There All Along

by Dane, Lauren

  Behind them on the table, Vikus stirred. Pera was on him in a flash, her hands on the front of his robes. Busy with Rehker, Jodah couldn’t do more than glance their way, but Venga had come forward. He and Pera struggled. Venga was bigger, but Pera younger and stronger. She pushed the old man down and bent over him. A blade flashed in her hand.

  “No!” Jodah cried as she stabbed the old man in the chest. Blood gouted in a thick, pumping stream.

  In that moment of distraction, Rehker grabbed a cooking pot from its place on the counter and slammed it against the side of Jodah’s head. The world tipped and spun. Then went black.

  29

  Sunsrise was Teila’s favorite time of day. It hadn’t always been so—as a child her amira had always had to pull her from the covers, and as a young woman she’d taken on the habit of staying up late and waking late, too. Becoming a mother had changed those habits out of necessity, not desire, but her reluctant embrace of the early morning had become genuine appreciation after too many interminably long nights sitting up with Stephin, who’d suffered from night terrors for one full cycle. Only daybreak soothed him, and Teila had come to cherish the first rising glimmers of pink and gold in the black night sky. She could only pray now that sunsrise would see her child recovering.

  He’d never been so sick. This was more than random childhood illness. There’d been a few times in Stephin’s brief life when Teila had feared losing him—once when he’d been missing for half a day after hiding in an empty cupboard and being trapped there. Once when he almost fell from an upper balcony as she watched, screaming, until Vikus managed to pull him back inside. And now, when no matter what she tried, he got sicker and sicker.

  More blisters had broken out all over his mouth, spreading across his pale, plump cheeks. He no longer even moaned when she shifted him. His skin had been cool and clammy before, but now heat had risen all over his body. He lolled in her arms.

  “C’mon, baby,” she whispered. “Please, come back to Mao.”

  Carefully, she put him on the bed so she could go to the monitor again and see if the medprogram had come back online. The screen crackled with noise when she tried to tap in a few commands, but nothing happened. Acid burned her throat when she looked at her son, lying so still. She needed to know what to do to treat him. They needed a medicus or the medprogram and now, or her boy might be lost to her before sunsrise.

  She went to the door, hating to leave him for even a moment but needing do find out if Vikus had come back or if Jodah had been able to get the network running. The moment she set foot in the hallway, the lights flickered and went out. Teila froze, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

  And it was dark, she realized. Completely. No light sweeping back and forth from the lamp room. She hadn’t checked it at nightfall, her attentions focused on Stephin, but it still should’ve turned on automatically.

  Outside, lightning flashed as another storm came in close on the heels of the last one. It might’ve explained the lights going out in the hallway, but not the lamp. If the main solar cells were somehow disrupted, the lighthouse went on auxiliary power from the backup cells. The only way the lamp wouldn’t go on was if something had happened to it.

  Fresh worry warred with her, not coming close to displacing her growing terror about her son but adding to it. Teila put a hand out, seeking the wall. She found something else instead.

  A solid body. Warmth. Before she could recoil, a hand grabbed her wrist. Held her tight. Another hand covered her mouth before she could scream. She was backed up against the wall hard enough to slam her head. An arm came up beneath her chin, pressing her throat.

  “What do you think you’re up to?” breathed a low and trembling male voice directly into her ear. Rehker. Teila shuddered, but couldn’t answer. He didn’t seem to expect one. A knee nudged between her legs, a fierce pressure devoid of any sensuality. “How’s your boy?”

  She made no attempt at even a muffled retort; she bit, instead. She choked on the foul taste of his blood, but didn’t let go even when he began shaking her. He dug his fingers into her hair and slammed her head against the wall. Again. Once more, until she fell from him, slack and faint. She went to her knees, ears ringing, stars bursting behind her eyelids.

