Allies and Enemies: Exiles, Book 3

by Amy J. Murphy

  The world became an ocean of sound. It was a torturous single clap of thunder that shook walls and made the very foundation beneath her heave. The light winked out. Against the ringing of her ears, she felt, rather than heard, the Poisoncry Guild moving in blind panic in the room.

  Kelta wedged back against the wall, the only solid thing she could find in the dark and gained her feet. From the chambers beyond came violent bursts of light, popping sounds like knots of wood burning in a hearth fire. But very few shouts or voices. The house grew silent, save for the creaking and groans of protesting wood. The whole structure seemed to shift around her like a ship at sea. She could smell smoke. Dust clotted on her tongue. A blast, something violent, had struck the home. But how? Who would do such a thing?

  She felt the weapon in her hand and brought it up, pushing out at the dark with it as if she could spear it back, make the dark recoil. With her free hand, she swatted out, feeling her way for the remembered place, for the pieces of furniture that lay along the path to the door. Surely her eyes would adjust to the dimness soon.

  “Mim?” Kelta called out.

  A hand seized her wrist.

  She yelped, nearly dropping the weapon.

  “Quiet, old mother.” Her heart flattened. The leader had remained in the room.

  “Erelah! Kelta?” The female voice calling from the lower level bore Northway’s unmistakable drawl. There was a flurry of discussion as a second voice joined her.

  “Not one word. I’ll kill them both.”

  She barely registered the decision before she brought the weapon around, swinging in a blind arc, aiming at the place where she heard his voice. Kelta pulled the trigger.

  The flash was brief. It offered a snapshot that burned into the back of her brain. The viscous snarl of his pouty mouth cleaved in half under the impact of the pulse round.

  A slithering thud at her feet.

  Then silence.

  The sob squeezed out of her lungs, a surprised burst of anguish. The gun slid from her grip to clatter on the stone. Kelta sagged to her knees, the twin shocks of pain dim and unimportant.

  “Here! In here!” Northway’s voice filtered into a reality that existed next door to this one. “I heard something.”

  Twin beams of light cut the darkness, catching the thick swirl of dust. With it came the sound of rushing feet. Arms, tender yet firm, scooped Kelta up, kept her upright. Northway’s face pinched with concern, appeared in the cast of light. She made nonsense noises, meant to comfort.

  “Hey, Miss Kelta. I got you. I got you.”

  “Ironvale guildsworn are coming.” The brutish Maeve was suddenly there, peering down over Northway’s shoulder. To Kelta, her head seemed to brush the ceiling; her shoulders were as wide as the room.

  “Good. They followed us,” Northway replied. “This place is a disaster. There are more people there that will need our help.”

  “Not sure this part of the house is going to stay standing.”

  “I told you not to shoot at the damn door, didn’t I? Lucky anything is still standing at all,” Northway admonished.

  “Wedge’s cannon could have done a lot worse.” It sounded like a boast.

  “Mim! Where is she?” Kelta’s mind felt muzzy. “Erelah. They were looking for her.”

  “We figured that part out.” Northway’s hands felt cool and soft against the skin of her neck. There was a counting silence. “Cavalry’s on the way. Parking a Sceeloid breeching vessel on someone’s lawn is little hard to ignore in this neighborhood.”

  Maeve stooped down over the body of the fallen Poisoncry leader in a creak of leather. The man’s remaining eye glared out a bleak corner, past them all. There was not much more left of his face to carry an expression.

  The woman made an impressed grunt and settled her hand on Kelta’s shoulder. “Rest, pra-Corsair. You’ve done proud works for your house tonight.”

  Kelta swallowed against a wave of nausea. “Have I? It does not feel so.”

  Part Eight

  Sixty-Three

  The Eugenes called himself Sweet Amos. He was biologically male yet chose to wear female attire and adorn himself in that manner. In the time since he’d found her, he never offered an explanation. She got the sense that if she asked, he would find huge insult in it.

