Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3

by Amy J. Murphy

  As if guessing his thoughts the woman said, “She’s exhausted. Let her sleep.”

  Something loosened in his chest, something wound so tightly and borne for so long, he did not even realize its presence until it began to dissolve. A gentle warmth took its place, bitter at its edges, but a comfort all the same. All this bloody business would be worth it. He had failed to protect her from so much for so long, but this was his chance to make things right. He could fix her. Keep her safe.

  “Jon…” Odd to hear his familiar name from a stranger. The woman’s mouth curled in pain, unease. “You’re hurting me.”

  He looked down. His hand had wrapped around her wrist. His knuckles were white. He released her, flashing a look of apology. She did not retreat. Instead, she went back to prodding the top of his head. Her thin fingers found the delicate welt at the base of his skull and pressed. He grunted at the bright pulse of pain and fresh wave of nausea-laced vertigo.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, in a practiced way that suggested she wasn’t. But for the moment she seemed satisfied with her assessment. “I think you’ll be okay. Need to get my hands on a scanner to be sure, though.”

  “Who are you?” He watched her unlatch the cover to an e-kit and dig out a hydration packet. She pushed the packet into his hand in a way that dared him to refuse. He drank it, swallowing against the receding tide of nausea.

  “Rachel Northway. Friend of your sister’s.” She pointed her chin at Erelah’s sleeping form. He realized he looked as confused as he felt because she frowned. “Figures that asshat wouldn’t mention me.” A ragged edge entered the woman’s voice.

  “You mean Corsair?” Jon took another gulp of the hydration matrix, willing his stomach not to rebel. “Where is he? He wouldn’t leave her like that.”

  Corsair was a lot of things, but his attachment to Erelah bordered on worship. A trickle of doubt met Jon’s spine.

  The corners of her mouth pulled down. “Yes. Him. He’s gone.”

  “Gone… as in—”

  “I couldn’t help him.” Northway looked down at her hands. “I tried.”

  Jon shut his eyes. Miri, granter of mercies. He knew Corsair would likely have scoffed at hearing any prayer muttered in his honor.

  “You’ve been out for nearly two days. A lot of this might seem confusing.”

  “Two days?” Panic raced through him. They were well overdue to pick up Sela. “Where’s Sela?” he demanded.

  Northway busied herself with repacking the medistat. She muttered something under her breath in a strange language. Her shoulders rounded, but she did not turn to him.

  “Where’s my wife? We’re overdue at the rally point.” A dull heaviness crept into his abdomen. That same sense of wrongness coated his thoughts, but now he was fully awake to feel all of it. Like the lull between the impact of a hit and the pain it brought.

  Northway straightened. When she did look at him, her eyes were fierce and sad. “Look—”

  He slapped the release on the four-point harness faster than Northway could move. Not that he would have allowed her, or anyone, to stop him. Unaccustomed to moving in null g, he pushed off too hard. His trajectory took him at a tangent to the pilot’s den. He grabbed the rung near the doorway at an odd angle, sending a barb of pain from wrist to shoulder. It was meaningless noise to him. “Ty!”

  Jon wedged himself into the hatch the moment there was space to pass into the interior. His fingertips brushed the back of the pilot’s grav couch.

  Maeve was a sudden crushing force against him. He collided with the bulkhead, his face pressed to the cold metal. Her warm breath against his neck reeked of old blood and sour mash. “Look who’s awake.”

  “Let him go,” Northway called. “He doesn’t know.”

  “You gonna cause problems?” Maeve pressed harder, ignoring the woman. Pain zinged down his neck and into his arm. He did not care.

  “Maeve, stop.” Northway’s voice was low, gentle.

  Then, like the attack never happened, she was gone with the hiss-clunk of mag boots against the deck, climbing back into the pilot’s hub. The dark ropey coils of her hair trailed along, like the tentacles of sea hag.

  Jon pushed off the wall. His spin took him into the navigator’s bench. Northway reached out to steady him. The move made Jon’s fury fold in upon itself, solidify. He slapped the hand away.

