Out of Orbit- The Complete Series Boxset

by Chele Cooke

  So far, she had found nothing of use. There were books and papers, but from what she could read with her limited knowledge of Adtvenis, they were not about anything of interest. She found objects that she neither recognised nor knew how to operate, so she left them alone.

  Edtroka was out. He’d been called to a meeting and left her alone in the apartment. Previously, when he had left the house, he had sent her into the city or locked her in the bedroom, but not this time. He had given her free reign of the apartment and even left the previously locked room open, so that was where she started.

  Placing a large book back in its place, Georgianna crouched and began flipping through the books on the lower shelves. A roll of paper of much finer quality than she was used to was held together with a leather strap. She lifted her head, listening carefully for any sounds of approach, and undid the buckle. The leather was attached to one edge of the paper and as Georgianna rolled it out across the floor, she realised that it was a map. It took a moment to recognise it. She’d never seen the city laid out in this way, not to mention that all the locations were labelled in Adtvenis. It was a map of Adlai.

  Adlai had always been one of the bigger cities. While tribes travelled separately to avoid the worst of Os-Veruh’s volatile seasons, they often came to Adlai to live out the heat months. When the Adveni arrived, Adlai became what they called the capital city. Georgianna had been in the city for the last couple of years as work had been easier to find than it was on the trail to their southern cities.

  Every street and alley on the map was marked with names that the Veniche never used. Sitting on the floor before it, she turned the map the other way around, laying it so that north faced away from her. It was easier to see now, the way the camps stood slightly apart from the rest of the city. A symbol drawn in the east represented Lyndbury Compound. Even the four Mykahnol pillars were marked by triangles with a line spearing through their centre, pointing into the city.

  Georgianna froze, staring at the symbol on the western pillar. The name for the Mykahnol weapon was the same as for the pillars. Perhaps if she could find that symbol somewhere she knew a pillar didn’t stand, she would know the location of the weapon. The Adveni had always been protective of its location, not wanting to jeopardise security. No Veniche she knew had any idea what the Mykahnol even looked like. A location would help the Belsa in a way she’d never imagined.

  She was scanning the layout of the Oprust District when she spotted it, a dotted line in green and gold. It led north through the district along one of the wider streets and, after a brief passage through the northern part of the city, the line snaked into the Adveni dwelling quarters.

  Georgianna frowned. Another line branched off, this time in gold and blue, starting at the edge of the dwelling quarter and leading into the city. Tracing it down, her finger rested just beneath Javeknell square. They were paths from one spot to another and Georgianna realised that the gold and blue path led directly to a tunnel entrance.

  The place where the line ended within the Oprust District looked similar to all the others. Roads intersected, alleys led into dead ends and small landmarks were marked with symbols for their use. She didn’t recognise many of them, but there was one for food and drink that she had seen before. It was the same three symbols in a line she had seen marked on the sign outside Crisco. She focussed on the layout of the streets around it. It was the Trade Inn, and it stood just down the road from where the paths ended…

  Where she had been caught.

  Now she looked closer. The start of one of the paths in the dwelling quarter looked similar to where she knew Maarqyn’s house stood. A dread settled in her chest. It wasn’t a nameless Adveni who knew of the escape; it was Edtroka. He had known the specifics of the escape. He had directed the other Tsevstakre to their location.

  Georgianna grasped the other papers that had been stored on the shelf beneath the map. She rifled through them, trying to find something, anything, that she could read and understand. Perhaps the name of the person who had given them the information, the traitor within the Belsa. Edtroka might be back at any moment and who knew whether he would leave this room unlocked again? Maybe he was planning on getting rid of this information and he’d simply forgotten to lock the room before going out? Perhaps he had thought that Georgianna wouldn’t think to go through his things. Maybe he trusted her?

