Encrypted (19 page)

“
We have to get back to
the device,” Tikaya said. “If we punch in another gas, maybe it’ll
change the output. Something innocuous that won’t hurt
anyone.”

Thumps continued at the door, probably more
for the purpose of distracting Tikaya and Rias than getting in. The
lanterns previously visible through the window had disappeared,
which made her think the marines had stopped planning and were now
engaged in that plan. She shifted her stance, readying herself to
fire toward the window if necessary. The last thing she wanted was
to dodge another blasting stick.

“
Innocuous gases,” Rias
said. “Oxygen? Hydrogen?”

“
We tried those, albeit on
accident. And you pressed in water, which should be deliverable as
a vapor. Except the device didn’t like any of those.” Tikaya
groaned. “Maybe my guess is completely wrong.”

“
Or maybe the machine is
only designed to create synthetic or organic compounds,” Rias said.
“Though I don’t know any molecular structures that might qualify.
Do you?”

“
No, but maybe there’s
something in your book.” She tapped it with the pistol
butt.

“
There aren’t many
innocuous somethings in that book.”

“
I know it’s a long shot,
but—wait, no. When your people captured me, they knocked me out
with something sweet-smelling in a rag. When I breathed in, I
passed out. Do you know what that was? Would it be in
there?”

Rias shifted away from the door.
“Chloroform. Yes.”

The thuds stopped.

“
Let’s try it.” Tikaya had
a feeling it would be better to find a light and check the book in
a different room. “Can we get down the hall?”

Rias cracked the door. A rifle fired, and
the ball smashed into the frame, hurling wood splinters. He closed
the door.

“
Not at this
time.”

Tikaya snorted. She pressed her nose to the
icy glass window panes. At the edge of her view, shadows and
lanterns moved.

“
Not this way either,” she
said. “Unless we can—oh!”

“
What?”

“
Maybe nothing, but Agarik
and I had to shove our way into the room with the artifact. The
window was boarded, the door barricaded, so whoever killed all
those men must have come in through—”

“
Attic,” Rias said. “There
must be space to move around up there. Watch the door.” He hopped
onto the desk and thumped the ceiling. Wood scraped against wood.
“Here.”

Outside, the lanterns headed toward their
window.

“
I need help up.” Annoyed
to be a burden, Tikaya stuffed the pistol in her pants and joined
him, book clutched against her chest. “I don’t think I can lift my
arm over—”

Still standing on the desk, Rias caught her
by the waist and lifted her over his head as if she weighed
nothing. Blackness waited above, though an icy draft touched her
cheek. That meant a way out. She hoped.

“
Hurry,” Rias said, giving
her a final boost.

Tikaya scrambled into the dark attic. Even
with his help, she came down on her shoulder and had to stifle a
curse. When she tried to stand, she bumped her head on a beam.

Below, glass shattered.

“
Rias?” She started to
lean over to check on him.

He jumped through and a thud sounded—his
head hitting the ceiling—but he did not pause to acknowledge
it.

“
Go, go!” he barked,
pushing her ahead of him.

Half running, half bear-crawling, Tikaya
maneuvered past beams and supports.

Light flashed and an explosion rippled
through the floorboards beneath her. The force sent her crashing
into Rias, and they went down in a tumble.

“
Ooph,” he grunted, voice
sounding odd.

Then her mind caught up to the situation.
Rias had been behind her, not in front of her.

Tikaya tried to jump back, but the man
grabbed her. She dropped the book. His grip kept her from reaching
for the pistol. He unshuttered a lantern, illuminating beams,
trusses, and his snarling face. One of the marines.

“
Got her!” he
yelled.

Rias charged past Tikaya and tackled the
man. The lantern flew free. In a lucky lunge, she caught it before
it hit the floor and went out. Though her shoulder protested, she
held it with her left hand and yanked the pistol free with her
right.

Rias needed no help though. He knelt over
the marine, arms locked around his neck. The man’s face turned
purple, and he passed out.

A shadow moved behind Rias.

