Seduce Me in Flames (6 page)

Then one of the guards got a clean shot with a stunner, and that big body jolted in pain and surprise. Anybody else would have hit the floor in a mewling ball of discombobulated pain, but not this Tarian. Instead he turned to the gunner and gave him the coldest, deadliest look that Ambrea had ever seen. It even outstripped those that her father and uncle had given
her
. Probably because their power had been an ephemeral thing, whereas this prisoner’s power was far more tactile and all but bounced off the walls.

“Come try that again, squirt,” the beast goaded the gaoler.

The young gaoler looked as though someone had just stripped him naked and thrust him into Blossom Square. He was still armed, still aiming the weapon straight at the prisoner, but his hands and body were shaking fiercely, and Ambrea wouldn’t have been surprised to see him standing in a puddle of his own wet any second now.

Fortunately for the frightened guard, his compatriots were not as scared. They began to take aim at the prisoner in twos and then, when that had no effect, in threes.

“Surely not even a Tarian can withstand three stunners at once,” Suna whispered. But the tone of her voice was eager and delighted. She, just like Ambrea, wanted to see the Tarian kick them all straight to the Great Being’s doorstep.

But there was truth to what Suna said. Stunners attacked the nervous system, discharging jolts into it that
disrupted the electrical impulses of the nerves. Not even a savage Tarian could shake off that kind of disruption. When three stuns filled his body with electricity all at once, there was nothing he could do to withstand it. He staggered at last and fell to his knees, cussing in a garbled sort of way when he couldn’t even think straight enough to form words.

Ambrea hated to see him fall. It made her sad in a way that her own imprisonment had not been able to do. She leaned closer to the bars and could imagine she could smell the out-of-doors and the wild places of Tari on him, not this endless wet mustiness she knew too well. She saw the clench of his jaw, the ticking fury of what had to be an incredible amount of frustration. He was looking directly up at her again, so she clearly saw him make a conscious decision to stop fighting. His big body relaxed, even went limp. Strange, she thought, that it wasn’t already both of those things after being hit with three stunners. Sure, at the time of the stun all the muscles tensed up, and then immediately following would go lax when all normal impulse in the body disrupted the ability to flex or contract, but this was afterward by a good twenty seconds. It was clear to her that he went lax because he had decided to do so.

Oh, to be so powerful a man
, Ambrea thought with no little envy. She had seen some strong, dogged women in her time, even female fighters who could excel beyond some of their male counterparts, but not a man like this. This giant was something Ambrea could only dream of being in another lifetime. She was willing to bet there were few others who could push him around or tell him what to do. He was, no doubt, in command of his own destiny.

Although, she realized wryly, he had still managed to end up in exactly the same place she was.

She watched as they quickly bundled him up into a
cell only a couple of doors down and across from hers. They were afraid to give him too much time to recover by bringing him down deeper into the wet rooms. That was how the Tarian managed to spare himself the Allay torture chambers, for the time being anyway. Perhaps that had been the method to his seemingly wild madness. Perhaps that had been the source of that playful smile he had shared with her.

She wondered what his crime had been. Had he crossed a line legitimately, or had his tattooed arm and chest made a mark of him, goading the Blossom City guards into fabricating charges or provoking him into breaking city law? Still, not every common criminal or trespasser was given the inestimable experience of the wet rooms. Usually it was an experience reserved for those of higher rank or those who crossed someone of higher rank in a political gambit.

Ambrea’s curiosity ate at her, resulting in her lingering at the door long after Suna lost interest and went back to her twist-stitching. Ambrea got some amusement out of watching the guards regroup after their tussle with the Tarian brute.

“By the Great Being’s ass, he was a strong son of a bitch,” one noted breathlessly to another as he rubbed at a sore shoulder. “I don’t know how we’re expected to transfer him into the deep tunnels.”

“Going to have to knock him out, I guess. Maybe the feel of three stunners will mellow him a little bit.”

