Carnival-SA (36 page)

The boots were too tight and pinched across the ball of Kusanagi-Jones’s feet. He could already feel every step of that fifteen kilometers. “I hope you can run,” he quipped, which earned him an arched eyebrow.

He wondered what Vincent would have made of that look, of the jaunty set of Robert’s shoulders. And if it would have meant anything. Because if Robert had been fooling Lesa for as long as he must have been, the only explanation was that either he was a Liar, too, or he’d been very lucky never to find himself in a context that Lesa could pick up what he was concealing from her. Of course, it was possible that the New Amazonian women just didn’t talk to their men very much. The guard at the gap in the zareba barely gave them a glance. They emerged into a camouflaged clearing that extended a few meters beyond the stockade, and crossed it quickly, Kusanagi-Jones blinking gratefully when they entered the shade of the trees. He slid a hand under the borrowed shirt and retrieved the datacart, wincing at the beep when it activated.

Amateurs.

Something took flight overhead, invisible among the branches.

“What are you doing?” Robert asked.

“She’s east?”

“So Medeline said.” Robert stepped into the lead, using his own long knife to lift vegetation out of the way rather than slashing at it. Of that, at least, Kusanagi-Jones approved. The map was easy to use. Lesa’s estimated position was marked by a yellow dot, that of Kusanagi-Jones and Robert by a pulsing green glow. All he had to do was make the second match the first.

He’d done harder things in Academy.

Robert never knew what hit him. Michelangelo stepped left, the chain from the door doubled in his right hand, the lock swinging freely. It struck Robert at the base of the skull, on a rising arc that snapped his head forward and sent him crashing forward into the brush. His knife went flying. Michelangelo had to search to find it, after he straddled Robert and broke his neck. It was a pity, because Michelangelo had sort of liked him. But he’d already proved he would switch sides over a woman he’d betrayed at least once, and unlike Vincent, Michelangelo didn’t believe in redemption.

And you couldn’t trust a Liar.

Lesa would have taken the night before over the day that followed. At least nants weren’t much for climbing, and few of them bothered to scale the inside of her trousers past where they bunched at the knee. After a while, the scathing agony of each individual bite, like a heated needle slipped into her skin, dulled into consistent pain as her flesh puffed up, honeycombed with lymph. And when she could manage not to flinch reflexively at every bite, she didn’t wind up imbedding the thorns farther into her skin. Thrashing wouldn’t help her anyway. The wire-plant’s barbs were backcurved like fishhooks, and every twist impaled her more. But if she could get her hands around the vines…

They were strong enough to take Stefan’s weight. If Lesa could manage a grip on them while she still had the strength, she could lift herself off the barbs. They
hurt,
but they weren’t long enough to threaten her unless they tore her throat or eyes, or punctured her inner thighs where the femoral arteries ran shallow. It meant freeing one arm, however, while her entire weight rested on the wire-plant wrapping her other arm and her torso, and every movement earned her anguish.

The thorns didn’t come out any sweeter than they’d gone in. She closed her eyes in concentration and lifted, edged, bending her wrist in an arc that encouraged the burred vine to drag down the back of her hand. She couldn’t just yank herself off the thorns without impaling herself on others; she had to coax it. It was like giving birth, one centimeter, two centimeters. A slide and a moan and a fraction closer to freedom.

Flecks of sun dotted her face through the fluttering leaves of the strangler oak, and her tongue swelled in her mouth by the time she got the last serrated coil to scrape down her arm and drop away. She swayed with reaction and gasped painfully, the vines crossing her torso tightening. Lifting her head, blinking sweat from her lashes, she studied the vines on her right side, looking for a place with fewer thorns. The motion made her light-headed, the jungle a green whirl around her as she tilted her head back. But it would go faster now. She had a hand free, through careful work and resolute refusal to panic, and there was a spot about a half-meter to the right and slightly over her head where the thorns might be thin enough that she’d only shred her hand grabbing onto the vine, rather than crippling it. It beat dying here.

