Legion, page 16
Other than that, there was nothing but silence.
The giant flung himself at the dwarf, his mouth working to curl back from his teeth, and before Steel could move, could speak, could lift a hand and fend, Shem had fired, the practically inaudible hiss of the handgun riding a faintly red streak that tore through Kalen’s chest. A projectile might have stopped him and slammed him to the floor, but all the laser did was burn through his heart with the ease of a whisper. And Kalen continued on, dead, running, dead, pushed aside by Shem’s broad hand and skidding on his hip until his skull cracked loudly against the base of a console. He did not twitch, did not moan, did not roll over and plead for help. He lay there, in silence, until Vivian began to sob and it was Marla who put her arms around her and held her while Mathew pushed himself to his feet.
“Idiot,” Steel muttered, then waved a hand as though brushing aside a cobweb, whispered something to Shem who stepped around Mathew, took Marla’s arm, Vivian’s, and led them quickly through one of the left-hand doors. Mathew could do nothing but rub at his shoulder and stare at his dead friend.
“He wouldn’t have understood,” Steel said. “He would have gone sooner or later.”
“You never gave him enough credit,” Mathew answered, backing until he could brace himself against the wall. “But then, I didn’t give you the same, either.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” Schaefer said. “Let’s get it over with so I can call the others.”
“Good,” said Mathew. “For God’s sake, get it over.”
Steel laughed. “He’s not talking about killing you. Matt. There are other things that have to be done. The first thing, of course, is to make sure you really understand what’s going on.”
“Coup,” Mathew guessed, his tone disbelieving.
“Not in so many words, no,” Steel admitted. “That is, I have no intention of moving into Central, if that’s what you mean. You had it right, and that day on the road when you explained it, I nearly had a heart attack. You knew me better than I thought.”
“No, I didn’t know you at all. I knew Quilly. And speaking of which, why that name? It isn’t even historical, I don’t think.”
“No, that’s true, it isn’t.” Steel uncrossed his legs, crossed them again, signaled Schaefer to stand by the right-hand door. “In a minute,” he told him, then turned back. “You should have listened more to your grandfather’s notes, Matt. But I knew you wouldn’t. In that you’re too much like Orion, you know. If you had, you’d have known that when Franklin made his way from his Town to Central right after the Plaguestrike, he had a brief run-in with a man named Quilly, one of the original dictators who didn’t waste any time at all trying to get started. He died not long after your grandfather did. All that lineage was my own, in case you did stumble on it and get suspicious.”
“Nice touch,” he said truthfully. “My father would have liked it. All very symbolic.” He pushed away from the wall, ignoring Schaefer’s cautious touch to his weapon. “Okay. You didn’t get me this far just to kill me, as you said. You want something, I’m the one you need for it, and … hell, Tim, let me know so we can end it.” He slumped perceptibly, not overly much, defeat in his attitude, though he kept his eyes averted. Steel regarded him for almost a full minute before sighing loudly and nodding.
“All right, it works this way.”
The most unsettling part was Steel’s inordinate calm; there was no fanatical ranting, no piping of grandiose dreams of what, for the times, was world conquest. For reasons Mathew was unable to pry from him—though he suspected a combination of age encroaching, and Central’s failure to snap back like some fabled storybook kingdom—Steel had fallen from the dreams stage. Instead, he saw conflicts, generations, simply too much time. He had started, in the beginning, just to drive Central, and that led him to his perennial Council seat, the appeal to the basic thrust-emotion of those who had been born and raised in the valley. Unfortunately, for him, those children grew into adults who were by his definition tainted again by those dreams. They would not move rapidly enough; they were cautious, testing, speculative but realistic. They were skaters who checked the ice before racing. And when Orion took Philayork and gave it lights and people who cared, Steel became anxious. What he saw were not the teams, but troops; not the careful reintegration, but the morale-building shows of force that often enough in the past proved to the populace that the government was in fact working actively for their preservation. Armies. Generals, the stuff of parades and chapters in texts that glorified and uplifted. And Central would have none of it. And Steel believed they needed it. So he rejoined the teams when he was too old ordinarily, scouted the villages that seemed small enough, ripe enough, and with help—
“What help?” Mathew demanded in his only interruption.
—with help created the Quilly persona. A bribe here, a bribe there, and village leaders who had also fallen prey to impatience fed the Central computers with what amounted to fabricated tales of plunder and murder. Suddenly, he stopped, abruptly embarrassed, abruptly crestfallen.
“It was an accident, Mathew, what happened to your family. It was never planned, it was never meant to be that way. Schaefer and Shem went to Benlowe that afternoon. They were supposed to take them, all or any one of them, and bring them to me.”
“But why?”
“Because you were who you were, whether you liked it or not, Parric. You were who you were and I couldn’t raise an army unless you approved. Robbins means nothing, Morgan, Basil … none of them mean anything if a Parric doesn’t work with them. You’ll never understand that. You’re too close to it, like Orion, like Dorin. But believe it, Mathew … without you, I couldn’t do it. And damnit, you wouldn’t get mad!”
“But I am,” he said.
“I know,” Steel said. “I know you are, and that’s what’s making me change things a bit. See, I could have had it done, I could have had Robbins hating you so much that he would have given me that damned army, and I would have all these places ours within a handful of years instead of the hundred it’s already taken. You know what he wants, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Mathew nodded. “He wants me dead.”
“Of course he does, and I’m going to have to give that to him. I wasn’t, you know. I was going to lead you straight to—”
Straight to Philayork. Straight to Orion. Who would die. And to Courtney, who would die. And Steel would gloat an I-told-you-so and bring Central out of the mountains where … where it would die because there would be no contact with the people it needed contact with, no closeness, no sense of doing the same for the same ends. An ivory tower. A fortress issuing edicts for the good of the people. A return to the way it had been before the end.
Mathew rubbed at his face, his eyes.
Steel wasn’t a maniac, nor was he demented. He was a conservative—no, a radical in the most strict sense of the word: he wanted it the way it had been, not the way it could be, whether he or someone else was on the throne. And the Hunters were the nucleus for his parade—appeals to them had worked far beyond his expectations. They were, in a real sense, an elite, and they were prideful, and had always been that way. Pride. Promise them the mountains, and they would have taken the sea if Steel had ordered it.
For years, then, he had worked; a little here, a little there, sniping away and rebuilding under everyone’s noses. Every vote, affirmative and nay, a step in his direction. He set the villagers against him when he didn’t get mad, dropped words that began fights, slipped the androids out of the captured villages and turned them into makeshift Rogues that he conquered with his Hunters for the favors of his people.
“Your people, Matt,” he said, climbing down from the stool. “Our people.” His finger jabbed at the air between them. “And it will work. You’re here now. You’ll take me to Orion, and it … will … work!”
Mathew lunged. There was nothing more he could do. Will had dampened the thinking, Steel had fired the rage, and he could do nothing but lunge and feel the blow of the handgun’s stock across the back of his skull as his hands closed around the shrieking dwarf’s neck.
… feel the burning that reminded him of the night on the bridge; and it had been Timothy who had delayed him because the village in the pinelands had not yet been made ready; not had his accomplice, or accomplices, been ready with—whatever;
… feel the concrete beneath his cheek as he rolled over and looked up, closed his eyes quickly when a light burned them worse than the fire in his bones;
… feel the hands on his neck, massaging, the whispers in his ear, urging, until another pair of hands lifted him gently by the shoulders and propped him against the wall. … feel the cool air in slow circulation, and the lock on the narrow door that snapped into focus.
Vivian and Marla.
Vivian had been weeping; Marla had not.
And Will was still gone.
“They’re going to kill him,” he said then, looking to Marla. “They’re going to kill him. And when we get to Philayork, they’re going to make him kill Orion … and me.”
XIV
He used his hands as little as possible because every movement nudged the pain still lurking beneath his skull; eventually, however, he managed to tell the women everything Steel had said, tried to explain to them about the dreams and the military taint the little man had set on them. Marla was disbelieving and began to pace the small, windowless, furnitureless chamber. Vivian listened only, her head slightly cocked, her eyes almost closed as she worked on the possibilities he outlined when he had finished.
“The hardest part to grasp about all this,” he said, one hand probing gingerly at his head, “we’re not really working against each other except in method. He wants what we want, and ordinarily that should be the compromise position. He gives, Robbins and the Council give, and we all come out of it for the best. But damnit, he won’t! He’s been thinking on this for too damned long, and he’s petrified himself into a commitment.” His smile, then, was rueful. “In fact, he’s as much in a prison as we are, now.”
Marla stopped by the door, turned and glared at him. A gesture encompassed the room. “Oh, sure he is.”
“He means,” Vivian said, “that Steel’s promised too much to the Hunters. Even if he wanted to, he can’t back out now. They’d kill him for a traitor, because Central would never make the same deal.”
“Ridiculous,” Marla said. “Look, I’ve known Tim since I was a kid, and he couldn’t possibly be—”
“Marla,” he said wearily, “I’m not going to argue with you. You heard what I told you. It’s the truth, and there’s no sense in our debating it. The question is, how do we stop him without getting stopped ourselves?”
“We escape,” Marla said, as though he should have known it. “We get back to Harve and we warn him.” Mathew shook his head. “We can’t, even assuming we can get out of here. Tim admitted he had at least one accomplice, probably on Council. If I were he, I’d probably already be feeding some more so-called evidence to Robbins about me, and about Quilly. Enough to give him one more reason to mount an army. He’s close, Marla, damned close to doing it.” He lifted a finger to quiet her. “I know what he said before we left, and I know what went on in Council, but nevertheless he’s … if he does that … idiot!” He punched at his leg angrily. “If he does that, he’ll lose every village he’s already gotten. He’ll get himself into a war.”
“It’ll be over,” Vivian said. “It’ll be all over. Again.”
“And Tim will be able to step up. In Philayork. Without doing a thing.”
He tried to rise, slumped back to the floor when his head protested, and pulled his knees close to his chest. Absently, his left hand trailed down to his boottop, fingering the empty sheath where his knife had been. Miracles, then, were out. They would have to wait on Steel’s pleasure for a while; and suppose, he thought, they did manage to escape—where would they go? Home? Orion? He didn’t really know, and knew he had no real choice. If only because access to Orion’s Hive was confined to several bridges and would be considerably more defensible than Central with its mountains now more and more becoming bars on a cage.
But that, all of it, was the least of his worries.
First he had to stay alive long enough to do something, if he could do it, then find out what they were planning for Will … and why the android hadn’t made any attempt that he’d noticed to escape himself. He wasn’t stupid. He probably had most of it figured out even before Steel’s low-keyed confession—no, Mathew frowned, it wasn’t a confession. And it wasn’t an apology. It was … a declaration. In Steel’s mind a de facto appraisal of the way the world was and would be, with Central little more than a cloud of gnats that could be ignored even when bothersome.
Accomplice.
That was something else he’d like to know. And he was disappointed in himself for hoping, for nearly believing for a time that it was Robbins. But that was another war, and when he thought about it further, decided to relegate it to nothing more than a skirmish. Once so important and now so … he blew out a breath, stretched his legs and watched Marla return to her pacing, Vivian crouched by the slit of the door probing for a means to open it. An illusion of thinking, an illusion of acting … things, he thought, to pass time when it’s no longer on your side.
He had no idea, then, of the hour when the door suddenly, silently, slid back and Schaefer stepped in with a food-laden tray he set on the floor. Vivian, still sitting near the door, had tensed, but the faint murmur of voices from behind him stayed her. Marla only stood in the center of the room and glared.