  She was a couple of pages past something when she realised what she had seen. Staring at the page in front of her for a moment, her eyes narrowed. She must have imagined it, or been mistaken. Carefully, she went back two pages. There it was. She had not been imagining it: it was her name. She recognised the Adtvenis. Georgianna Lennox, Kahle. It was written in exactly the same way her registration had been written. The same as when Greun gave her a paper with the details of her wages.

  Georgianna gulped. There were five other lines beside her own, all with the same layout, a name and a classification. There were two Kahle, two Nerrin and two designated as dreta. It didn’t take long to translate the names. She knew the letters well enough and she knew the names, even while hoping that she was wrong. Hope faded into dread. She wasn’t wrong. Along with her, Taye, Wrench, Alec, Nyah and Keiran were all listed. Everyone involved in the escape.

  It wasn’t luck that they had known she was involved. Edtroka had her name, he had all their names. He had Keiran’s name.

  Maybe if Edtroka hadn’t said his name in the square, if she’d believed that Halden had been the one to make the deal and Keiran had only pointed him towards it, she could have questioned the hole that opened up in her stomach. She could have called it a mistake or blind luck that Keiran had not been captured. But she couldn’t. Edtroka had said Keiran’s name in front of her only a few days before. Keiran had admitted that he was the one to approach Edtroka and make the deal. Edtroka knew him and despite his name being on the list before her, Keiran Zanetti had not been arrested.

  Georgianna rolled the map and buckled the leather strap. She shoved the papers back into their place. The map wouldn’t fit. Since taking it from the shelf, something had dislodged, and now, when she tried to fit the map into place, the paper bent.

  Throwing the map down, she began scrabbling through the items on the shelf, trying to fix them back into place. The books were still stood as they had been and the papers beneath had been put back properly. She gave one of the books a violent shove in frustration and was rewarded by a clunk. The sphere dropped off the edge of the shelf and rolled a short way across the carpet. It sat there glittering. Placing the map back in place and finding that it now fit perfectly, she reached out and picked up the sphere.

  It was heavy, far heavier than she would have expected. Its shining surface was the colour of the night sky before a red sunrise, a mottled deep purple that shone in places and swallowed light in others. Georgianna stared at it, even as the light within it began shifting. The light melted into the shadows, the colour swirling and changing, becoming lighter, a lilac sunrise.

  “What the fuck do you think you are doing?”

  Edtroka’s deadly snarl startled her and in her haste to scramble to her feet, she dropped the sphere. It thunked on the floor, where Edtroka grabbed it up.

  Holding it in one hand, he brandished it at her.

  “TELL ME!” he roared.

  There was fury in his eyes and for a split second, Georgianna thought that she saw a wide-eyed panic she had never seen in the Adveni before. He advanced on her, brandishing the heavy sphere.

  “I was just… just…”

  “You never touch this, do you understand?”

  His voice was a poison she knew could kill her in seconds. In all the times Edtroka had been angry at her, she had never feared him harming her. She did now.

  “I didn…”

  “Don’t…”

  “I’m sor…”

  The slap knocked the word right out of her lips and rattled her teeth. Pain radiated from her cheek and Georgianna covered her face with both hands
, shielding herself from a further attack. A beeping pulsed through the room. She peeked through her fingers, but Edtroka had walked away.

  The tsentyl slid open easily in his hand, bright blue writing appearing across the flat surface. He stared at it with a look of suspicious disbelief.

  “You knew…” he murmured.

  “Sorry?”

  Edtroka was on his feet, the tsentyl clattering against the table as he dropped it. The sphere thudded on the floor. Georgianna stepped back, but she was trapped in the small room. There was nowhere to run.

  “I don’t…”

  “DON’T LIE TO ME!”

  The door hit the wall with a crash as he hit it with the side of his fist. He was across the room in two steps, his fingers buried into her shoulder, tugging her forwards. Georgianna struggled. He was too strong.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Edtroka pulled her out of the room and towards the table. He grabbed up the tsentyl, turning it so that she could see it. She looked up at him in confusion. He clicked a few buttons on the tsentyl and translated the text into Veuric.

