Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  “If they’re just for providing—services—to clan members, why did that one approach me?”

  Kit grinned. “They’re allowed to earn a little extra money on the side if they so choose. Indeed, tikitiras often have the nicest jewels and the most expensive clothes because they’re able to splurge more than the other women in the clan. Every once in a while, it makes for a little hostility, as you might imagine.”

  “I don’t think this is something I would ever, on my own, imagine.”

  “You have prostitutes among the indigo.”

  “Yes, but they’re not something we’re proud of! They’re not something we’ve—we’ve set up as an institution so that other women can keep their place!”

  Kit shrugged. “Oh, in a way they are. In Inrhio, only low-caste girls are prostitutes. They’re the ones with no prospects, no hope of marrying for money, so they use their bodies like any other attribute to earn cash and get ahead.

  “The mid-caste girls, now, they never sleep with a man till they’re married, because it ruins their opportunities. They have a chance to better themselves through marriage, and they aren’t going to lose that chance if it means losing their last hope of love. A man infatuated with a mid-caste girl marries her or wonders for the rest of his life.

  “The high-caste girls do whatever they want. They’ll have sex with their teenage sweethearts, they’ll sleep with jahla girls, they’ll marry, they’ll take lovers. They don’t care. It doesn’t matter. They’re the ones with the money and the land, and they know they’ll be able to marry no matter what. And even if they don’t marry, they still have the land and the power, so they can have the sex, too, if they want it.”

  Nolan gave a sigh of exasperation. “Why does everything have to go back to sex?”

  “It doesn’t. It goes back to power.”

  “So is that why you’ve been able to flout convention? Because you’re a high-caste indigo?”

  “I have never in my life traded on my mother’s lineage,” she said coldly. “I have flouted convention, as you say, because I have been brought up in the most unconventional manner possible. I was taught that the individual has the obligation to understand his society but the right to live outside it. But the only reason I was able to live by those convictions is that my father had a great deal of money, and he left it all to me.”

  “How’s that? Blueskin men don’t inherit wealth.”

  She gave a wintry smile. “He earned it himself. And then, under Chay’s guidance, he invested it in gulden markets overseas. And the returns were quite impressive. He was careless with money, and he spent a lot of it before he died, but he left me enough to live on without worrying.” She paused, laughed shortly, and continued. “It’s much easier to be a rebel when you don’t have to worry about where you’re going to sleep and what you’re going to eat. I often wonder exactly how passionate I would be about some of my issues if I was dependent wholly on my grandmother—or, in Geldricht, on Chay’s good nature. I think I wouldn’t be nearly so outspoken. Which infuriates me, but there you go. Wealth is freedom. And anyone who doesn’t believe that is unimaginably naive.”

  He was quiet a few minutes, as if mulling that over. Then: “You never said. What exactly are you doing in the city? If you have money, I guess you don’t need to work. How do you fill your days, then?”

  “I do charity work in the Lost City.”

  “What kind of charity work?”

  “There are places women can go. Gulden women. Where they can get food, and have shelter for a few nights, and find help getting settled into their new lives in the city. I work at a place like that. Mostly, I do fund-raising—I go into the city and ask wealthy merchants to help fund the charity bank.”

  “Gulden or indigo?”

  “Both, but I generally have more luck with the indigo.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “Not if you’ve been paying attention. The gulden don’t approve of the Lost City.”

  “Well, blueskins aren’t known for their kindness to the gulden.”

  “Ah, but blueskin women have a certain sense of—sisterhood, almost—with guldwomen. They like to think their meager contributions will lead to an overthrow of the patriarchy. And maybe they will. So some of them have been generous. But they don’t like to deal directly with the gulden women—especially the poor ones in the Lost City—so I’m usually the emissary who approaches them. It makes them more comfortable, because they think I’m one of them. They don’t realize how wrong they are.”

  He gave her a long, serious look. She became immobile under his scrutiny, neither looking away nor scowling to turn his gaze aside. He did not seem to be staring at her features so much as peering behind the worthless mask of skin and skull to pore over the brain below. Then he gave his head a small, helpless shake and shrugged.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said again. And she made no answer. It was not something she knew how to explain.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  True dark again. Nothing to see out the train’s smudged window. Nolan stared out anyway, since it was all he felt safe doing. He was sick of this strange food, sick of the endless lazy rocking of the train, sick of his own thoughts of outrage and betrayal.

  And electrified by this woman who traveled beside him, instructing him and mocking him by turns, revealing herself more with every word, confusing him more with every syllable. She looked every inch the indigo heiress, with that flawless blue skin, those aristocratic features, that turn of expression that could make a man feel like contaminated mud beneath the most expensively shod feet.

  And yet she had rejected that pampered lifestyle wholesale. She had chosen to live among foreigners, adopting many of their beliefs—but challenging that lifestyle as much as she challenged the one that was hers by birthright. There did not seem to be a place for her either in the ordered scheme of the gulden world or the rigid caste system of the indigo. She was like no one he had ever encountered before. He could not get his mind to track with hers; he could not comprehend her motives or her values.

