Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “It’s not by air,” Alexis said. “And yes, I made sure of it. I’ll get you out the way I would have gotten the Good Man out should he allow it.”

  “How is he?”

  Alexis shrugged. “Alive. Stubborn, I expect.”

  “Of course.” The doctor got up, on shaking legs, retrieved a small bag from somewhere and started putting injectors and instruments into it.

  Alexis didn’t say anything, but the doctor must have detected something in his posture or some half-suppressed movement of impatience. “I must take the tools of my trade, Alexis. Into the unknown, and at my age.” The last was almost a grumble. At some point he closed his bag, and Alexis lifted him. I thought I heard Corin huff by my side, but it was such a small sound that it was hard to be sure.

  Alexis carried the doctor effortlessly, with Madame Dufort running alongside him, down a long hallway and then into a vast room.

  To this day, I have no idea how vast the room was or precisely what it contained. I just know that, as I walked past, it seemed to me it was full of glass coffins, and within the glass coffins there floated…people. Or sometimes parts of people: a leg, an arm, not torn and bleeding as they’d be if they’d come off a living person, but whole and sealed, as though they had grown by themselves. There were also other organs, of the kind that were imprinted in my mind as “things that should be inside people and never outside” but most of all, what stayed in my memory was a kind of container at the end, which could be viewed as a coffin on its side. Inside it, floating in some liquid, surrounded by glass, was someone I’d swear was Simon—but the eyes were blank and the body contracted in the fetal position.

  I stared at it, and Corin grabbed my arm and said, urgently, “Come on. We must go. They’re going to blow this up.”

  “This?” I said. “This secret place, too?”

  He pulled more urgently. “They must,” he said. “The things in here…”

  And he pulled me out completely.

  We left the lab area and trotted down a narrow passageway for a long time. I lost sense of the center of the room and how far we traveled, because we were in the sort of space where the light came on just ahead of us and vanished behind us. It was like moving in a fog, or else in a dream, where the only space that existed was the space immediately ahead, and the space behind us vanished again.

  Alexis ran, as though he weren’t carrying a full-grown man, even if one smaller than himself. And Corin walked just ahead of me, pulling me if I delayed.

  At the end of the tunnel we emerged into what seemed to be a public park, and miles away—as far as I could tell—from the neighborhood where the doctor’s house had been.

  I was shocked once again, by how peaceful a night could look, even when the human world was in turmoil. The night air was warm on my skin, and crickets were chirping in the shadows of palm trees. While we walked, without breaking stride, down a grass-covered slope, and then down narrow stone steps. From somewhere—probably many somewheres given the looting and burning going on—came the smell of fire and burning.

  “Alexis?” a voice asked out of the dark.

  “Yes,” Alexis answered.

  “You were such a long time,” the voice said. It sounded young and diffident.

  “Yes,” he said. “I met with some trouble. But everything is all right now. Here?”

  “Nothing,” the voice said. I realized it was not only young but female.

  “C’est bien,” Alexis said, and walked past a shadow standing on the beach, at the bottom of the stone steps. I spared her a glance as I went past. She was shorter than I, which was no great feat, as most women are, but also one of those young women who would have no trouble passing as young men, save for the breasts. The moonlight glinted on blond hair topped by a liberty cap.

  I wondered once more what Alexis was playing at, and would have given the doctor and his family the warning if I thought there was the slightest chance they’d listen to me. But I wasn’t fool enough to think they might.

  Alexis stepped heavily across the beach, still moving fast, still without giving the impression of being winded. The doctor’s wife ran alongside him, to keep up with the pace.

  The beach was hardly that. There was a semicircular space of soft sand and, at the end of it, a bit into the sea as though enclosing the space, stood a ring of tall, dark stones. From a certain regularity about them, I guessed they were not real stones, but poured black dimatough.