  MYKAHNOL, WEST. Failure to respond.

  MYKAHNOL, SOUTH. Failure to respond.

  All available military to report immediately.

  Capture: A.M.N

  “What do you know?” he demanded, tossing the tsentyl onto the sofa and kicking the table away from him.

  Georgianna shook her head furiously.

  “Nothing, I…”

  “You know something. Why would you have asked me about them if…”

  “I swear! Edtroka, please, I didn’t know.”

  He let out a growl of frustration and shoved her towards his bedroom. Georgianna stumbled, catching herself against the doorframe, but he was there again, pushing her inside.

  “Edtro…”

  “Stop! Just stop!” he snapped. “Whatever you’re doing, whatever you know, you will stop it, do you understand?”

  Georgianna turned, but he slammed the door behind him. She wasn’t even able to grasp the handle before the lock turned, trapping her inside. She tugged at the handle anyway.

  “Edtroka,” she called. “Edtroka, please. I swear, I didn’t know!”

  No answer came. She stood behind the door, still grasping the handle, waiting for the lock to turn. It didn’t.

  She sat on the corner of the bed and listened as Edtroka moved around the apartment. She heard him leave, slamming the door on his way out. Her breath was the only sound to keep her company. She was unable to focus on anything except wondering if the information Alec had taken from Maarqyn had been worth something after all, or whether it had just made everything worse.

  The sun was rising by the time Edtroka returned, stomping through the apartment, muttering constantly under his breath. Georgianna was woken by the slam of the door. She scrambled up from her position on the bed and quickly rearranged the covers. Edtroka’s room was surprisingly nice, though sparse. Everything had a purpose, but was well designed at the same time. The only odd aspect was that he didn’t seem to own a single personal item. There were no pictures of his family, no mementos of his childhood. She knew that the Adveni focused on family less than the Veniche did, but she’d still expected something to point to the young boy he’d once been.

  Georgianna perched on the edge of the bed, hands clasped tightly in her lap, and waited. From the clattering around the apartment, she couldn’t imagine that Edtroka was in a good mood, and she didn’t want to anger him further by begging to be released. She could hear him putting the table back in its place, the shrill tones of him opening the locked cabinet he had told her not to go near. Wringing her hands in her lap, she chewed on her lip, swallowing the lump that had been rising in her throat.

  There had been nothing to do but worry while he was gone. She’d worried that Alec had been caught, that the Adveni had sent a full assault at the Belsa, or that they had taken out their frustration on the innocent people of the camps. The tsentyl had shown that the western pillar was one of the two that weren’t responding. It stood on the far side of the camps, a short walk from the outer rim of houses. It was further south than her own home, but there was no guarantee that the Adveni wouldn’t have fanned out in order to get the answers they wanted.

  She’d also spent hours wondering about the list of names she had seen and why Edtroka could have made a deal with a man he’d known had been involved in the escape. She wracked her brain for any excuse, any way that she could believe that Keiran was not a traitor. It was selfish, but she didn’t want to believe it. If Keiran was a traitor then it meant that she had introduced him to the plan to free Nyah and Alec. She had orchestrated her own incarceration through a selfish desire to be close to someone. She didn’t want to believe that she had been that blind, that stupid, just because he thought she was pretty.

  The door smacked the wall when Edtroka finally pushed it open. He took her in for a moment, his eyes narrowed and suspicious. She gulped, but said nothing.

  She remembered that stare, that expression of anger and disappointment. It was the same way he had looked at her when she’d been taken into the compound. Then, he had told her that he was no longer Edtroka to her, that he was Guard Grystch. Would it be the same now that she had betrayed him by searching through his things, now that he thought she’d been involved with the failure of the pillars? Would he be just her owner now, treating her like any other drysta? Her fingers went instinctively to her neck, wondering if he would put a cinystalq collar on her to ensure good behaviour.