“Tell me something,” Mathew said, and Schaefer frowned skeptically. “Do you really think Steel is going to give you what you want if—”
Schaefer’s barking laugh interrupted him. He shook his head and brushed one forefinger over the other to cast a dart of shame, and left without speaking. As soon as the door closed, however, a full-throated laugh exploded in the corridor. Marla looked at him in disgust, and he lifted his shoulders to tell her he at least tried.
The indirect lighting dimmed when they’d eaten. In silence, not in fear. And once the chamber was a shade gone from night, Vivian stretched out by the door and closed her eyes. Her cap was off, her hair sprayed over her back, and Marla, who hunkered down to sit beside him, poked him hard in the arm with her thumb.
“Keep your mind on the job,” she whispered.
“How can I with you two around?” he said, hoping it would sound like a jest, realizing it came out almost petulant.
“Matt, I’m afraid.”
“Why? When you came here ahead of us, didn’t you find any of this out?”
She shook her head. “We were kept in separate rooms most of the time. The only one I saw was Shem. Do you really think I would have kept my mouth shut if I’d known? Damnit, Matt, I would have been screaming the first time I saw you.”
“And you would have been dead, too.”
She shrugged, and he slipped an arm around her shoulder. She shuddered, briefly, and he immediately recalled the night they had gone to talk to Will, when he’d needed the courage of his decision. He had touched her then, too, and she’d been … not cold, more like reacting to a scant chill in the middle of summer. Disturbing, he thought, but passing. Now she was doing it again, as though his touch were something only to be tolerated. The idea that she might be jealous of Vivian startled him when it came, and there was a brief moment of doubt when he wondered if she in fact had a right.
Chamra, to his knowledge, had never been jealous.
Chamra.
Tim claimed he hadn’t ordered it. And despite his position in this three-meter cell, Mathew believed him. He knew it had been Shem. Shem, out of Wister who had been killed by Orion.
He sighed quietly and lowered himself until he was lying on his back. This time the chill was his: the thought of Chamra had not been painful. The sting was gone. Only the memories remained.
The light dimmed to extinction.
“Matt?”
“You should try to get some sleep, Mar,” he said. “Tim can’t afford to keep us here for very long. He’d like to think that, but—”
“Matt—”
“You know, I just thought of something, something really stupid. When Chamra and the boys were … alive, we used to joke a lot about what would happen if my father and my brother, and the boys, all got into the same room together. Four people, two names … lord, the confusion! Naturally, that depended on Father being alive, too. You know, there were times when I thought I was the favorite, and when I thought Orion was. I think now it was Orion, not because he’s better than me, of course, but because there’s always that little bit of specialness—if there is such a word—about the firstborn. I was lucky. I never knew which of the twins was first. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to think of them both popping—”
“Matt, please! That kind of talk isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“You’re wrong,” Vivian said, her voice floating out of the darkness, startling them both.
Marla fell silent, and he heard her shifting about on the floor, trying to get comfortable. When finally she stopped, he wanted to ask Vivian how she knew. But he didn’t. Instead he stared into the dark that covered the ceiling and let all the memories break from their cages. One by one. Chamra and Dorin, and Orion, and…
He sat up suddenly, heard Vivian do the same. Marla didn’t move.
There was a slight scraping of metal against metal as the door slid back slowly. A fainter shade of black when it had opened full; and he heard Vivian’s boots push off the floor, heard a grunt, her muffled swearing, and a voice that complained: “Pick on someone your own age.”
A moment later a brilliant flare banished dark into shadows and he threw a hand over his eyes, waiting for the flare to subside into the recognizable soft glow of a litetorch baton. Above it was Will’s face. Unmarked.
Mathew could think of nothing to say except: “What took you so long?”
Will scowled at him. “You were expecting me?” It was a scolding.
