by Jaine Fenn
Jarek sighed. ‘Sorry, no.’
‘Well then, we might have a problem.’ Her tone and expression belied her words. Jarek had the distinct impression she was enjoying the challenge.
‘I realise it’ll take as long as it takes, but I might have to leave in a hurry.’
‘Oh, that won’t be an issue,’ she said.
‘Really?’
‘No. I’ve also been looking into your other little problem, and I think I have a solution that I can be ready to implement within a couple of hours. The only problem is that you’ll need to take me with you the next time you make a transit.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘Hush now, there are no demons here.’
Marua Ruanuku smiled down at her daughter. For the second time this week Taimi had woken up from a nightmare of creatures from ancient islander legend chasing her through the dark. Taimi was at that difficult age, soon to become a young woman, though for a girl in her position there were additional worries beyond the usual ones of approaching adulthood. Her oldest daughter and heir was just coming to the same realisation Marua had reached at her age: that the luxurious life she lived came at a price.
No demons here.
What she’d told her daughter was not entirely true - but then again, what are demons except names for that which we fear and do not understand? She grasped Taimi’s hand, a quick reassurance, nothing so smothering as a hug. ‘Will you be all right? Shall I leave the light on?’
‘I don’t need the light,’ said Taimi defiantly. ‘I’m not a baby.’
‘Indeed you’re not. Sleep well, my sweet.’
Marua paused on the landing outside her daughter’s room. Taimi was as clever as she’d been designed to be, with as much empathy as could be reliably coded into a normal human child. She was probably picking up Marua’s own troubled state of mind.
Although she had suspected for some time that Doctor Grigan was hiding the full extent of his illness, his sudden death two weeks ago had been a shock. The news had introduced a sour note into the long-awaited wedding day of one of her second cousins to a scion of Tawhira-ngai. Though Marua had never been comfortable with her chief neuroscientist’s Ascensionist views, he’d given her ngai many years’ loyal service in areas both highly complex and, to her softly Salvatine upbringing, morally grey. He had almost finished the final encoding when he died, and Marua suspected that his final push to complete the process may have hastened his end. His assistant was attempting to carry on his work but Grigan’s talent had been a rare one, and even though the job was almost complete, Marua was not convinced Tikao would be able to finish it.
She’d started looking for a replacement for Grigan as soon as he’d admitted he was ill. Her spies in Tawhira-ngai had found a scientist in that ngai’s employ with compatible skills and, more importantly, the expensive interface implants and the one-in-a-million ability to fully utilise them. Professional and personal reasons had combined to put Doctor Pershalek in a position where he wanted to leave his ngai, but he’d come too far up the ladder for Tawhira to just let him go. Right now his loyalty was for sale, the price being a route out of his luxurious prison - straight to another one, of course, but such was life at the top. She had not been surprised to find that Makoare-ngai were also interested in Dr Pershalek, for projects of their own. She’d been foolish to let apprehension over their interest combine with her anxiety about the upcoming visit to panic her into acting hastily. The truth was she was afraid: nothing mattered more than convincing her visitors that she could continue to deliver the essential service her family had provided for longer than the ngais had been in existence.
Sometimes Marua could almost feel her foremothers looking over her shoulder, depending on her to keep promises made millennia ago. As long as she fulfilled her obligation, then her family, her employees and her ngai would remain in a position of strength. Her very existence, like that of her mother’s before her and her daughter’s after her was tailored to serve her ngai: a bright if slightly curtailed life balanced by the promise of an eternal reward. Marua was not certain she believed in Heaven, but she believed in her own value and in her responsibilities. If she faltered now they could lose everything.
Had she been superstitious, she might have blamed the failure of the mission to extract Pershalek on her own actions: making a move against a ngai she had just sealed a blood alliance with was a dishonourable act. But she had recently discovered the real reason for the disaster, and she was still coming to terms with it.
She sighed. Her husband was out playing backgammon, so she might as well return to her office; there was never any shortage of work in her position. She was sat at her desk, going through the endless polite, meaningless exchanges that kept the relationships between the ngais essentially cordial, when a faint rustle of cloth, barely audible over the night-sounds from the forest below, made her stiffen. When it came again, Marua raised her head, expecting to see Taimi standing in the doorway, but there was no one there.