The eldest guard, one who was sympathetic to Ambrea’s situation and had proven to be quite wise and intelligent for his position in life, just smiled and shook his head at the younger, less experienced gaolers.

“The only way to mellow out a Tarian is to kill him,” he remarked. “I don’t know what it’s like on that planet, and frankly I don’t want to know, but that hell-acre spits out some of the worst and some of the toughest prisoners
I’ve ever dealt with. But I’ll tell you this, if I was caught in a bad spot, I’d want a Tarian fighting on my side.”

“They’re savages,” a younger guard scoffed, looking at his senior coworker as though he’d lost his mind. “Just as soon eat you as fight for you.”

“Don’t be ignorant,” the older guard warned him with a frown. “You know all that crap about them being cannibals is just that. Crap. Don’t you?”

The younger man agreed halfheartedly.

The senior guard looked Ambrea’s way and noticed her at the door window. He gave her a gentle smile. “I guess for these few minutes you were actually glad to be locked safely away, great lady.”

“I doubt that would ever be true,” she rejoined. “I’d much rather be out amongst you fighting a Tarian than locked ‘safely’ away.”

He inclined his head and body in respect and then followed the guards back up the stairs, where they sent a shot of daylight into the darkness before leaving the floor abandoned. Well, hardly that, since they had cameras watching every nook and cranny of it and the doors were locked with the latest security devices. Besides, she knew that the guards weren’t far away. The exterior guardhouse was situated right at the mouth of the catacombs entrance. And there was only one way in or out of the wet rooms.

Even if every prisoner escaped their individual cells, the guards could lock down the catacombs at that single armored and reinforced door and wait for the mob to tire or starve to death. They could shut down all the water and food dispensers. They could completely control the climate.

No one had ever successfully escaped the wet rooms, and no one ever would. Not even the brutish Tarian. Once they’d dumped him down those stairs, fighting for escape was a lost cause. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of
that. Perhaps he hadn’t cared one way or another. He didn’t look as though he was much impressed by those finer details.

Before long, Ambrea’s persistence at the door paid off. The Tarian male stuck his face against the small aperture in his own door and began to look up and down the tunnel. Then he looked across to her and that smile came back, crinkling the corners of his eyes. She noticed then just how tan he was, as though he had spent a great deal of time under a hot sun. She imagined him to be from the plainslands of the planet Tari, where the only true savages might remain. Most Tarians actually came from the clannish space platforms. Like stepping-stones, these colonies were each successively farther away from the actual planet of Tari but still in the same orbit. The closer to the actual vastness of space, the wealthier the platform was, since space traders preferred to go the shortest distance with their goods and found the external colony the easiest to trade with. The goods would then be marked up and would filter from platform to platform, each step adding its own tariff, until by the time they reached planetside it was impossible to afford anything.

This was why Tarian natives on the actual planet—“true Tarians” they liked to call themselves—tended to live nontechnological lives and lived solely off the natural products of the planet. However, it also meant living without modern medicines and food cultivators, which left crops vulnerable to common blights and the ravages of insects and animals, and the populace vulnerable to the devastation of the simplest of diseases. It was said that a true Tarian never left his homeworld in his entire lifetime, so a true Tarian could not be found anywhere but on the planet Tari.

That meant that in the eyes of his own people, this Tarian was no longer “true.”

“Hey Blue Eyes,” he greeted her, his voice sounding like a rolling rumble. His tone made it easy to imagine him riding a djit beast bareback over vast rolling prairies, his body bare and painted in tribal patterns. He would not be a simple farmer. No. She imagined him as nothing else but a warrior in defense of his own tribe. “Can’t imagine what you did to earn a stay in the emperor’s famous wet rooms.”

The guttural vibration of his accent made him almost impossible to understand, but in a few moments she caught on. Unlike most people her age on Ulrike, she had not been fitted with a standard translator in her preadolescence. Such things were expensive, and her father had seen to it that she couldn’t afford the standard tool. Even if she could have afforded it she imagined she would have been forbidden to get one. The more she was isolated from others, including alien others and outside sources of information or media, the more crippled she would be. He figured it would keep her from hearing what other worlds thought of Allay, or keep her from petitioning others for help.