  “Oh, look,” the man said from above her as another flash of lightning illuminated the hall. “It’s a whaler. A big one, a crew of sixty or more I’d say. I surely hope they know enough to stay far away. Not run aground.”

  “The lamp,” Teila managed to say.

  “The lamp is out.” More lightning and at last she could see his face. Rehker sneered and nudged her with his toe. “The lamp will stay out.”

  “Why would you . . . ?”

  “Let’s just say I needed that equipment for other things.” In another flash from outside, his grin was wide and terrible. He bent in front of her face, the heat of him so close she knew if she snapped her teeth it would catch his flesh. “Other, other things.”

  From outside, far away, she thought she heard the slap of a ship against the sands. It had to be her imagination, just like the sounds of men screaming had to come from memory, not whatever was happening out there now. When Rehker moved away from her, Teila struggled to her feet.

  “You have to turn on the lamp.”

  “No. I don’t. I told you,” he said in a low voice that was not very much like the one she was used to but still eerily familiar, “I need the equipment in the lamp room for other things.”

  “What could you need it for?” With the wall at her back, Teila was able to orient herself. Her bedroom door was across from her and to her right. The lamp room, all the way to her left at the end of the hall and up another short flight of stairs.

  “They will all die. All of them die. All of you die, too. That boy of yours, Teila. He’s going to die. Did you know that? You can fix the lamp or you can fix your boy, Teila. Which do you choose?”

  “You shut your mouth,” she said fiercely. “Vikus is bringing—”

  Rehker laughed. “Vikus? That useless pup. He isn’t bringing anyone. If he’s not dead yet himself, the dear Pera will have taken care of him. Much the way she took care of your boy, though much more swiftly, I’d think.”

  Teila staggered toward the sound of his voice as another flash of light lit them both. “What do you mean? What have you done?”

  “Chaos,” whispered Rehker in a voice that sounded like love. “Anarchy. Disbandment. Downfall. You want to know why?”

  She didn’t have to ask him why. She already knew. She’d known the moment the first flash of lightning had lit his face.

  Rehker had gone over.

  30

  Jodah wasn’t out for long. His enhancements kicked in, sending blood flowing to the places that needed it, expanding his lungs to bring in fresh oxygen. He was on his feet before he actually became aware of what he was doing.

  He didn’t remember grabbing her, but he had Pera by the back of her neck. She flailed, but unlike Venga, Jodah wasn’t old or infirm. The fragile stem of her throat threatened to snap when he shook her.

  “What are you doing?” Jodah demanded.

  The lights went out. It didn’t matter to him—he could see as well in the dark as in the light. But Pera fought him harder, kicking and biting at him like a wild animal. She began to scream in breathless, panting gasps. He didn’t have time for a temper tantrum. He shook her again until her teeth rattled.

  “Don’t worry about me!” she screamed through horrifying laughter. “You should be paying attention to something else, something other than that bitch’s spawn! You can’t help him anyway, there’s no cure!”

  Jodah went still. Pera still dangled in his grip. Vikus groaned from the table as unsteady Billis leaned over him. Venga didn’t move and made no sound.

  Jodah brought her very close to his face and bit out each word. “What did you do?�
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  “Whale oil. I gave him whale oil!”

  “Why?” Oh, by the Three, Jodah’s stomach twisted as he remembered now, Pera in the shed while he put away the whale oil. He stopped himself from breaking her neck right then, but only barely. “Why, Pera?”

  Her eyes fluttered. She couldn’t see him as anything more than shadows, but every line of her face, every pull of her expression were clear as glass to him. Her features shifted rapidly through every emotion. Hilarity, fear, desire, surprise, all in rapid succession and not as though she had any control over it. A low, grinding noise came from deep in her throat, and froth appeared in the corners of her mouth.

  “I remember,” she said, jerking in his grip.

  Her eyes opened wider, staring into his though he knew all she could see was darkness. All of her muscles twitched and spasmed, making her kick and squirm. Then, she calmed.

