Rapture (19 page)

She woke to a splash of cool water, and a dusky blue sunset.

Eshe and Eskander leaned over her, their faces blotting out the bruised sky.

“She’s awake,” Eskander said.

Kage averted her gaze from their faces, and looked past them, into the dusk.

“Keep drinking,” Eshe said, and pressed a water bulb to her mouth.

She drank. It tasted good… but not as good as the darkness.

After a time, she was able to sit up. She saw Ahmed sitting just behind Eshe, and a flickering fire-beetle blaze popping a few paces away.

Eskander yelled at Nyx, “She’s fine, little maggot. Just dehydrated.”

Kage reached about for her gun, and felt a rising panic when she could not find it. “Where is it?” she asked.

Eshe and Ahmed exchanged a glance.

“It’s here,” Ahmed said. He reached behind him and handed her gun back to her. “Nyx needed to get the position on some movement southwest of here. She needed to use your scope.”

Kage pulled the gun close. It would need to be cleaned.

Eshe brought over a thin gruel of mealworms and gravy that made her gag, but she choked it all down. The world was jumping back into focus. The fear began to set in. She had been unconscious, totally vulnerable, with these people. She stood and walked farther away from the fire, though the air was cool, almost cold.

“Where are you going?” Ahmed asked.

“I need to clean my gun.” She dragged her gun and her pack as far away from the camp as possible, deep into the black. She found an outcrop of stone a dozen paces distant. She crouched behind it. Removed all her clothes. Rubbed herself with sand until her skin burned. Shivering, her skin tingling, she dressed herself once again and then sat down to clean her gun.

How long this all took, she wasn’t certain, but as she was beginning to put the gun back together, she heard heavy footsteps approach. She turned to see Nyx coming up behind her. She froze in the middle of locking her scope to the barrel, fingers still.

Nyx paused a few steps behind her. She was chewing sen. Kage could smell it. The old mercenary just stood there for several minutes. Chewing.

Kage did not move. Did not speak. It was easy, to wait out Nasheenians.

“You need water, you ask for it,” Nyx said.

Kage firmed her mouth. Saying anything at all risked exposing weakness.

“You heard me?” Nyx asked.

Kage nodded, once. Then realized the Nasheenian would not be able to see her, in the dark. Not like one of her people.

“I understand you,” Kage said.

“I have too much at risk here. If you can’t take care of yourself, then I’ll stake you out on the sand and leave you. You understand that, too?”

“Yes, master.”

“I’m not your fucking master.”

Kage gritted her teeth. The words bubbled up, something fearless, from the darkness. “You say you are not my master, but you threaten me with violence for not complying to your will. What else is that, but the act of a master over a slave?”

Nyx was quiet a long moment, chewing. Then, “You could shoot me here. Any of you could. Hardly slavery when I arm you, is it?”

“Then why threaten me?”

“So you know I’m serious.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Listen, kid. I’m here to bring in a man alive, and if we do this right, we save a lot of people from dying. I have to sacrifice a few people to save a lot, I can do that. That’s what I am. I don’t like it. I don’t want to kill anybody I don’t have to. But when I say I need your scope, I need your vision, I need your talent, you have to deliver. Pretending you’re invincible doesn’t help me. Being fucked up is fine so long as you compensate for it. You have to carry extra water, that’s fine. But don’t lie to me. Don’t pretend to be something you aren’t.”

Kage flexed her fingers. Took a deep breath. “I will carry more water,” she said.

“Good.” Nyx threw her a water bulb. “Start with that.”

She heard Nyx turn away and start back into camp. Kage looked back at her. “Was there a danger? Did you see anyone through the scope?”

“We have some folks on our tail,” Nyx said. “Don’t seem like bel dames to me. Mercenaries of some sort. Ahmed’s eyes are good, but not as good as yours. They melted back into the desert when they saw the gun—yours is kinda hard to miss with a scope that reflects light like that—but they weren’t just traders. Not enough gear for that. Not dressed like Khairians, either.”