  In other words, we were in a private cove, probably the private beach of some property, where the owners could have disported in safety and privacy. The waves broke, passing through the tight space left open between the ring of stones. The water in the cove rose and fell with the effect of something breathing deeply. I could easily see it as a place for children to learn to swim, or for a family to enjoy the sea without being watched by strangers.

  Now, as Alexis got to the edge of the water and continued into it, splashing up to his knees into the ocean, a shadow detached from the deeper shadow around the rocks. It revealed itself as it approached as a little boat, the kind of craft children will motor in around safe areas. And like a children’s toy, it made no sound, save the buzz of an electric motor.

  There was no sound either, as Alexis nodded to the one man in the craft and then carefully, delicately, deposited the doctor in the little boat. The boatman nodded.

  And then…and then the little craft grew a dome of transparent…ceramite or dimatough, I’d guess. And silently it submerged.

  We waited in silence while I tried to make sense of what I’d seen. I’d guess that the little craft was a submarine’s lifeboat. Its retractable, transparent dome had halved, retracting down to take in the doctor. Then it had closed again to take him to…a submarine waiting beyond the black rocks, I guessed.

  The little craft came back silently, and Alexis turned to Madame Dufort and said, almost soundlessly, “Madame.” She had stepped up to stand beside him, the sea wetting half of her very proper skirt, but she turned back, to where Corin and I had stopped at the edge of the sea. “Corin?” she said. “Son?”

  Corin shook his head. “Apres vous, Maman,” he said. But I knew that voice, that stubborn tone, and I had a feeling that he had no intention of going, before or after her.

  She seemed to know that too. By the light of the moon, her expression was exasperated, a mother’s annoyance. “Corin,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “This is my place, enfin. You and Papa must go. I don’t have a need to. No one knows me. And there is…a man must make sure that no innocents are harmed—Surely you understand?”

  She shook her head and said, “Take care,” and to Alexis, “Look after him.” Then she stepped into the craft. The dome closed and the craft went under again.

  I expected Alexis to turn and come out of the sea. Then we would have time to talk. At least I hoped so, because I had a lot to say to him.

  But he remained very still, and I thought he was waiting for the craft and then…would get into it and go with the doctor. Of course, perhaps he needed to go with the doctor and his wife, to arrange their stay wherever it was they needed to be.

  On the other hand, perhaps he meant to run away, abandon the isle after setting whatever plans he’d got started.

  The craft came back, the man in it sitting, immobile and impassive, a slight man with dark brown hair. And Alexis turned to me. “Madame,” he said. “If you will.”

  “What? No.” I was outraged. “I have come here for a purpose, and I have not fulfilled that purpose.”

  Alexis’s homely countenance looked like he was counting backward from three thousand. Slowly. Possibly in Chinese. “Madame,” he said. He turned and advanced out of the sea towards me. “You have to go.”

  “No.” I stepped backward up the sand and half hoped he would try to force me, because I was more than willing to show him that I was not his to command. “I came here to save the Good Man and I—”

  “The Good Man,” he sneered, his cou
ntenance turned ugly. “If you think that the Good Man should be saved by you, you are—”

  That was when the voice called out from up on the beach. “Alexis Brisbois. Mailys Bonheur. Doctor Dufort. Madame Dufort. You are under arrest by orders of the Protector of the Republic.”

  “Merde,” Alexis said. “Zen, now, please, I beg of you.”

  I shook my head.

  At the head of the stairs, a man appeared, standing in the full moonlight. He was short, with a haircut that made each of his hairs fall into the exact position to delineate an elegant cranium. Except for the balding up front. And the unmistakable rabbit-quality of his features.

  “Alexis,” he said. “Surrender. You know she has a tenderness for you. It won’t go badly for you.”

