by Jacinta Jade
‘No,’ Siray said.
Huroy froze. ‘What?’
She looked at Deson, who nodded to her, his face grim, and then lifted her chin to meet the captain’s eyes. ‘No. We won’t do it.’ She stood, crossing her arms, and Deson stood with her. ‘You would plunge the Resistance into disorder, jeopardising any chance we have of defeating the Faction, just to satisfy your own delusions of grandeur.’ Her tone was one of disgust and disbelief. ‘We will not support you.’
The captain stared down at the table for a long moment. ‘Well,’ he said with a sigh, ‘that is disappointing.’ Then he glanced up at them again, his eyes hardening. ‘But I’m sure you’ll both cooperate when I tell you that if one of you does not, I will kill the other.’
Siray stared at Huroy in horror. Was he completely mad?
‘You won’t do that,’ Deson said quickly. ‘You’ll lose the advantage of us being a potential ruling pair.’
Once more, Siray could hear fragments of a conversation she and Deson had once had.
And if one of us is valuable …
Then both of us more so.
No doubt Deson was also recalling the same conversation.
The captain shrugged, dismissing Deson’s words. ‘Not if I sell it as the story of a mated pair fated to be rulers, when one of them is suddenly and tragically killed by the Faction.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘It would work in my favour—it might even drive an increase in recruits. But I’d prefer to have both of you.’ He called to the helmeted guards outside the room. ‘Lock them up separately in the secure area.’
As the guards moved into the room, Deson stepped swiftly to Siray’s side, kicking his chair out in the direction of the advancing pair to stall them.
The guards raised their stun sticks in warning, but Huroy lifted a hand to halt his soldiers’ advance. ‘We have a safeguard in place to prevent anyone Changing on this level, so please, don’t fight. My personal guards are very skilled and very loyal, and it would be a shame for you to be injured before our work has even begun.’
Deson unclenched his hands with an effort and glared at Huroy.
The male who, up until half a span ago, Siray had admired and respected, just gave them both a winning smile.
‘I look forward to working with you both.’ He left the room.
The guards approached cautiously, and Siray tensed, preparing to fight in her normal form despite Huroy’s caution.
But then another two guards entered the room.
Siray clenched her teeth. They might have had a chance of taking out the first pair, even against stun sticks and armour, but two against four was not good odds. She placed her hand on Deson’s arm and, twisting her head slightly to look at him, gave the smallest shake of her head.
One guard came up behind each of them and placed the tip of a stun stick against the middle of their lower backs.
‘Walk,’ ordered the guard behind Siray, and he applied the slightest pressure of the stick to her back, causing a warning tingle to start in that area.
She obeyed, walking out into the hallway and following a guard who strode along before her.
The guards took them through the back hallways of the level and then through a pair of dark, heavy doors that yet another pair of guards was stationed beside. They went down another hallway, this one dark in colour like the doors, and then the guard in front of Siray stopped at one of the doors spaced along the wall and activated it.
Siray took the opportunity to try to speak to Deson mind-to-mind. Should we try to fight? she asked. But there was only silence.
The door before them hissed open slowly, its bulk made of heavier materials than the other doors in the facility.
The guard ahead of Siray pivoted to speak to the guard behind Deson.
‘Put him in there. You’—he gestured to the guard at Siray’s back—‘bring her.’ Then the male spun around again and kept walking.
Forced to move as the guard behind her pressed his stun stick harder into her back, Siray obeyed, but glanced back at Deson as she walked. They were able to lock eyes for one instant before Siray saw him pushed through the door. She assumed the rooms in the hallway—like the one Deson was being forced into—were holding areas. Cells, really.
When the guard behind Siray prodded her sharply again, she reluctantly twisted around again, listening to the hiss of Deson’s cell door closing behind him.
Not far down the same hallway, the guard ahead of Siray stopped again. He activated a door on her right, and the guard behind her again prodded her to move.
She complied and stepped through the doorway, wincing as her own cell door hissed closed behind her an instant later, followed by the sound of a low hum as the activation pad was locked from the outside.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SIRAY WAS ABLE to track the progress of the day easily enough, as meals were brought to her cell at seemingly the same intervals as when she would normally have eaten. Not that knowing the approximate time of day made it any easier to sit as a prisoner and watch as her meals were delivered to her, but there wasn’t much she could do, owing to the strict protocols the guards followed.
When her cell door hissed open, meals were placed on the ground just inside the door by one helmeted guard while another kept watch from a short distance behind the first, their stances and actions showing them to be highly alert and wary of anything she might try until they had closed and locked the door again.
Soon after Siray finished each meal, the guards would activate the door, pick up her plate, and gesture for her to enter the hallway, with both guards holding stun sticks at the ready.
The first time this had happened, Siray had thought they were perhaps bringing her to see Captain Huroy again. Instead, it turned out she was allowed one washroom visit for each meal consumed. Apparently Huroy still intended to give them some basic liberties.