  Today he wore a gown of a blue diaphanous material. She knew his head was shaven beneath the wig of aggressively purple hair. The eyebrows that danced with his expressions were carefully drawn on, competing with the heavy makeup and glittering eyelashes. Already, beard stubble shadowed his jaw beneath the artificial flush of rouge.

  He carried on with an air of mild annoyance. As if the Known Worlds had consistently disappointed him, therefore each new struggle was no different or surprising.

  He said he knew her from Before and even knew her name: Sela Tyron.

  She tried it out. It felt like receiving a set of clothes in the right size, but worn by someone else. The fabric was still warm from the previous occupant, and the story was just something that had happened to someone else.

  He called her names that were clearly meant to be mocking: “war muffin,” “miss killer.” But Tyron, as he called her when he wasn’t using one of his multitudes of pejoratives for her, was how she came to think of herself.

  He claimed they had somewhat of an acquaintance, although she was hard-pressed to understand how that had come about. It seemed unlikely. She entertained the notion that he was lying. With no frame of reference, there was very little information she was willing to trust.

  The clock in her head was broken. The passage of time was frustrating, nebulous. Days had somehow slid into full weeks, during which all she knew was this cramped little metal box of a room—which turned out to be his shelter. She got the sense that they were underground. Occasionally she could feel the distant rumble of ordnance and hear the pop of small-arms fire.

  Amos explained that there was civil unrest in the city above, a place called Brojos. Tyron assumed she’d been separated from her unit, a dispatch from the carrier assigned to quell rebellions. Police actions were a common function of her division. He eluded her questions and skirted her quest for details. He could be peevish. He did not understand her desire to rejoin a unit, stating the Regime wasn’t interested in anything that happened here.

  His nursing was well-practiced, efficient. Tyron suspected he had more formal meditech training than the “field service” he confessed to as a minion to one of the crime bosses that once ran a settlement called Obscrum.

  In Amos’s case, it had been an unsavory sounding Trelgin called Ephid. He was dead now, the victim of an insurrection of sorts. With the downfall of Poisoncry’s hold on the area, anyone that aligned with the Guild was fair game. It was open season on everyone that might have held even a modest station under Ephid. People that had once lived their lives under the crime boss’s boot now sought retribution. They hunted out imagined stashes of wealth and sought out any remnants of the man’s crooked empire, including low-level members like Sweet Amos. To hear Amos’s end, he’d mostly spent his life stationed at the doorway of an overcrowded club and might have done the occasional “errand.”

  His flight had taken him to Brojos and his “rainy day” location and eventually Tyron. He said it with disdain as if it were beneath him.

  Brojos. Tyron tried it out, repeating it to herself as she did each word in the catalog of new proper nouns she discovered, hoping it would spark something familiar. So far, nothing brought much shape to the half-glimpsed colors and blobs that were now her long-term memory.

  Tyron got no sense of aggression from him, only this mild hostility conveyed by huffing sighs and the tense line of his shoulders beneath the sheer fabric. She watched him with a detached fascination.

  She made him nervous. It was gratifying on a level that made her feel a little ashamed. After all, he was helping her, and help was a commodity in short supply, to hear him tell it. Judging from the sounds of chaos in the streets beyond
the shelter, it was an increasingly risky endeavor to obtain medical supplies—or any supplies, for that matter. Tyron realized he was expecting something in return.

  Always when Amos spoke, it was as if he were diving back into some ongoing narrative of his life. Intentional or not, the fact that he referred to himself in the third person led to this impression. This day was no different.

  He sank back onto his haunches and inspected the bandage wrapped around her leg. With a sigh that could have meant everything or nothing, he tapped the long ash of the vine stick onto the floor and stood. “That’s the last of the anti-infective goo.”

  He shrugged as if to say anything that happened now was clearly a work of the Fates. He looked at the bandages, and not her, when he spoke. “Don’t pull any of the bio-sealant. Sweet Amos won’t be able to do much if you spring a leak again.”

  She nodded, more in agreement than gratitude. He was often brusque, dismissive.

  “Your kind heals fast. At least, that’s what they say.” He took a drag from the vinestick and exhaled the too-sweet smoke over her head. “Lucky break for you, girly.”

