Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3

by Amy J. Murphy

  Likely Ironvale meant to seize the capital while Poisoncry was weakened. Hirano was indeed crafty. For the past few days, she’d received a crash course on the inner workings of the three Guilds from Kelta and the guarded answers of the nebulous Yasu. Like jealous siblings, the Guilds threatened and connived. This move was yet another insult in their restless rivalry, now carried on for centuries.

  “I need to do this.” His jaw barely moved, and his shoulders bent against some terrible invisible weight. “I need to know either way. I keep trying to tell myself that she’s dead. But I cannot believe it.”

  Your fault. She died because of you. You have done this to him. Do you blame him, really? Perhaps he cannot stand the sight of you, knowing that you are the reason his wife is dead.

  “Jon, please,” she replied, taking his hand. “Then, why Hadelia? That is not where she…” she avoided the word died “was last seen.”

  He nodded, more to himself than her. He placed his hands on her shoulders and looked down at her. She saw the depths of loss in him and knew it from her own mirror.

  Who am I to tell him how to mend his soul when I am just as broken?

  Perhaps in the face of things, for Jon, it was for the best.

  “Baby sister, I need to do this. Let me go.”

  The raw agony in his voice made her throat grow tight.

  A breeze stirred the glass ornaments, turning their chimes into a crashing rage. She shivered under the layers of her cloak, suddenly feeling as if all the suns of the Known Worlds and Reaches combined would never be enough to warm her. She remembered another goodbye, years ago, just before he slipped out of the sleeping house on Argos when he left to join the Regime.

  Perhaps she said the same thing then, too: “Just come back. Promise?”

  He placed a light kiss on her forehead. “Promise.”

  Fifty-Three

  Fisk no longer came to ask his daily question.

  They had left her alone. Somehow, the dread that created was worse.

  No more ghosts came to visit her. The lights of the room had dimmed. She settled into a threadbare sleep.

  The clatter of the hatchway woke her.

  Fisk.

  Her spine tightened in response. Her eyelids snapped open.

  Not Fisk. Two men with unfamiliar faces. They were dressed in dark brown coveralls, thick-soled boots. Both wore the heavy black sigil of Poisoncry, a hand engulfed in vines, high upon the bands of their arms. Their moves were harried, brusque. This was utilitarian. She was no longer special. There was no more reason for the antiseptic clothing.

  One held down the chains that bound her wrists. The other unfettered her ankles, exposing the bruised rings on her skin. Neither spoke as they pulled her up. She braced herself, ready to spring. She pushed away. Her move surprised them, and they released her. Sela took two steps to the open hatch when her legs seized up. She toppled to the floor, unable to break her fall, landing to the sounds of a wet crunch.

  A boot flipped her onto the side. “Told you she’d try something. That’s ten scrip you owe me.”

  “I never took the stupid bet. Know better than that.”

  They hooked her under the arms and dragged her through the passage, arguing over her head. Her bare feet scraped over the floor. The dull metal of her cell changed to a coated matting. Her head hung on a boneless neck. Blood dripped from her nose.

  Around her, there were noises.

  Snippets of hurried conversations from passersby. Blaring intervox with overhead announcements of senseless designations and instructions. It felt like a ship, or perhaps a station. It was impossible to lift her head and take in anything to support or dismiss this notion.

  Something like an alert beacon whirred to life, drowning out the other sounds. She saw legs of others rush past. They continued, pausing only once before a larger door, thicker. The kind meant for hangars or pressure locks.

  They’re going to space me. Why waste the ammo?

  She tried to fight. The best she could do was flex her biceps and make her spine rigid.

  The door opened. Instead of dumping her into an airlock like so much garbage, they stepped through. She heard a noisy thrumming echo, a sound she’d known for most of her adult life: they were in a hangar.

  With a monumental effort, she lifted her head. It felt as if gravity had tripled. Neck muscles straining, she glimpsed a small vessel open its rear hatch to engulf them. It had the look of a craft meant for flight in atmo, not intended for journeys in the void. She allowed her head to flop.