She reached out and took hold, gritting her teeth against the pain as she forced herself to close her hand. Some of the thorns broke, while others cut deep, but she held on. Held on, and tensed the shoulder, and flexed the biceps, and
pulled
. She felt the tendons in her forearm take the strain, the searing heat flash up her neck, blinding white static, and a concomitant lessening of pain as her weight came off the thorns.
This might just work
.

When Vincent had asked to talk to Katya, he hadn’t expected Elena to consent. They both knew
talk
was a euphemism. But she showed him into the room and left him there, and almost two days later, there he still sat, across a low table from Katya, his bare heels resting on the strictly decorative rungs of a stool that was an outgrowth of House rather than a piece of individual furniture. He was already growing accustomed to single-purpose objects, wasteful as they were. The little cultural differences could seem absolutely homey, compared to the big ones.

Katya stared sullenly, her hands folded in her lap as if to hide the manacles linking her wrists. She wouldn’t shift her gaze from his chin, which was meant to be disconcerting. Vincent wouldn’t permit it to succeed.

She was good. Very practiced, very serene, offering open, neutral body language nearly as controlled as Michelangelo’s despite exhaustion that had her swaying in her chair. Many years of practice in lying to her mother had given her that edge.

But Vincent wasn’t Lesa, and he didn’t have a mother’s blindness, her self-deception. Katya Pretoria had no power over him.

They had been sitting here, with brief intermissions, for sixty-one hours, most of two New Amazonian days. Katya had been sitting longer than Vincent, because Agnes took over when Vincent left the room, and Katya…didn’t leave the room.

Agnes, Katya would plead with. Vincent didn’t envy the older woman that. Vincent could have taken longer breaks, but he contented himself with catnaps barely longer than microsleeps, because they were in this together. She needed never to realize he had been gone long enough to rest…and when she broke, he needed to be there. He needed to be making a difference, doing something, anything. Even if it was wrong.

And besides, he had something neither Katya nor Agnes had. He had chemistry, and his superperceiver’s skills.

He hadn’t seen Elena Pretoria since the interrogation started, and he didn’t blame her. He didn’t have a granddaughter, but if he did, he didn’t think he’d care to watch her browbeaten, cajoled, misled, manipulated, and entrapped by the likes of Vincent Katherinessen.

Especially if his child’s life hung in the balance.

He could only hope that wherever she was, Elena was putting as much effort into locating Saide Austin’s illegal genetic engineering lab as Vincent was into prying any potentially useful information out of Katya. And having better success.

He thought she might be weakening, though. The pauses were growing longer, the disconnects between her sentences had become disconnects between phrases, and she could no longer maintain the thread of a lie—or even a narrative. Her wobble on the stool had become a sway. She would break. All he needed was time. And to put away the sinking, invalid knowledge that Michelangelo could already be dead.
That
was unbearable, the idea that something could have happened, and Vincent would not know. He wanted to believe there was some connection, that somehow he’d understand if anything happened. It was self-delusion. Magical thinking. Even breaking her wasn’t without risks. After a certain point, she’d tell him anything just to get him to leave her alone. If she lied, he was counting on his ability to catch it. Almost as much as he was counting on her actually possessing the information he needed, which might be a little more problematic. But he’d deal with that crisis when he got there.

“Katya,” he said as he hopped off his stool and came around the table to stand beside her, “if you tell me where they took your mother, I can let you sleep. I can get you something to drink and put you in your own bed. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

She blinked, wrapping her fingers around each other, her legs splayed wide as she tried to balance herself. Her toes curled into the carpetplant, flexing tendons playing across the tops of her feet. “Can’t tell,” she said, in a tired little-girl voice that could have broken his heart. “S’important.”

She sounded drunk. But she still wasn’t to the point of giving him any old answer he asked for just to placate him.

“Your mother’s life is in danger,” he said, and managed not to frown when Katya shook her head. No impatience. It wasn’t his style. And however long it was for him, it seemed twice as long to her. Katya couldn’t know it, because House had been asked to conceal time cues in the ceiling and walls (which Vincent also hoped was disconcerting to someone who had spent her life under, more or less, natural light), but the sun was setting outside, and Lesa and Michelangelo had been in captivity since the afternoon of the day before yesterday.

