I opened my mouth to make an implausible denial, but he didn’t wait, barking a command at Ojas, who pulled a device out of his coat, and moved towards me. “Whoa! What’s—”
“Shut up or I kill him,” Dandak snapped, pointing his weapon at Shardul. “Do it,” he ordered Ojas.
Ojas shoved me to my feet, running the device over my body. A scanner, I figured. Sanjeev stared at me in horror, as if I’d split open and revealed a monster hidden in my skin. I suppose I had.
A chilly calm came over me. I felt Shardul’s fear, the hate and suspicion of the three men, the miserable confusion of the old woman, and Sanjeev’s crippling terror. I knew we couldn’t escape. I couldn’t save myself. My only hope was saving Shardul. “Let him go,” I said, my voice sounding oddly flat and even to my ears. “He knows nothing. I tricked him like I tricked Sanjeev.”
Dandak’s blue eyes remained cold, and his emotions, like his aim, flickered not at all. Ojas continued his scanning. To my surprise he stopped, shaking his head, and spoke to Dandak. Had he really not found the implants?
Ojas pushed me back down to the chair. Dandak leaned forward, assessing me. “Who are you?”
“Gafur Kawildin from Hegal. You’re right. I’m not a cop. I...I’ve been lying. I wanted to meet you, do something for our people. I really do work for the police though. Ask Sanjeev. The information I gave him was accurate. I want to help.”
His eyes narrowed, and a sliver of uncertainty entered his emotions. Could it work? Would he believe me?
He stood, and held his hand out for Ojas’s device. “Who knows you’re here?”
“No one but Shardul, I swear. I’m not stupid. The chuma cops are looking for you. I’ve got access to their system. I can pull out whatever you need to know. I thought if you believed I was a cop too, you’d trust me. I’m sorry, okay? It was a dumb thing to do.”
Please let him believe me. It was the only hope I had of saving Shardul, if not myself.
He stood in front of me, staring down. No one moved, or made a sound. Waiting, like I was, for his next move.
He raised his hand to my face, and I jerked in reflex. “Careful. I think my cheek’s broken.”
Dandak sneered. “Hold them,” he told the men restraining us. “I’m going to call someone.”
Nadira had fled as soon as the shouting started. Shardul was looking for a way to get out of this by force, I sensed, and I wished I could signal to him not to risk his life. We had a better chance of arguing our way out. Not a very big chance, but fighting these brutes in my condition was hopeless. Sanjeev might not help them but he wasn’t going to help us either.
Dandak was back in very little time, and he shouted in Nihani at Sanjeev who leapt to his feet. Shardul shouted back, but his captor had him firmly under control. “Let him go!” I yelled up at Dandak. “He’s done nothing.”
“Only bring a spy into our midst. There’s something interesting about Shardul, Sanjeev. His best friend until a few months ago was the governor’s son, Javen Ythen, a former cop.”
“Yes, but he—”
Dandak sliced impatiently through the air to silence Sanjeev, who cowered and shut up. “Then Javen Ythen apparently goes back to Kelon, good riddance, and who should Sri Shardul start to be seen associating with? Another dark-haired man who bears a superficial resemblance to Ythen, is exactly the same height and build, and also a former cop. Who, we discover, is matos—just like Javen Ythen. And who has some kind of cheek implant.”
Fuck.
Dandak crouched before me, and suddenly ripped the dressing off my skin. I yelped in pain, but he stopped me clapping my hand over the injury with a brutally strong hand on my wrist. He raised the scanner and held it against my face. It beeped softly, and he smiled nastily. He did something with the device. Blazing agony shot through my skull, and I yelled, pulling away from his attack. He yanked me hard, dragging me close, running the scanner over my forehead and jaw. Another jab of pain, blinding me. I collapsed off the chair, holding my face, the fiery pain easing only slightly.
A kick to my side made me cry out and curl around the hurt. “Someone’s tracking you. Not any more.” His automatic clicked quietly as he readied a shot. I couldn’t see him for the pain tears. I waited for the bullet, hoping he believed me about Shardul.
