Neodymium Betrayal, page 27
“What woman doesn’t.”
“—and may already have a general idea of my whereabouts. Tomorrow, we’ll display you publicly as me. That way, you don’t have to worry about also evading my men: you just lead Mera and Jei to the decoy ship we’ll pretend I’m taking off from. They will follow whichever of us they see first, so we’ll make it easy and make it me. I’ll hang around that ship, hidden, so she reads two signals, and maybe we can flash your face through the window so they think we’re traveling together. Once they get into the hangar bay, we’ll have the ship take off via autopilot.”
“How we gonna leave that ship to go our actual separate ways?” Lem asked.
“That’s the best part,” Diebol grinned, irrigating the wound with a disinfecting solution. The icy liquid felt good; pleasant, relaxed chills flooded Lem’s scalp as the rivulets dribbled off her shoulder and down her side, and as Diebol traced the edge of the wound in small, hypnotic circles with a white cleaning cloth, Lem remembered how tired she was. “I have a device that masks our electromagnetic output—basically a signal dampener in a vest. We’ll put those on, and sneak out.”
Lem sighed, and looked away from the wound for a moment, resting her neck on the wall behind her as the world blurred, and she forced herself to blink instead of sleeping. “Why can’t we just do this now? Why we gotta wait ’til morning?” she asked. “I’m at that point where I don’t even care, I just want this shyte to end.”
“Nonsense. You need to be in tip-top shape to murder my compatriot.” Diebol smiled, such a genuine, conspiratorial smile Lem could’ve sworn they were just smuggling cookies out of the mess hall. “Besides, the vests need to charge.”
Diebol held up a needle and thread very deliberately right in front of her eyes. “No surprises,” he said. “I wouldn’t normally close a shallow cut, of course, for fear of locking in infection—but where this has split, on your arm here, the skin won’t close over it right without stitches because your muscle’s too developed. See how it’s oozing still, in the middle?” He pointed with his pinky finger at the gaping fish-mouth of a wound, and the red, striated tissue underneath.
“My muscle’s too developed, huh,” Lem chuckled. “I appreciate the compliment, I guess. Yeah, go ahead, sew it up.”
“I don’t have anesthetic,” he said. “But we both know you tolerate pain.” The needle pricked into the edge of wound, and Lem sucked in her breath, not at the pain, but at the familiar feeling of his proximity to it. Her other hand slipped to the bamboo staff dangling from her belt …
“I’m sorry,” he said. Her eyes flitted to his face, fixed on his work—he pulled the thread tight with clenched jaw, and he winced as the needle dove back through her skin again. He really was sorry. “You’re doing well,” he murmured.
The needle hit a sensitive spot a bit more central to the wound—a wave of dizziness washed against her forehead, and a gasp escaped her lips. Why, she wondered? She never had a problem with blood, or pain. But she began to shiver, and the firm, moist earth at her back seemed to be replaced with icy cement as her vision seemed to darken, and she heard clinking chains, and Cinta’s yowls …
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. His voice brought her back to here, and she saw him watching her face. “I would have you do this, so it’s not me, but …”
“It’s difficult to suture your own shoulder with only one arm,” Lem grunted, leaning her head back on the wall again. “I’m fine.” She stared at the irregular lumps in the dirt wall across from her, listening to him breathe beside her, feeling the gentleness of his fingers around the sharp sting of the needle … “You ever wonder what we would be if you weren’t evil?”
He laughed. “If you weren’t evil, you mean.”
“I would never mean that,” Lem said—twitching as the needle penetrated again. In her exhaustion, the sheer sensory overwhelm sent shivers and tingles through her skin, and she thought, for a moment, that the pricking pain was replaced by something else more pleasant. She bit her lip, and her eyes strayed to the needle, glinting in the low light of Diebol’s holopen …
“Of course,” he said. “How could I not wonder? I spent months trying to save you and Jei from your Contamination. Of course I thought about what could have been. The three of us could have overthrown Bricandor, if we wanted.” He shook his head, mocking his past self. “I used to imagine game tournaments with him and—ha, hiking!—with you, if you can believe it.”