  The arms released her. She landed on her stomach. Boots stepped around her. One of her jailers disappeared to the forward compartment. She glimpsed a sliver of a pilot’s console before the hatchway shut. With a humiliating grunt of effort, she pushed up onto hands and knees. Arms quivering, she attempted an awkward sideways crawl. The hatchway was achingly close, beyond that a sprint to freedom.

  “Eh! None of that, meat.” A boot collided with her side. The wind rushed out of her lungs. Her captor gathered up her bound wrists and dragged her to the wall. He secured the shackles to an eyebolt threaded through the exposed frame. She slid down the curved wall.

  The man squatted down over her. For the first time, she got a good look at his face. Unlike the other Poisoncry, he was not clean-shaven. She got the impression he was more of a hired servant than one of their guildsworn. Silver and black wires threaded under his skin and outlined the socket of his missing left eye. In its place was a metal disk, like a port. Some sort of augmentation.

  “No time for screwing around, meat. Fisk wants you moved. You’ll see him soon enough.”

  Why would Fisk want her moved? Moving a prisoner was risky. Prisoners escaped. Killed their jailers. Plotted bloody revenge.

  He tapped at the side of her head. For the first time, she realized that there was something affixed there. Panic laced through her. “Don’t fight the control node and it won’t hurt. It’s that simple. Got it?”

  She stared at him, silent.

  “Hey!” He snapped his fingers in her face. “I need to know you’re not going to start anything.”

  He waited, watching.

  Sela glared, memorizing his face.

  His strike sent her head bouncing against the wall. “Well?”

  Sela bared her teeth. “Don’t start things. I finish them.”

  His laugh spoke of vine sticks and old wars. He stood, walking back to the pilot’s den. Somewhere, unseen, she heard the hatch snick closed and felt the distant vibration of a ramp rolling up. The engines hitched to life.

  There should have been no a-grav on a vessel this small. But a force weighed her to the deck all the same. That meant that they’d been planetside this whole time. But which planet? Hadelia? One of the Poisoncry-controlled moons?

  She tried to keep track of the time. The engines rumbled on, and the air in the hold took on a chill. She shivered in the thin paper clothes. Of course, they wouldn’t turn on the climate controls. Not that it bothered her. It was actually invigorating. It seemed to sap away the thick, greasy film that coated everything. But she still felt like a non-participant in the world.

  The universe had stepped around her as if she’d been buried in a hole, forgotten. Had she been forgotten? Why would Fisk want her moved? She pressed at the idea, trying to force things back into place, reshape memories that had come unraveled. There were important things missing. Something vital had been taken. It was an agonizing discovery, like stumbling into a familiar room to see that the floor had collapsed.

  Tentatively, she prodded at the shape on her left temple. It was cold and smooth, barely larger than her thumbnail. She thought of the gruesome mass of wires invading the missing eye of her jailer.

  Did I honestly expect to die pretty?

  She pressed at it, testing. A ribbon of hot white pain invaded her skull. She hissed, surprised by the sudden severity of it. Much more delicately, she traced the shape of the device, burrowed into her skin. She slipped a fingernail
around its edge and considered prying it off, then she felt something move under the skin there.

  She froze. A bright acid panic slid into her blood. She snatched her hand away, forced herself to breathe in full breaths.

  What did they do to me?

  An angry god kicked the vessel. Her shoulder collided with the wall. A new series of shudders rattled her teeth, her bones.

  This wasn’t turbulence. It was instinct fortified by dozens of combat drops into hostile territories. They were being fired on. But by whom? What enemy of Poisoncry would be so bold as to attack? It was not a rescue, that was for certain. What rescuer would endanger the very person they meant to reclaim?

  There was another gut-wrenching twist to the deck. She was in freefall for a second, the shackles tethering her to the body of the ship. Then she struck the deck before sliding into the wall.

  If the crash didn’t kill her, the lack of restraints certainly would. She pushed out with her feet, bracing herself between the bulkhead and wall. The effort made the large muscles in her thighs and calves scream in protest.