  Alexis’s face did something. I wasn’t sure what exactly, but for just that moment, as his facial muscles contorted and his heavy eyebrows came down over his dark eyes, I wouldn’t at all have been surprised should he have grown enormous fangs or turned into a werewolf. At any rate, he looked as though he’d very much like to acquire a more murderous shape. “I’d like to beat you,” he told me in a vicious whisper. “If I weren’t sure you’d manage to get into even greater trouble, I’d knock you unconscious and stick you in that craft.” Then he moved, just so slightly. I realized he was moving to hide view of the craft from the beach, and he turned towards the figure up on the sea wall, by the stairs. “Jean!” he said. “Are you now her errand boy? Did she threaten to burn your frocks?”

  The man took a step back, shook his head. “Don’t play the fool, Alexis. I have ten guards with me. This is no time to be an idiot. Rose said to bring you, and that you had nothing to fear. We understand you were caught on the Good Man’s side, and you had no chance to escape. We understand your natural sympathies are with us.”

  I saw Alexis’s hand go back to the back of his pants. I figured he had a burner hidden there, where the fullness of his doubletlike coat hid a multitude of sins. Still in a whisper, he said, “Run. Left. There’s a path out. Keep the children safe.”

  I had no idea who he meant by the children, and then I perceived that the girl who had guarded the cove for us was knitting herself with the wall, hoping, I was sure, to pass unnoticed. And she was a child, probably well under twenty. And Corin, too, was a child in a way.

  I grabbed at his arm. He seemed to resist briefly, but as Alexis said, “My dear Dechausse, you have no idea where my sympathies are or why!”

  And then, lightning fast, so fast I could barely follow it, Alexis drew a burner and fired at the man on the wall. And shockingly, unbelievably, the man returned fire. Even as he fired back, I realized he was too intent on Alexis to see us. I ran, holding Corin’s arm, to flatten against the wall. Then, pulling at the young woman, I led them both at a fast sort of slide, in the direction Alexis had indicated. As I did, I realized that I’d have been killed by Alexis’s first shot. And I was faster than normal people. But then perhaps Dechausse knew Alexis very well and knew what he was likely to do.

  My heart hammered in my chest, pushing the blood past my ears with a sound much like the sea. I was trying to move as fast as possible, but not so fast that two normal young people couldn’t follow me. To their credit, neither of them protested. They obeyed my pull in silence, even the young woman who knew nothing of me. Corin was the one having trouble keeping up with the speed, stumbling occasionally as I tried to rush him along.

  In the confusion, intent on getting the young people to a safe place, I didn’t pay attention to Alexis’s fight, except for keeping an eye out on the beach, in case the man atop the wall or the men he had with him should come after us.

  Alexis seemed to be firing with both hands, and some other men had joined the fight from above the wall—or at least burner rays were coming from multiple places in the retaining wall, lending credit to Dechausse’s claim that he had many men with him.

  We hit water, and walked sideways into it, trying not to splash or make too much noise, even though I was sure that we couldn’t be heard above the zap of the burners. But it also seemed to me that, in the light of the firing weapons, we were fully visible, no matter how closely we knitted ourselves against the wall.

  Then, suddenly, something blew up. I couldn’t tell where, precisely, but it seemed to me in recollecting the images before the explosion that Alexis Brisbois had taken a grenade from one of his pockets, and pulled the pin.

  There was a fountain of sand, a lot of screams and a lot of imprecations. And I realized from some of them that the men from the wall had to be on the beach, having somehow crept there without my seeing them. I grabbed Corin and half threw him into the deep water. Then I threw the young woman. I screamed as they tried to come up again, “Dive, dive, dive.”

  And then I dove after them, in the dark water, with the pale moonlight filtering through, my lungs bursting with lack of air.

  Alexis had said there was a passage here, but I couldn’t see one above water, between the dark, artificial rocks, and the retaining wall. So the passage must be under water.

  I dove deeper, looking for it.

  Horrible Example

  I swam deeper and deeper, away from the light. It felt as though my lungs must burst before my hand—extended in front of me—perceived a break between rock and wall. By feel alone, since it was too dim to see this far down, it was hard to tell if I could fit through, but there wasn’t much other choice. The only other choice was to go back to the beach and be shot by whoever had come to arrest Alexis and whoever was with him.