  My kind. Volunteer. That word had an aseptic feel to it as if calling a distasteful act by a more civilized word made the concept more palatable. Breeder. That was the other word. It felt right.

  Tyron sat up, testing. Something pulled, deep inside her gut beneath the bandages. The sensation danced along the edge of pain but was more of a warning to stop the movement.

  Amos busied himself with repacking the medical kit. It bore a very old Regime emblem and a standard for a battlegroup she did not recognize.

  He said he’d try to get more anti-infectives the next night. It was safer to move then, he explained. Sela thought it was a sound tactic. The agreement came from something firmly installed in her brain. It was the same place that told her how much force would be required to break someone’s femur or the kill zone ratio of a scatter grenade. This partial knowledge was frustrating, like only having part of a strategy map, useless without the other pieces.

  Sixty-Four

  An uneasy sleep engulfed Tyron. Most of her dreams were half-formed images: There was a man with soulful dark eyes. The perfect symmetry of his features made him clearly Kindred stock. With the strange clarity of dreams, she knew what it felt like to run his hair between her fingers and that it would curl if he permitted it to grow too long. He was about to tell her something important.

  She woke in the dimly lit alcove that she’d come to think of as hers. There was a strange vibration to her muscles. She felt weaker, weighted down. How could that be? Amos had said she was getting better. She could complete a full circuit of the tiny room without the need to lean against the wall. A thickness settled over her, like a heavy damp blanket, muting everything.

  There it was again. The sound that woke her. It was joined by the mutter of deep voices in whispered collusion.

  Only one of the three voices she recognized: Sweet Amos. She heard the rasping squeak of the door on its hinges. Two heavier sets of booted feet scraped against the bare earth floor. She tried to push up, found the order went to her limbs, but they did not obey. Straining and shaking with the concentration of it, she maneuvered herself onto her side.

  Amos’s bunker was not very big: a larger common room, a wasterec and a smaller area that Amos used as his private domain. She’d peeked in it once when he was away and found nothing more interesting than festoons of gauzy clothes and sparkling trinkets. Her alcove was in the common area. She always slept with her back to the wall, facing the door, watchful.

  She recognized Amos’s tall, slender shape and caught the ridiculous dapple of glinting fabric under the amber glow of the cheap chem lights. There were two others with him, carved of shadow. Male, judging from the boxy motions. They had poorly trained stealth. They brought the smell of cold and burning ash with them.

  Tyron felt her fury surge—not at Amos, but at herself, for allowing herself to be caught with her guard down. She had allowed this, in her depleted state. She gritted her teeth and attempted to sit up. It was a monumental effort. Sweat oiled her skin despite the damp cold of the room.

  “Great. She’s awake.” A cragged voice, male. Older. Commonspeak in that jarring patois of this place.

  “You give her all of it?” asked the other shape.

  “I dosed her with what I had,” Amos replied, his annoyance plain. “Their metabolism is different. Should have been twice that.”

  Amos had drugged her. Something in the food, or the water he’d given her. It didn’t matter now.

  “What’d you give me?” Tyron growled. It came out wasyagimme, trapped by a numb tongue.

  They were upon her now. Rough hands dragged her from the alcove. Her legs felt ten times too heavy. Her knees folded. With grunts of annoyance, the men speared her beneath her armpits and dragged her between them up the small flight of stairs to the surface with an ease that was embarrassing. A memory teased at her; there was something very familiar about this. Had something like this happened to her before? Despite her present danger, part of her wanted to pursue it, trap the memory and make it divulge any other secrets. This time was different, though. They were dressed in ragged coats that bore no mark. Nothing about them suggested the attitude or bearing of soldiers or even mercenaries.

  They deposited her unceremoniously against cold, rough metal. The smells of rust and fuel exhaust invaded her nostrils. The surface beneath her shifted with the protest of ancient springs; she was in the back of a motorized cart. Soft fabric brushed over her face and hands with a rush of sickly perfume. Sweet Amos had crowded into the cargo platform with her.