  Why had she come with him? Why—since he had been the most lax of kidnappers—had she not fled from him at one of the stations they had passed through? Why had she not asked one of their fellow travelers for aid? Of course, given what she had told him about the gulden world, she may have had a hard time finding a champion. Traveling with him, she must appear to be under his protection, and in Geldricht, that relationship seemed sacrosanct. But she was a demonstrably resourceful girl. She could have escaped him if she would.

  She must have her own reasons for returning to Geldricht, and to Chay Zanlan. There was no other explanation.

  She was nothing to him—just a means, a key to a door that might be locked to him despite her—and yet he found himself, as the hours passed, growing more and more obsessed with her. What a passionate creature! So alive, so furious, so contradictory. For her, nothing came on faith. Nothing was immutable. Nothing could not be changed or overturned. Leesa would not have three words to say to her, and yet her heritage was every bit as rich, as impressive as Leesa’s. Colt would hate her, instantly, comprehensively, and yet she knew as much about Colt and his upbringing as she knew about her own family. She was reserved and civilized, both in speech and manner, and yet her very existence was iconoclastic. She was a living dare to both of those insulated worlds, indigo and gulden. Her life said to them, “You may be well enough as you are, but you could be so much better.”

  He wanted her to talk forever; he wanted to ask her increasingly more intimate questions. She had not mentioned her imprisoned gulden lover, though he was the reason she had come with Nolan this far. She had not clarified her relationship with Chay. She had not asked Nolan to explain what possible reason he could have for dragging her so abruptly from her home, using her to gain entry into an alien society, offering violence to her loved ones.

  (But
did she love them? Did she truly love Jex Zanlan? She had scarcely mentioned him. But then, Nolan had mentioned Leesa only once. He had not felt much like talking about his betrothed.)

  To love this girl would be to embrace fire and whirlwind and immolation. At least, that would be true for Nolan. Perhaps Jex Zanlan was flame and cyclone himself, and he would not notice how this woman churned through him, realigning his molecules, resurfacing his skin. For Nolan, she would be catastrophic, she would be upheaval on the grandest scale.

  But he needn’t worry. She was not intended for him, either by the fates or the dictates of his own society. Calmer things were in store for him, once this trip was over. He would never lay eyes on Kitrini Candachi again.

  Kitrini. He had not even said her name aloud this whole time.

  “Kitrini,” he said now, almost without volition. He was still staring out the window, his face turned away from her, but she heard him anyway. She stirred, as if shaking herself awake, and looked his way.

  “Yes?” she said.

  He shook his head. “I was just wondering if you were awake. How’s your foot? Still hurt?”

  “A little. It’s getting better, though.”

  “You want another painkiller?”

  “Before we sleep for the night, maybe.”

  He turned to look at her, slowly, knowing (from his experiences the past day and a half) what a fresh shock it would be to see her face. Two eyes, a small nose, high cheeks, that familiar indigo skin—what was there about this collection of features to make his heart pause, actually shut down for three beats, and then gallop forward again at a clumsy, frantic pace? “You never told me,” he said in a casual voice, “how you injured yourself.”

  An indescribable expression crossed her face. Nolan tried to catalog the swift emotions: pain, embarrassment, a lingering anxiety. “I was caught in the blast that shut down the Centrifuge,” she said shortly.

  Nolan’s eyes widened. “You were? I thought nobody survived that.”

  “A handful of us only. No reason to it—the survivors were scattered over the whole area, our cars interspersed with the cars of the dead ones. Luck—fate—who knows? But it makes me feel very strange to have lived through something almost no one else survived.”

  “And most of them were indigo, weren’t they? The ones who died?”

  “Why would you say that?” she shot at him angrily, taking him completely by surprise. “Gulden ride the Centrifuge!”

  “I know—I just—since the explosion happened at South Zero—”

  “They haven’t discovered what caused it yet. Or at least, they hadn’t by the time we left the city. There’s no reason to think it was a bomb.”

  “I didn’t think—did I say—”

  “You implied that someone had set a bomb at South Zero to kill a bunch of blueskins,” she said furiously.

  Ah. Of course. The terrorist lover in jail. No wonder she was touchy on this subject. “I didn’t mean to imply that,” he said gently. “Frankly, I don’t have a clue what started the explosion, and I haven’t given it much thought. I do know that it disrupted my life most inconveniently.”

  “Well, Jex had nothing to do with it.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  Now she gave him a look of renewed hostility. “And why are you so sure of that?” she demanded illogically. “He set off a blast in the medical center, after all.”

  Nolan spread his hands. She baffled him. “I just assumed he wouldn’t be capable of something so—so horrifying.”

  “And why would you assume that?”

  “Because you love him,” he said softly. “And you don’t seem likely to love a murderer.”