  The engines released a tortured wail then cut out completely. Whatever had struck them had taken out the engines.

  Small vessels like this weren’t made for combat. They had all the grace of bricks. Metal groaned and bucked. There were distant shouts from the cockpit that might as well have been from another planet.

  She stared at the ink on her forearm, gritted her teeth. Jon.

  Fifty-Four

  The area outside the docks of Nirro’s main port was a bit of a disappointment. It was just as industrial-looking as the few others Rachel has glimpsed in her time in the Reaches, only slightly better kept. And like those places, everything was covered with a healthy patina of serviceable grime. Men and women dressed in coveralls of various colors passed her in the wide, overly bright corridors. They walked in groups of threes and fours, chatting animatedly. It was like any scene of the few dozen colonies or stations back home: just a bunch of people knocking off work and headed home for the day.

  At this time in the tightly scripted Ironvale work-rest cycle, she was going in the opposite direction of the foot traffic like a salmon headed upstream. Rachel had never seen a real salmon except in nature video archives, but she imagined this was what it felt like. Some people caught sight of the sigil on her jacket, the one that marked her as an honored guest of Hirano, and stepped out of her way, jostling others in the process. She’d protested wearing the stupid thing on her clothes to the guard that finally allowed her to leave Yasu’s house without an escort. But she had to admit that this was a pretty cool benefit.

  Some of the workers peeled away from the stream of body traffic to a cube of a building with a stylized icon painted over the doorway and window. The symbol resembled one in Commonspeak they used as a catchall that said “drinking-eating-companionship.” In that second she was jealous of the normalcy of the moment.

  Must be nice. Go to work. Stop in at the pub for a pint. No need to worry about interplanetary conspiracies or psychic aliens. She shook her head. “Jesus. I need a vacation.”

  Rachel continued on. Soon, she reached the ports proper. The ships that graced the docking stanchions resembled each other in build and shape. They had the utilitarian look of cargo ships. Beyond them rested sleeker-looking passenger vessels. Some even bore what looked like advertisements or logos—various combinations of the symbols for “value” or “journey.”

  It was in the questionable borderland between these two sections that she found the ship she was looking for: Wedge. Although the port seemed busy, the slips to either side of it were empty. It was easy to understand why. It was a Sceeloid vessel. No captain would park his ship next to such a thing.

  Though the residents of the Reaches tended to separate themselves into Guilds, they were united in their fear of this elusive species. If the stories were true, although the Sceeloid had suffered greatly from the Treaty of Ashes, they still dwelled in the deepest, darkest part of the Reaches in vast numbers, unforgiving of any outsiders stupid enough to come across them. Rachel could attest to that story first hand, although much of her experience as their captive had been brief, terrifying and blissfully difficult to remember, like some fever dream.

  She strode up the gangway. Greenish yellow light spewed out onto the metal framework of the docking mesh from the open mid-ship hatchway. Rachel paused. Two voices argued in Commonspeak. One of them she recognized as Maeve. The other was plaintive, flat, with the odd nasal tone common to the denizens of Nirro.

  And from the sound of it, Maeve was getting angrier.

  Rachel approached the doorway and leaned in, uncertain if she should announce herself. Maeve stood in the center of the hold, arms folded, faced flushed with defiant anger as she stared down a man dressed in a dockworker’s coveralls. A blue armband wrapped around his upper bicep marking him as some kind of administrator. He cowered behind a tablet, raised like a flimsy shield between himself and Maeve.

  “I move Wedge when I decide to, little man.” Maeve’s jaw thrust forward. She took a step closer, towering over Mr. Clipboard.

  “With apologies.” He bowed, holding the tablet out Maeve. “This was the decision of the Transport Council. You may take up your grievance with them.”

  Maeve snatched the tablet from him. Without a glance at the screen, she snapped it in two. The useless plastic pieces clattered to the deck. “I show you grievance.”

  Rachel stepped into the room. Maeve noticed her and gave an abrupt nod that sent the beads in her hair to clatter against each other in the tense air.

