Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3

by Amy J. Murphy

  Rachel knew her insistence on a-grav for what it was, her ingrained impulse to control something—anything—about her circumstances. The universe was turned on its ear once again. But she wasn’t about to let it roll over her without a fight. Once more, Rachel found herself in the company of fugitives, this time on the losing side of some conflict she had no idea existed, and nothing she wished to play a part in. While karma decided that this was destined to be her life’s theme, she was at least going to name her terms. Now they were flying head first into God-knew-what in search of shelter and a place to lick their wounds before some other asshole giant came along and decided to stomp them.

  Erelah seemed convinced that these people—Ironvale, which frankly sounded like a heavy metal grunge band—were their salvation. They’d promised shelter and the medical resources that Rachel needed to help Erelah. At the end of the day, what choice was there?

  This shit is getting really old, really fast.

  She’d already claimed hair and blood samples from Jon, placing them in a stasis chamber that Maeve had assured her was superior to any sort of refrigeration unit for preserving such things. She still checked on the device compulsively, reluctant to put faith in alien technology that she did not understand. The samples were essential for the mapping she needed to weave together the unfurling helix that was Erelah’s genetics, undo the damage done to her system. Without the tools to synthesize a treatment, all she could do was watch the girl grow worse. Any medicines and equipment that Maeve had stashed on her vessel were for trauma care. There was nothing more sophisticated than implements to keep people from bleeding out or writhing in agony until you found a real medical facility to take over. She was practicing Stone Age medicine in the trunk of a goddamned spaceship. The irony did not escape her. She’d have given anything for even a rudimentary medical analyzer.

  Over the past three days of their journey, Erelah slept more and more. Rachel had to force her to wake to eat and drink. Grief was one thing, but this was another. Her earlier estimates for the girl’s health had given her a matter of months. That was at Tintown, before the shitty and most decidedly non-happy ending at Roughbook, and whatever had happened to Erelah in the in-between. At this rate, she had days.

  Add to that the major complication of the baby. The girl wasn’t a little pregnant, or almost pregnant. She was the kind of pregnant that was for real—“stuck.” That’s what Rachel used to call it during her adolescence.

  We’ve all been screwed, some of us in less pleasant circumstances. The term was highly appropriate here.

  Jon pulled the shirt back over his shoulders, moving like a man triple his age. Commonspeak was a mix of gutter languages, but he seemed to elevate it. His curling accent even made her name sound charming, although his voice was low and hoarse from disuse. “Something for what, Rachel?”

  “I think you know.” She caught him with a steady look. The one she used when she meant “you don’t have to cowboy up to impress me.”

  “Keep it,” he responded, closing up his shirt. “Someone else may need it more.”

  “You people have a word for ‘martyr,’” Rachel muttered.

  “Apologies?” His eyes narrowed, dull with a vague anger. The curling, charming accent flattened.

  “Everyone on this goddamn boat has dead people. It doesn’t give you a reason to check out. Your sister still needs you. She’s alive,” said Rachel, knowing she was being a dick, but too tired to care.

  He rose from the padded bench that was her examination table. Moving like a zombie, he stood over the lump of blankets where Erelah lay cocooned. Only a dark head of hair peeked out from the covers. “I’m still here, doctor. I haven’t…checked out…yet.”

  He sauntered off to resume practicing his thousand-meter stare.

  She was aware of someone watching her. It could only be one person: Maeve.

  The woman stood at the edge of the doorway, metal cylinder in her hand. Liquid sloshed inside as she held it out to her. Rachel took it, tentatively, looking from the container to Maeve. When she said nothing, the woman’s expression drew tight, defensive. “For patchin’ me up.”

  “Oh.” Rachel drew the container in. “Thanks.” It sounded like a question.

  Maeve watched her expectantly. Rachel opened the container, took an experimental whiff and regretted it. The overwhelming wave of alcoholic vapors brought tears to her eyes. “You really shouldn’t have.”