  “We’re turning this ship around right now and going back for Sela.” Jon was surprised by how even, how sane his own voice sounded.

  “Listen to me. You’re hurt. You need to relax,” Northway replied. She was trying to soften him. There was a presence to her, like a person who knew how to talk others down from the high ledges of grief after delivering bad news. “There’s a lot more going on than you know.”

  He resisted the comfort in that soft voice. “Stop.”

  “There’s nothing to go back to,” Maeve spoke slowly, with a flat ferocity. Like the way a wild animal protects its den, refusing to budge in the face of a threat no matter how large. “Tove’s ship was dead. Everyone’s gone. Your breeder too, crester.”

  “Did you even bother to go to the rendezvous? Sela’s smart. She could have made it.”

  Maeve straightened, her shoulders bent outward. The banked rage was in her gaze and shaped the corners of her mouth. “You think I wouldn’t? I—”

  “We stayed as long as we could, Jon. There were Poisoncry ships everywhere. Likely looking for us.” The voice was cool and soft. The stuff of half-memory. Erelah. Jon turned, using limbs that seemed to belong to someone else.

  Erelah drifted in the open hatchway, her hair moving about her like a living halo, absorbing light. She moved closer. “I’m so sorry, Jon. But Sela is gone. Asher as well.”

  “Show him what we already know,” Maeve growled. “Once is enough for me.”

  Forty-Five

  The vid feed was grainy. The audio quality was patchy. This was unsurprising, considering it was a signal pirated from one of the larger Poisoncry-controlled coms array systems.

  The violent gist of it was clear. This was Erelah’s second time seeing the transmission. Each time it was like walking into a stranger’s half-finished nightmare, the roles of the players only made apparent by the reactions of those around her. Jon had refused to return to the aft compartment of the bay. He wouldn’t allow Rachel near him, only Erelah. So she hovered beside him like a harbinger from one of the Fates’ tales, a grim spirit sent to bear the grievous news to a hero.

  “— again, Tove Agrippa, Imperator of Splitdawn Guild, is among the confirmed dead along with key members of her personal escort…under attack during her journey to the Citadel where she was…. …discovery was made by a Poisoncry scientific team in the area. Early reports indicate a lone assassin was killed along with the Imperator.”

  Lone assassin. There was no mention of a name. Why would there be? To the Poisoncry, Sela Tyron was nothing. A mote in their gathering storm.

  Like the rest of us.

  Then the part that drove a wedge of ice under Erelah’s heart: “So far blame has been placed on a separatist movement with ties to the fishery colony of Narasmina, long known for sympathies to Ironvale. The Conclave of Houses, the ruling body of Ironvale…denied any knowledge.”

  Lies, all of it. But the great mass of people in the Reaches watching this, those who cared anything about it, would not know lies from truth. If anything, to them it would be gruesome entertainment. This was meant to spark anger and provoke fear. She held little doubt that if they’d been able to capture an Ironvale transmission, the story would lay blame at the feet of Splitdawn or Poisoncry. Each of the Guilds controlled their version of the truth.

  It filled Erelah with anguish to know that somehow, she was the cause of all this. She told herself that this was part of something planned well before any of them had come to the Reaches. They were simply in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time, to serve as an unwilling catalyst. Splitdawn—or more correctly, Imperator Maxim—was under
the full influence of Poisoncry without Tove to oppose it. Only Ironvale remained the last pocket of resistance against Poisoncry’s push for complete control of the Reaches.

  “She’s not gone,” Jon said around a clenched jaw. “She can’t be.”

  Erelah caressed his back. Anger and grief radiated from him even as she lowered her forehead to his shoulder. Her arms moved around him in a stiff embrace made more awkward by the lack of gravity. He stiffened, resistant at first. Finally, he turned toward her. It brought an onslaught of half-thoughts and images:

  Ty laughed. A rare thing that always evoked a warm flutter in his chest. Blonde hair mussed as she leaned against him. Stretched out in cool sheets, languid. “Shall we get married?”