“What were they dressed like?”

Nyx spit on the sand. “Drucians,” she said, and started walking away.

Kage turned back to her gun. Ran her fingers across the smooth metal of the stock. Did she know? Or just suspect? And if the time came, would she cut up Kage and leave her out on the sand for them after all, despite her good sight? I have to stay useful, Kage thought. If she failed again, her chances of surviving to the other side of this wretched place—and her freedom—were slim.

She took the water bulb and packed it away with the others. If she wanted to stop the men who hunted her, she would need to turn around and hunt them herself, or hope she and Nyx could lose them at the next settlement. Whatever she decided, it would be a risk—Nyx or the fukushu-sha.

The fukushu-sha she knew, would kill her now, but it was Nyx she feared in the long run. She was only as valuable to Nyx as she was useful, and she feared her use would run out once they freed their quarry.

Staying with Nyx kept her alive a few days longer. Turning back meant death within the day.

She hoped only that she would not regret choosing to live.

“T
hey’ve asked for a letter.”

“A letter? Why?”

Inaya stood over the table slide in the communications room, sending data to her eight cell leaders. It had taken her three years to switch from a regular com console to a slide. She still preferred the more refined manipulation of the com console, but Michel had insisted that though a slide was less secure, more of their operatives were familiar with the slide technology. Receiving and storing data sent by the bacteria on her slide to their portable ones also took longer, and it gave a permanent record of communications that made her nervous. It was why she kept a regular com console in the next room, for more sensitive information.

Michel stood now in the doorway to the communications room. It was early, far too early for him to be up. Only the cook was awake at this hour. Inaya could smell grilled meat.

“I am uncertain,” Michel said. “They have become skittish since the death of the last priest, and I fear they no longer trust me. I am hopeful that a few words in your hand will calm them.”

“Perhaps I should call them,” Inaya said. She had been the first to get the Savoie family’s financial backing for the Fourré, despite Michel’s many attempts. To be fair, it was only when she made the trip with Isabet at her side that she finally won them over. It was not a good time to lose them.

“Their former pattern has been purchased by a protein farm in Clairie.

I fear I do not have their new pattern,” Michel said.

“I will need some time. I have other things to attend to, but I will have a letter for you tonight. Are you delivering it personally?

Of course.”

“Fine, then.” She turned away, dismissing him, but he lingered a moment longer in the door. Just as his gaze began to discomfit her, he retreated into the hall. His behavior was becoming increasingly disturbing of late, but she was uncertain what to do about it. To cut him loose risked making a grave enemy. The best she had been able to manage was to give him less critical duties, and cut him out of key decisions. But Michel was a prideful man, and not a stupid one. It would not be long before he confronted her more forcefully about his place in the Fourré.

She needed to be ready.

Inaya spent the remainder of the morning debriefing with the primary contact for the six cells in Ras Tieg’s capital, Montmare. She saw him only four times a year, and even those visits were risky. Just eight individuals were ultimately responsible for the organization’s work. Any of the eight could identify her if she did not wear a glamour. She trusted these men and women as if they were family, but like family, there were rifts—disagreements.

Hynri sat with her in the shuttered office of the abandoned textile mill that rested above the organization’s central operations. He was a slim young man, just twenty-five, but he held himself like a man much older, cynical of the world.

“They call us terrorists,” he said.

“Of course they do. It’s why we must stay away from civilian targets.

We are already feared and hated. People must see the good we do,” Inaya said.

“We have tried that for generations,” he said. “People see what shifters have to contribute. They choose to murder and enslave us all for it.

You asked us to act out violently and now you want to rein us in? I don’t understand.”

“You will. We have gained their attention. Now we must hold it. Twist it. We must rewrite our story from one of fear to one of celebration.

When you discovered you were a shifter, what did you do?

I wanted to kill myself, to be honest.”

“And you never told anyone what you were.”

He shook his head. “I joined the Fourré just a few months later. My family never found out.”

