement earned her anguish.
The thorns didn’t come out any sweeter than they’d gone in. She closed her eyes in concentration and lifted, edged, bending her wrist in an arc that encouraged the burred vine to drag down the back of her hand. She couldn’t just yank herself off the thorns without impaling herself on others; she had to coax it.
It was like giving birth, one centimeter, two centimeters. A slide and a moan and a fraction closer to freedom.
Flecks of sun dotted her face through the fluttering leaves of the strangler oak, and her tongue swelled in her mouth by the time she got the last serrated coil to scrape down her arm and drop away. She swayed with reaction and gasped painfully, the vines crossing her torso tightening.
Lifting her head, blinking sweat from her lashes, she studied the vines on her right side, looking for a place with fewer thorns. The motion made her light‑headed, the jungle a green whirl around her as she tilted her head back. But it would go faster now. She had a hand free, through careful work and resolute refusal to panic, and there was a spot about a half‑meter to the right and slightly over her head where the thorns might be thin enough that she’d only shred her hand grabbing onto the vine, rather than crippling it.
It beat dying here.
She reached out and took hold, gritting her teeth against the pain as she forced herself to close her hand.
Some of the thorns broke, while others cut deep, but she held on. Held on, and tensed the shoulder, and flexed the biceps, and pulled. She felt the tendons in her forearm take the strain, the searing heat flash up her neck, blinding white static, and a concomitant lessening of pain as her weight came off the thorns.
This might just work.
When Vincent had asked to talk to Katya, he hadn’t expected Elena to consent. They both knew talkwas a euphemism. But she showed him into the room and left him there, and almost two days later, there he still sat, across a low table from Katya, his bare heels resting on the strictly decorative rungs of a stool that was an outgrowth of House rather than a piece of individual furniture. He was already growing accustomed to single‑purpose objects, wasteful as they were. The little cultural differences could seem absolutely homey, compared to the big ones.
Katya stared sullenly, her hands folded in her lap as if to hide the manacles linking her wrists. She wouldn’t shift her gaze from his chin, which was meant to be disconcerting.
Vincent wouldn’t permit it to succeed.
She was good. Very practiced, very serene, offering open, neutral body language nearly as controlled as Michelangelo’s despite exhaustion that had her swaying in her chair. Many years of practice in lying to her mother had given her that edge.
But Vincent wasn’t Lesa, and he didn’t have a mother’s blindness, her self‑deception.
Katya Pretoria had no power over him.
They had been sitting here, with brief intermissions, for sixty‑one hours, most of two New Amazonian days. Katya had been sitting longer than Vincent, because Agnes took over when Vincent left the room, and Katya…didn’t leave the room.
Agnes, Katya would plead with. Vincent didn’t envy the older woman that.
Vincent could have taken longer breaks, but he contented himself with catnaps barely longer than microsleeps, because they were in this together. She needed never to realize he had been gone long enough to rest…and when she broke, he needed to be there. He needed to be making a difference, doing something, anything. Even if it was wrong.
And besides, he had something neither Katya nor Agnes had. He had chemistry, and his superperceiver’s skills.
He hadn’t seen Elena Pretoria since the interrogation started, and he didn’t blame her. He didn’t have a granddaughter, but if he did, he didn’t think he’d care to watch her browbeaten, cajoled, misled, manipulated, and entrapped by the likes of Vincent Katherinessen.
Especially if his child’s life hung in the balance.
He could only hope that wherever she was, Elena was putting as much effort into locating Saide Austin’s illegal genetic engineering lab as Vincent was into prying any potentially useful information out of Katya. And having better success.
He thought she might be weakening, though. The pauses were growing longer, the disconnects between her sentences had become disconnects between phrases, and she could no longer maintain the thread of a lie–or even a narrative. Her wobble on the stool had become a sway.
She would break. All he needed was time. And to put away the sinking, invalid knowledge that Michelangelo could already be dead. Thatwas unbearable, the idea that something could have happened, and Vincent would not know. He wanted to believe there was some connection, that somehow he’d understand if anything happened. It was self‑delusion. Magical thinking.
Even breaking her wasn’t without risks. After a certain point, she’d tell him anything just to get him to leave her alone. If she lied, he was counting on his ability to catch it. Almost as much as he was counting on her actually possessing the information he needed, which might be a little more problematic. But he’d deal with that crisis when he got there.
“Katya,” he said as he hopped off his stool and came around the table to stand beside her, “if you tell me where they took your mother, I can let you sleep. I can get you something to drink and put you in your own bed. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
She blinked, wrapping her fingers around each other, her legs splayed wide as she tried to balance herself. Her toes curled into the carpetplant, flexing tendons playing across the tops of her feet. “Can’t tell,” she said, in a tired little‑girl voice that could have broken his heart. “S’important.”
She sounded drunk. But she still wasn’t to the point of giving him any old answer he asked for just to placate him.
“Your mother’s life is in danger,” he said, and managed not to frown when Katya shook her head.
No impatience. It wasn’t his style. And however long it was for him, it seemed twice as long to her. Katya couldn’t know it, because House had been asked to conceal time cues in the ceiling and walls (which Vincent also hoped was disconcerting to someone who had spent her life under, more or less, natural light), but the sun was setting outside, and Lesa and Michelangelo had been in c
aptivity since the afternoon of the day before yesterday.
And the evening and the morning were the second day,Vincent thought, and stroked her hair, pushing dark strands off her clammy forehead. Admittedly, the insurgents had taken great care to capture them alive, and if it was the same group that had tried to snatch Vincent, they had been almost solicitous.
But his training and his experience told him hostages that weren’t rescued within seventy‑two hours usually weren’t rescued. The logistics of keeping somebody alive in detention started to wear on the captors, arguments started, and mistakes…were made.
“Your mother needs you. You can save her, Katya.”
“My mother’s fine,” she insisted, words slurring out after such a delay that he startled at the sound.
“What if she’s hurt? What if she needs medical attention? You made some bad choices, Katya. But nothing we can’t fix, if we get to her in time.”
“They wouldn’t hurt her.” A chink, the first admission she’d made that she knew who had Lesa. She didn’t seem to realize her error. Instead, she waved her hands for emphasis, but the manacles brought her up short and the weight of her own arms overbalanced her. Like Vincent’s, her stool was an extension of House. It didn’t tip.
But Katya did, flailing, and fell hard. Vincent caught her, cushioned the impact, but he was tired, too, and she slipped through his hands and landed on her shoulder on the carpetplant with a sharp sound. She pulled her knees up as if to hide her face against them.
Vincent crouched beside her, none too steady himself. He had to pause and adjust his chemistry, or he would have joined her on the floor. Energy rose through him like sap. It didn’t fool him; he could feel the ache of weariness in his bones, the sensation of every joint in his hands swollen and fouled with grit. The itch and ache of peeling skin on his back, thighs, and shoulders wasn’t helping. At least the sun toxicity had faded, and his fever, muscle pain, and nausea had broken. If he wasn’t so damned tired, he might even be thinking clearly.
It was a small enough consolation.
Katya giggled as he got his hands under her armpits and hauled her upright. It morphed into a sob when he deposited her back onto the stool, balancing her carefully before he stepped away. Agnes, wherever she was watching from, was probably scandalized. Vincent really didn’t care.
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