  It was raw, like a fresh burn. She did not care what the Sight absorbed from him. She had earned this. The very least she could do was take it. But she knew it was a bottomless well. It would never stop coming. For either of them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but she doubted he heard her. Would it matter? It felt stupid, insignificant in the face of his pain. She knew firsthand that there was nothing that another person could possibly say to make that horrifying ache release its hold.

  Finally, after what seemed like years, she pulled away, hating the words that came next. Hating the person that she had to become now, but it was necessary. She was getting sicker. Time had been running down ever since Rachel’s people had taken her from stasis.

  She was tempted to give in, just let things run its course and allow the gears and springs of her life grind to a stop. There’d once been a time when she would have entertained that thought, but she had emerged from the Roughbook fire as something new. A ferocity that she could have never imagined thrived within her now, all of it centered on the vulnerable being that grew under her heart. It was the only piece of sanity left in all the Known Worlds. She would do anything to protect it.

  Maeve had given her the dat-tab the moment she’d woken up, pushing it into her palm without ceremony, as if happy to be done with a grim errand.

  The recording from Asher was brief. No flowery phrases or sage-like revelations. He spoke in his usual irreverence, almost self-abasement, half-embarrassed to acknowledge such sentiment. He said his goodbye to her and then gave a warning. He’d known in his secret heart that a violent ending, long overdue, awaited him. If it were not during the mission to reclaim her, it would be at the hands of the Ironvale Guild as they delivered his punishment for past sins.

  “It is the only place left,” his recording said. “Believe me. I know that ‘ironic’ doesn’t come close to covering it. You have to go to Nirro…to Ironvale.”

  Forty-Six

  Don’t go soft on me now, boss.

  Valen’s voice roused Sela from the edge of an unsteady sleep.

  Exhaustion was taking its toll. How long had she been here? Weeks? Months?

  Time felt different here. Sela could usually rely on her internal sense of its passage. It, like her memory, was a solid thing. But the clock in her head was broken.

  She lifted her head and felt the protest in her shoulders and neck. The restraints around her wrists connected to the ones around her ankles and were laced through a bolt on the floor. Straightening her legs forced her to slump over, just as straightening her spine meant she would have to bend her knees. Sometimes she would alternate her position, but comfort was impossible. The quivering in the larger muscles of her thighs would seize up into cramps. Her back was a throbbing mass. The first two fingers of her right hand, her gun hand, were swollen to unrecognizable proportions.

  She was no stranger to pain. None of what she felt indicated serious damage, so she ignored it.

  The Poisoncry ship that took her from Tove’s heavy runner completed the act with embarrassing ease. They simply suspended the reboot on the suit and removed her to their vessel like a piece of cargo. None of them spoke. No demands had been made. No one came to gloat or question her in what she guessed was the Poisoncry ship’s hold.

  Then blackness came. She suspected they’d used a stunner. She might as well have been in a plastic sack for all the protection the suit had offered from that.

  She woke up in this room. It was more of a box, really, with four featureless walls and a metal floor, a drain at its center. The air had a vague smell of sanitizer and ozone. There was the faintest whiff of something dank and rotten under that. Before her was a door with no visible control; not that she could get up to try it. The overhead lights stayed on continuously. Gravity did not have the sticky quality she tended to associate with the artificial. She suspected this room was planetside. But where?

  Powered armor was gone. Not even the contact-suit. No boots. Just a plain, rust-colored jumpsuit that felt like thick paper. It rustled and crinkled when she moved. The idea that people had touched her handled her body when she was unconscious and vulnerable was as unsettling as the presence of the drain in the floor. She told herself to look away. But it drew the eye, insisting upon her attention. It forced one to imagine what secret horrors it may have watched or what bloody evidence it may have consumed from prior occupants.

  This was their game. Leave you to dwell and rot and wonder. This was part of it. They wanted her to fear. The fact that she was still alive meant they wanted something from her.