  “Oh, Mothers. I remember everything now.”

  She’d dropped the blade she’d used on Venga, but all good soldiers carried more than one weapon, and no matter what she’d become, Pera must’ve been a very good soldier. The knife came up and across before Jodah could step back, so the blade caught the edge of his arm. But her slice wasn’t meant for him. She’d aimed for her own throat, gouging deep and without mercy. No chance of saving her. The suicide act was a maneuver they’d all been trained in.

  If only, Jodah thought as the heat of her dying covered him, she’d done it before being captured by the Wirthera.

  He dragged her corpse to the corner and let her fall. He knelt next to Venga, certain the old man was dead, but he found a faint throb of a pulse. The blood flowing from his wound had slowed, but only because his heart was going to stop soon.

  Jodah hadn’t been medically trained. He knew that much without having to force a memory. But as a Rav Gadol he’d been given the information necessary to provide care in the field. Programmed into his auxiliary data sources, accessible via the data stream, if only he could finally figure out how to access it. He was so close and still too far.

  Pressing his hand to Venga’s, Jodah murmured a prayer to the Mothers to take the old man under their fiery skirts, should he not survive. Venga didn’t move. Vikus did though, when Jodah checked over his wounds.

  “Billis. Are you hurt?”

  “Not too bad. No.”

  “Is there a handlight or something down here?”

  Billis gestured wildly. “Yes. There’s a box of them in one of the cabinets. For emergencies. We’ve never had to use them, the backup power always comes on.”

  Jodah went to the cabinet and found the handlights, cracking the inner tube to get the light glowing. He gave a few to Billis and tucked a couple into his sleeve pocket. Also from the cabinet, he pulled a medkit of sutures, surgical glue, and bandages. The seal on it had never been opened, and the box hissed when he cracked it.

  “Take this,” he told Billis. All of this came from common sense, not from the data stream, which still danced elusively out of his grasp. He rifled through the contents, searching for poison antidotes, but there were none. “Pressure on the wounds. Use the glue to seal them. That bottle is anti-infection meds, make sure he takes some.”

  “Where are you going?” Billis cried.

  “I need to get the power back on. And help Stephin and Teila.” Without waiting for an answer, Jodah left through the back door.

  Lightning bathed the sky when he ran out. In the flash, he saw the dark shape of a whaler, dangerously close to shore. Without the light, it would surely crash.

  The crack of thunder, flash of lightning, the crackle and sting of smoke. Rope skidding on his palms, burning them. The rough kiss of sand against him, over his head as he held his breath and tried not to drown.

  Jodah shook his head free of the images assailing him. Breathing hard, he spat the taste of sand that had become so thick on his tongue he passed a hand over his face to convince himself he was on land and not suffocating beneath the sea. In the next crack of lightning, the ship had come closer. He needed to get the power on.

  The mechanical equipment was all housed in a small shed connected to the lighthouse. Jodah had never had reason to be inside, yet when the door opened with a tug instead of being locked, he froze in surprise. Bathed in the amber glow from the handlight, the interior of the shed gleamed with machinery and solar cells.

  He had been in here before.

  A vision overlaid itself on top of the one he was actually seeing. Most of it was the same, except for the stream of golden sunlight through the windows and a few pieces of equipment that were shifted. He blinked and blinked again, but the vision didn’t fade. From behind him, he heard a woman’s voice and turned even though he knew she wasn’t there for real. Only in his mind.

  In his memory.

  In moments it was gone, nothing but darkness behind him. Focus, he told himself grimly. Get the power on. Find Rehker. Get help for the boy.

  The problem with the solar cells was clear at once—a tangle of wires that had been torn apart. There’d be no fixing it. Whoever had done this, whether it was Rehker or Pera or even Venga, they’d known what they were doing . . . and Jodah did not. Helplessly, he shone his light over the shredded wires, components hanging from the ends. The solar cells had been smashed, all but one, and that one was still connected to the main power grid. One small green light glowed on the circuit board, showing it was live.