“Jei’s the only friend you ever had, isn’t he,” Lem said. In the shadows, as her eyelids drooped and the endorphins of the needle kept pricking her awake, her enemy looked sad. What would have become of him if he hadn’t been the other little boy in the cage with Jei? Was that kid still in there, under all the blood, just wishing he wasn’t so filking alone?
But the young Growen leader answered with a canned response, “Attachments cause suffering,” he said definitively. “I didn’t need the attachments after all.”
With that, he closed the wound, and cut the thread.
Reise
The four Frelsi runaways found themselves forced to stop their march through the wet Alpino plains once the sun went down: without the digital compasses on their wristbands, or any source of light, they couldn’t risk changing direction by accident and becoming lost. They sat with their backs against each other, still wet and cold and in significant need of body heat despite the cessation of the rain.
The wind, at least, had mostly died down. That made it worse, though, when grass rustled here and there—was it a breeze, or something else? In the distance, something hooted; Reise twitched.
“It’s okay, Reise,” Jake said.
“Thanks,” Reise said back. He leaned his head back on his little brother’s shoulder behind him. “When we return home, this is my fault, okay? Don’t tell them that you hid with us on purpose. Say you fell asleep.”
“I should lie?” Jake asked.
“You should,” Reise said. “Or, you don’t have to, and I can, if you want.”
“My own stuff is my own fault, though,” Jake said.
Reise shrugged and lifted his head to blow on his hands. “Self-determination for all,” he said. Still, he detested the idea of Jake facing consequences for something that was Reise’s responsibility. It was another something wrong.
From Reise’s left, leaning against both boys’ shoulders, Nathan piped up: “‘When we return home’—see, you’re feeling more confident now. That’s a good attitude, Reise.”
Reise’s eyes narrowed in the darkness. “I’m interested in logic, not unfaltering positivism,” he snapped.
On Reise’s right, Gideon’s back twitched with laughter. “Oooh, he got you there, Nate,” the larger guy said. “Your shyte is unfaltering as filk! But it’s positivity, not positivism, Reise.”
“I don’t think it is,” Reise said. Before Gideon could answer, though, Reise stood—he saw a light, in the distance, over the silhouette of that hill. A light!
Nathan saw it a second later. “No Reise!” he hissed.
“You three stay here,” Reise whispered, his uninjured hand on his flayer pistol already.
“Reise! No, we can’t risk getting caught, we have important—”
Reise had already taken off through the grass, his back hunched to keep his shape from showing against the horizon and the stars. In his mind, if the information they carried was important enough, it was worth any risk to get it back sooner. His pants legs swished faster as he broke into a bent-over sprint … as the hill rose under him, he lowered his hands to the earth, keeping pressure off the shoulder that was still throbbing from Gideon’s forceful replacement.
That had been fun. If fun meant sudden, excruciating pain. Gideon had literally yanked his arm forward, which seemed like the opposite of what Reise thought you should do, and kind of up—it had actually “clunked” back into place.
Reise crested the hill now … yes.
Below the dune, a pale-faced blonde human female squatted by a fire across from a red-scaled Draconian who appeared, by the ridges crowning his humanoid skull, to be male. By the flickering light, Reise could see blue stripes painted across the woman’s face, and leather strips of dragon-skin dangling from her wrists and ankles. The Draconian wore only metal: silver bands decorated his neck and midsection, and a light, chainmail-like weave loincloth hid his mammalian dangly bits. His forked tongue flicked through sharp, pointed teeth under a single simple lip piercing as he leaned forward, speaking, with great passion, low words Reise couldn’t hear over the crackling of the fire.
Curled around them lay a moderately-sized dragon, its spiked tail wrapped around under the human woman’s ample derriere, and its face smoking in the shadows behind the wings on the Draconian’s back.
Reise could feel his pulse racing through his throbbing shoulder. Wow! He knew certain Alpino people groups used the non-sentient volcano-dwelling lizards as beasts of burden and food, but in real life he’d never seen—
The dragon sat up suddenly, stiff like a feathered cat, both front paws tucked in close to its seat. Its green eyes glowed in the darkness, staring at Reise with its pointed ears on end.