  She could deny them that, too.

  Sela ran a tongue over chapped lips. Thirst. Hunger. Like pain, they could be ignored. For a time.

  If they knew what they had for a prisoner, they also knew that a breeder could go twice as long without water or food as a typical Eugenes could. It was an unlikely avenue of coercion if they wished to obtain intelligence from her in a reasonable amount of time.

  Bored, she traced the outline of the inkwork on the inside of her forearm. It was starting to feel like a habit. The sigil was lopsided, inexpertly applied. It annoyed the perfectionist in her. She specifically told herself not to think about the owner of the symbol’s other half, and failed. Jon had told her that by this mark the Fates would know them as a pair, meant to be reunited in death. As a concept, it seemed unlikely and foolish—as if a bunch of powerful deities had nothing better to do with their time than match up dead people.

  But it had meant something to Jon, so she’d agreed to it.

  A click came from beyond the featureless door. It parted from the wall, sliding back.

  The man that entered was no different than she remembered him.

  Fisk. He was dressed in the rich purple of his Guild that he once tried to recruit her for, but with new implants along his neck and vining into his shorn scalp. The skin over them was freshly healed.

  Poisoncry did love their tech.

  He clasped his hands against his waist in that same patient manner. For a long, judging moment, he stood over her. She stared into the tired ocher color of his eyes. He squatted down to her level, his forearms resting on his knees.

  “Well.” Fisk breathed out the words in what was, even to her, feigned disappointment. “This is awkward.”

  Forty-Seven

  “Any pain?” Rachel asked, inspecting the red and scabbed-over slices along the man’s neck. They were superficial and would fade eventually. Unlike the other damage he had sustained.

  Jon…Jonvenlish Veradin. Jesus, what a mouthful.

  There was a minute pause. For a moment, she thought she’d chosen the wrong words in Commonspeak.

  He gave a subtle shake of his head. Good-looking man. Clean cut, he would be considered web-vid star handsome back home. “Too pretty for a guy,” is what Sasha might have called him. She’d always said compliments like that with an air of suspicion as if good looks suggested unforgivable flaws buried somewhere under the attractive packaging.

  Rachel was not sure what lay beyond Jon’s thick dark hair and soulful brown eyes. Under the five o’clock shadow and red-rimmed eyes, he seemed filled with a kinetic misery. He looked used up.

  With that, Rachel could definitely identify.

  “You’ve not
been sleeping,” she said, once it was apparent he wouldn’t speak. “I can give you something.”

  It wasn’t an actual question, so he said nothing in response, finding interest in the wall behind her. That seemed to be the game he was playing, anyway. It was more likely he was looking at some remembered world that existed beyond the hull of this ship. That was a type of escape she could not fault him.

  Rachel finished up her assessment of his vitals. Any residual effects of the toxin were gone. The reason he looked like shit now was likely because he felt like shit. He’d lost someone. According to Erelah, he’d lost love of his life.

  We’re all part of a club no one wants to belong to now. We’re all walking around with dead people.

  It drove them to stake out areas of the ship’s small interior. Grunting when circumstances required them to communicate, and avoiding eye contact when it didn’t.

  Maeve was a real piece of work. A dreadlocked woman that seemed positively feral at times and demonstrated incredible self-control and insight at others. She made it plain that the ship…Wedge, as she called it (no “the” in front of it)…was her domain. Nothing was to be touched without her consent. Rachel had gone toe to toe with her on the first day of their long journey to Nirro. It had been a battle of wills to get the woman to activate the a-grav deck webbing, at least in the part of the vessel she’d taken to calling the medical bay.

  Humans did not heal well under null gravity, Rachel argued—a fact she doubted their Viking chick of a pilot would challenge her on. Born and raised on Earth, she hadn’t set foot in a null g environment until she’d shipped out to her first medical posting. The training she’d had for it in no way told her stomach to keep from rebelling or her inner ear that it had to stop trying to impose an orientation. In truth, Rachel hated zero-g and tried her best to avoid it.