Her cell had one redeeming feature—a small, round opening set at about head height in the door. By virtue of this opening, Siray knew that Deson was also being treated in the same manner as she, due to the faint hiss she could hear when his cell door activated from time to time. Further, due to the washroom being located at her end of the hallway, Deson was escorted past her cell in the span following every meal.
After being thrown into her cell early that morning, she had immediately attempted to communicate with Deson in their special way again—mind to mind. But once more there had been no reply. Then she recalled what Huroy had said—that there was a safeguard in place on this level to prevent anyone Changing. Siray guessed that it was this safeguard, whatever it was, that was also subduing her ability to project her thoughts to Deson. And when Deson had been escorted unhurt past her cell after their first meal, she had breathed a sigh of relief at the confirmation of her theory. Yet she regretted that without their ability, they could not discuss what Captain Huroy had revealed—that their mental link could allow for more than the sharing of thoughts.
They never said anything to each other when Deson made these trips with guards both ahead and behind him, but Siray knew he could just make out her eyes peering at him from the dark as he passed each time, due to the way they lingered on hers. She took his silence as confirmation that he had understood the message she had tried to silently convey to him before they had been locked away. That there would be another chance for escape.
Siray didn’t have much else to do with her time except think on just that—how to escape. At times she paced in her dark cell, her eyes adjusted enough to see where the walls were, and at other times, she sat on the low bunk that was fastened against the back wall. She never shouted at the guards, demanded any information, or gave them any reason to suspect she might try to fight her way out into the hallway.
The reasons for this were twofold. The first was that, when she did escape, she didn’t want them to be prepared for it. She wanted to them to think that she was compliant and posed no threat.
The second reason was more worrying. If she demonst
rated that she wouldn’t comply with their demands, they might harm Deson.
But she tried not to think on that second reason too much, as it tended to stop her from thinking rationally.
When Siray received the next meal, she sat down and just looked at it. She knew her friends would be wondering by now where she and Deson had gone. Genlie would have told them all why they’d left, and after the incident with Mocery, there was a good chance Baindan would make enquiries about her whereabouts when she and Deson didn’t turn up for the midday meal. That was, if he hadn’t made enquiries already.
But what could they possibly do in a facility like this where everything was under such tight security?
She was sure that the captain would have fed them some lie about her and Deson. Maybe he would say that he had sent them out on special mission of their own. And if he then sent the rest of her group on another mission, they wouldn’t be any the wiser.
When she received her third meal of the day, she was ready with a plan. After convincing him that she had reacted rashly earlier, she would pretend to go along with Huroy’s scheme and then make contact with either her friends or someone else who could help her and Deson. After all, Huroy couldn’t keep them locked up all the time. He would need them to speak in support of his ploy to assume leadership of the Resistance.
Yet later that same evening, after being escorted to her final washroom break for the day, she discarded the earlier plan as too risky—too much depended on them not harming Deson—and instead began considering the varying ways of how she and Deson could actually make an escape.
If they waited for the guards to get sloppy, either she or Deson could potentially knock one out. Maybe use a guard as a hostage.
And surely Huroy had to have some attachment to his personal guards? If not, he still couldn’t very well tell her that he didn’t care about one of them in front of the others.
Throughout the day, she had carefully watched everything the guards did, scrutinising their movements for even one moment of inattentiveness. But she didn’t see any. The guards were careful, alert, and they were switched out every three spans. Not good for her and Deson.
She also kept checking the device on her arm regularly, hoping that somehow her friends might get a message to her. But the device remained still and its screen blank.
She hadn’t planned on sleeping that night, thinking instead she would watch the guards and listen at the door to see if maybe they were less alert during the night. But at some late time, she grew tired and decided to rest on her bed for just a moment.
She was rudely awoken in the morning by the hiss of her door activating.
‘Get up and enter the hallway,’ said one guard gruffly.
This was inconsistent with the procedure the guards had followed yesterday, and Siray was wary of the difference as she complied with the order.
The four guards escorted her a short way along the hallway and, surprisingly, stopped beside Deson’s door. The lead guard repeated his instructions, and Siray watched carefully as Deson took his place in front of her, a guard moving into the space between them.
Siray and Deson followed obediently as their escort led them the rest of the way along the hall and through the dark double doors she had seen yesterday.
Siray frowned, wondering if they were going to be taken back to the questioning room, but instead the guards swept around another corner and into a rear corridor, leading the two of them along its length until they were brought to a stop in front of a new set of doors.
Once more, there were two doors set into the wall, several paces separating them. The doors themselves appeared to be made of a lighter material than those of the cells they had just left, although these also had small, round holds set in them at head height.
A guard opened the door by activating a pad on the wall opposite and gestured for Siray to enter, his helmet hiding any expression that might provide a clue as to what was happening.