  “Scorch rum,” Maeve replied. She cocked her head. The defensiveness re-entered her tone. “Good stuff. Hard to find.”

  “Lucky me.” Rachel coughed, quickly putting the lid back in place. She held it out to Maeve. “I appreciate the thought, but I’m fond of my liver.”

  “What’s the matter?” She folded her arms. “Ain’t good enough for you?”

  Oops. Rachel chewed her lip, brain scrambling. It struck her that insulting Maeve would have permanently damaging consequences.

  “No. I…I just hate to drink alone,” Rachel heard herself say with a tittering nervous laugh.

  The woman’s glower transformed to a coy smile. “Not drink alone.”

  Maeve maneuvered closer, reached past Rachel to produce two tumblers from a cabinet. “That little bit there’s enough to kill a soul drinkin’ alone.”

  “Great.”

  Forty-Eight

  “You’re being silly.”

  Mim. The girl had not spoken, not really. Rail thin. Clad in a shabby tunic and dingy leggings, all once white. A torn patch of fabric lay over her left chest, where the Kindred house standard would be. Her bare feet were tucked beneath her as she sat on the deck across from Sela.

  Or appeared to.

  “You’re not there.” Sela had only meant to think it. Yet her own rasping voice startled her.

  They listened and watched. It would not serve to have them witness her decline.

  She told herself the entities that visited were the likely product of pharms, perhaps slipped in on the air cyclers or the hydration packs or calorie rations. The tiny chemical invaders dug into the nooks and crannies of her brain and produced a face, a form, a voice. They’d managed to formulate ghosts of the past and the dead to become the avatars of her interrogation. They asked questions, commanded her to recall her past sins.

  Fisk himself never asked her more than his single question. He’d walk in, stand over her with his thin, elegant hands neatly folded across his waist. His voice and expression were always aloof and patient. Every day, he asked the same question:

  “What do you want?”

  Which was just a weird thing to ask, in terms of interrogations.

  If Sela were still considered Regime, her only accepted reply would be her designation, her ident code. But that was the wrong play. Fisk knew those same things and knew just how empty her comfort would be in that litany.

  So, she chose silence. At first.

  Then, when he asked for the fortieth or the four hundredth time, she replied. It was a long, continuous narration of his death at her hands, each time picking up where she left off before. Admittedly, it was getting quite creative, and slightly ridiculous.

  His response remained the same: that slightly off-focus gaze from his pale ocher eyes. It did not take her long to realize that he was not really looking at her. That he had some sort of embedded optics that drew his attention, like Otkel. Perhaps the information was about her. Maybe it was a holovid of interspecies porn. Neither would have surprised her.

  Poisoncry did love their tech.

  It ate at her. Why did he ask her only that? She craved to know. It could mean nothing or anything. Perhaps this was torture for the sake of torture, but that did not seem to fit her own accepted understanding of Poisoncry logic.

  There was a method here. But what?

  When he arrived again that day, the word crawled out her dry throat and past her peeling lips: “Why?”

  He canted his head.

  She swallowed. Then, “Why don’t you ask me more?”

/>   Fisk’s face changed. “I know everything I need to know.”

  Then they weren’t expecting to obtain information about Erelah or the jdrive. They knew. Rage spiked in her. Her hands balled into fists. Pain sped up her forearm from her broken fingers.

  “I know of Erelah Veradin and her new jdrive technology. We have agents dispatched to deal with it. Her knowledge will be absorbed by Poisoncry, distributed as we see fit in our governing algorithm.” He said it in a way that suggested he that the subject bored him.

  “Then why?” It was torture for the sake of torture then. She stared, wondering what it would be like to drive her thumbs into the delicate orbs of his eyes, feel them pop like ripe grapes.

  Fisk seemed to sense her renewed rage. He held a pale, long-fingered hand out at her. Calming, the way you approach a dangerous animal. “You misunderstand. I do this because I want to perfect you.”

  Sela glared in silence.

  “The kennel masters and splicers made a masterpiece in you. You are the culmination of careful planning and selection. Your helix is a work of art. Your neural-synaptics, coordination, reflexes. An eidetic memory. Do you not marvel at your own gifts? Surely, you must have felt it; you were meant for far more than this.” His voice was flooded with strange reverence. He gripped her arm, the first time he’d touched her. His hands were dry, smooth as if coated with a fine powder. He indicated the inkwork on her skin. “Why would you forsake such gifts to be at the beck and call of such an inferior being? To live the life of a grifting mercenary? Veradin is nothing, an insect.”

  “He’s my husband.” It was strange to hear the word aloud. Moves restricted by her shackles, she wrested her arm from his grip. “Say his name again, and I will rip out your tongue.”

  Fisk smiled, settling back. “I would be disappointed if you did not resist. But, Tyron, you must see the logic. The end result will be the same. Do not fight the gifts that we want to give you. You must want this, accept it. I only want the best for you. Poisoncry seeks the perfect. As a species, we were meant for so much more. Do not fight this. Embrace it. Fighting will only cause damage.”

  He was obsessed. Mad.

  There was no reasoning with the mad. They bore their own logic.

  This would only ever end when one or both of them were dead.

  Other than Fisk’s visits, there was no way to mark time here. The lights stayed on, always at the same brightness. Sela imagined she could hear its hovering electric bruit, a constant mechanical pulse.

  Then others started showing up in the room.

  She would nod off and wake to find a new one. The dead, the abandoned, the ones she had failed.

  Valen. Atilio. Sometimes bleeding out, the way she remembered them last in life. Sometimes whole and perfect.

  Never Jon, however. It made her grateful and oddly disappointed in the same breath.

  Some, like Lineao, did not even talk.

  But the little girl, Mim, never shut up.

  The thing that was worse: Sela was absolutely certain she knew how she met the child. And she could not remember. That fact, that one slim thing, was terrifying.

  She’d never forgotten anything. Ever.

  This must be what it’s like to go mad.

  “You know how you met me, silly.”

  Something flickered, and the thing that was not Mim stood over her now, looking as real as the walls, or the shackles that bound Sela’s wrists.

  Her brain told her the girl was not there. Never was.

  Sela whispered, “Go away.”

  “Don’t be mean.” Not-Mim frowned. It was overplayed. More a caricature of a child than a real one, adding credence to Sela’s suspicions that this was something more than Poisoncry’s method of torture. It was a way to use her memory against her. The random memories were an avatar or a tool to lay out the map of her mind. A diversion tactic, while unseen, Poisoncry probed their way into her mind.

  “It’s all right there.” Mim tapped Sela’s temple. The touch felt real. “It’s there with all the other things we need to know.”

  A jolt of pure agony entered Sela’s head in that spot. It roared into a gathering thunderclap. The pressure grew so quickly, she could barely glimpse its edges. It squatted inside her skull and pushed out everything else.

  The room tilted around her. Her shoulder smacked the cold steel of the floor.

  Time stuttered again, went dark.

  She became aware of a shifting sound. She opened her eyes to glimpse a sparse forest of legs. Feet clad in disposable paper coverings. Someone flipped her onto her back. She twisted in the tether, limbs pulled into unfriendly angles. Ravenous cramps fed on her quads, her calves.

  She stared stupidly at the inky blot on her forearm, unable to move her neck, her head. This close, the shape of the tattoo was a nonsense pattern.

  But it still raised that hard lump behind her sternum. Jon.

  She shoved the thought away.

  One of them righted her head, prodding as if he were selecting a melon from the market. They were elongated men with the look of low-grav dwellers. Shaven heads. Their thin smocks like the garb usually worn by splicers or meditechs crinkled in the sterile air. They were not guards or soldiers.

  “This one will be difficult.” The one that spoke had a cruel, cadaverous face. His thin lips were like scissors that snipped off words.