  “Everything okay in here, guys?” Rachel asked. It felt absurd the moment she said it. Everything was not peachy.

  The dockworker turned. His eyes widened the moment he saw the patch on her jacket. He immediately bowed and spoke with his face parallel to the floor. His Commonspeak was too rapid, but Rachel picked out a portion of an apology. Maeve rolled her eyes.

  “Maybe you should just go.” Rachel tapped Mr. Clipboard on the shoulder. “I’ll tell them what a great job you’re doing with the…whatever.”

  He looked from Rachel to Maeve and then to the ruined remains of the tablet. For a moment, he seemed to consider picking up the pieces but instead disappeared out the hatchway with efficient, butt-clenched strides.

  Maeve pounded a button on a nearby console, and the hatch swung shut behind him. Air exchangers hissed. Rachel felt pressure against her eardrums as the door sealed.

  “I take it he wasn’t here to sell you cookies.” Rachel retrieved a piece of the broken tablet from the floor. A yellow goo leaked from the edge. Gross. She tossed it aside, hurriedly wiping her hand against her trouser leg.

  “He’s telling me to move Wedge. Dock master doesn’t want a Sceeloid ship here. But I move Wedge when I say.” Maeve turned away from Rachel and pushed into the forward hold, disappearing down a narrow corridor that required her to stoop. Rachel debated following. The woman could be tetchy about her ship, as Mr. Clipboard had found out. When it was apparent she was not returning, Rachel followed.

  She found Maeve sagged on the edge of her bunk, elbows on knees, hands against the sides of her head. It was not the posture expected of a woman that seemed ready to spit tacks just a moment ago. Rachel drew in a breath to speak but paused. A subtle sheen glistened on the exposed skin of Maeve’s shoulders and arms.

  Rachel rested a hand on the woman’s forearm, registering a faint trembling. For a moment, she feared that was the wrong move, like trying to pet a feral cat. “You’re sick.”

  The woman pulled away. “I’m splendid.”

  “No, you’re not.” Rachel leaned in, examining. “Are you…on something?” She’d worked in narc-detox clinics during one of her sub-intern rotations on Miranda station long enough to know when someone was coming down.

  “On something?” Maeve scoffed. “Ain’t nothing left to be on. No suit. No battle drugs. No pharms.”

  The floor of the small space was scattere
d with the empty tubes of injection devices—the items Rachel had come to identify as pre-loaded medical syringes. The labels indicated they were some sort of adrenaline analog.

  “You mean the battle armor?” Rachel asked, tossing the empty package back to the floor. “It fed you drugs?”

  Maeve stood abruptly and brushed past her. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

  Rachel pursued her back into the bay. “Busy doing what? I could have helped you. Detoxing on your own is kinda dangerous. You could die—”

  Maeve looked up at her from her task, which seemed to involve shoving handfuls of wire and tubing back inside one of those spine-covered panels that lined the walls. She paused long enough to scowl at Rachel before resuming her work. “Then maybe that’s what I deserve. Tove’s gone. I wasn’t there to help her. Maxim seen to that.”

  “Are you…feeling sorry for yourself?” Rachel planted her hands on her hips.

  Maeve cast the panel onto the deck and turned on her. Rachel started. The other woman was easily her height but could do menacing like no one else’s business.

  Rachel swallowed and thought about edging closer to the hatchway.

  “None of the Splitdawn houses left will have me. Too afraid of Maxim. Tove was my house. It was Tove that found me. Gave me a place and house to serve. I wasn’t there when she needed me. Now there’s nothing. Not even my armor. Just Wedge.”

  “Life sucks for you. I get it,” Rachel replied, drawing her chin up. “You’re not the only person in existence to have bad shit happen. You’re like a fricking Amazon warrior, and instead of kicking ass, you’re throwing stuff around your crummy little space ship—”

  “Wedge isn’t crummy,” Maeve growled. “Whatever that means.”

  Rachel ignored this. “My point is. You should be kicking ass and taking names, none of this ‘oh poor me’ bullshit.”