Inaya leaned toward him. “We have a narrative in this country that shifters are in the minority. That we are some statistical anomaly. But my mother and I, we lived for many years without anyone knowing what we were. If we all admitted to what we are, how many shifters do you think would be revealed? I don’t believe men and women want to kill their children. I believe we want what is best for them. When the priests come for children, and not just those who are not careful, I think we will see a change.”

“You propose to turn over the nation’s children to the priests?

No. There is something more than violence that Nasheenians taught me, and that is the awful brutality of speaking absolute truth. I propose that we begin to unmask ourselves. We speak the truth of ourselves. We tell them just how many of us there are.”

“They will see us as an even bigger threat.”

“Will they? Or will they simply see that they are condemning their own sons and daughters, mothers and fathers? We can show them another future.”

“What future? Us? Our lives? Our lives are not glamorous, Madame.

Aren’t they? I know many shifters, not just those in the movement.

They have families. Husbands and wives. Sons and daughters. They live respectably.”

“And covertly.”

“It is our obligation to convince them to live otherwise.

They’ll be killed. I have seen it happen, Madame.”

“Some may die,” Inaya conceded. “But many are dying already.

Blood will run through the streets. I see genocide, Madame. I see it as plainly as I see you.”

Inaya placed her hand on his. His hand was cool. She saw the terror in his face. These were men and women who had killed for her, and for themselves. They risked death and dismemberment each day in the fulfillment of their duties for the Fourré. Yet here they were, in shocked terror at the idea of doing the one thing that may set them free: speak the truth of what they were.

“There will be a great many of us. The priests can stop a rill, but they cannot stop a river. We must show them our true numbers. Our true strength,” she said.

His eyes filled with tears. He pulled his hand away and he wept openly in front of her, like a child or a priest. He was so young—nearly the same age she had been when she fled Ras Tieg, terrified and newly pregnant, running toward an uncertain future that, she believed, held nothing but death and dishonor.

“You tell us to be brave,” he said. “You tell us not to be violent, but I heard about the murdered priests.”

“It was a rogue act. The boy is no longer part of the organization. It will not happen again. We will not tolerate further violence.”

“I don’t want things to go back to what they were. We lived in so much fear before you came to us, Madame. So much terror. You showed us we have power. Now you want to take it away.”

“No. I want to give you real power. Lasting power. Violence is a not a true tenet of our faith.”

“The priests would say otherwise.”

“I am not a priest.”

He grinned through his tears, and wiped his face with his sleeve. “No, you are not.”

“Come, now. You had faith and trust in me five years ago. We have come far since then. Now it is time for our final act. It is time to take our place in Ras Tiegan society as true equals. You must have faith, Hynri.” He touched his breast, the space between his ribs where she guessed a saint’s pendant hung. “I will trust it, Madame. But the others… I don’t know how successful I’ll be.”

“In three weeks’ time, we will be holding an event.”

She saw his eyes widen. “Event” was the euphemism they used for some violent act—a bombing or kidnapping or raid.

“I will be asking all of our cells to reveal themselves. And all of their shifter allies. We will walk onto our streets, and we will shift. Together.

We must show them how many we truly are.”

“They will murder us, Madame.”

“They may. They may murder a good many of us. But we cannot go on as we are.”

If they went on as they were, it would all end in blood. She could see a bloody civil war, a revolution, on the horizon, and she had seen enough bloody revolutions.

They spoke for a few minutes more, and she ensured that he was calm and composed when he left her office. This evening, she would speak to three more cell leaders like this one. Softly, carefully, she would share this same message. And each time she said it, she had to believe in it just a little bit more. Because if her own faith wavered they would know it.

And it would all come undone.

Inaya rose from her seat and stretched.

“Madame?” A knock at the door.

“Yes?”

Adeliz cracked the door and peered in, revealing only her face, as if seeking to present a smaller target. “I have a missive for you, Madame.

Michel has asked to meet you.”

“Where?”

Adeliz held out her hand.