  Now she was the one to turn her face away. Her arms were wrapped tightly across her chest, and she had drawn her feet up to the edge of the seat, so that she sat in a small, folded position, looking as though she would prefer to disappear. “He told me himself,” she said in a lost voice. “He swore to me that he did not plan for any bomb to go off in the Centrifuge. Why wouldn’t I believe him?”

  “Well, it might not even have been a bomb,” Nolan said soothingly. “It may have been some electrical problem, I heard. Or a spark setting off some underground gases. They’re looking into it.”

  “It was a bomb,” she said, still in that frail voice. “You know some of the gulden have sworn they’ll do anything to stop the Carbonnier Extension. This is one of the things they’ll do.”

  “But even if that’s so—Jex is still in prison, isn’t he? How could he have had anything to do with it?”

  “He does have visitors,” she said in a strangled voice.

  Nolan had a sudden vision of Colt, caught by Cerisa as he attempted to meet with Jex Zanlan in stealth. But surely Colt was not one of that band of terrorists. Colt had a fine disdain for all things indigo, but he was not a destructive man. He had chosen a career as a scientist, a preserver of life; he would not wantonly and randomly destroy it. And certainly he would not have risked the lives of his coworkers at the Biolab, many of whom rode the Centrifuge home at night, many of whom would have been at risk that fateful evening if Pakt had not kept them after hours with a meeting …

  Nolan’s mind came to a sudden dead halt. Such an evening meeting was rare. Not unprecedented, but far from common. Why had Pakt chosen that night of all others to discuss items even he had agreed could have waited till morning? Had Colt warned him about the bomb? Surely not, that could never be—Pakt would unquestionably have reported such information to Cerisa, to Ariana Bayless. But perhaps Colt had spoken more enigmatically—“There will be trouble tonight. Everyone will be safe if they stay in the Biolab until dark.” That would not have given Pakt enough information to report, but enough to make him keep the others at his side. Perhaps Colt had not even said that much—perhaps he had merely told Pakt, “You’d better stay late at the lab tonight,” and Pakt had taken it upon himself to keep them all safe. That seemed realistic. That seemed possible.

  But then that would make Colt a terrorist. That would make Colt a murderer. That would make the man Nolan knew a monster that he could not recognize.

  He shook his head, trying to shake away the vision. Melina would be able to clear it all up for him, if he ever got back to the city, if he ever had a chance to speak to his friends again. His whole life seemed so far away, unreal, something he had dreamed of in a fevered sleep. He shook his head again, more forcefully.

  “What? You think he isn’t allowed to have visitors? He is. I’ve seen him myself in his cell at the Complex.”

  Her words made no sense until he was able to recall what she had said just before his brain descended into dark speculation. “No—I was thinking about something else—sorry, I wasn’t paying attention,” he stammered.

  “Well, let’s not talk about it anymore,” she said.

  “Tell me one thing,” he said. “How does Chay feel about Jex? And some of his more—violent activities?”

  “He hasn’t told me,” she said in repressive tones. “Why would he discuss his son with me? A man of honor would do no such thing.”

  “You must have formed an opinion,” he persisted.

  “I think—I think Chay has a very mixed reaction to Jex’s strong opposition to Ariana Bayless,” she said reluctantly. “On the one hand, he’s proud of Jex for being so forceful, for following his convictions to the blind, bitter end. The gulden have always loved a man who was willing to die for a belief. And, in his heart, Chay agrees with Jex—he does not want to see the Carbonnier Extension. He does not want the indigo to take another inch of land from the gulden. On the other hand, Chay has rejected violence his whole life. He has preached negotiation and strategy—still forceful, but much less brutal. So he would not endorse Jex’s methods even if they were successful. And I believe the parent in him fears desperately that Jex’s methods will not be successful, and that Jex
will lose his life in this endeavor. And Jex is Chay’s only son. So you can imagine how deep such a grief would go.”

  “And you?” he said, before he could stop himself. “How deep would such a grief go with you?”

  She gestured; a motion of helplessness. “He is my life,” she said simply. “He has been since I can remember. How do you give up something like that? But I do not know that Jex will survive the course he has set for himself. And then—” She gestured again. Nolan made no answer. There were no words.

  They were silent for another hour or two. Nolan was surprised when Kitrini was the one to speak next.

  “Have you considered,” she said, “exactly what you will say to Chay when you approach him?”

  He looked at her dumbly. He could scarcely credit what he had to tell Chay Zanlan; he had not thought how to word it. “No,” he said. “Is there some way I should address him? Some title he goes by?”

  “There are no titles among the gulden, but if you do not know a man, it is considered polite to refer to him by his full name every time you speak to him. As he will address you by yours. And do not come directly to the point. Make civil inquiries first. Ask about his health. Comment on the beauty of the landscape in Geldricht. These show you have an interest in the man, not just the issue.”

  “All right. But what I have to tell him is fairly urgent.”

  “He will have guessed that,” she said dryly, “by your very appearance at his door.”

  “Does he speak bluetongue?”

  “Fluently.”

  “Once we get to—to the issue—can I speak straight out? Or must I talk in that roundabout way that I have heard the gulden use?”