  Swimming forward, I could touch rock and wall on either side, but nothing caught. I emerged on the other side, into brighter-moonlit water outside the shadowy little cave, and I realized I must swim upwards or drown. My lungs felt near bursting and at any minute, my mouth would open against my will, trying to get air that simply wasn’t there.

  I made a rush for it, swallowing three gulps of water before I was clearheaded enough to realize that no, there was no one pointing a burner at me, which of course, was a possibility. It was possible that it was a small detachment and that, as such, it was surrounding the cove only. Or, depending on how badly whoever it was who had sent them wanted to apprehend Alexis and his presumed accomplices, the capturing party could have extended here.

  But when I surfaced there was no one there. I’d have seen anyone waiting because there was no beach on this side.

  Beaches on seacities were always artificial constructions, at least beaches as they were shown in holos and as people imagined them, with sand leading on to a gentle slope into the ocean. Seacities, poured in dimatough and anchored to the ocean floor in some way I wasn’t sure I understood, back in the twenty-first century, were…one piece. There would, I suppose, in time, be sand on their beaches, and their beaches would become graduated as the sea wore away at the dimatough.

  But right then and there, unless beaches were constructed and sand flown in, the seacity floor, upon which all construction rested, ended abruptly at the water’s edge. Save for where harbors had been constructed, the most common view of a seacity was as of a black or gray cliff rising out of the sea.

  And on this side of the rocks, no one had built a beach. There was the cliff and, at the base of it, the not uncommon bit of a lip, little more than a natural shelf created in the pouring of the dimatough.

  I thought that I’d need to swim to it and lie down to rest. After that, I could think of where to go, but first I must be able to think, and I was still shaky from holding my breath so long.

  Then I wondered where the two young people were and realized, with a groan, that I might need to swim back and get them.

  This was just before two blond heads popped up out of the sea, close to me. The first was Corin’s, and he broke the water surface gasping, snorting and coughing, indicating that the holding of his breath had failed sometime before he made it to the air. The second was the young woman who’d been waiting for Alexis, her blond hair streaming water and glued to her head whi
le she blinked. She looked far more composed than Corin.

  I caught their eye and gestured with my head towards the shelflike feature. Corin nodded, and when I pulled myself up to the ledge, and sat on it, he sat next to me, and then the girl pulled herself up next to him.

  “I beg pardon,” I said. “I should have come up to guide you. I was going to see if there was a passage, and by the time I found it, I needed to see if I could get through.”

  Corin gave me an odd look. “Why should you have come back? We are grownups, and we could find our own way. We did.”

  I almost said Alexis had told me to look after them, but suddenly realized they might resent the sentiment as well as the fact he’d called them children.

  “I think,” the girl said, her voice higher. “Alexis told you to get us out of there, didn’t he?”

  “Who are you?” I asked, taken with the sudden certainty she must be his daughter, or someone he trusted as much. I remembered the name that Dechausse had called down. “Mailys Bonheur?”

  She inclined her head. “They call me that,” she said.

  “And you were working with Alexis Brisbois?”

  She opened her mouth, closed it, then suddenly shrugged with the air of a woman throwing it all on the line. “In a way. I was his…secretary,” she said. And as though she thought I’d judge it unlikely, which I did for someone so young, she added, “No, secretary trainee, you see. Clerk in the offices. I barely escaped on the night…the night of the ball. Alexis has been trying to track us down, look after us.”

  For reasons I couldn’t imagine, Corin looked stricken. He stared at the young woman then said, “You?” in an accusatory tone.

  That seemed to confuse her. She blinked at him. “Yes, why?”

  “Oh, nothing at all,” he said.

  “I take it you don’t approve of your father’s work?”

  Corin groaned. “Ah, papa, papa.”