Renegade

by Justine Davis

  “Do they tell the survivors? Do the ones chosen to live know? Do they know the other that grew beside them in the womb has been slaughtered?” Her voice was low, husky, and annoyingly insistent. “Do they?”

  “No.” He knew this was true, for he had asked once, when he’d been on Lustros and seen several newborns loaded onto a cart in a hallway, where they were being taken.

  They are the mistakes. Lessers of two, who should never have been born and so will now be disposed of.

  Twins? What of the other?

  They have no need to know. They were Coalition chosen because they were stronger. That is all that matters.

  He had nodded, as if it were of no import to him. Which it should not have been. And yet . . . he had felt an odd tug somewhere deep inside him, and a faint touch of a queasiness he did not recognize.

  “You have said the . . . contributors of twins were forbidden thereafter to reproduce. Did yours have any more after you?”

  “I don’t know.” How strange, that he had never thought of this in that way. But those who had combined to produce children had nothing to do with them after their birth. It was not their duty, and he would not have known if they had been forbidden. He knew of them only what had been put in his file, for medical reasons.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” Her voice had taken on that note he’d only heard before when she’d been healing him, that soothing voice that had helped him hang on and fight the pain as much as the presence of the Raider had. “Somewhere, deep inside, you have always known something was missing.”

  “I am Coalition. I want for nothing.”

  The words came out automatically, and he had the odd thought that he’d heard them spoken with more feeling by machines.

  “That is not what I mean and you know that, Caze.” That same tingling that came over him every time she used his name recurred. “Do you think either Lux or Nyx could lose the other and not forever feel the absence?”

  “They are aware; they have always lived as two.”

  “Yes, but think of what twins are, Caze.” And again the tingle. “They are tied to each other as no others. And some begin as one being, then divided into two. The connection is beyond anything a single child or ordinary siblings can imagine.”

  “You speak of those that are duplicates.”

  “I speak,” she said, her voice going even lower now, “of the kind of twin you were. One being, divided. Had your brother survived, he would be the image of you, and you of him. He would have your green eyes, your strong jaw, and likely your brilliant mind.”

  And now she had tipped over into insanity. This wasn’t just impossible, it was preposterous. Why would she even begin to think that he would believe such a tale? He would sooner believe in the blazers old Ziem legends said had once lived here.

  “Is this, perhaps, the reason you have worked so hard to fit into the Coalition mold? Because from the beginning you knew you were . . . different? Would he be as magnificent, do you think?”

  She caught him off guard, a rare thing, with that assessment. But his brain only allowed him a split second of wondering just how she meant it before it jabbed at him, letting him know how wrong it was, the way she spoke of this non-existent entity as if it—he—were real. Or had been real. Had lived, for some few minutes of time before he was tossed onto a cart like the one he’d seen—

  “Stop.” It broke from him harshly.

  “This is impossible for you to believe.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So was that healing, if you will recall.”

  He could not argue that. Right at the moment, he wasn’t certain he could argue anything. If this was some kind of twisted Sentinel torture, it was effective. But he kept coming back to the obvious question: What did she hope to gain? Did she think he would do anything to get her to stop speaking of this? And what if he did? He could tell her the entire Coalition plan for this world and it would change nothing, since they could never hope to withstand Coalition might.

  “So you are saying you have never felt . . . a wrongness, an emptiness, a sense of something absent, lost?”

  “No.” He said it firmly. But slowly, a tiny cry within him was growing in volume. “No,” he repeated, even knowing that if he was truly certain, repe­tition would not be necessary.

  “Yes,” she countered, in that luring, soothing voice. “I suspected this from that day on the bridge. I sensed it even then, just from that brief contact.”

  “Mind reading?” He tried to say it scoffingly, but to his ears it sounded more fearful. It was not a sound he cared for.

  “It was only during the healing that I was certain. For that process takes a certain connection. Your injuries involved the nerves leading directly to the brain, and there is inevitably some . . . bleed over, I believe it is called? And somewhere, deep within your mind, some instinctual part of your brain knows I speak the truth.”

  “Stop,” he said again, hating the urgency he heard in his own voice.

  “You separate yourself from your feelings,” she said. “You wall them off, and declare them vanquished, as the Coalition requires. But there is some­thing else behind that wall. A void that you have no name for, for you have never known what should be there. But now you know, Caze.”

  “Stop,” he said for a third time, but this time it sounded like a plea. He felt as if he were crumbling, as if he were once more lying there helpless, unable to move.

  “I swear to you, upon my skill as a healer and a seer, that I tell you this not as torture or to crush your will.” It was so close to his earlier thoughts his gaze shot to her face. Something glowed in those incredible eyes, and he found himself unable to look away. “I tell you this,” she said, holding his gaze, “because you have the right to know. And the Coalition be damned.”

  She stood up and walked out. And left him there, staring into nothing.

