by Dan Allen
“Ah,” Angel said. “You want to get yourself killed like a prophet?”
“Go down in a blaze of glory. You reading me yet?” Jet said.
“Loud and clear. You’re all going to fake your deaths so ASP is off their guard when they show up.”
“I mean this really has to look good,” Jet said. “The Xahnans and ASP have to be completely convinced.”
“How many do you want to go down with you?”
“Every dropship in the fleet.”
“You’re going to fry my transistors with that kind of sim.”
“Better get started, then—oh, and you have less than three days.”
“Initializing memory. Loading Xahna model. Loading fleet model. Loading ASP pursuit fleet model—that feels like burying myself under a ton of bricks.” She paused briefly. “What are our success metrics?”
Jet mulled the question. “How about the number of Believers and Xahnans surviving, times the number of available ships.”
“Simple, but robust.”
“So, Angel, what are you going to call this plan?”
The AI gave a laugh. “You ever read Orson Scott Card from the classical library?”
“Are you kidding? That stuff is fantastic.”
Angel gave a chirp of approval. “Commencing mission simulation ‘Speaker for the Dead.’” A moment later she said, “This whole thing assumes you make orbit.”
“Yeah.”
“Well there’s an ASP frigate waiting for you. I hope you’ve got a plan for getting past them.”
“Um,” Jet said. “Sure. It’s . . . uh . . . entering the final stages of planning as we speak.”
Black space. I need a plan.
* * *
The bird pecked at Forz again, his fingers appearing to jump toward the bird as its head moved.
“You want food. Got it.”
The bird followed Forz as he stepped carefully downstairs, apparently trying not to wake Master Tidwell, who usually spent his late evenings at the tavern—that was when Forz worked on delicate tasks like the kind Dana had interrupted the last time she was there.
Forz opened a pantry door, and the bird hopped into a bag of mixed seeds and nuts Forz probably used for trail rations. Once its little belly was satisfied, it returned to duty, leading Forz and his wheelbarrow-pushing mechanodron out of the city gate, then north toward Dana.
Hurry.
Dana flickered at the edge of consciousness as the urge to just let it go became overwhelming. Controlling the bird for this long at such a distance had drained her of nearly every shred of will she had. Already she had lost the will to move.
Next would be the will to breathe.
As Forz and Blamer hurried up the mountainside, the bird stopped heeding Dana’s weaker and weaker suggestions.
It fled. Dana lost the connection. She could no longer see Forz or guide him.
She was truly alone.
A cool gray mist beckoned her to a place she had never been and would never return from.
So peaceful.
“Hello?” The voice jolted Dana.
Forz!
He was calling out but not using her name. It’s him.
She tried to cry out in answer, but simply couldn’t find the will.
Forz! She screamed in her mind as her body stubbornly refused to speak.
If he didn’t find her, she would die here, unable to move and so near the city she risked everything to reach.
Dana clenched her fists and was surprised to find her fingers still worked. The first things a baby learned were the last to go. Dana could open and close her hands.
With her hand in her pocket, she squeezed the bloodstone, digging the facet against the scabs on her palm. She had no will to resist the temptation to use the stone now—she had no other choice.
Finally, a trickle of blood ran from her palm, connecting her with the bloodstone.
Dana squeezed the crystal, and light flared into her mind.
“Forz!” A single cry escaped her lips as she lost consciousness.
* * *
“She looks . . . not quite dead.”
Dana moaned in response. Her eyes flickered open. Lying on the floor, she saw a broad wooden beam and a familiar sloping ceiling. It was Brista’s attic bedroom above the chapel.
She was inside Norr. She supposed Forz had snuck her into the city in his mechanodron’s wheelbarrow.
Dana squeezed her hand, which was still in her pocket. The bloodstone was still there.
She tried to open her fingers that had clenched the stone but could barely move them.
Brista leaned over her. “It’s like some kind of rigor mortis.”
