Warchild

by Karin Lowachee

  I went to the inidrla-na when Ash-dan wasn’t in it, stood on the balcony wrapped in blankets and breathing sharp, salty air. A spatter of people dotted balconies below but they were too far to see clearly. Clouds huddled in the sky. When they got that dark it meant rain.

  I thought about flying right over the balcony and down the mountainside. What did you toss when your mind enemy refused to let go?

  When the storm hit I watched it from inside the inidrla-na. Water beat at the long windowpanes. The world outside seemed to melt into a gray mass of nothing, broken only by white claws of lightning raking the sky. A big noisy beast. Its cries shook the room. My nerves jumped, wouldn’t settle. Not even when I retreated to my room, on my pallet, under the blankets.

  A flash of lightning tore around the edges of the screen on my window. I jerked awake, not sure when I’d even fallen asleep.

  “Jos-na,” someone said, and a shadow crouched by my side.

  “Niko?”

  He leaned forward and his face caught the bar of light pouring in from the hall. It wasn’t Niko. Blue eyes shone from the shadow, hot as welding flames.

  I struggled to sit, back away.

  But Falcone had me by the arm, my bad arm, and the pain made me kick and scream. No training in me. I fought like a netted fish against the anchor of his hold, managed to scramble off the pallet, across the smooth floor to the far wall.

  “Jos-na!”

  I cradled my arm and pulled in breaths. My skin was wet. Sparks went off in my sight, then a flash of light that didn’t go away.

  My room. Feet approached and I looked up against the ceiling lights, saw Ash-dan staring at me. Confused gray eyes.

  I put my head down, numb from my arm upward. Numb from the inside out.

  * * *

  XXIV

  After that nightmare, Ash-dan was more attentive. He fixed my bandage, gave me more injets for the pain, and cooked me candy-bark soup. He said I was lucky I wasn’t sicker, being from space, even though Niko had probably inoculated me before I’d even landed. I said I didn’t remember, I hadn’t been awake at the time.

  I didn’t want to talk about Niko with Ash-dan. I didn’t want to do anything but sleep.

  I was better by the time Enas-dan returned, but when she saw me in the Tree Room fooling around manually in my comp, she wanted to know if I had slept since Niko had left.

  “I still have a little bit of the flu, ki’redan. But it’s not so bad.”

  “Where is my son?” she asked, and she didn’t mean Niko.

  “I don’t know, ki’redan.”

  She approached closer, crouched to where I sat on my cushion, and put her hand on my head, running it over my hair and down my cheek. I didn’t move. She didn’t linger, but stood quickly and strode from the room.

  I was too tired to follow, though I would’ve liked to have heard that conversation.

  Later, somewhere in the house I heard a door slide shut. In minutes Ash-dan came in. “You seem to be better.” He didn’t pause, but came right up and knelt and put his hand behind my neck. “What did I say before, Jos-na? Do you remember?”

  “Don’t touch me.” I tried to wrench my head away, but he held on. So I grasped his forearm with the good intention of shoving him on his ass.

  But he put his other hand on my chest, not quite gripping the front of my shirt. His fingers seemed to burn through my clothing.

  My uninjured hand shot up toward his chin but he dodged it, slid his hand under my armpit, and squeezed. Hard.

  “Sshh,” he said.

  “Let me go!” I brought my knee up and jabbed an elbow.

  He slammed me onto my back and shoved his knee in my gut. It knocked out my wind. “If you can’t fight me properly, you’ll never last. I think you know this. If every time something happens you feel the need to run to Enas-dan, or my brother, what sort of ka’redan will you make? You are a Hub orphan. Eja, I have little hope for you.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I lashed out, caught him in the face with a fist, and rolled quickly when he leaned back, letting up the pressure.

  “Good,” he said. “Very good.”

  “Ki sraga!”

  “Go on. Run to my mother. She is meditating in her room. Go and disturb her, tell her what I just did. Explain to her about your nightmares, how everywhere you look there is nothing but Falcone—”

  “That’s not true!”