As it stirred, the two sentients talking over the fire suddenly saw Reise, too. They stared through the darkness, but didn’t reach for their weapons, or get up.
“Hi,” Reise said. Then, the code for civilians friendly to the Frelsi: “Do you have any butter?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Jei
As Mera and I strolled through the fields on the periphery of the Growen fort, I almost forgot where we were, and why. It was so quiet. The stars weren’t as beautiful here as out over the bare prairie, but even the Growen preferred to save energy at night, and only mission-essential buildings emitted light pollution. A cluster of buildings far off in the center of the base flickered with red and blue communicator lights, and scattered barracks buildings glowed with patches of translucent polymerwall here and there, closed windows lit from within by silhouettes burning the midnight fuse.
Out here, behind us, the armory lay quiet now; only a soft glow through a few points in the wall, and a beam of light emanating from the crack in the top, hinted at the forensic specialists still working inside. Multiple land-runners were parked in the front, with guards posted by the entrances, but Mera and I took a long, long circle around the building through the fields, and no one was the wiser. Grass swished by our legs, and a few musical insects sang as we walked by.
We were following Mera’s electrolocation. She would put her fingers out into the air, or into the ground, and close her eyes to hum—sometimes completely inaudibly, and sometimes a low, soft rumble of her voice box would just barely tickle my ears. Then, we would walk more.
For the first time in months, I felt … happy. Maybe even at peace. Not quite—I couldn’t rest inside, not until I could taste justice, but something in the way the horizon framed Mera’s silhouette, or the shadows highlighted the near-glow of her cheeks, or the way her tongue tapped on the roof of her mouth with little kks and tts as she thought, and listened, in the evening breeze …
Despite what I’d said to Cinta about “replacing” Lem, I’d actually never felt about her the way I felt about Mera. Lem was my battle-buddy—like my brother, but a girl.
Mera was something else. Mera made me think about the possibilities of my powers, and hers, entwined—about the neurons on the tips of our fingers, touching, and firing, lighting up the ridges of our fingerprints as the very molecules pressed into each other and capillary pulses synced, in a world where our abilities retired from battle and our souls, the electricity that made up our programming, the lines of code flickering in patterns in our beating, wet brains, became one story, one light, one new universe of peace.
I told myself the thought was metaphor upon metaphor, my mind couching itself in nobility to cover for something very basic and biological. But another part of me—very nearly the part that loved Njande, and, when I was alone, the occasional line of poetry from the old Alpinoan masters—that part said that to love someone this way, in the right place, and the right time, could be the highest calling given a man.
It was a different feeling, but by no means a lesser feeling. Like Mera said, I only hated Lem this much right now because I’d cared for her that much before. The betrayal of a brother, once ensconced in the psyche by battle and blood, often hurts more than the betrayal of a biological lover. “Your love is better than the love of women,” wrote a warrior-poet to his friend in the historical archives we’d found for Njande last year …
“What are you thinking about?” Mera asked me, tracing my forearm with her finger.
I sighed and shook myself off. “Stupid shyte,” I said. “Lotta nonsense.”
She fake-pouted. “Ah, I was hoping you were thinking about me.”
“Well …” I stepped in front of her and leaned forward with a soft laugh, almost but not quite into the space in front of her mouth, as I started to retort—
And noticed the fullness of her lips. Why am I doing this to myself? I squeezed her hand, and then stepped back, to give myself and her a little space.
She trotted after me and gripped the elbow of my tunic in her fist. “Hey,” she said, stepping in front of me.
“Hey,” I said back. My voice sounded lower, and more gravelly, than I intended.
“Jei—listen.” Her voice grew higher and more bouncy as she began to put on that colorful armor again; her hip slipped out to the side, shaping her into an S as she planted her finger on a pouted lip. “I’d like to try something together. To see if it enhances your powers. We have a big fight ahead of us, and certain … endorphins … might prime your neurotransmitters.”