“I’ve already given her calcium dissolved in sugar sap,” Forz said.
“I think we have to put her in a bath to loosen up her muscles. And besides, she smells like . . . not good.”
“Okay. What do you want to do?” Forz said.
“Just hold her up while I get her shirt and pants off.”
“No,” Dana moved her mouth in protest, but the only sound that came out from her hoarse throat was a groan. She wasn’t going to have Forz undressing her.
“Yep. Hot bath,” Brista said. “That’s what you need.”
“Brista, is your father going to come barging in?” Forz asked. “Because this I simply cannot explain.”
“He wouldn’t come in during my bath. He’s the height of piety.”
“Just making sure.”
Dana tried to protest as they forced her arms out of her jacket. By the time she was down to her tie-top and underwear, she was almost making sense.
“Get . . . stop . . . tight . . . whap . . .”
Almost making sense.
“What about the rest of her clothes?” Forz said.
To Dana’s relief, Brista spared her the embarrassment of a lifetime.
“It all needs a wash. Just get her in the bath.”
Forz grunted as he tried to get her in the copper bath. “It’s like trying to fold a plank—bend, would you?”
With some bumping and cramming, Dana was lowered into the bath.
Brista ducked out, probably to stoke the furnace behind the cleric’s quarters that heated the water in the copper piping, leaving Dana in the tub and Forz sitting on a stool nearby, doing his best to look the other direction.
She hoped. Her neck wouldn’t turn very well.
Brista returned and sat on a dressing stool beside the tub. “I’ll take it from here, Forz.”
Forz looked down at Dana. “Is she going to be alright?”
Brista pushed his face to the side. “Yes, that’s enough help from you.”
“I’ll be at the workshop. Send a tap on the line if you need anything.” Forz descended the steep ladder and closed the attic trap door.
How had they gotten her up the ladder?
As the running water became warm and soaked into Dana, she let out a slow gasp of agony and rapture.
Brista managed to help Dana out of her underclothes. “What did you do, roll in the dirt for a week? If you ever expect to wear these again,” she said, holding them at arm’s length, “I’ll need some peroxide and lye from Forz’s workshop.”
Brista slipped away to tap out a message on her static line to Forz’s workshop attic, which was only a few houses away. In answer, a burst of tiny sparks etched a pattern of lines and dots in a viewing paper that ticked past with each high voltage pulse. Brista checked her handwritten chart on the wall. “He’s going to bring some over. I just might be able to save your clothes.”
Dana felt her knees and hips beginning to loosen up.
“I brewed a pot of magic sauce,” Brista said.
Magic sauce. Brista had forced some down her throat before. It was an awful mixture of gorm root and white pine bark tea, a very hot spice from Torsica, and fish oil.
She offered some to Dana in a wooden mug.
This time, Dana took it willingly.
After Dana scrubbed her hair, she attempted,
and failed, to get the dirt from under her toes and fingernails.
Brista helped her brush her sifa.
“Look at all this fanning—I should go on a death march through the wilderness too.”
“It’s the sayathi,” Dana said. “I’m blood-sworn. I drank from the pool in the sanctum.”
Brista dropped the comb and knocked over the stool as she backed away in a hurry.
“I’m not contagious.”
“Dana—it’s forbidden. They’ll execute you.”
Dana couldn’t hold her gaze and looked away. “I had to.”
Brista’s sifa trembled. “You’re blood-sworn—and we brought you into the city!” She looked to Dana’s clothes. “Do you still have the . . . bloodstone?”
Dana nodded again.
Brista looked dumbfounded. “Are you insane? Why did you keep it?”
Dana’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Well, after they drugged me and took it, the city decided to destroy it at a public meeting, but the Vetas-kazen attacked and tried to steal it. I was the only one close enough to save it.”
“You just took it and ran? Again?”
Dana nodded once more, and suddenly all the emotions of her journey came back. She broke into a sob, wanting more than anything to run out of the chapel attic and through her front door, hug her mother and father and pretend like nothing had ever changed.