  It wasn’t. It never was the truth until he made it so.

  He shrugged. “Isn’t it? Such a pretty boy you are. Pretty like a girl.”

  “Shut up!”

  He laughed and unfolded to his feet, loose white robes brushing his body in layers. Hiding his weapons. “Niko isn’t coming back for a long time. Eja, you know this? He might not be back for years, as this planet reckons time. There are things going on, larger than one buntla-na ke taga ke go. Even if that buntla-na has such beautiful blue eyes. My brother is immune.”

  The cold cloud in me began to grow, whispering through my head and heart like smoke.

  “You take him away from what he truly should be doing—destroying the rude place that you come from. In you he thinks he sees all the sweet innocence of the Hub. But I know you, Jos-na. You are a pirate’s whore, though you sit there in striviirc-na clothes. And here I am forced to waste my time with a whore.”

  He walked by me to the door.

  “Go ahead, Jos-na. Run to my mother. Turn that face and all your tears to her. Use it like how Falcone trained you.”

  When he left I didn’t hear it. I barely saw it. I didn’t move. Words flailed in my head, wild fists that battered me and left me bruised.

  * * *

  XXV.

  I told Enas-dan nothing, and Ash-dan acted as if nothing had been said between us. So I kept to myself when I could and tried to put it out of my mind. In a week the bot-knitters crawled out the narrow tube in my arm and died in ashes on my bandage. I clenched a fist-sized exercise ball every few hours to strengthen my arm. There wasn’t even a scar, a mark to show what had happened in the vas’tatlar. A month since Niko left, my class began.

  Enas-dan held it in the inidrla-na. Two other students showed up, both of them striviirc-na. They spoke together in a dialect I didn’t know, but I listened for a second just outside the door. When I walked into the room they both stopped and stared at me, big black eyes in broad, greenish-brown faces. Uncasted faces, no pigmentation. They were both taller than me, their feather-textured hair tied back and flowing down their necks. They didn’t look much like the Caste Master.

  I moved to the center of the room and began my breathing exercises. Enas-dan wasn’t there yet and my head felt clouded, my body stiff.

  “Your name?” one of the strivs asked in Ki’hade, stepping up to my right side. I stood still, kept my arms in. His companion drifted to my left. A female striv. It was obvious even with her loose black pants and shirt, which was open at the sides to allow her transparent wings to move.

  “Jos Musey-na,” I answered.

  “Jos Musey,” he said. “What name is that?”

  “A human one. What’s yours?”

  “Mra o Hadu-na. I am Ash-dan’s student. This is Yli aon Ter’tlo-na, Enas-dan’s student. You’re the student of the ki-a’redan bae.”

  “Enh. He’s my teacher.”

  I couldn’t read their faces but they didn’t stand too close. They weren’t trying to intimidate me—yet.

  “Will you be going to space after you’re fully casted?” the girl asked. Her voice trilled much more than Hadu’s.

  “No. Why would I? Are you?”

  “You’re human,” the boy said. “You could serve the fleet in space, maybe even across the buffer on a Hub sympathizer ship. We can’t.”

  “I want to go to space,” Ter’tlo said, “and serve on Bae S’tlian’s ship. Not stay here and wait for the Hub to invade.”

  “Enas-dan will prepare us,” Hadu said. “We heard you’re from space.”

  “Who told you?”


  Enas-dan strode into the room. “I did. Jos-na, your classmates are curious. They have never met anyone so recently from the Hub.”

  “I’ve been on Aaian-na for over a year.” I wished everyone would stop reminding me where I was born.

  “You speak well,” Ter’tlo said, but it sounded like a joke. Her pointed teeth bared just a little.

  “Maybe you fight as well as the se’latbe-na too,” Hadu put in.

  Se’latbe-na. The engineer caste, which knew as much about fighting as an assassin-priest did about building a house.

  I followed Hadu with my eyes as he positioned himself on the floor in a crouch, to begin his respects to the first ki’redane-na. Ter’tlo did the same. I was last, and clasped my hands firmly in that gesture that honored the dead.