  One live connection, but where did it go? He scanned the board but couldn’t tell where any of the wires went. Jodah held the light closer, but none of the ports had been labeled. The data stream brightened as he looked, and for one miraculous moment he thought he was going to be able to access it, figure out the schematics, find a solution. But it was only so much distracting gibberish. Useless and annoying. He blinked it away as best he could.

  From far away, he thought he heard the sound of screams. Teila’s voice, so familiar to him now, brought to his ears only because of his enhancements. He still couldn’t make out her words, but the fact she’d raised her voice enough to carry to him with this much distance between them told him more than he needed to know. She was upstairs with her son, and he needed to get to her.

  31

  You don’t need to do this, Rehker.” Teila, her head spinning and woozy with pain, did her best to stand upright.

  Rehker had dragged her by the hair all the way down the hall and up the stairs to the lamp room, where he’d tossed her against the low wall below the windows. He barely gave her a glance when she managed to get to her knees, but when she put a hand on the windowsill to pull herself higher, he hit her hand with the long metal pipe she used for hooking the storm shutters.

  “Shut your mouth,” he said mildly. “Or I will beat it so swollen you can’t speak.”

  She shut her mouth, but not out of fear. If he beat her any harder, she’d be unable to stop him from whatever he was doing in the lamp room. She’d be incapable of helping her son.

  “Let me go back to Stephin. He needs me.”

  The pipe slammed onto the wall so close to her head she felt the breeze of its passing. Rehker bent over her, the stink of his breath sour enough to choke her. His hand cupped her chin, forcing her to look at him though the lamp room was so dark she could see nothing but the faint glint of his eyes.

  “The lamp or your son, Teila. Which would you choose?”

  She thought of the ship on the storm-tossed sea, but there was no question. No doubt. “My son. Always my son.”

  “Sentimental bitch.” He didn’t sound angry, only thoughtful. “Do you know when they took me, I was one day away from being sent home. To my family. I’d been injured in a hornet attack. My face. I was meant to be blind. They hadn’t done anything to my eyes, they said when I got home I could apply for surgery and might be eligible. The money’s there for the Rav elite, to be sure, but for us plain soldiers, we have to
limp along with what scraps we can glean. When the Wirthera took me, I didn’t even care. What life could I have led back here, supporting a family without my sight? Before I joined the SDF I was a sculptor. I made beautiful things, Teila. How could I do that without being able to see?”

  She thought better of speaking, and Rehker clearly didn’t care to have an answer because he kept on.

  “The Wirthera took me and the rest of the crew on the mediship headed for home. One minute we were cruising along. The next, I was naked in a metal cell with no windows or doors, no sound. Just like that. They don’t tell anyone back here that truth, do they? That the Wirthera don’t need to cross our borders to get to us. We never see their ships because they don’t need to leave them. Maybe,” Rehker said, “they don’t even have them. Maybe they’ve never left their homeworld at all. However they take us, it has nothing to do with a ship. They take us and keep us while they study us . . . and then—”

  “Then they send you back,” Teila said quietly. She wanted desperately to turn her face away from his to keep the stink of his breath from making her want to gag, but she didn’t dare. “I know.”

  “They gave me back my eyes.”

  Teila closed hers. She cringed at the brush of his mouth against her cheek, then to her neck. He sniffed her, and she shuddered.

  “They are the enemy and yet they gave me what my own government would not. Better than the ones even that the Mothers themselves gave me. What do you think of that, pretty Teila?”

  “I don’t think it gives you the right to kill anyone,” she said.

  His teeth tore at her flesh, bringing blood before she shot up a knee to catch him between the legs. With a roar, Rehker fell back enough to allow her to roll away from him. Teila didn’t need light to find her way around the lamp room. She crawled with one shoulder along the curved wall, heading for the door.