  “STAND SENTRY OUTSIDE,” she told Maxon, the Sentinel assigned as guard. “I wish him to have to grapple with what I have told him alone.”

  Maxon nodded respectfully. “The Raider sent a request that you join him when you were through.”

  “Thank you. I will go now.”

  As she walked up toward the cavern, she wondered if it had been enough. Wondered if she should have established a connection with him and planted the knowledge she had gleaned. By the time she arrived she had decided not, for she was certain the fact that it was truth would not ameliorate that kind of trespass into his mind.

  And then she walked into bedlam.

  “Why is this even a question?” came a shout from someone she could not see among the gathering. It was followed by more.

  “We have the Coalition commander in our hands!”

  “How can we just let him go?”

  “Better him than Frall.”

  “I don’t know, at least Frall was easy to fool.”

  Iolana kept silent and hung back as the others discussed the matter. Drake knew her feelings on it, as he knew Brander’s and Eirlys’s and Kye’s. It was the others he’d approached now, as he’d said he would, looking for a valid, compelling reason to do other than what his instincts told him.

  As she could have predicted, Teal and Kade were the most adamant for his execution, and she understood. They had both lost all that was left of their families on Paledan’s watch. Pryl, Mahko, Tuari, and according to Drake, Maxon as well, all saw the benefit of having Paledan in control rather than some unknown quantity.

  Drake, leaning on the edge of the table in the large cavern, his ankles and arms loosely crossed, let them argue the point. His presence alone kept the anger somewhat in check for the most part; no one wanted to completely lose their temper in the Raider’s company. Young Kade came the closest to shouting, while Teal merely glowered; he was nowhere near accepting the loss of his steady,
calming older brother.

  “So they send some administrator who’s worse,” Kade growled out. “Maybe we’ll capture him, too. I still say he deserves to die.”

  “If anyone deserves punishment for what was done to you, Kade,” Eirlys said with a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder, “it is Jakel. What he did, he did without the major’s knowledge, permission, or order.”

  “You’re defending him?” Teal snapped.

  Eirlys met the other Sentinel’s gaze steadily. “No. I am saying he deserves blame only for what he himself has done. It is their way to execute people that had no hand in something, not ours.”

  Teal opened his mouth, and Iolana sensed he was going to protest, but Eirlys’s words seemed to register and he stayed silent. But the argument went on. She could not deny the pain of those who had suffered such losses, nor blame them for wanting retribution. Still, the thought of Drake—for he would do it himself, because that’s the kind of leader he was—coldly executing Caze Paledan sent a shiver through her.

  And she belatedly realized the true reason she was keeping silent during this discussion; she was very much afraid she would end up pleading for his life, and for reasons that were far too much her own and deeply personal. Reasons she had not even thought through herself, for she had not had enough time away from his unsettling presence.

  In the moment she realized this, Teal turned to her.

  “I would hear what the Spirit has to say.”

  There were nods from others. It took everything she had learned about controlling her own mind so as to keep it from interfering with what she received from others to control it now, and keep herself only to those things that would matter to this gathering.

  She went through what she had sensed about him and could say with assurance, to what was more in the realm of speculation, careful about where she drew the line because she knew they were listening to the Spirit and thus might accept what she said simply because she was saying it.

  When she told them of his reasons for requesting a meeting with the Raider, that he feared if they did not stand down he would receive orders to destroy them, and he did not want to do that, she felt their attention shift to her son.

  “It is true,” he said, answering the question they had not asked. “And I believe he was sincere in that wish. I believe all she said to be true. I also believe he is a man of his word. Twice he has personally had an excellent chance to take out the Raider, yet he did not. He has also had multiple chances and reasons to take the twins, and he has not. He has handed us Jakel, but not until he had given that traitor Ordam to him for his just punishment. And perhaps most telling, he suggested that if he died during the healing process, that we make it look like an accident.”

  There were still mutterings, but they were no longer angry.

  “But above all I would have you think of one thing,” Drake added. “If we execute him, there is a great possibility the Coalition will not send another administrator to replace him.”

  They were all looking at him now. And it was the Raider who answered their questioning looks.

  “They will simply wipe us out, to the last Ziemite.”

  Chapter 39

  “YOU ARE THE woman from the mountain.”

  Iolana ignored Jakel and didn’t take her eyes off of Eirlys and Kye. “The Raider grows weary of guarding it,” she said.

  “So we must decide what we will do with it?” Kye asked, as brightly as if she were commenting on the first brilliant day of sun season.

  They were having this discussion, purposefully, in front of the “it” they spoke of. Kye had been the one to suggest that the brutal enforcer be referred to only as “it” from his moment of capture, since that was how he treated his many victims.

  “I vote we do to it what it did to Kade’s mother,” said Eirlys.

  “Better yet, we do to it what it did to Barkhound,” Kye suggested.

  “Best of all,” Iolana said, “we do to it what it did to Drake.”