Tikaya reacted. She fired the pistol without
thinking, and the ball hammered into someone’s chest. Rias spun to
look.

Only after the man collapsed did her brain
scream that these people were her captors and aiming to kill one
might get her into a mess of trouble.

“
It’s Lieutenant Commander
Okars.” Rias checked the officer’s pulse. “It
was
Lieutenant Commander
Okars.”

“
Oh, no,” Tikaya
breathed.

Rias picked up a knife. “Yes, but he was
going for my back, so I must thank you for my life.”

Tikaya closed her eyes for a moment. “Let’s
just get that horrible device cut off.”

By the lantern’s light, they found the
source of the draft. The first explosion had left a ragged hole in
the ceiling of the room with the artifact.

“
Walk softly,” Rias said
as they neared it. “The structural integrity has doubtlessly been
compromised.”

“
Thank you for that
brilliant engineering assessment. Maybe when I fall through the
floor, I can take out my other shoulder.” Her grumbling made her
wince and long for the sphere of protection around the artifact. It
would be easier to problem solve if she did not feel so cranky. She
hoped. It could be worse; she could have become an unthinking
aggressive lout who thought it was a good idea to throw blasting
sticks at innocent—

Her boot went through the floor, and she
pitched sideways. When her body struck, the footing deteriorating
further. Rias grabbed her and tried to pull her free, but the floor
had enough of them: it dropped away completely.

She smashed to the level below and landed on
something cloth covered. Not cloth, she realized as she looked
under her. Clothing. Clothing on dead bodies.

She lurched away, igniting pain in her
shoulder. Rigid fingers tangled in her braid, and she pulled,
trying to free herself without using her injured arm or touching
the corpse again. A disheartened cry escaped her lips when the dead
man’s hand lifted with her, fingers fully snagged in her hair.
Tormenting ancestors, this was too morbid, and too damned much. Why
couldn’t the idiotic Turgonians run a decent Polytechnic so they’d
have their own philologists to kidnap for secret missions?

“
Sorry,” Rias murmured,
crouching beside her. “As soon as we get this taken care of, we’ll
find the sawbones to check your shoulder.”

“
The problem is less the
shoulder—though that is irritating me every three or four seconds
too—and more the bodies. And the being attacked. And the part where
I’m shooting people to death, and—” She brought her fist to her
mouth and squinted her eyes shut, struggling to keep from breaking
into sobs. Slow breaths, she told herself. This was not the time
for wheezing and gasping and flirting with an emotional breakdown.
React later. “I’m all right. I’m just... I’m better in a classroom,
I swear.”

Rias wrapped his arm around her back, and
she leaned on him.

“
I suppose you’ll think
I’m odd—odder—if I admit this is the most exciting my days have
been in ages,” he said.

She rubbed her eyes. “I’ll forgive you for
being a crazy odd Turgonian who probably has had a horrible life
for the last couple of years, if you’ll kindly disentangle that
dead man’s fingers from my hair.”

“
Oh.” Rias released her to
undertake the task, then stood. “We’re back in the artifact room,
but they’ll figure it out soon. That new window doesn’t hide
much.”

The blasting stick had blackened the floor,
turned furniture to shrapnel, and torn holes not only in the
ceiling and a side wall but in the building’s exterior as well. In
the center of the room, the device remained, unharmed, symbols
still glowing.

Tikaya picked up the book, set her jaw, and
strode over to it. There was not much time. Shouts on the other
side of the building promised the men were still looking for
her.

She flipped through the chapter on
chemicals. “There.”

“
Find something?” Rias
stood nearby, weapons loaded and ready.

Reluctant to speak too soon, Tikaya pressed
the appropriate runes. The regular image blanked out to be replaced
by the new symbols. They hovered until she finished. Then, by some
alien consciousness, the artifact understood what she wanted, and
it arranged them in a way eerily similar to the layout in the book.
Even though it was what she hoped for, it sent a shiver down her
spine.

A soft click sounded in the core of the
device.