“Shardul doesn’t know anything, I swear. He’s nothing to me. Just a pawn. Let him go and you can do what you want with me.”
“I can do that anyway.” Dandak grabbed my collar, hauled me up, and jabbed a hypospray at my neck. I barely registered that he wasn’t going to shoot me, before everything went away.
~~~~~~~~
Waking was about as unpleasant an experience as I’d ever had in my life. My head pounded with every beat of my heart, and my vision sparkled in rhythm. My mouth tasted like someone had taken a piss in it, and my body was a mass of aches and tortured muscles.
I panted through the worst of the pain, trying to figure out my situation and location. My hands and feet were tied with rope, tightly with no give. I was on my back. I rolled onto my side, and saw another person lying still and bound about a metre from me. Shardul. I held my breath while I listened for his. When I heard it, saw his chest rise and fall slowly, the tight worry in my own eased a little. But only a little, because we were both prisoners, and who knew where?
I looked around. We were indoors, in a small dark room with the dim shapes of boxes and sacks just visible in the gloom. A storeroom, for food, I guessed, going by the smell. No helpful tools or sharp edges to cut our bonds, and when I squinted, I saw the light under a rough wooden door intermittently interrupted, as if someone stood guard outside.
First things first. We were both alive, though I had no idea why. I had no idea where we were, but I figured we’d been taken some way from the farm. If Dandak had disabled my implants, then Captain Largosen couldn’t track me, and presumably Dandak wanted us well away from our last known position. But why not just shoot me? Both of us?
I couldn’t guess and my head hurt too much for prolonged concentration. Shardul. I needed him awake, because he was smarter than me, and two of us had a better chance of escape than one alone.
Painfully I wriggled my clumsy way over to Shardul, coming up to lie behind him. “Shardul, wake up.”
No reaction. He weighed less than me, so the drugs would have taken more hold on him if we’d had an equivalent dose. My fear was that he’d been injured on top of it. I had no way of knowing what had happened to him after I’d lost consciousness, and he could have been roughed up, questioned under duress. Dandak had shown no interest in my protestations of Shardul’s innocence, and he might have thought Shardul was a softer touch to having the truth beaten out of him.
My imagination had Shardul dying before my eyes, and it made me desperate. I nudged him as hard as I could. “Shardul.”
He made a sound—a grunt, a moan, I wasn’t sure—and inhaled sharply. “Javen?” he whispered groggily.
“Here. Shhh, there’s a guard.” He grunted again. “Are you hurt?” I asked, wishing he’d roll over.
He took some time to answer. “No. Sore, though. I think we weren’t handled very carefully.”
“They knocked you out when they did me?”
“Yes. No questions first, which was odd.”
“No need. We were betrayed.”
“Largosen?”
“No idea. We have to get out of here.”
He chuckled dryly. “I know you’re amazingly talented, but I suspect making ropes evaporate is beyond even you.”
“Wasn’t planning on evaporating them, just cutting them. In my boot heel, there’s a knife. I need you to get it out and use it on my restraints. We should hurry. I have no idea what their plans are for us.”
“The things we don’t know about all this are too numerous. Move back, will you?”
I did so and awkwardly manoeuvred around so my head was level with Shardul’s feet. I couldn’t do much else to help him. He had to open the magnetic
catch on my right boot heel and winkle out the little knife on his own. His fingers were probably numb, like mine.
He couldn’t do the cutting himself, I realised after a few fumbled attempts, so I had him hold the knife as hard and firmly as he could, while I rubbed the rope around my wrists against it. The knife was small, and the rope tough and new. I couldn’t even tell if I was making any headway at all, or if I was cutting skin instead of the bonds. Both of us were working behind our backs, and my hands had lost all sensation. “Should teach this stuff at University,” I said, grunting with effort.
“Quite. And all heels should have bigger knives installed. This isn’t working, Javen.”
“It’s all we have.”
“I could pray.”
“So go ahead. Just hold the fucking knife while you do it, okay?”