  “Nothing,” he said bluntly, marching past her towards the small bathroom adjoining his room.

  Turning to watch him as he pulled off his jacket and approached the basin, she leaned forwards over her knees, wondering if she should say something.

  “The work was good,” he murmured, perhaps more to himself than her. “Two pillars disconnected. Wires slashed and burned. It’ll take months to repair them. Whoever did it knew the designs of the pillars. Something someone would only know if they had knowledge from an Adveni who had dealings with them, wouldn’t you say?”

  She didn’t know whether to answer him or not. He was already furious at her for lying to him and looking through his belongings. She could imagine that it wouldn’t be long before he started demanding to know what she had been looking at, or who she had been talking to. Did he know that Alec had stolen information about the pillars from Maarqyn, or was he taking a guess because it was the most logical conclusion? As the silence stretched out, she figured that not saying anything at all was better than saying the wrong thing.

  “Your friends will be in…”

  A thump at the door cut him off. He lifted his head, glancing to her, and tossed the cloth into the basin. He stormed towards her. Georgianna squealed as he grabbed her by the arm, dragging her into the bathroom. He shoved her away from him. Catching herself against the basin, she turned quickly.

  “You don’t move. You don’t speak. Am I understood?”

  She nodded.

  Edtroka closed the door behind him and, striding across the bedroom, closed that door with a snap as well. Georgianna tiptoed to the door, pressing her ear up against the wood. It wasn’t locked. She knew that she could easily get to the bedroom door, but she didn’t dare incur any further anger from him. He’d already threatened to sell her to the compound, or to Maarqyn, if she remained involved with the Belsa. She couldn’t take that risk, not now.

  The front door was opened so quietly that she only realised he had done so from his reaction. It was hard to hear through the two doors, but she could just about make out a few of the words.

  There was no introduction, other than Edtroka asking the person what they were doing there. There was a mumbled response that she couldn’t make out, then someone slammed something against the wall.

  Edtroka snapped. Though the words were impossible to make out, his anger was clear.

  Georgianna released the door handle and lowered herself
onto her knees. Bracing her hands on the floor, she leaned down to get her ear as close to the gap at the bottom of the door as she could. It didn’t help much. There was still another closed door between her and the conversation.

  “She knew nothing.”

  The voices were too garbled. She couldn’t even tell who was talking half the time. They were discussing the pillars and she thought she heard someone asking about her knowledge of the information, but apart from that, it was impossible to tell.

  Edtroka laughed. She could tell it was him. It was a gruff and throaty bark of laughter that seemed to vibrate. The other man said something in return, he sounded concerned, and Edtroka’s response dripped with disdain.

  “When I am satisfied.”

  She wondered if he’d raised his voice to make his point.

  There was a scuffle, a grunt of pain, and a thud as one of them hit the wall.

  “Alright, alright.”

  “You do as we discussed. Then, perhaps.”

  There were footsteps, fading away quickly. The door slammed.

  Georgianna scrambled to her feet, backing away from the door. Sure enough, moments later, the bedroom door opened, and then the bathroom door. Edtroka stared at her.

  He didn’t say anything. His glaring accusation was enough. Turning away, he left the door open and stormed back through the bedroom. Georgianna grimaced and wrapped her arms protectively around her stomach, but followed him just the same.

  She’d heard mention of ‘seeing her’ and ‘she’. It was logical that she was the one they had been talking about. Who else would they have been referring to? An inmate in the compound, maybe, but then why would they have come to Edtroka’s home right after he returned from the search?

  Hovering by the bedroom door, Georgianna watched Edtroka clatter around in the kitchen, muttering under his breath. She stepped forwards and upon hearing him properly, she realised that no matter how closely she listened, she wouldn’t understand his muttering any more than the small number of words she’d heard in the conversation. He was murmuring in low, rapid Adtvenis. Georgianna stopped, staring at the front door as questions sprang into her mind.