A knock came at the trapdoor.
“Who is it?” Brista said, clutching her hand to her chest and staring at Dana with a look of mingled shock and the unmistakable hurt of betrayal.
“Who do you think? Open up.”
Dana ducked under the bathwater as Forz poked his head through the opening.
“Peroxide and lye—it’ll take the color out of anything.”
“She can’t stay here,” Brista said. “She’s blood-sworn now and she still has the bloodstone. If somebody sees her—”
“Figures.” Forz looked at his bottle of peroxide. “Hey, I just had an idea.”
Minutes later, Dana was seated on the dressing stool and wrapped in a towel. Her itching scalp was starting to feel like it was burning. “Are you trying to kill me?” Dana said. She leaned forward with her hair draped into a bucket of bubbling peroxide.
At least in this position, Dana felt less dizzy.
“It’s working,” Forz said.
“It’s gone from brown to red, yes—but now it just looks . . .”
“Horrible,” Dana said. “Just tell me.”
“Ah—that’s more like orange,” Forz said. “See.”
“Well, you can’t tell while it’s wet anyway,” Brista said.
It was the kind of thing somebody said when they were looking at a complete disaster.
Forz snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it. It needs a base.” He returned with a bottle and uncorked it, filling the room with a stench like urine—only it stung her nose.
“Ammonia.”
He added it in increasing amounts to the bucket.
“Look at that!” Brista gasped. “It’s turning blond.”
“Better not leave it on the skin—wash it with vinegar to stop the reaction.”
“So I’ll attract flies?” Dana said. “You’d better know what you’re doing.”
After more rinsing and scrubbing and some detail work on her eyebrows by Brista, Dana was allowed to look in a silvered hand mirror.
“Oh, wow.” Dana turned her head from side to side, admiring the new pale blond that matched the cool coloration of a newborn Norrian’s first hair. “I look like a goddess!”
Forz looked like he was about to agree but glanced at Brista and bit his knuckle.
“It’s a start,” Brista said. “What else can we do—give her a peg leg or something?”
“Actually,” Dana said. “I need Forz to build me a mechanodron.”
Forz laughed. “You need a mechanodron? I thought you hated them, always complaining about how a mechanodron can walk right up to you and you can’t even sense it.”
“Well I can now—if it has sayathi. Anyway, this is a matter of life and death.”
Doubt and curiosity fought behind Forz’s eyes. “And this mechanodron is going to save your life?”
“It’s going to save everyone’s.”
“Dana, if this is just some—”
“Touching the bloodstone isn’t enough to become ka,” Dana blurted out. “You have to drink it.”
“What?” Forz looked around to be sure no one was listening.
“I have to lie in a thermal chamber hot enough to melt the sayathenite. The matrix will be absorbed into my blood. Then if I cool slowly enough, the crystal will form on my skin, not in my veins. That’s why I need the mechanodron—to keep me from dying of heatstroke while all that happens.”
“Holy stars of heaven,” Brista gasped. “You’re going to do it?”
“I have to. Nobody else will. And if I don’t, there won’t be anyone to stop Vetas-ka from taking over the city. And then where does it stop? He could come to Norr and force you all to bind your will to him.”
Forz rubbed his temples. “But it’s not your bloodstone.”
“I have to fight.”
“Vetas-ka isn’t going to come all the way—” Brista began, before Forz interrupted her.
“He is.” Forz looked up and wrung his hands. “A sea-skimmer arrived in Port Kyner yesterday. The ship’s captain said Vetas-ka’s entire fleet was rallying at Tenek—it was in a message for the chancellor. I read it over the signaler’s shoulder when I went to the static-line posts to get a message for Master Tidwell.”
The news was terrifying, but Dana could hardly be surprised. She knew it would come to this.
Brista looked directly at Dana. “Tenek is right across the Sayathi Sea from Norr.”