She turned to the other door, open to the balcony, as a cloaked figure stepped into the room, carrying with it the shadows of night. Even as she was shocked at the intrusion, Marua knew she was seeing some sort of stealth technology in action. She felt a flash of anger: a family home was tapu, and for a rival ngai to break that tradition was a grave mistake. But as she raised a hand to call security the figure lifted its own hands and lowered the hood.
A dark-haired, pale-skinned young woman stood there. Her delicate, immaculate face looked drawn but Marua barely had time to register her appearance before she met the woman’s eyes and was overcome with a sudden desire to trust and co-operate. She dropped her hand to the desk. There was nothing to be concerned about. This person did not mean her any harm.
‘I need information,’ said the visitor in a gentle, compelling voice, ‘and then I will leave you in peace.’
Now her visitor was in the light, Marua felt sure she had seen that face before, and recently. ‘What do you need to know?’
‘I want to know about the mission against Tawhira-ngai last night. I need to know what went wrong.’
A complicated request. As Marua considered the best way to fulfil it, she recalled where she’d seen this woman before - and realised how she had been able to enter Marua’s home, set on a near-vertical slope. ‘Are you—? You’re one of the Angels, from Vellern, aren’t you? Your brother—’
‘—was captured, yes.’ The woman’s melodious voice was tinged with tension. ‘And I wish to get him back.’
Marua was fighting the desire to tell the Angel everything she could about the disastrous job. She said instead, ‘Why do you think I’ll be able to help you? Missions like this . . . they go wrong. You’re a professional, surely you know that.’
The Angel advanced on her and Marua felt the strangest sensation, as though someone else’s anger was about to eat her up and spit her out. Then it was gone, and the Angel said quietly, ‘If you are the leader you make yourself out to be, then you must know the reasons for the failure.’
‘I . . . Of course I do,’ Marua felt as though she’d been at the kava; her thought processes were heavy, vague. ‘There was a traitor, a man called Olias Kahani. It’s . . . it’s his fault.’ Marua was desperate that it not be her fault, because if she incurred the Angel’s wrath then something terrible would happen. She realised the other woman was still looking at her, expecting more. ‘He was a facilitator, a close advisor of mine. He was the one who talked me into attempting the extraction, and he’s the one who suggested I use you and your brother. Now I know what sort of man he really was, I suspect he must have been working for Tawhira-ngai for some time.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. He disappeared, cleaning his bank account out - which was the final evidence of his guilt. He may try to leave Kama Nui, though I think he would find that quite difficult.’
‘Have you tried to find him?’
‘We have made some effort, though we will not exert
ourselves overmuch in pursuit of a traitor. He no longer has the means to harm my ngai. To pursue him purely in the cause of vengeance would be both dishonourable and indicative of weakness.’
‘I need you to give me everything you have on Olias Kahani, including the results of the enquiries you have made so far.’
Marua found herself turning back to her computer and searching out the relevant files. As she set the download running she looked up and asked, ‘What will you do if you find him?’
The Angel just smiled.
When the download was complete Marua picked up the dataspike and held it out. The whole encounter felt surreal, but something about it was beginning to nag at her, as though she should recognise what was going on here.
As she took the dataspike, the Angel gave her a long, hard look. Marua’s sense of dislocation grew—
A door slammed, somewhere below. The pressure in Marua’s head intensified, and for a moment she thought she would pass out.
‘Still working hard, my sweet—Marua, are you all right?’ She looked up to see her husband standing in the doorway, looking concerned.
‘I’m fine,’ Marua heard herself say. A glance towards the balcony showed that the two of them were alone. Had someone been here?
‘Are you sure? You look tense.’
‘No, no. Everything’s fine.’ And it was, she thought. Just fine.
The next morning she wasn’t so sure.
In the bright light of day Marua thought at first that she had dreamt the strange night-time visitation. But the more she thought about it the more she suspected it hadn’t been a dream at all. The Angel had come to her and—
—and what?
After breakfast, she rescheduled a couple of non-urgent meetings and walked around the caldera to another house, a little smaller than the one she shared with her husband and children, but equally well-appointed. She found her mother in the garden, tending her orchids. Marua wondered what her own focus would dwindle to when her time to retire came. She knew that in twenty or thirty years her mother would be dead and she’d be living here, burnt out by the stress of running one of the most powerful organisations on the planet. It wasn’t a bad fate, provided the succession was assured, the future guaranteed. Family mattered more than any one individual.
‘Hullo, Mother,’ she said.