He went silent, and I kept working. Whether it was his prayers or sheer blind luck, I didn’t know, but five seconds later, I thought I felt some give. I tried forcing my wrists apart, and fell forward in shock as it worked. “Bloody hell!”
“What? Are you all right?”
“Yes. It worked. Give me a minute or two.”
“Thank the Spirit,” he breathed, and I was inclined to give him that, since praying might have helped him concentrate, at least.
I dragged my numb and useless arms around in front of me. “Bloody” was the right word—we’d made a mess of my skin. But it was all superficial. The most important thing was I had use of my hands...or would do, once the blood supply returned, which it did, slowly and very painfully. I had to bite my sleeve so not to moan at the additional agony.
Cutting the rest of the ropes away took a lot less time. Shardul wasn’t as pleased as I was at being free from them. “You look terrible, and I think that cheek wound is becoming infected.”
“If we don’t get out of here, an infection is the least of my worries, and so’s a head injury. I need your brain, Shardul. Mine’s wrecked.”
He snorted with amusement, which cheered me a little, even though nothing about this was funny. “I can’t see how my brain is going to get us out of this room.”
“Any idea where we are?”
“Not in the slightest. Rural is my only guess, which covers ninety-five percent of Medele. We didn’t know where we started from, remember?”
“Take a look around the room, see if you can find something we can use as a weapon. But quietly.”
He slipped his shoes off and climbed silently to his feet, while I watched the ankles of the guard outside. He had the tiny torch from my heel pack to help him. The only other light we had came through the crack at the bottom of the door, and that wasn’t much.
I didn’t attempt to get up off the floor—I was far too dizzy for that, and the exertion of getting freed from the ropes had nauseated me. I lay with my ear to the floorboards, hoping to maybe hear conversations in the rest of the house, figure out how many people were holding us.
The building we were in creaked and groaned quietly, and I guessed it was wood all the way, which carried sound nicely. I heard no voices, but what I did hear surprised me. Water. Not running through pipes, but lapping softly against something underneath us. I listened for a good two minutes before my sluggish brain figured it out. “I know where we are, I think.”
Shardul padded quietly over to me and crouched down. “Where?”
“Demultan Flats. It’s the rainy season, so the river’s in flood, right? This building is over water. Is there anywhere else where they build like that?”
“Not that I know of. But does that help? We’re still without a weapon, or transport, and you’re hurt.”
“Details, details. Help me up, and give me the torch.”
Jyoti had told me when I was out here the last time that the floorboards in many houses weren’t fixed for easy replacement and drying during excessive floods. I hoped she was right, and that it was true for this building. I pried at the crack between two boards with the little knife, not making any obvious headway.
“What are you trying to do?” Shardul whispered.
“Lift one of the boards so we can drop through.”
“You’ll make too much noise, and the boards will be tight from all the moisture.”
I glared at him, realising he was right, but annoyed he had ruined my great plan. “We can’t just sit here.”
“No. Let me have the torch again, please.”
I was out of ideas, and his brain worked better than mine, so I handed it over, still irritated, and now worried. If we couldn’t get out of here in the next few hours, while it was still dark, we would be helpless to prevent Dandak doing whatever the hell he wanted. Up to and including shooting us and dropping our bodies into the river to drift out to sea. The only question was why he hadn’t already done that.
Shardul moved a sack. “Careful,” I breathed. He turned and gave me a look I couldn’t see in the shadows, but my empathy told me he had already considered the noise issue, so would I please shut up?
He moved some other items, not making a single sound, though the boards creaked a little. The guard’s feet didn’t move. Maybe he was asleep. Hoped so.
“There.” He pointed at the floor, and I slid over to see. “A hatch, unlocked. They must unload and load through here in the wet season.”
Dandak had either forgotten or not known about it—or assumed that two tied up men wouldn’t be able to use this escape route. “Hinges make noise.”
“Yes. No help for it...ah, in your heel. Is there anything in the medical kit?”
I stuck my foot out and he opened the heel catch, taking out the sealed kit. The antibiotic cream? It was usually greasy, wasn’t it?
He examined the content, and extracted the tube of ointment, and a minijector. “What’s this?”