Tikaya arched her eyebrows at Rias who gave
her an encouraging hand gesture. She gripped the edge of the device
and waited. Nobody stirred nearby. She tried to decide if the
distant shouts were diminishing. Minutes passed, and a deathly
quiet fell over the town.

Rias walked to the door. He cocked his head,
listening.

“
What is it?” she
asked.

Rias lifted a finger, cracked the door, and
peered into the hallway. He leaned back in with a smile, and Tikaya
heard the noise now too.

“
Snoring?” she
asked.

“
The two men out there are
sleeping, and the air has that sweet smell of
chloroform.”

Tikaya exhaled slowly. “Good. That should
mean we’re safe from being shot or knife-stabbed for the moment. Of
course, now we have a lesser problem.”

“
How to wake everyone up,
leave town, or even leave this room without succumbing to
unconsciousness ourselves?”

“
That’s the
one.”

She dropped to her back on the floor to gaze
up at the writing beneath the machine. Before, she had been trying
to translate it. Now, she just thought about cutting the artifact
off. Only one of the groupings did not have alchemical elements in
it. The first one. Nothing so obvious as a switch stood out
anywhere on the machine, so she poked and prodded that grouping.
They sat flush and she did not expect them to move, so she nearly
cracked her head on the bottom of the box when they did. By pushing
and twisting, she could rotate them.

“
What’d you do?” Rias
asked. “The symbols are flashing.”

She could rotate them further, but she
paused and peered up at him. “You sure you want those people awake
again?”

He smiled gently. “I’ll possibly regret it
later, but yes. We’ll need help to tackle the tunnels.”

“
Or you and I could devise
some kind of masks, gather as many supplies as we need, take a
couple of those dog sleds down the coast until we reach a port, and
then sail somewhere far away, leaving the empire to deal with its
own problems.”

Rias sighed and gazed into the night. “I
cannot.”

“
Even though these people
left you to die? Even though they probably got themselves into this
situation?”

“
Even though,” he said.
“But...” He took a breath and, with palpable reluctance, said, “If
you want to go, I’ll keep them busy long enough for you to do so.
It’s about three hundred miles south to Tangukmoo. If you grabbed a
dog team and supplies, I’m sure you could make it in a couple of
weeks. It’s technically an imperial town, but it’s eighty percent
natives, and I suspect they’d hide you just to irk us. After the
thaw, trade vessels come in to barter for whale oil and bone. With
your skills, I’m sure you could bargain for passage and find a way
home.”

“
Sounds like a lonely
journey without any company,” Tikaya said.

“
Probably.”

“
Last week, you told me
your people really needed my help. What’s changed?”

He looked back and forth from her to the
dead bodies. “This is only the beginning, Tikaya. It’s going to get
worse. I suspect this is also the only opportunity you’ll have to
leave.”

That Rias offered meant a lot, but the
journey he described would not be a speedy one. It was likely
Bocrest would make it back to civilization first and send the order
to have her family assassinated long before she reached home.

She rotated the grouping of runes as far as
they would go. The crimson symbols in the air winked out. “When I’m
complaining later about how horrible it is out here with your
marines, remind me I had my chance and was an idiot who gave it
up.”

The glum expression on his face waned, and
one side of his mouth curved up. He pulled her to her feet and
wrapped her in a hug, mindful of her injured shoulder. His stubbled
jaw brushed her cheek, and a pleasant shiver ran through her.

“
Only if you remind me I
was an idiot first,” he murmured.

“
Deal.” Tikaya wondered if
that talk of marriage had been inspired only by the moment, by the
uncertainty that they would live to see dawn, or if it meant
something more. She lifted her good hand to brush strands of hair
away from the cut on his temple.

Rias drew back slightly, eyes flickering,
watching her face. Soft breaths frosted the air between them, and
some distant part of her mind announced that this was a ridiculous
place and situation for a first kiss, but what if they didn’t
survive the coming weeks? What if there were no other opportunities
to be alone together? What if...