The giant flung himself at the dwarf, his mouth working to curl back from his teeth, and before Steel could move, could speak, could lift a hand and fend, Shem had fired, the practically inaudible hiss of the handgun riding a faintly red streak that tore through Kalen’s chest. A projectile might have stopped him and slammed him to the floor, but all the laser did was burn through his heart with the ease of a whisper. And Kalen continued on, dead, running, dead, pushed aside by Shem’s broad hand and skidding on his hip until his skull cracked loudly against the base of a console. He did not twitch, did not moan, did not roll over and plead for help. He lay there, in silence, until Vivian began to sob and it was Marla who put her arms around her and held her while Mathew pushed himself to his feet.
“Idiot,” Steel muttered, then waved a hand as though brushing aside a cobweb, whispered something to Shem who stepped around Mathew, took Marla’s arm, Vivian’s, and led them quickly through one of the left-hand doors. Mathew could do nothing but rub at his shoulder and stare at his dead friend.
“He wouldn’t have understood,” Steel said. “He would have gone sooner or later.”
“You never gave him enough credit,” Mathew answered, backing until he could brace himself against the wall. “But then, I didn’t give you the same, either.”
“This is getting us nowhere,” Schaefer said. “Let’s get it over with so I can call the others.”
“Good,” said Mathew. “For God’s sake, get it over.”
Steel laughed. “He’s not talking about killing you. Matt. There are other things that have to be done. The first thing, of course, is to make sure you really understand what’s going on.”
“Coup,” Mathew guessed, his tone disbelieving.
“Not in so many words, no,” Steel admitted. “That is, I have no intention of moving into Central, if that’s what you mean. You had it right, and that day on the road when you explained it, I nearly had a heart attack. You knew me better than I thought.”
“No, I didn’t know you at all. I knew Quilly. And speaking of which, why that name? It isn’t even historical, I don’t think.”
“No, that’s true, it isn’t.” Steel uncrossed his legs, crossed them again, signaled Schaefer to stand by the right-hand door. “In a minute,” he told him, then turned back. “You should have listened more to your grandfather’s notes, Matt. But I knew you wouldn’t. In that you’re too much like Orion, you know. If you had, you’d have known that when Franklin made his way from his Town to Central right after the Plaguestrike, he had a brief run-in with a man named Quilly, one of the original dictators who didn’t waste any time at all trying to get started. He died not long after your grandfather did. All that lineage was my own, in case you did stumble on it and get suspicious.”
“Nice touch,” he said truthfully. “My father would have liked it. All very symbolic.” He pushed away from the wall, ignoring Schaefer’s cautious touch to his weapon. “Okay. You didn’t get me this far just to kill me, as you said. You want something, I’m the one you need for it, and … hell, Tim, let me know so we can end it.” He slumped perceptibly, not overly much, defeat in his attitude, though he kept his eyes averted. Steel regarded him for almost a full minute before sighing loudly and nodding.
“All right, it works this way.”
The most unsettling part was Steel’s inordinate calm; there was no fanatical ranting, no piping of grandiose dreams of what, for the times, was world conquest. For reasons Mathew was unable to pry from him—though he suspected a combination of age encroaching, and Central’s failure to snap back like some fabled storybook kingdom—Steel had fallen from the dreams stage. Instead, he saw conflicts, generations, simply too much time. He had started, in the beginning, just to drive Central, and that led him to his perennial Council seat, the appeal to the basic thrust-emotion of those who had been born and raised in the valley. Unfortunately, for him, those children grew into adults who were by his definition tainted again by those dreams. They would not move rapidly enough; they were cautious, testing, speculative but realistic. They were skaters who checked the ice before racing. And when Orion took Philayork and gave it lights and people who cared, Steel became anxious. What he saw were not the teams, but troops; not the careful reintegration, but the morale-building shows of force that often enough in the past proved to the populace that the government was in fact working actively for their preservation. Armies. Generals, the stuff of parades and chapters in texts that glorified and uplifted. And Central would have none of it. And Steel believed they needed it. So he rejoined the teams when he was too old ordinarily, scouted the villages that seemed small enough, ripe enough, and with help—
“What help?” Mathew demanded in his only interruption.