“Mahozil. Painkiller.”
“Use it, Javen. If we get out of here, you’ll need to be as active and alert as possible.”
He had a point, and after I stuck the minijector against my neck to deliver the Mahozil dose, he used some of the cream on my cheek injury. “Waste of time,” I said.
“Possibly. Hold the torch, will you?”
He squeezed the tube against the ancient metal hinges. There didn’t look like enough of the cream to make the slightest difference, but we had to try—and hope like fuck the hatch wasn’t locked on the other side, or stuck from swollen wood.
He must have had the same fear, because he took the knife and carefully eased it all the way around the edge of the hatch. That wouldn’t have occurred to me. If I had to be stuck in this mess with anyone, I was glad it was Shardul. Except I would never forgive myself if anything—anything else, at least—happened to him.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be,” I said, trying to sound less anxious than I was. The painkiller had taken effect, but even in peak condition, I’d be worried. It was the middle of the night, the middle of the flood, and I had no idea where in the Flats we were or if we were in the Flats in the first place. Rural Medele wasn’t friendly toward Kelons, as I knew well. Getting out of this storeroom wasn’t even half the problem.
He nodded, and gave me back the knife. “Whatever you do, don’t lose that or the light. They’re all we have.”
He eased the heavy ring grip up, then put his strength behind lifting the hatch itself. I held my breath, willing the wood to move smoothly. It did, years of constant use making it loose and easy to move.
I gave Shardul a thumb’s up and his grin flashed white in the dark. “Hope you can swim,” he said.
“Like a quirnel. You first.”
There was a ladder leading down from the hatch, fairly logically, and Shardul went down, slow and silent. A smell of damp rotting vegetation wafted out of the hole, and I wondered how I could have missed that unforgettable odour in the first place.
“Torch,” he signalled, and when I gave it to him, he swept the darkness below him. He popped up out of the hole. “There’s a boat tethered to a support just here.
”
“Chain or rope?”
“Can’t tell. Knife?”
I passed it to him, and he dropped down again. I bit my lip. A boat was unimaginable good luck. Even if I had no idea where we were, away from here could only be a good thing.
Shardul reappeared. “It’s only tied. Come on.”
I eased over to the hatch, and climbed down carefully, still dizzy and suffering an alarming vertigo as soon as I was upright. At least the pains and aches had receded. I needed to make the most of that before the painkiller wore off.
Shardul waited for me in the little boat, holding the torch to give me as much light as he could—which wasn’t much. The boat rocked as I climbed in, and he hissed in a breath, as worried as I was. My heart was thumping by the time I found a seat, and the boat stabilised.
“Let it go,” I murmured. “We can drift with the current, can’t we?”
“There are oars, but yes. Keep down. We’re high under the house.”
And I’d already had too many knocks to the head. I leaned forward, going flat. Shardul slipped the knot holding the boat to the pillar with the confidence of a born sailor, and we began to move. In which direction, I didn’t know. Didn’t matter—we were out of our prison, and the boat had given our chances of surviving a significant boost.
We cleared the house, and found it was drizzling. There were no lights anywhere, our torch all we had to avoid any obstacles such as trees and house supports. “Which way should we go?” Shardul asked.
“With the current. If we hit the river, we can head to Verzet. If we’re going inland, we’ll have to take our chance. If you spot a light, head towards it. Chances are it’ll be the local police station.”
Shardul looked like he knew what he was doing with the oars, and since I didn’t have a clue, I let him take charge of them. He let the current do the work, using the oars only for guidance, and a couple of times to push the boat away from an obstruction.
The rain increased, which made us less visible, but also made our progress miserable and cold. The torch was close to useless in these conditions, Shardul having to wait until we hit something before he knew to push the boat clear. We were moving at a walking pace, and at least we were now well clear of the building we’d been held in. It was impossible to otherwise judge how far we had travelled, or the direction, but I thought we had left the original settlement long since. I had only a vague idea how many were situated on the flood plain, though. Jyoti’s relatives lived in one and I knew there were more, but that was it.
Different Senses Page 56