  His companion stood behind Sela, unseen. The rustle of the paper-like fabric and delicate plink of metal gave away his position. The meter of his words suggested he was distracted. “Fisk indicated as much. Volunteers are practically resistant to physical torture. Mentally, they break down before divulging much intelligence. Which is why I was pushed for her to be resourced. He’s insisting on conditioning instead.”

  “Conditioning?” A surprised scoff.

  “He’s quite taken with this one.” It was a rough chuckle.

  A hand prodded her side. She wanted to slap it away, to grab the offending fingers and snap them off like twigs. She’d pull its owner down to her and chew out his throat.

  But only an angry mewl boiled out of her, embarrassing in its feebleness. Nothing more.

  The hand against her froze. “You’re certain the neural block is active? She shouldn’t even be conscious.”

  “As I said. Difficult.”

  A desultory huff greeted this. As if she was more nuisance than concern. That tiny noise alone drove fury through her every pore. She was a hot white star radiating the promise of violence. She wanted to rage, to howl. Her spine arched with the force of the thought. The blood-drenched words stayed trapped in her throat. I will show you difficult.

  “Heart rate is spiking.” The voice had a twitch of amusement to it. A malicious child toying with an insect. “I think you’ve made her angry.”

  The pressure against her temple increased. Pain flooded in from there. She heard and felt the crunch of bone. Her eyelids clamped shut.

  Incredibly, she realized that this was what terror felt like.

  Forty-Nine

  “You look well, my lady. I’m glad.” Kelta’s voice rang with forced cheerfulness as she burst into the darkened bedroom. Erelah did not answer. She curled onto her side in the bed of elaborately carved wood and stone.

  Kelta sailed past her for the gauzy curtains that dominated the far wall. She busied herself with straightening the sashes that that bound them in place. It was a useless endeavor. The breezes continued to play with them, undoing her work.

  “The Lady Northway says the treatments are working. You’re both doing well.” Kelta stepped back to inspect her work.

  Both. She meant the baby, of course.

  The therapies using Jon’s genetics were helping. She felt strong. Fatigue no longer chewed at her edges or slowed her thoughts. The most telling was the quieting of the Sight. She could still sense strong emotions, and she still feared the touch of others. But gone was the barely caged stirring, the pressing hunger at her insides seeking to draw from another person’s mind. The
re was peace as the ghosts faded, absorbed into the walls and never to reappear.

  Like any healing muscle, there were occasional twinges. She suspected that would continue with her through the rest of her life. For the first time in a long while, she was in control. It should fill her with gratitude, with joy. But there was only emptiness.

  Erelah rolled onto her back and pondered the ceiling high above, an inlaid mosaic of mimestone and copper depicting the gauntleted fist of the Ironvale sigil. Another reminder, in the unlikely event that any guest resting there were to wonder who owned this gracious house filled with orange-jacketed servants and tasteful decadence. Some cages could be beautiful.

  She could feel Kelta watching her, waiting for her to respond.

  This had been their routine for the better part of a week now on Nirro. First Kelta, with her prodding to eat or “take a turn through the gardens.” Then, Rachel would enter without such ersatz cheer or preamble. The doctor would glower at the medicines and equipment as if by staring hard enough at them, she could accelerate her patient’s healing. At least she did not try to fill the gray silence with nervous chatter. Through it all, Jon would come and go as a ghost, appearing seated at her bedside, his gaze cast to the woven firesilk mats on the floor.

  Erelah recalled little of her arrival on Nirro or just how she came to be lodged in the extravagant home of High Chancellor Yasu, a strange little man with flamboyant hair and a nervous blur to his edges. There were only fever-drenched fragments, sticky with misery: Kelta’s anguished sobs. Mim attempting to climb into bed with her. Rachel ordering the smothering clutch of red sisters from the room.

  Sometimes their fractured order made sense. Ultimately, she decided it mattered little to remember it all. Knowing the how changed little.

  It was the why that was the concerning part.