—with help created the Quilly persona. A bribe here, a bribe there, and village leaders who had also fallen prey to impatience fed the Central computers with what amounted to fabricated tales of plunder and murder. Suddenly, he stopped, abruptly embarrassed, abruptly crestfallen.
“It was an accident, Mathew, what happened to your family. It was never planned, it was never meant to be that way. Schaefer and Shem went to Benlowe that afternoon. They were supposed to take them, all or any one of them, and bring them to me.”
“But why?”
“Because you were who you were, whether you liked it or not, Parric. You were who you were and I couldn’t raise an army unless you approved. Robbins means nothing, Morgan, Basil … none of them mean anything if a Parric doesn’t work with them. You’ll never understand that. You’re too close to it, like Orion, like Dorin. But believe it, Mathew … without you, I couldn’t do it. And damnit, you wouldn’t get mad!”
“But I am,” he said.
“I know,” Steel said. “I know you are, and that’s what’s making me change things a bit. See, I could have had it done, I could have had Robbins hating you so much that he would have given me that damned army, and I would have all these places ours within a handful of years instead of the hundred it’s already taken. You know what he wants, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Mathew nodded. “He wants me dead.”
“Of course he does, and I’m going to have to give that to him. I wasn’t, you know. I was going to lead you straight to—”
Straight to Philayork. Straight to Orion. Who would die. And to Courtney, who would die. And Steel would gloat an I-told-you-so and bring Central out of the mountains where … where it would die because there would be no contact with the people it needed contact with, no closeness, no sense of doing the same for the same ends. An ivory tower. A fortress issuing edicts for the good of the people. A return to the way it had been before the end.
Mathew rubbed at his face, his eyes.
Steel wasn’t a maniac, nor was he demented. He was a conservative—no, a radical in the most strict sense of the word: he wanted it the way it had been, not the way it could be, whether he or someone else was on the throne. And the Hunters were the nucleus for his parade—appeals to them had worked far beyond his expectations. They were, in a real sense, an elite, and they were prideful, and had always been that way. Pride. Promise them the mountains, and they would have taken the sea if Steel had ordered it.
For years, then, he had worked; a little here, a little there, sniping away and rebuilding under everyone’s noses. Every vote, affirmative and nay, a step in his direction. He set the villagers against him when he didn’t get mad, dropped words that began fights, slipped the androids out of the captured villages and turned them into makeshift Rogues that he conquered with his Hunters for the favors of his people.
“Your people, Matt,” he said, climbing down from the stool. “Our people.” His finger jabbed at the air between them. “And it will work. You’re here now. You’ll take me to Orion, and it … will … work!”
Mathew lunged. There was nothing more he could do. Will had dampened the thinking, Steel had fired the rage, and he could do nothing but lunge and feel the blow of the handgun’s stock across the back of his skull as his hands closed around the shrieking dwarf’s neck.
… feel the burning that reminded him of the night on the bridge; and it had been Timothy who had delayed him because the village in the pinelands had not yet been made ready; not had his accomplice, or accomplices, been ready with—whatever;
… feel the concrete beneath his cheek as he rolled over and looked up, closed his eyes quickly when a light burned them worse than the fire in his bones;
… feel the hands on his neck, massaging, the whispers in his ear, urging, until another pair of hands lifted him gently by the shoulders and propped him against the wall. … feel the cool air in slow circulation, and the lock on the narrow door that snapped into focus.
Vivian and Marla.
Vivian had been weeping; Marla had not.
And Will was still gone.
“They’re going to kill him,” he said then, looking to Marla. “They’re going to kill him. And when we get to Philayork, they’re going to make him kill Orion … and me.”