  Enas-dan looked us over. “Eja, let’s begin.”

  * * *

  XXVI.

  The class was much like the individual training, with the same proportion of minutes spent on warm-ups (about half the class time), compared to the drills of kicking, punching, and blocking that followed. I quickly learned that Ter’tlo was the senior student, so Enas-dan demonstrated many of the new moves with the female striv before letting Hadu and me attempt it together.

  Hadu had the innate grace of his species, and didn’t hesitate to tell me that he had been training with his teacher since he was five years old. He also never hesitated to tell me how he was going to get himself to space in order to fight the Hub. I never answered him on those claims. He wasn’t truly against me, but we sparred well together. It showed better control if you stopped your strikes before contact, but I accidentally made full force contact once, in a kick that caused a large orange bruise on his arm for days.

  Once the class finished and I helped Hadu clean up the inidrla-na, I retreated to my room. If I stayed too long about the house, Ash-dan always found me, even when we weren’t doing comp work. He didn’t speak to me outside of the training time, but I didn’t want to be around him unless I had to. Luckily Enas-dan was so busy with her sympathizer work and training us, she never commented.

  But she visited me one evening as I sat in my room reading another Send update. I hoped in a way one of the updates would mention Niko so I’d know what he was doing, but then I never wanted it to be a death report.

  “Enas-dan, how often does Niko contact you?”

  She folded down next to my pallet. “Once a month if he can, but it depends on if it’s safe to transmit. I just received his first message. He asks how you are.”

  I tilted the slate at her. “Safer than he is, I guess. This says there’re more debates going on in Hubcentral about how to end ‘the strit threat.’ What would happen if they decide to attack Aaian-na space?”

  She always answered me directly, since the first time I’d met her. “Many of the people on the planet who are training, like you, would have to actually fight. But we don’t want it to get to that. Nan’hade, Vran, and Isuitan are the only countries truly together against the Hub. The rest of Aaian-na are divided and do not always look to the stars.” She took the slate from me and shut it off. “Jos-na, Niko is up there with the hope that the war will end. But it’s a difficult thing to try and stop a war when the other side has little interest to do so.”

  “Why doesn’t Niko just—raise a white flag or something?”

  Enas-dan sighed. “Because the Hub hates him. They wouldn’t listen. There have been so many deaths, over these many years, that people are just too angry to stop.”

  I thought of Ash-dan. “But even if it did stop, how could you trust the Hub?”

  “That’s what we don’t know. There hasn’t been a summit between our worlds since the accord that set up the demilitarized zone. And you see how that’s disintegrated. People in the Hub still want to own us.”

  I poked at my blanket.

  “Jos-na. Niko asks how you are. What should I tell him?”

  “Can’t I write to him?”

  “No, I’m sorry. Our communiqués are limited in length. But tell me what you would like to say and I will pass along the gist.” Her eyes bore into my face.

  “Tell him I’m fine, I guess.”

  “How are your lessons with Ash-dan?”

  “Fine. He says I learn quickly.” Among other things.

  “You keep to this room a lot, Jos-na. You know you can walk down to the shore when you please, or go to the roof.”

  “I know.”

  She pursed her lips briefly, patted the slate, then handed it back to me. “Next week we begin training on guns. Niko told me you had asked him about them.” She smiled.

  “Enas-dan, when’s he coming back?”

  Her smile faded. Her white face and twin tattoos were a mask I couldn’t see behind. “When he can, Jos-na. Truthfully, I don’t know.” She stood and pressed my hair lightly. “In the meantime, try to leave this room. Ask Ter’tlo-na and Hadu-na to show you around the mountainside. They know it well. You can take your sketchbook.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  I had no desire to ask them. I only thought that Niko had left me here, like my parents had left me, and any day now I would know for certain that he was dead.

  * * *

  XXVII.

