Treason, page 12
Chapter Seventeen
Two days after Korrian came so close to death, Caya, Briar, Adina, Zoem, Neenja, and the president were in Adina’s office in the military headquarters, a large room located on the second floor. The walls were grey, but they were decorated with photos of family and friends, some blueprints, and a few framed diplomas. Zoem gazed around the room and guessed that Briar had put up the latter, rather than Adina herself, as the commander was rather low-key and struck Zoem as the type that thought diplomas on the wall were inconsequential.
Commander Adina Vantressa pulled three devices from a large, padded case. Looking at them, she propped her hip against the desk. “All right,” she said slowly. “I have been able to talk to Admiral Heigel, and she has informed me in detail how these things work.”
Zoem eyed the contraptions on Adina’s desk. Two of them looked the same, meant to wear on one’s upper arm, but the third, although similar, was bulkier and taller. She had a feeling that one was for her.
“These two are for Briar and Caya.” Confirming Zoem’s guess, Adina pointed to the smaller cuffs. “They are mostly for reception as well as filtering. This one,” she said, indicating the bigger one, is for Zoem. This receives too, but it mostly transmits. To be on the safe side, you should wear them throughout the day.”
“What?” Caya turned to her sister. “Did you know that?”
Briar sighed and shook her head. “No. I didn’t. This is the first I’ve heard of it—just like you.”
“At least you don’t have to sleep with them on,” Adina said sternly. “You never know when you’re going to encounter Zoem and how close the proximity will be. Until Darmiya and I can figure out something less, um, obvious, this is it. We can’t risk anyone getting hurt again.”
“And how will we know they work?” Neenja asked. “How will we test them?”
“That’s what we’re going to do now.” Adina waved Zoem over. “As you’re the one with the most power, in a way, we better put this on you first.”
Zoem nodded, and looking at the cuff, she unfastened her shirt and pulled it off. She was going to have to wear more loosely fitted clothes with that apparatus on her arm.
“Excuse me.” Neenja stood. “The device. Can it hurt her?” Hands on her hips, she firmly stared at Adina, who calmly shook her head.
“In itself, no. What can hurt her is if it doesn’t work. Since both Caya and Briar have begun to notice more pronounced tingles and buzzing sensations when they come within one meter of Zoem, they can step closer to her than that. If they feel no tingles, they can touch, very carefully. If the cuffs work, neither of them should feel anything at all. If they experience any sort of sensation or pain, the devices clearly aren’t effective, and then it’s back to work for Darmiya and me.”
“All right.” Neenja didn’t move.
“Go on,” Zoem said to Adina. “This is our only option if I’m going to be able to coordinate with Caya and Briar. And that needs to happen.”
Adina took the cuff and slid it up along Zoem’s arm until she held it in place just shy of her armpit. Zoem was starting to worry that the cuff would be too large and keep falling off, when Adina pressed a sensor and it seemed to shrink to just the right size.
“We won’t turn it on until the other two are in place.” Adina repeated the procedure with the other two cuffs.
Zoem looked at the device around her left arm. She was ambidextrous, which meant it wouldn’t be in the way. Made from a matte metal alloy, it held buttons, small displays, and a multitude of tiny sensors. She hoped she wouldn’t have to remember what each was for, as she was certain that the level of her recurring fatigue would keep her from retaining such detailed information.
“All the cuffs have a larger sensor at the front, near the top. Press it for three seconds, and the cuff will acclimatize to your system. Go ahead.” Adina motioned for them to follow her instructions.
After pressing the sensor, Zoem waited for something to feel different, even hurt, but all she experienced was a faint buzzing sensation that soon faded. She was starting to relax when her cuff gave a loud, piercing signal. Flinching, she fumbled for a way to turn it off.
“No. Don’t, Zoem.” Adina hurried over and took her hands. “Korrian said yours would have to perform more readings of your system and that it would take longer.”
Neenja seemed ready to rip the cuff off Zoem’s arm, but eventually, perhaps two full minutes later, the tone faded as well.
“Good.” Adina scanned all three devices and tapped on her tablet. “Now for the first test. Caya, walk toward Zoem. Slowly.”