XIV
He used his hands as little as possible because every movement nudged the pain still lurking beneath his skull; eventually, however, he managed to tell the women everything Steel had said, tried to explain to them about the dreams and the military taint the little man had set on them. Marla was disbelieving and began to pace the small, windowless, furnitureless chamber. Vivian listened only, her head slightly cocked, her eyes almost closed as she worked on the possibilities he outlined when he had finished.
“The hardest part to grasp about all this,” he said, one hand probing gingerly at his head, “we’re not really working against each other except in method. He wants what we want, and ordinarily that should be the compromise position. He gives, Robbins and the Council give, and we all come out of it for the best. But damnit, he won’t! He’s been thinking on this for too damned long, and he’s petrified himself into a commitment.” His smile, then, was rueful. “In fact, he’s as much in a prison as we are, now.”
Marla stopped by the door, turned and glared at him. A gesture encompassed the room. “Oh, sure he is.”
“He means,” Vivian said, “that Steel’s promised too much to the Hunters. Even if he wanted to, he can’t back out now. They’d kill him for a traitor, because Central would never make the same deal.”
“Ridiculous,” Marla said. “Look, I’ve known Tim since I was a kid, and he couldn’t possibly be—”
“Marla,” he said wearily, “I’m not going to argue with you. You heard what I told you. It’s the truth, and there’s no sense in our debating it. The question is, how do we stop him without getting stopped ourselves?”
“We escape,” Marla said, as though he should have known it. “We get back to Harve and we warn him.” Mathew shook his head. “We can’t, even assuming we can get out of here. Tim admitted he had at least one accomplice, probably on Council. If I were he, I’d probably already be feeding some more so-called evidence to Robbins about me, and about Quilly. Enough to give him one more reason to mount an army. He’s close, Marla, damned close to doing it.” He lifted a finger to quiet her. “I know what he said before we left, and I know what went on in Council, but nevertheless he’s … if he does that … idiot!” He punched at his leg angrily. “If he does that, he’ll lose every village he’s already gotten. He’ll get himself into a war.”
“It’ll be over,” Vivian said. “It’ll be all over. Again.”
“And Tim will be able to step up. In Philayork. Without doing a thing.”
He tried to rise, slumped back to the floor when his head protested, and pulled his knees close to his chest. Absently, his left hand trailed down to his boottop, fingering the empty sheath where his knife had been. Miracles, then, were out. They would have to wait on Steel’s pleasure for a while; and suppose, he thought, they did manage to escape—where would they go? Home? Orion? He didn’t really know, and knew he had no real choice. If only because access to Orion’s Hive was confined to several bridges and would be considerably more defensible than Central with its mountains now more and more becoming bars on a cage.
But that, all of it, was the least of his worries.
First he had to stay alive long enough to do something, if he could do it, then find out what they were planning for Will … and why the android hadn’t made any attempt that he’d noticed to escape himself. He wasn’t stupid. He probably had most of it figured out even before Steel’s low-keyed confession—no, Mathew frowned, it wasn’t a confession. And it wasn’t an apology. It was … a declaration. In Steel’s mind a de facto appraisal of the way the world was and would be, with Central little more than a cloud of gnats that could be ignored even when bothersome.
Accomplice.
That was something else he’d like to know. And he was disappointed in himself for hoping, for nearly believing for a time that it was Robbins. But that was another war, and when he thought about it further, decided to relegate it to nothing more than a skirmish. Once so important and now so … he blew out a breath, stretched his legs and watched Marla return to her pacing, Vivian crouched by the slit of the door probing for a means to open it. An illusion of thinking, an illusion of acting … things, he thought, to pass time when it’s no longer on your side.
He had no idea, then, of the hour when the door suddenly, silently, slid back and Schaefer stepped in with a food-laden tray he set on the floor. Vivian, still sitting near the door, had tensed, but the faint murmur of voices from behind him stayed her. Marla only stood in the center of the room and glared.
“Tell me something,” Mathew said, and Schaefer frowned skeptically. “Do you really think Steel is going to give you what you want if—”
Schaefer’s barking laugh interrupted him. He shook his head and brushed one forefinger over the other to cast a dart of shame, and left without speaking. As soon as the door closed, however, a full-throated laugh exploded in the corridor. Marla looked at him in disgust, and he lifted his shoulders to tell her he at least tried.
The indirect lighting dimmed when they’d eaten. In silence, not in fear. And once the chamber was a shade gone from night, Vivian stretched out by the door and closed her eyes. Her cap was off, her hair sprayed over her back, and Marla, who hunkered down to sit beside him, poked him hard in the arm with her thumb.
“Keep your mind on the job,” she whispered.
“How can I with you two around?” he said, hoping it would sound like a jest, realizing it came out almost petulant.
“Matt, I’m afraid.”
“Why? When you came here ahead of us, didn’t you find any of this out?”
She shook her head. “We were kept in separate rooms most of the time. The only one I saw was Shem. Do you really think I would have kept my mouth shut if I’d known? Damnit, Matt, I would have been screaming the first time I saw you.”
“And you would have been dead, too.”
She shrugged, and he slipped an arm around her shoulder. She shuddered, briefly, and he immediately recalled the night they had gone to talk to Will, when he’d needed the courage of his decision. He had touched her then, too, and she’d been … not cold, more like reacting to a scant chill in the middle of summer. Disturbing, he thought, but passing. Now she was doing it again, as though his touch were something only to be tolerated. The idea that she might be jealous of Vivian startled him when it came, and there was a brief moment of doubt when he wondered if she in fact had a right.
Chamra, to his knowledge, had never been jealous.
Chamra.
Tim claimed he hadn’t ordered it. And despite his position in this three-meter cell, Mathew believed him. He knew it had been Shem. Shem, out of Wister who had been killed by Orion.
He sighed quietly and lowered himself until he was lying on his back. This time the chill was his: the thought of Chamra had not been painful. The sting was gone. Only the memories remained.
The light dimmed to extinction.
“Matt?”
“You should try to get some sleep, Mar,” he said. “Tim can’t afford to keep us here for very long. He’d like to think that, but—”
“Matt—”
“You know, I just thought of something, something really stupid. When Chamra and the boys were … alive, we used to joke a lot about what would happen if my father and my brother, and the boys, all got into the same room together. Four people, two names … lord, the confusion! Naturally, that depended on Father being alive, too. You know, there were times when I thought I was the favorite, and when I thought Orion was. I think now it was Orion, not because he’s better than me, of course, but because there’s always that little bit of specialness—if there is such a word—about the firstborn. I was lucky. I never knew which of the twins was first. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to think of them both popping—”
“Matt, please! That kind of talk isn’t going to get you anywhere.”
“You’re wrong,” Vivian said, her voice floating out of the darkness, startling them both.
Marla fell silent, and he heard her shifting about on the floor, trying to get comfortable. When finally she stopped, he wanted to ask Vivian how she knew. But he didn’t. Instead he stared into the dark that covered the ceiling and let all the memories break from their cages. One by one. Chamra and Dorin, and Orion, and…
He sat up suddenly, heard Vivian do the same. Marla didn’t move.
There was a slight scraping of metal against metal as the door slid back slowly. A fainter shade of black when it had opened full; and he heard Vivian’s boots push off the floor, heard a grunt, her muffled swearing, and a voice that complained: “Pick on someone your own age.”
A moment later a brilliant flare banished dark into shadows and he threw a hand over his eyes, waiting for the flare to subside into the recognizable soft glow of a litetorch baton. Above it was Will’s face. Unmarked.
Mathew could think of nothing to say except: “What took you so long?”
Will scowled at him. “You were expecting me?” It was a scolding.