Forz folded his arms. “The ka in Port Kyner thinks Vetas-ka is coming to settle some debts with Shoul Falls—at least that’s what he said in the message to the chancellor.”
“He’s coming for that stone, isn’t he?” Brista said.
Dana nodded. “And someone has to stop him, or he’ll keep taking bloodstones until all of Xahna worships him alone—two more of his kazen nearly killed me on the way here.”
Brista clasped her hands over her face in horror as if she already knew the conclusion.
“I killed one of them. Just one.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of,” Forz said. “You’ll do anything to survive, but when does it stop?”
“Help me make the mechanodron. I’ll leave as soon as it’s done.”
The conflicted look on Forz’s face Dana had seen before, when she was stealing the greeder.
“This is the most important thing any of us have ever done—will ever do,” Dana said. “Only a ka can stop him. And we don’t have much time. They could be here in a matter of days. The sea only takes a couple of weeks to cross in a steamship.”
“It’s fast day tomorrow,” Brista said. “And there’s chapel service in the afternoon.”
“Exactly,” Dana said. “The perfect time to work unsupervised.”
Forz looked at Dana. “If Brista and I are both missing—”
“Everybody will just think you’ve both snuck off to kiss in the clocktower.”
Brista’s face took on the look of an accused criminal.
“You’ve done that already?” Dana rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ll forgive you both—maybe—if you help me make this mechanodron.” It was still a bitter nut to chew. Her two best friends were kissing.
Forz shrugged. “Okay. But this is really risky. Just getting to my workshop—how are we going to do that on fast day with everyone gathering at the chapel?”
“We can go out the window and slide down the water pole,” Brista said. “It leads to the back alley.”
“Alright.” Forz met Dana’s eyes, and his mouth turned up slightly at the corner. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He did like adventure in spite of himself. And he loved a challenge. That w
as what Dana had that Brista would never bring to his life. Dana made life interesting.
What is going to happen to our friendship after I leave?
Forz gathered his bottles and disappeared through the hatch.
With some effort and patience, Dana dressed in one of Brista’s nightshirts and fell asleep in her bed, not knowing or caring where Brista slept.
When she woke, Dana felt a touch of momentary pity that Brista had to curl up on the floor with only a blanket and a pile of laundry for a pillow. But thinking of all the terrible places she had rested over the past few days, what pity Dana felt evaporated. Sleeping on a floor is practically paradise.
The muscle aches were still there. Dana wished for another bath to loosen her aching limbs, but that would make Brista’s persnickety father suspicious.
But even if he wasn’t suspicious, someone from Shoul Falls, or worse, from Torsica, might arrive to ask about Dana. In that case, the chancellor would send the civic guard straight to Brista’s and Forz’s homes.
This place isn’t safe.
Dana’s bleached blond hair would only slow them for a few seconds. At best, it would delay an onlooker who passed her in the street from immediately crying out, “Greeder thief!”
Brista slipped downstairs and brought up two biscuits with salted fruit sauce for breakfast, which Dana devoured.
“Father’s going to know I took the biscuits,” Brista said. “He always checks on fast day.”
“Who cares?” Dana said. “I’m a long inch from being found and executed, and you are worrying about your dad feeling disappointed?”
“Sorry my feelings don’t matter to you.”
“Oh Brista, of course they do,” Dana said. “I’m just being awful because I’m so beat up. I might be dead if you and Forz hadn’t helped me.”
Brista shook her head. “Why do I even like you, Dana? You do your best to ruin my life every few weeks with some insane idea.”
It was true. But Dana had never thought of it that way. Maybe Brista didn’t like trying new things or trying to change things. Maybe she liked things just the way they were.
Maybe we’re just different.
Dana looked her friend in the eye. She wanted to say sorry for all the trouble she’d caused. She wanted to go back and make it all disappear and let her have her life the way she wanted it—without trouble.
Without me?