“Very slowly,” Neenja said darkly. Zoem glanced at her, noting the storm brewing in her eyes.
Caya made her way toward Zoem, who tensed but still didn’t feel any different than she did about standing close to a non-changer. When Caya stood half a meter from Zoem, she smiled. “Take it up a notch?”
“Just be careful. I don’t want to hurt you.” Zoem shifted sideways, away from Neenja, in case she might inadvertently send Caya hurtling across the room again.
Caya placed a firm, steady hand on Zoem’s lower arm and then took her hand. Nothing happened on Zoem’s end, but Caya’s eyes grew wide. “Oh, dear.”
“What’s wrong?” Tylio, who had been quiet until now, stepped forward, looking like she would break them apart by force.
“Wait! Wait.” Caya closed her eyes. “Briar. You too. Hurry.”
Briar didn’t hesitate. She came over and placed a hand on top of her sister’s. Within seconds, her eyes snapped open wide, and she gaped as she looked back and forth between Zoem and Caya. “Oh, dear, indeed.”
“Will someone fill the rest of us mere mortals in?” Tylio all but stomped her foot.
“In a sec, Thea.” Caya raised her free hand and waved it dismissively in the air. “Just wait.”
Tylio sent a help-seeking glance at the ceiling and pressed her lips together.
Zoem was still not feeling anything special about Caya’s touch. Relaxing marginally, she closed her eyes. Blue flashes and orange flames flickered on the inside of her eyelids, and she lifted her hand to rub her eyes. This motion only seemed to emphasize the emerging sensation of being linked.
“Caya?” At first Zoem was certain she said the name out loud, but the echo behind it made that assumption dubious. Was she…transmitting? “Briar?” Zoem tried again.
“I hear you,” a slightly echoing voice, clearly Briar’s, said. “Can you hear me?”
“For the love of the Creator.” Caya’s voice came through, sounding wry. “This reminds me of using my very first toy communicator. “Can you hear me? Can you hear me now? How about now?” She snorted.
Zoem wondered how it was at all possible to snort in a telepathic conversation. “I feel dizzy,” she said, and immediately felt the hand on her arm steady her.
“It can be disorienting, in the beginning. I’m so glad you could let us in this time,” Briar said.
A hand stroked her hair, and somehow Zoem knew this wasn’t any of the Lindemay sisters’ touch. Neenja? Who else would think to do this, to reassure her?
“Would you allow us to probe your system?” Caya asked. “I promise we will be discreet, and unless it has to do with national security, we won’t go any further.”
“By all means.” Wasn’t she an open book already? She had been prodded, probed, scanned, and tested, ever since she was rescued from the cave, no, ever since she was taken, initially. Relaxing farther into the hand cupping the back of her neck, Zoem kept her eyes closed and let her mind go, if not blank, exactly, then still. She felt Caya and Briar within her in the strangest of sensations, as if she were a small pond and they were small tumi water creatures. Time seemed to slow around her, and Zoem merely reveled at the gentleness of the hand in her hair, the care and strangely inconspicuous exploration by Caya and Briar.
Eventually, the sisters were done, and they slowly broke the connection. Looking up, Zoem blinked at the bright light of the sun filtering through the half-closed shades.
“How do you feel?” Neenja asked.
“Fine. Nothing hurts. I’m not tired.” Zoem smiled faintly. “Actually, I feel replenished. Recharged. Something like that.”
“And you?” Tylio pulled Caya down next to her on a couch.
Adina did the same with Briar.
It dawned on Zoem that neither of the sisters had spoken since they broke the contact. Looking at them, she realized that they’d only broken contact with her. They were still communicating. Perhaps it was hard for others to detect the signs of their telepathic connection, but for Zoem, it was obvious.
“Caya?” Concerned now, Tylio raised her hand to touch Caya’s face.
“Wait,” Zoem said. “Madam President, they’re still working.”
“What? But they broke off—oh.” Tylio looked over at Briar, who seemed as preoccupied as her sister.
They waited for another fifteen minutes for Caya and Briar to acknowledge them. Zoem was content sitting next to Neenja, as their proximity felt so right. From what she could sense, Neenja felt the same way.
Caya blinked a few times, as did Briar, and then they both got up and fetched their tablets. Sitting down again, Briar nodded at Caya, who remained at her feet.
“All right. I’ll start.” Caya tapped a few commands into her tablet and then looked at Zoem. “Thank you for allowing us access. It takes a lot of courage to do that, and we appreciate it. However, the result of our clairvoyant scan is—unexpected, and worrisome. I think it’s safe to say that Briar and I don’t have the knowledge of what it all means. For you, or for the rest of us.”
Tylio sat up straighter on the couch. “What did you see?” she asked, her voice grave.
Caya gripped the tablet harder. “We discovered things that normal scans and tests failed to detect. I think it was because of Zoem’s ability to block standard examinations.”
“Go on.” Tylio sounded far too calm, which worried Zoem. What had the sisters found?
“The first thing, the most obvious thing, was the fact that—and this is going to sound crazy—Zoem harbors black garnet in every cell in her body.”
“What?” Tylio got up. “What the hell are you saying?”
Zoem couldn’t believe her ears. Shrinking into the backrest of the couch where she sat with Adina, she wanted to hide from the startled expression on everyone’s face.
“Stop before you jump to conclusions. Zoem is not about to explode.” Caya held up a hand. “The black garnet is dormant, if that is the correct term. We investigated it, very carefully, and it’s just…sitting there.”
“Damn.” Adina rubbed her face with both hands. “Did the bastards turn her into a weapon of mass destruction?”
Zoem tried to be stoic but gave a muted sob.
“No. I don’t think so,” Briar said, placing a hand on Adina’s knee. “The black garnet is contained in each cell like a nucleus within its membrane. And those membranes were reinforced in a way that makes them impenetrable.”
“Then why would she have them? Did the Nestrocalder install them? Or someone else?” Neenja asked.
Zoem curled up away from Neenja. “Wait.” Her voice was drowned out by the others speculating about the presence of black garnet in her system. New blue and red flashes ignited and, with them, flickering memories of her years in captivity. They weren’t intact, or complete, but they began to make more and more sense. “Wait. Listen.” Zoem sat up, but nobody paid much attention. Desperate for the others to hear her out, Zoem pushed against the couch. A new sensation of being weightless filled her, and only then did Zoem notice that she was hovering a few centimeters above the couch.
“Look,” Neenja said, and turned to the others when they didn’t hear her either. “Hey! Look!”
Four heads whipped around, staring at Zoem. Adina and Tylio paled, but the sisters merely smiled.
“Creator…” The president shook her head as if denial would help her make sense of things.
Zoem relaxed and found herself back on the couch again. “Listen to me.”
“All right. We’re listening,” Neenja said, and put her arm around Zoem’s shoulders. “Go on.”
“I remember some things. I’m not sure where my new memories come from.” Zoem shrugged. “Perhaps Caya’s and Briar’s probing unlocked them? Doesn’t matter. What is important is that I do have some vital memories.”
“Regarding what?” Tylio asked.
“Regarding my abduction, being a prisoner, being experimented on, and yes, the creature, the Nestrocalder.” Zoem gripped Neenja’s hand and held it tight. “Most of all, I remember how the black garnet entered my system.”
“Don’t keep us guessing,” Caya said, walking closer. “Tell us.”
Zoem rested her forehead against Neenja’s shoulder for a few moments. Then she looked up at them, praying they would understand. “They did a lot of things to me, the Nestrocalder’s people, and some was pure torture. I learned to hide, to mask things, to retreat within myself.” She paused, clinging to her courage before she lost it. “They didn’t infuse my system with black garnet.” Zoem closed her eyes hard. “I did.”
Chapter Eighteen
Neenja watched the other women around Zoem go pale.
“What?” Tylio asked.
Zoem merely hid her face against Neenja’s shoulder. “Give me…a moment.”
“A moment?” Tylio lowered her voice until it reverberated like the kind of growl that made her political opponents cry and leave the room.