  Jakel scrambled to the back of the small cell Brander had rigged a barred, metal gate for. The movement on his injured leg made him groan in pain. Eirlys glanced over instinctively, but covered the move with a shrug.

  “How long would it take you to heal its wound?” she asked Iolana.

  “Mere moments,” Iolana answered. “But there is no reason to waste the effort on one who is already dead.”

  “Which brings us back to deciding the method,” Kye said.

  “I promised he would soon be a eunuch,” Eirlys said. “And I hate to break a promise.”

  “Then you must not,” Iolana said.

  “Absolutely,” Kye agreed. “So we start there.”

  “I’ll need a duller knife,” Eirlys said cheerfully.

  Jakel howled in fear as they left the small cave.

  When they were far enough away that he could no longer hear them, Kye sighed. “Do you know what our trouble is?”

  “Yes.” Eirlys echoed her sigh. “We take no pleasure in torture.”

  The two other women nodded.

  “I would say hand him over to Kade,” Kye said, “but . . .”

  “He is angry enough he would likely do it,” Eirlys said, “but I fear what it would do to him, in his heart.”

  “It is not the way of Ziem,” Iolana agreed.

  “We cannot keep him forever, yet slaughtering him like the animal he is is not nearly as pleasant an idea in reality as I thought it would be,” Eirlys said glumly.

  “When I think of what he did to my mate, I should want to carve him into pieces,” Kye said. “And yet . . .”

  “Your happiness has had an effect on both of you,” Iolana said. “As has this respite from the fight.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Kye said. “I do not dwell on the painful memory of Drake in that torture chamber, not when I have him alive and vividly well in front of me every day.”

  “It is as well you do not look back,” Eirlys said to her sister by covenant. Then, shifting her gaze to Iolana she added with a small smile, “I have sworn it off.”

  “And I,” Iolana said, letting all she was feeling into her voice, “am blessed far more than I ever imagined.” Then, more briskly, “We are agreed then?”

  “I think we are agreed we do not wish to be like him,” Kye said.

  “Yet I hate to leave it to Drake to end him because it is distasteful to us,” Eirlys fretted.

  “Perhaps your major could do it,” Kye suggested with a wry grimace. “He said he had been about to anyway.”

  Iolana did not think this the time to admit she would hate to leave it to Caze as well, although she had little doubt he would do it. In payment for what she had done for him, if nothing else; she had sensed early on he believed in balanced accounts. And that, she thought, is how he would look at it. Clin­ically, mathematically, without emotion.

  And how she wished to see him as he would have been, had the Coalition not bound him. He had the capacity for great emotion—she could feel that—but it had been so stunted, so locked away she didn’t know if even her skills could free it.

  Or if he could deal with the result.

  Her skills. . . . Iolana studied both women for a moment, her daughters. “He has earned death, has he not?”

  “After what he’s done? Yes,” Kye said.

  “Except,” Eirlys said with a grimace, “death is a bit too merciful for him.”

  Iolana smiled, but it was not a happy one. “Exactly my thought. I must speak with Drake.”

  “YOU CAN DO THIS?”

  “I have always known I could damage as well as heal, but it is something I am scrupulous to avoid, normally.”

  “Of course,” Drake said. “But . . . you are certain? You could put him in such a state of constant fear?”

&
nbsp; “Yes.” Her mouth thinned. “I have never done so intentionally however, so I cannot speak to how . . . exact the results would be.”

  “A fate worse than death,” Drake mused. “But would it be, for one such as Jakel’s limited mind?”

  “If you give me leave, I would like to discuss this with our guest. He might have a better sense of it, since he’s dealt with Jakel more recently.”

  “And he was ready to end him himself.”

  “Yes.”

  “Speak to him. I would be curious to know his opinion.”

  She pondered how to make the approach as she walked back down the mountain path. He would likely still be in turmoil over what she had told him, unless he had decided not to believe it. And it would be a decision with him. He had the power of mind and will to ignore what she’d told him, for was that not what all his Coalition conditioning as a child had taught him? Ignore what you think, what you feel, anything that does not fit the Coalition mold.

  Grim stood sentinel now. She gave him a questioning look as she paused outside.

  “He has been very restless.”

  “Pacing?”

  “And more,” Grim said.

  Curious now, she stepped into her home, although she had grown used to seeing it disguised as an office in the Council building. And she realized that for some time now she had not thought of Torstan’s office every time she walked in. She did not know if she liked that, but had no time to dwell on it now.

  He was on the floor. Her heart skipped for an instant, until she realized he had been doing some sort of exercise, holding himself above and parallel to the ground on just his hands, his muscled arms tight with the strain.

  When he saw her, he tucked his knees up as he pushed off with his hands and brought himself neatly to his feet in one, smooth movement. It would not do, she thought, to forget how powerful this man was. He was rapidly nearing his full strength, and when he did, they would have that blazer by the tail.

  “Testing your limits?” she asked mildly.

  “That,” he said in a wry tone, “seems to be your expertise.”