And the evening and the morning were the second day,
Vincent thought, and stroked her hair, pushing dark strands off her clammy forehead. Admittedly, the insurgents had taken great care to capture them alive, and if it was the same group that had tried to snatch Vincent, they had been almost solicitous. But his training and his experience told him hostages that weren’t rescued within seventy-two hours usually weren’t rescued. The logistics of keeping somebody alive in detention started to wear on the captors, arguments started, and mistakes…were made.

“Your mother needs you. You can save her, Katya.”

“My mother’s
fine,
” she insisted, words slurring out after such a delay that he startled at the sound.

“What if she’s hurt? What if she needs medical attention? You made some bad choices, Katya. But nothing we can’t fix, if we get to her in time.”

“They wouldn’t hurt her.” A chink, the first admission she’d made that she knew who had Lesa. She didn’t seem to realize her error. Instead, she waved her hands for emphasis, but the manacles brought her up short and the weight of her own arms overbalanced her. Like Vincent’s, her stool was an extension of House. It didn’t tip.

But Katya did, flailing, and fell hard. Vincent caught her, cushioned the impact, but he was tired, too, and she slipped through his hands and landed on her shoulder on the carpetplant with a sharp sound. She pulled her knees up as if to hide her face against them.

Vincent crouched beside her, none too steady himself. He had to pause and adjust his chemistry, or he would have joined her on the floor. Energy rose through him like sap. It didn’t fool him; he could feel the ache of weariness in his bones, the sensation of every joint in his hands swollen and fouled with grit. The itch and ache of peeling skin on his back, thighs, and shoulders wasn’t helping. At least the sun toxicity had faded, and his fever, muscle pain, and nausea had broken. If he wasn’t so damned tired, he might even be thinking clearly.

It was a small enough consolation.

Katya giggled as he got his hands under her armpits and hauled her upright. It morphed into a sob when he deposited her back onto the stool, balancing her carefully before he stepped away. Agnes, wherever she was watching from, was probably scandalized. Vincent really didn’t care. With Katya swaying behind him, he crossed to the door and tapped it open. As he’d predicted, Agnes waited there, arms crossed, chin tilted belligerently when he stepped into the corridor.

“Would you get us a drink?” he asked. “Something sugary. Fruit juice. With a stimulant in it.”

She nodded and turned away. He waited just outside the door until she came back, two cups in her hand. He took only one of them, smiled, and stepped back into the small chamber that had become an interrogation room.

Katya, miraculously, was still on her stool. He set the cup down on the table, out of her reach, and stood between her and it. “Come on, Katya,” he said, quietly. “Help me out here.”

She lifted her eyes, focused on his face. Another crack in the armor. His heart rate picked up. Sometimes, when they broke, it happened all at once. Like pebbles rolling down a hill. “I want to sleep,”

she said, more distinctly than he would have thought she could manage.

“Me, too.” He reached around behind him, picked up the mug, took a sip of the juice. It was cold and sweet, with bits of pulp that burst on his tongue when he swallowed. By an act of will, he managed not to drain it.

Katya watched what he was doing, and couldn’t stop herself from licking her lips. She wouldn’t beg, though.

He came to her, put his hip against her shoulder, and with one hand encouraged her to lean back against him. He brushed her hair, stroked it gently, smoothed the tangled strands. “Talk to me, sweetie,” he said.

“We both want to sleep. You can end this, you know, anytime.”

“Can’t,” she said. Her hair was dirty; the greasy strands coiled between his fingers when she shook her head. She probably would have fallen over again if he hadn’t braced her. His fingers wanted to tighten in frustration, but hurting her wouldn’t net him anything. “Not can’t,” he said.

“Won’t. I can save her, Katya, but you have to let me.”

She leaned her head against his belly, and he stroked her hair and held the cup to her mouth so she could drink. Her manacled hands cupped around his, and she drank in long, lingering swallows, licking the edge of the empty cup before she’d let him take it away.

The sugar and stimulants worked fast. He felt her stabilizing before he finished reaching over her to set the empty cup down. She shifted on the stool, but didn’t fall or pull away. Instead, she leaned her head against his stomach, closed her eyes, and sighed.