Her mother turned and smiled, a vague but genuinely happy expression, very different to the astute, careful smiles Marua remembered from her own childhood. ‘Ah, it’s you! What a lovely surprise! Can you stay to take tea?’
Marua smiled in response. ‘I’m sure I can find time to share a cup with you this morning, Mother. But I also need to talk to you.’
‘Of course, sweet. What about?’
‘The hine-maku.’
Her mother frowned. Marua knew that frown: not one of annoyance, but of mild confusion. Her mother’s memory was not what it had once been. But perhaps Marua had not been as clear as she could have been; she had used the islander term to avoid the name that every human, in any culture, knew, a superstitious touch she felt vaguely ashamed of.
Then her mother’s gaze sharpened. ‘Ah,’ she said gently, ‘you mean the Sidhe.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
When the water splashed up over her knees, Nual decided that she needed to find somewhere to stop and rest. It had been twenty-four hours or more since she’d last slept - those few snatched hours with Taro, before the disastrous extraction. Getting out to Ruanuku-ngai’s island headquarters had involved a seven-hour skim-boat trip to a tourist island in the rough vicinity, then a six-hour flight over open water. Her implants were designed to return her gently to the ground if she passed out, but out here there was no ground to return her to, so if sleep did overcome her, she’d end up in the sea. She pointed her toes and rose above the water again, up into the warm, moonlit night.
She had programmed her com to navigate back to the tourist island, but she would never make it that far, so instead she set a search for the nearest scrap of land, however small. She tried not to weep in relief when the tiny glowing screen showed a chain of uninhabited islets about ten klicks south-west of her current position. They would do nicely.
Paradoxically, knowing that she would be able to rest soon woke her up a little and as she made her way towards her new destination she considered her encounter with Marua Ruanuku. After years stifling her powers in order to get by amongst humans it had felt good to exercise them fully. She was pleased and surprised at how quickly her abilities were developing. But she was not entirely sure she had acted wisely . . . her plan had been to go in, get what she needed, then edit the woman’s memories to remove any recollection of what had happened, leaving her peacefully asleep at her desk. She had considered the more drastic option of killing her, but to murder the head of an ngai was asking for trouble. Besides, when she’d read the house she had picked up the sleeping minds of three children; she preferred to avoid killing their mother unnecessarily.
If her probing had revealed that Medame Ruanuku was to blame for what had happened to Taro, she might have changed her mind. She was tempted for a moment, when her scan revealed that her ngai was the one she and Taro had been looking for all along. But to kill her as punishment for having dealings with the Sidhe would have been petty, and pointless.
How very un-Sidhe her reactions had become, Nual thought. She was developing an almost human conscience. A true Sidhe would not have hesitated to commit murder rather than risk being interrupted . . . but a true Sidhe would not feel this all-consuming need to rescue her human lover either.
The islets came into sight: five dark shapes gilded in moonlight. She chose one of the two with trees on and landed on the beach. The sea whooshed and rushed gently all around her, and insects made a surprisingly loud racket for such a tiny patch of vegetation. She sat down on the sand, above the high-tide mark. It still retained some of the day’s warmth. She pulled her cloak around her and curled up. Despite the hard surface and a vague concern over whether the islet was home to anything that might bite or sting, she soon dozed off.
She had hoped to dream - and she did . . .
The process of dreaming was more ordered for the Sidhe than for humans, though in essence the same thing was happening: the subconscious exercised itself while the body rested. But when a Sidhe dreamed, she could decide to watch the dreaming process, observing the images and sensations as they unfolded, or ignore it and return to true unconsciousness; she might even choose to join in, participating in the dream, directing its course. A Sidhe who lived in unity was most alone in her dreams; dreams were contained purely in the dreamer’s head.
Usually.
Nual knew that the seers, those amongst her people blessed - or cursed - with prescience, sometimes used dreaming as a tool to trigger their abilities. She had no idea how to do this, and no one to guide her, but now she tried to bend her will to this end, to direct her dreaming mind to show her the course of action she needed to take in order to rescue Taro.
The result was not what she expected.
No images or insights came; instead, she was aware of a familiar presence in her mind. Even as she recognised Taro, the pain broke through.
This wasn’t a dream. This was happening to Taro, now. She was sharing his experience.
The pain was low-key, a disturbing background constant. His thought processes were muddled by it, or perhaps by something he’d been given. She tried to work past the distracting physical sensations and into his heart.
She sensed his query as a wordless, distant cry of hope. She responded, and after a moment felt her own name forming in her head:
