Slavemakers (22 page)

“BUT CAN WE
do it now?” Aisha Rose said. “I'm quite tired.”

Then she looked past Kait at the doctor. “Dr. Konte,” she said, “please let go of her arms.” She smiled. “I'm perfectly safe.”

Konte looked skeptical, but after a few seconds, he released his hold. Kait, standing in place, didn't even seem to notice. She looked merely exhausted and ill, not aggressive, not anything like a last-stage host. Even so, Jason still felt alarmed, alert, ready for another transformation and attack.

Not that there was much he'd be able to do about it, with his hands still bound. Maybe at least he'd get his body in between Kait and Aisha Rose next time.

As if reading his thoughts, Aisha Rose looked back at him, down at his wrists, which were streaked with blood from where the rope had bitten in. Her mouth
turned down. “Do you think that's necessary?” she asked Shapiro.

Without waiting for a reply, she dipped down, a fluid, unexpected move, and reached with her right hand beneath the hem of her long dress. When she straightened again, she was holding a bone-handled knife with a curved, honed blade. An instant later, the rope was lying on the floor, and Jason's hands were free.

He rubbed his wrists, and said, “Thank you.” But she'd already switched her attention again, this time to the doctor. Jason found himself marveling at the way, seemingly without effort, this young woman had assumed her place as the group's alpha, even over the domineering Shapiro.

“Excuse me, please,” she was saying. “Dr. Konte. Do you have a—”

She struggled to find the word, her face betraying exasperation. Mama would not have approved of such a struggle, Jason thought, and Aisha Rose knew it.

Finally, she gave up. “A place where you cut people open?”

He nodded. “It's the same place where I took you, but, yes, we have the facilities.”

“Good.” Again the trace of exasperation. “So can we go there already?”

*   *   *

THEY WALKED SINGLE
file down the slick, salt-stained passageway toward the ship's stern. It was deserted though Jason could hear voices from abovedeck and from behind one or two of the closed doors they passed. Subdued
sounds, reminding him of the losses these explorers—these brave explorers—had experienced and were still absorbing.

The room they entered at the end of the passageway was a combined laboratory, examining room, and surgery. A single porthole of rippled glass provided a glimpse of blue sky and green water.

Jason took in the counters and shelves, the array of instruments and devices he never thought he'd see again in this world, including a beautiful, nineteenth-century microscope. And, on the top shelf of the interior wall to the right, three tightly sealed old gallon jars, each containing at least one thief. The wasps were standing just inside the glass, perfectly still except for the flicker of their wings, staring down.

Seeing them there, so unexpectedly, made Jason's stomach twist and his throat constrict. Somehow, and just barely, he kept himself from reaching up, pulling the containers down, and crushing the inhabitants.

He wondered if he'd ever again be able to look at a thief without feeling this sudden burst of rage. But he controlled it, turning to Shapiro as she entered the room.

He noticed the way her body relaxed. This was her real home, he thought. Even with its pet thieves.

He'd known plenty of people like Shapiro back in what she called the Last World, and now that his recall of that time was flooding back, he felt like part of him was reawakening.

He'd never much thought about the concept of repressed memories, but now he was realizing how much
he'd forgotten about the world that had been taken from him. All those sights and tastes and smells. The sound of quiet conversation.

In this little room, with its shining steel examining table, its microscope, its forceps and scalpels, its glass beakers and stoppered jars and pristine slides, its smell of medicinal alcohol and machine oil—the odors of science and technology, of civilization—Jason felt suddenly overwhelmed. Nearly undone by a combination of joy and grief, freedom and vulnerability.

Human emotions.

He was human again.

He missed Chloe with a fierceness that he thought might stop his heart.

*   *   *

AISHA ROSE CAME
and stood beside him. This time he was the one who reached for her, and after a moment he felt her strong, slender fingers intertwine with his once more.

She radiated warmth. Jason could see that her cheeks had a pink tinge, and among the room's other odors he could detect the sweet, musky one coming from her pores: the smell of sickness that he remembered so clearly from his own daughters when they'd been ill.

Across the room, Kait was on her back on the examining table, and the doctor was sterilizing both the surgical site and his scalpel and forceps with alcohol. She lay there, head turned, her eyes on Aisha Rose.

Aisha Rose smiled at her, still mostly in her eyes, but not all. “Rest now,” she said.

Kait looked like she wanted to respond, but her eyelids were already fluttering.

“Just rest,” Aisha Rose said. “We'll talk after.”

And Kait closed her eyes.

*   *   *

“WHY DIDN'T THEY
kill you?” Jason asked.

Aisha Rose's gaze had been fixed on Kait, but she spared an instant for a glance in his direction. She knew what he was talking about.

“Are they afraid of you?” he said.

He could see her thinking about it, as if she'd never had to answer that question before. Finally, she said, “No. It's not that.” She frowned a little. “Not
only
that.”

“Then what?”

Her brow furrowed. “They don't see me.”

He made a noise in his throat. Her gaze flickered again to his face, and she frowned at the incomprehension she saw there.

“No,” she said, trying again. “They don't see me as
different
from them. When they see me, they see themselves.”

She paused, then said, with the first sign of urgency he'd heard in her voice. “Do you understand?”

“I'm trying to.” He took a moment. “Until you focus on them, they think you're another part of the hive mind, just like them.”

She thought about his words, then frowned. “No, you still don't understand,” she said. “They don't
think
I'm part of them. I
am
part of them.”

He could see that she was about to go on, but Konte, standing by the table, raised his hand. The scalpel shone.

“This is a very interesting conversation,” he said, looking at Aisha Rose. “But I've administered the anesthetic, it doesn't last long, and we don't have much of it. So could I have some silence, please?”

For a moment, Aisha Rose looked almost chastened. Then she said, “Wait one moment.”

Letting go of Jason, she stepped over to the table and laid her uninjured hand against Kait's cheek.

For some reason, this gesture seemed to disturb rather than reassure the doctor. He looked into Aisha Rose's face.

She smiled at him. “It will be fine.”

“But how can you be sure?” he asked.

For an instant, the girl's eyes flashed at his tone, but when she replied she sounded as calm as always. “You were listening,” she said. “I told you—all of you. I'm sure because I'm part of them. I
am
them. Don't any of you understand yet?”

No one said anything.

“Then can we please stop talking,” she said, “and go ahead?”

*   *   *

THE PROCEDURE TOOK
about thirty seconds.

With careful movements, and under Aisha Rose's watchful eye, the doctor made a small incision and, using a pair of forceps, removed the worm. Which, as they always did when removed prematurely, died almost at once . . .

. . . while Kait did not. It was as simple as that.

And as terrifying while it was happening. Even Jason, who had quickly come to have an almost mystical belief in Aisha Rose, found that he was holding his breath as Konte extracted the worm, which was, in fact, far smaller and thinner than a last-stage larva should have been.

But though Kait's face was gray, her sleep more like unconsciousness, Konte said that her vital signs were strong, and he had no doubt she'd awaken soon.

As he disinfected the wound, Shapiro dropped the worm into a jar and turned to Aisha Rose. “So how did you do that?”

Aisha Rose shrugged, as if it were something she did every day. “I told it to keep the poison inside itself, so it did,” she said. “Mostly. Enough.”

Shapiro gave her a look. “As useful to have around as a Swiss Army knife, you are.”

Aisha Rose, polite as always even in the face of nonsense, said, “Thank you.”

*   *   *

THREE OF THEM
went back to the mess: Shapiro, Jason, and Aisha Rose. No guard necessary this time, Jason noticed. They'd passed some kind of a test.

“The thieves at the fort,” he said to Aisha Rose when they were seated again.

She tilted her head. “Yes?”

“You made them . . . spin around.”

She smiled at the memory.

“They were in a panic,” he said. “Terrified.”

“Yes.” The light in her eyes glimmered. “They are made to do that.”

“To
panic
?” Jason said, unable to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

“No. To receive. And then to react.”

He was quiet.

She looked at him more closely, then turned her palms up. “That's what the mind does. That's
all
it does.”

Still, he was silent.

Watching his face, she grimaced in frustration. “No,” she said. “I'm using the wrong words again.”

For a moment her eyes closed, and she mouthed two syllables.
Mama.

Eyes narrowed, she looked across the table at Shapiro. “That's not what the mind does. It's what it
is
.” Her eyes narrowed. “You all know this, don't you? You've lived among them for so long. It must be obvious to you.”

“But it's not,” Shapiro said, speaking the words as if she hated them. “Aisha Rose—we're not like you. You know that by now. We don't
see
.”

Aisha Rose frowned a little. But when she spoke again, it was with more patience. “You know that the
majizi
—the thieves—communicate one to the next. Almost as fast as you can think.”

Shapiro nodded.

Aisha Rose put her hands together on the table, the slender undamaged one and the one whose bandage made it look like an outsized paw. “I used to ask Mama what communication is,” she went on. “What it means.”

“It means—” Jason said. “It means understanding. And reacting.”

“Yes.”
Then, more quietly. “Yes. That's what the
majizi
do, what they're made to do. Hear. Understand. React.”

She looked at his face. “And because they're created to hear,” she said, “and because they're created to react, I can make them do what I want them to.”

Her shoulders twitched in what looked to Jason like a shiver. “Not as well as
he
can, though. He is so much stronger than I am.”

But Jason was still focused on the first part of what he'd said. “I get all that,” he said. “I saw it every day. The thieves gather information, millions, billions of bits of information every second, and model their behavior on what they learn. I just don't understand how
you
make them do it.”

But now, at last, it was Shapiro's turn. “Oh,” she said, “that part's easy. Because of the worm inside Mama. Isn't that it, Aisha Rose? The worm inside Mama changed her, and it changed you, too.”

Now Aisha Rose was silent, but after a moment, she gave a nod.

Shapiro turned to Jason. “You must have seen it all the time, the way thief venom can remodel its victims' brains.”

He nodded. “Change their chemistry, even alter their DNA? Yes, I think so.”

He paused. “The ridden slaves, the last-stage hosts, they're both part of the mind. They need it to function.”

“And the others?”

“Which others? The born slaves? They don't even need to be injected with venom to know what their responsibilities are.”

“See? Exactly. They're an evolving species.”

For a moment, her gaze went cloudy. Then she shook
her head. “New species changing to fit an empty ecological niche, just as new species have always done.”

She gestured at Aisha Rose, whose eyebrows rose. “And that's what you are. Another leap forward.”

Aisha Rose tilted her head, thinking about it. Then she gave a little smile.

“Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “Still low on the totem pole, though.”

*   *   *

JASON WAS MORE
interested in what was in front of him than any discussion of evolution. “Okay, you can see them,” he said to Aisha Rose. “See what they see. I know that happens. But how did you make them spin?”

She made him wait while she yawned. Then she said, her voice a little thick, “Well, I told them to.”

“But how did you get them to obey?”

He glanced back at Shapiro for help, but her expression didn't make him feel any smarter.

Nor did her words. “It's obvious,” she said, reaching over and tapping him on the side of his head. “Aisha Rose's brain is louder.”

Jason was quiet.

“Just because you can't see or hear her broadcasting doesn't mean she isn't,” Shapiro went on. “Any more than the fact that we can't see in the infrared spectrum or hear radio waves in the air means they're imaginary.”

He began to say something, but she didn't let him.

“Whether we can detect it or not, every bit of information sent back and forth between thieves is energy
transmitted and received,” she said. “Bigger brain means more energy transmitted and greater impact. It means that no one thief can control the others—they're all the same size—but Aisha Rose can.”