Neenja held Zoem closer. “Yes, a damn minute, Madam President. That’s not too much to ask.”
“Thea.” Caya placed a hand on Tylio’s arm. “If I had sensed even a fraction of malevolence in Zoem, I would have told you. Instantly. And so would Briar.”
“True.” Briar looked concerned when she regarded Zoem. “That said, she has been hiding things from us, knowingly or unknowingly—”
“Unknowingly.” Zoem pulled free and sat up straight. Her eyes glowed that strange amber-green-tinted fire. “I had no idea that I was doing that. Touch me again and verify that, Briar, if you don’t believe me.”
“We want to believe you,” Adina said calmly. “But too much is at stake for us to completely trust someone we don’t know enough about.”
Neenja could tell how Adina’s words, though spoken kindly, still cut Zoem deeply. Her own heart ached at the thought of how it must feel to be questioned and unable to prove your truthfulness. “So, we’re back to that again,” Neenja said. “Zoem is a liability, no matter what she says or does.”
“It’s not like we’re not grateful that she saved Korrian,” Adina said gently. “We’re not taking that away from her.”
“That’s utter nonsense,” Neenja said hotly. She was about to say something more, when Zoem placed a hand on hers.
“Neenja. It’s all right.” The sorrow in Zoem’s voice was evident. “You can’t expect anyone to place blind trust in someone who has been in enemy custody for so long. Add to that the substance in my cells—”
“We put trust in Pamas Seclan.” Neenja heard her own words strike like whiplashes.
“Not until we had debriefed and examined her. And she wasn’t a changer.” Tylio raised her hand. “Commander…Neenja.” Her voice softened. “Why don’t we let Zoem tell us how the black garnet got into her system—and more importantly, why it hasn’t killed her and everyone around her.”
Neenja knew better than to sneer at the president, yet she didn’t rely on her own tone of voice, but merely nodded.
Zoem changed her posture, straightening her back. “When I was held captive, I had blood drawn often. They gave me injections, and in the beginning these injections made me violently ill. Because of that, I found I could resist. It wasn’t an entirely deliberate thing, but the idea of throwing up for hours, not to mention the headaches that came with it, made me so unwilling to participate that I tensed up. After one of the sessions, I felt extremely rigid and that something was happening inside me. After a few moments, something foul-tasting filled my mouth, and I spit it out. It had the same fluorescent green color as the liquid in the vials they infused me with. That’s how I figured out how to get rid of whatever it was.”
“Amazing.” Adina made notes on her tablet.
“At one of the sites where I was held, a laboratory of some sort, something was going on in some abandoned mines that caused the staff to wear protective gear. I was kept next door to one of the rooms near the labs.” Zoem gripped her elbows, and Neenja saw how she shivered. Not hesitating, she placed an arm behind Zoem, in case she needed the support. “My hearing has always been excellent, and I heard workers talk about black garnet. I was around fourteen, I think? I had no idea about any color garnet. But when they spoke of it being the ultimate weapon, I thought of using it as a weapon of sorts—to escape. To get back to my mother…my family.”
“Go on, Zoem. How did you manage to get into the lab?” Tylio asked.
“I didn’t.” Zoem rested back against Neenja’s arm. “After a while, I realized that the visions I had meant I could distinguish between different particles in the lab sharing a wall with me. The wall was made from transparent metal alloys in several layers. The laboratory was void of oxygen, and you could get in there only by passing through four sluice rooms.”
Reaching for some water, Zoem sipped it before continuing. “It wouldn’t have been possible for me to escape or to go through those rooms completely unnoticed. So I sliced my scalp open, only a centimeter or so, and pressed that part of my head to the wall. Then I singled out the black garnet, which I realized had to be kept in an anaerobic atmosphere, as there was no oxygen in the lab. I pulled some of the particles in there through the several layers of walls and their empty, oxygen-free, voids. Only a few at a time, I directed them into my cells before they reached an oxygenized environment.”
“Creator of…” Briar whispered. “No wonder the Nestrocalder wanted you. It must’ve sensed your potential power—what you might be able to do.”