  “Eyes,” Ash-dan ordered, and I obediently popped in my holopoint receptors. This, my daily dose of comp training, here in my room that the kii’redan invaded with his disapproving presence. I tolerated his brisk instruction because I had to, meanwhile marking in my slate all the days Niko was off-planet. The dates had accumulated to nearly ninety. They felt like a year.

  I activated the comp with a glance and the three-dimensional, citylike grid display of the comp-ops blinked into view across my entire sight. “Communications,” Ash-dan said. I flickered up to the icon and accessed. After waiting a few moments for the simulated satellites to bounce the quantum light around, I passively traced the coded netline until I came to the fail-safes of the simulated Chaos Station commgrid. Ash-dan had constructed a full sim of Earth-Hub’s communications grid in the Dragons—at least the part of the Dragons they regularly patrolled. Deep space was too large to outfit entirely. The grid was pretty complicated and if I didn’t know better I would’ve thought it was the real thing.

  The restricted access wall loomed high and bright. It was supposed to be a deep insertion retrieval mission: Get in, get out, leave no footprints on either end of the link. Ash-dan didn’t follow me in this time, but I was aware in that heightened way burndiving gave you, aware of his gaze outside of my symbol self, looking for my mistakes.

  I inspected all the facets of that wall despite Ash-dan telling me I was on a time limit. One wrong flicker and the polisyms would launch. So I gave the code a good look over, then followed one particular seam where I thought I could insert an interrupt without too much notice—hopefully none at all if I was quick enough. But as soon as I constructed the crank to get me through the wall of code, my symself alerted the spatial awareness part of me—somebody was crawling up my butt. When I flickered that way I saw the bright blue globes of military polisyms.

  Bastard, I thought fleetingly, and beat a hasty retreat, triggering alarms on my heels in a firepath. I cast a false sig in my wake for the polisyms to devour. Most of them descended on the code, tearing it apart for content. Others kept the track. I saw my out, a circle of red hyped to my sight alone, and dived through. I blinked out of the main system ops, breathing hard as if I’d actually run, and glared through the afterimage hologrid at Ash-dan.

  “Why so panicked?” he asked blandly.

  “Those were EarthHub military tracers! Is this realtime?”

  “What if?”

  “I almost got marked!”

  “Yes.” He frowned. “Not much grace in that tail-turning.”

  “Is this real?” If they’d caught me they would have trapped my symself, restricted me from blinking out. I didn’t want to know the consequences of that.

  “You adapt well to comps. I thought to challenge you
.”

  Assassin-priests were smooth liars. I stared, then finally popped out the receptors.

  Ash-dan said, “You’re going to have to learn not to run from military traces. You should diffuse them instead.”

  I busied myself putting the receptors back in their liquid-filled cases.

  “And you definitely must learn not to set off alarms.”

  “Next time I’ll tiptoe.” I snapped the cases shut. “Does all of this mean that once I’m casted I’ll be assigned to satcomm security or something? I didn’t think ka’redan did that.”

  “That will be up to Niko,” he said shortly, and rose to his feet. My lesson was over.

  I wondered if I killed Ash-dan out on a walk or something, how the Caste Master would prove that I’d done it.

  I asked Hadu-na as we practiced on the gun range, a narrow room set apart from the rest of the house with human-shaped sim targets and a collection of weaponry. Enas-dan was working with Ter’tlo-na a few meters away, showing her how to handle a rifle.

  “Say I killed somebody, Hadu-na. How would the Caste Master deal with that?”

  He gave me a direct look. “Do you plan on killing somebody, Jos-na?”

  “No. I’m just asking.”

  He fired a couple shots from his striviirc-na-altered LP-150. They landed a bit wide of the mark. One of his wings flicked sharply. “It would depend on who you killed. Eja, in the later proceedings. Early on, the Caste Masters of all involved would hear all sides involved. Then they would decide who was right and who was wrong. If you were wrong to kill, then the ki’redan-na would send a ka’redan to equalize the event—if the person you had killed was not someone with high status in their caste. If the victim was of high status, then the justice would be public.”