She, in turn, quickly checked out the unfamiliar room before she tentatively entered, the guard closing and locking the door using the mechanism once more. As she heard his footsteps fading away, she looked around at her new accommodations, suspicious of why they had been moved. In comparison to where she had just come from, this space could not be called a cell. The room was bigger, for one, and contained an actual bed with sheets, a private wash area, and a table and chair. The light, she also discovered, could be activated or deactivated at her leisure.
‘As you can both see, I’ve had you moved to better quarters,’ came Huroy’s languid voice.
Siray stiffened and whirled towards her door, but the captain must have been closer to Deson’s room, as there was no sign of him through the viewing hole.
‘I understand that you have been behaving yourselves,’ he continued, ‘hence the improvement in your accommodation.’
Siray heard footsteps growing louder, and then Huroy appeared in front of her door. She stared at him with a blank expression through the viewing hole, fighting the urge to take another step away from the door.
His eyes raked her face. ‘If you were to agree to support me, I would, of course, improve your accommodations still further and give you whatever else you might wish for.’ Huroy turned away from Siray’s door, his steps fading as he walked away again in the direction of Deson’s room. ‘Disappoint me, and I will return you to the cells you were in yesterday. And then I’ll seek further ways to motivate you to see my perspective on this matter.’
Siray heard the scrape of his boots on the floor as he moved between their rooms again, stopping somewhere in between.
‘You have until tomorrow morning to think about it.’ His footsteps sounded, then faded away completely again.
Siray stayed silent and tense, listening carefully for a long moment.
‘Siray?’ Deson’s voice came floating across to her.
She strode swiftly to the viewing hole in her door. ‘I’m here,’ she called flatly, not knowing if there were guards outside their doors or not. She angled one eye close against the cutout in her door and tilted her head back and forth. No guards in sight. ‘Deson—can you see out into the hall?’
‘Yes.’
‘Look around as much as you can and tell me what you see.’
A moment of silence.
‘Not much. I can see a bit of this hallway, and the wall and space leading to your door.’
‘No guards?’ Siray held her breath.
‘None.’
She exhaled loudly. This might be their chance. But why wouldn’t Huroy station guards nearby? It was unlike him, after all the careful security he’d had in place yesterday. Wondering if the answer had to do with their rooms, Siray tried to map their walk that morning from the cells in her mind.
After a moment, she nodded to herself. If she had it right, then they were somewhere in the main section of the command level, although still in the back hallways somewhere. And that would explain why Huroy hadn’t posted guards. Because if anyone outside of his personal security team did come down this way, it would appear odd, and questions might be raised.
She guessed, though, that he probably had the guards in the foyer warning people away from using the two interconnecting hallways.
‘I don’t think they’ve left guards this time,’ she called to Deson.
‘Great,’ he called back, not questioning her logic. ‘So, what’s the plan, then?’
Good question. ‘Well, I think we could—’
‘Ssshhhh!’ came Deson’s hiss. ‘Someone’s coming.’
Siray listened carefully. The sound of an approaching pair of boots was indeed growing louder. She mentally tracked the steps as they turned into their hallway, and she peered through the viewing hole in her door as a figure in the black guard’s uniform, including the full helmet, appeared before her door.
Siray’s heart sank. A guard. There went her theory and any hope of trying for an escape.
‘Step away from the door,’ the guard commande
d, his familiar voice informing Siray that he was one of the usual soldiers set to watch them.
She glared at the guard and wondered if he was delivering her breakfast. Then she realised. The guard was alone. This was her chance. So, obeying his order, she took a large step back from the door. And another.
And as the guard pivoted to activate the mechanism for her door, she charged forwards, leaping through the open doorway and tackling him around the waist to the ground. They both landed heavily, and Siray rolled before springing up onto her feet, the guard also finding his feet swiftly.
But now he was between her and Deson’s room.
I’ll have to do this quickly, Siray thought.
She tensed herself to launch another attack at the guard, but he raised his empty hands up in the air before him, surrendering.
‘Stop, please,’ he begged quietly.
Siray hesitated, confused by the guard’s actions, and disturbed by the pleading tone in his muffled voice.
And that was all the time he needed to reach up and remove his helmet.
‘Zale!’ Siray sprung towards him, wrapping her arms about him, all the while thanking the Mother for his appearance. ‘How did you find us?’
‘I’ll explain later,’ he said, giving her a quick squeeze in return before stepping away. He spun away from her and strode rapidly to the spot in the wall across from Deson’s room that housed his doors activation pad and slapped it, causing Deson’s door to open.
As Deson cautiously stuck his head out, Siray encouraged him with a wave.
‘Thanks,’ he said, swiftly joining them after recognising Zale.
Zale nodded at Deson and, prowling swiftly across to the nearby hallway corner, peered around it.
Creeping up beside him, Siray crouched and peeped out. There was one guard in the hallway, far enough away that they wouldn’t be able to get the jump on him, and she tensed, wondering if they would be caught before they had even really escaped.
Zale, however, had the opposite reaction, and he sighed in relief when he spotted the lone guard. He gave a low whistle, startling Siray and Deson, and the guard whirled immediately to come hurrying up to them.