“I’m here because I was born,” she answered him wryly. She sighed and leaned her forehead into the cold metal of her door. “I’m willing to bet you could say the same. Tarian’s are not treated well when they come to Allay.”

“Aye,” he agreed, momentarily curling his lip. “But I don’t imagine I helped things much by being caught smuggling a wee bit of this and that into the country.”

A wee bit of this and that
? “There isn’t much outlawed in trade in Allay,” she mused aloud. “Certainly not much that would be considered enough of an infraction to earn you imprisonment in the catacombs.” But there
was
one thing. “Unless you’re a Delran smuggler.”

The supposition made him smile, and she felt her heart clench with a sudden rush of excitement. The one
thing the emperor of old and, very likely, the emperor of new tried to keep a tight grip on was the entrance and exit of Delran platinum through the Allay borders. Delran platinum, mined most successfully and in the most abundance on Tari, was the most expensive and valuable metal in all the Three Worlds. And although it was the most beautiful decorative metal, known for its easy malleability and subsequent strength after being heated, it was also the most conductive and most widely used in just about any and all technology. To control the flow of Delran platinum was to control every single industry in Allay. In a complex series of trade agreements, tariffs, and controlled avenues of import and export, the royal house managed to earn a sumly portion of every Delran platinum purchase that took place.

Unless, of course, it was being smuggled into the continent and completely bypassing all federal fees. Under her father’s rule it was an offense punishable by public execution. An offense that the IM charter left to individual countries to adjudicate—unless, of course, that country asked for their help. Allay would never ask for that kind of help. It would open up the government to too much scrutiny—perhaps enough scrutiny to draw attention to the ways the ruling house used to dispose of its enemies.

“Allay does not take kindly to those who would take money out of its coffers.”

“Its coffers are fat and overflowing enough. Meanwhile, your merchants are being tariffed into starvation. Your technology is lagging behind because it costs too pretty to make new, innovative machines.”

“You sound very passionate about a land that is not your own. Far from it, in fact.”

He tried to shrug it off, but she was unconvinced. “I’m just about the money, Blue Eyes. And maybe a wee bit about the danger. It’s fun trying not to get caught.”

“With ‘trying’ being the operative word. You might work more on the succeeding part.”

That made him chuckle, whereas another man might take offense at having his skills called into question.

“You might be right about that. But it’s always about a weakness. Mine’s always been the damsel in distress. I stopped to help a woman in need and it turned out she was a damn cop. That should teach me a lesson. Next time, I won’t fall for a pretty face asking for help.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Ambrea scoffed. “You’ll be sentenced to death. And apparently whatever it was you were doing was enough to earn your being held in the country’s most notoriously inescapable prison, so you might put escape out of your head if that’s something you’re hoping for.”

“Ah. You’re a real cup-half-empty kinda girl, now aren’t you? Are you an expert on this place? How long have you been in here? You have some color to your skin and face, so you haven’t been underground that long.”

“This time, only a couple of weeks, I think. Time moves so differently in here, and they don’t exactly give us a clock to watch. Not unless they want us to watch it. It can be hard on you to see the minutes of your life slowly ticking away, or the moment of your execution quickly ticking toward you.”

“This time? You’ve been in and out of here before?”

Ambrea exhaled long and slowly. She didn’t feel like discussing her periods of incarceration. It was better not to think about it. It would only depress her. If she let her mood flag, it would make it easier for her uncle to weaken her. In a low moment, she might end up throwing it all away.

She liked to think she would never do that. That she was stronger than that. That she cared too much for the future of her country. But interminable darkness and
wetness and having all your rights stripped away for no apparent reason other than the question of your birthright—it could wear on a person’s spirit. Honestly, she didn’t know how Suna could bear it. How she could volunteer for it. Perhaps it made it easier, her knowing that at any time she could just get up and walk away. Then again, so could Ambrea. All it would take is a signature and a retinal scan.