  She felt him right her head with an odd tenderness. The cart jerked into motion. She took advantage of the swaying motion to maneuver onto her side. Overhead, the sky was infested with unfamiliar stars. The streaks of light of the ship-to-ship firefights were gone. The moon was only a sliver now, casting a blue glint on everything. Her breath came in small bouts of steam. Gooseflesh pimpled her skin. Amos tossed a blanket over her.

  “This isn’t personal.” He gave an odd half-shrug. “But a girl’s gotta survive. That’s something you’ve got to understand.”

  “There’s no honor in betrayal.” Her jaw felt the wrong size, but at least her tongue was working. Whatever they’d given her was loosening up. Her muscles were starting to come back to her. “This is not Decca.”

  His eyes hardened. He turned away to watch the grimy alleyway pass by. “Decca? You say that like it means something, sweetness.”

  She tested out her body, one muscle group at a time, flexing the large muscles in her thighs, her arms, tightening the muscles of her stomach. They seemed to be livening up, filling with a pins-and-needles sensation. Tyron clamped down on the elation that came with this discovery. It was a distraction. Right now, she needed to be vigilant. She focused on testing her hands, her feet. Flexing, extending. They had been confident that the drug would render her powerless and had not bothered to bind her. That was to her advantage. She lay still, feeling her body wake back up and come under her control.

  Working the muscles bit by bit, she watched the vehicle’s progress through the slats of the cart’s side rails.

  Despite the late hour, the streets burst with filthy life. The throng of beings shoved and brawled and traded. If there was a war on this world, someone had forgotten to tell this particular population.

  The cart stopped abruptly. Amos stepped past her in a swish of gauze and perfume. Tyron coiled her muscles beneath her, ready to lash out at her captors with a savage kick. But they surprised her by dragging her along the platform of the vehicle’s bed. The cracked plasti-crete road rushed up to meet her. She could not move to break her fall. The wind rushed out of her wounded lungs. She pushed up, much stronger this time, but still no match for them.

  Again they half-dragged, half-carried her. They pushed through the crowd with Sweet Amos leading the way. He moved with a delicate ease, hands upraised at times as if h
e dreaded touching the other people, almost all Eugenes. Occasionally she glimpsed a Trelgin, there an Onari. Non-reg species co-mingling with a Eugenes populace: little wonder there was such turmoil here.

  No one paid them a second glance.

  Amos sidestepped an angry altercation between a merchant and client. They raged at each other in broken Commonspeak that might as well been an alien dialect. One of them stopped, mid-argument, to gape at Tyron, his eyes narrowing. The other participant in the yelling match turned to watch as well. A young woman, barely more than a girl, with a blaze of red-orange hair, stared at her. There was something in her expression: recognition. Tyron dragged her bare feet in the cool dry dirt; the men were forced to pick her up. When she managed to twist around to look back, the red-haired girl was gone.

  They stopped at a series of steps that led down beneath a building. Amos gestured for Tyron and her captors to enter the stairwell first.

  “Age before beauty.”

  Tyron scowled at the implied insult. She dug in again with her feet, trying to stop their forward progress. One of the men lashed out with a savage kick to her healing leg. She crumpled back into their grip.

  The stairs ended at the mouth of a rough-hewn tunnel. Small firepots dotted the wall. It smelled of dampness and unwashed bodies. There was a deeper smell under it: burned meat gone bad.

  A heavy metal door blocked the other end of the passage. At their approach, it rolled aside. The interior space beyond was lit with the jaundiced yellow of cheap chem lights.

  The room was oppressively warm compared to the cold outside. The heavy smoke of graceweed lingered in the air above the reek. Across from the door, a man was slumped behind a heavy overseer’s console repurposed into a desk of sorts. Half of his face was a badly healed scar, still red and angry from what was likely a plasma burn. The remains of yellow-white hair sprouted from the unburned side of his scalp. His lone eye stared balefully out, fixed on Tyron. There were two other men in the room: scrawny, haggard. Their weapons were antiquated, and their clothes were a mismatched assortment of decades-old utilities and flight suits.