She emphasized the words endorphin, and prime, with weak giggles and a hand trailing across the pearls that hung on her chest. Bloodseas, I almost hated that armor. She seemed like she was mimicking something—something she thought I wanted instead of the wide-eyed acrobat who explored old libraries and made-up scientific theories about ghosts.
“Mera, you’re not an experiment to me.” The words burst from my mouth before I realized what I was saying. “I’m not going to use you like an energy drink or a disposable hand tool.” That sounded—harsher—than I intended, and I backpedaled quickly and lowered my whisper. “Sorry, I—am I misunderstanding something, here?”
I wasn’t misunderstanding, and she was unfazed. “Come on, tell me I’m not the woman of your dreams.”
She was very literally a woman from my dream. “Mera …”
“What, you can neither confirm nor deny?” she pouted.
“No, I can’t deny it,” I said. My voice sounded angry, and I didn’t know why. “You’re talented, you’re sweet, you’re full of these hidden thoughts and feelings and theories I just want to drag out of you and hold up to the light—”
“Also I’m perfectly proportioned, and you like ribbon dancers,” she quipped, still with the filking armor.
“Yes, thank you Mera, I’m not blind. You’re literally a sunrise, or an unobtainable memory, made human.” I found my hands clenched by my temples in frustration I couldn’t explain. Her eyes searched me in the dark.
“But?” she asked.
My throat caught; I resented myself for my overly-honest outburst. “We need to find our target,” I coughed. “We’re running out of time.”
She deflated, and continued walking.
Agh, I resented myself for that, too. Before she could retreat too far, I strode up next to her and took her hand. “Mera, I don’t want you as something disposable. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“Everyone’s disposable,” she said. “It’s no hard feelings, just how it is. That’s why we have to seize the moment when it comes.”
“That’s—that’s heartbreaking, that you think that,” I said.
“It’s mine to think.” Her voice hardened a bit.
“Okay.” I nodded, and took a deep breath: “That’s true, you’re yours,” I said. Kiss me, said the tingly pins and needles sensation in my fingertips, before trickling up my arm and fading over my neck, and lips.
I withdrew my hand. “But I’m also my own person, too, right?” I said. “I am also allowed to say no.”
“I don’t believe you mean no for a moment. Not if you like me. Every guy wants this.”
Yeah, I was screwed. I’d lost so many potential girlfriends over the past five years to this conversation. “I made a vow,” I said. “When I started to understand my abilities, and the interdimensional world, I decided that because of my powers I’m going to kiss, and be with, just one person. I don’t know one hundred percent who she is yet, and—”
“What do you mean, because of your powers?” Yup, I was blowing it. Her scowl of disapproval said I belonged in a convent, not an army.
I folded my hands like a prayer by my mouth, hoping I could explain using the inner exploration we both understood. “Okay, so we control our electromagnetic abilities via thought, emotion, will, and other neurological impulses, right?”
“Yes?” She continued walking—not away from me, but with a slow amble, kicking the grass.
I stayed beside her. “The—physical—part of love is a complex chemical and neurological reaction, right,” I said. “It’s unique in that it involves at least four electrical systems, and a hormonal system. For comparison, fighting takes a hormonal system and three electrical systems, and most of your daily activities just take one or two.”
“What do you mean, four electrical systems?” she asked.
“Somatic—the moves you decide consciously to make; the sympathetic system, which ramps you up unconsciously; the parasympathetic system, which calms you down, also automatically; and the sensory system, which feels things. Right?” I walked with her, watching for her understanding nod before I continued. “There’s also the reflex system, where your spine makes decisions for you, like to jerk your hand away from pain, and your gut actually has its own ‘enteral’ system that talks to the parasympathetic system, but can run on its own without it.” I took a breath. “The physical part of love uses at least the first four and a system of hormones that talk between them, and every time you use a system, you invoke ‘plasticity’—you change your neurons based on what you just did, to make new synapses or strengthen existing ones. It’s a powerful, permanent thing you do when you supercharge multiple systems at once.”
