‘Shut up, Cass,’ he says.
‘That’s where you go, on those nights we don’t fight.’ Tyl’s face twists in an ugly way. ‘What is it, captain, a midnight dance?’
‘Shut your damned mouth,’ he shouts at her.
She punches him, then, square in the face. Fel’s vision dazzles for a second and he tastes blood. His temper breaks like kindling, and he grabs hold of Tyl by the front of her fatigues and puts her up against the wall.
‘Enough,’ he says.
Tyl stops fighting him and looks at him, stunned.
‘Throne of Earth,’ Tyl murmurs, in Antari now. ‘You love her, don’t you? I can see it in your face.’
Fel lets Tyl go and takes a step back from her. ‘Leave it alone,’ he says, though he knows that it’s too late for that.
‘You do.’ Tyl sounds dumbfounded. ‘You damned fool. She is a commissar, Dren.’
Tyl only calls him by the shorthand of his name when she really wants to talk to him and not her captain. When they are being kin, and not just soldiers.
‘I know that,’ Fel says. ‘Believe me.’
‘It’ll be the death of you, one way or another,’ Tyl says.
Those words settle heavy on Fel, because he can’t deny them.
‘I know that too,’ he says. ‘But I trust her. Severina might be a commissar, and an outsider, but she is much more than the sum of those things. She’s a fierce heart, Cass.’
Tyl shakes her head at his use of Raine’s given name, but all of the fight has gone out of her.
‘I don’t doubt it,’ she says. ‘But it doesn’t make you any less of a fool.’
Fel shakes his head. ‘You might be right about that,’ he says.
Tyl puts her hand out, and the two of them clasp wrists. It’s a gesture of forgiveness.
‘Nobody else learns of this,’ Fel says. ‘I want your word.’
‘You have it,’ Tyl says.
‘And just to be clear,’ Fel says. ‘You never take a swing at me like that again. Is that understood?’
Tyl’s face colours, and she holds up her hands. ‘Understood, captain,’ she says.
‘Now, tell me about Myre,’ Fel says. ‘I want to know how it happened.’
Tyl looks down the corridor as if she is worried that she will be heard. Fel is reminded of the pict-feed capture of Isabella Luz.
‘It was Rol,’ she says, softly. ‘I know it sounds like dream-talk, but I swear to you, it isn’t.’
Fel is already hurting from everything he has seen and heard today and from everything he now knows, but there is still plenty of room for another hurt as Tyl tells him about finding Rol again in the Sanctum of Bones. About everything he said to her. Everything he did. She gets so far through the retelling and just stops. Her hand goes to her side, where there is a good deal of blood staining her fatigues.
‘You had to kill him,’ Fel says.
‘Yes,’ Tyl says quietly.
Fel can’t help thinking of when he recruited the two of them. Rol and Tyl had come up from the scholam as a pair, and stayed that way in every fight after, like shadows for one another. As good as blood.
‘I’m sorry, Cass,’ he says, softly.
Tyl shakes her head. ‘Me too,’ she says.
She takes a deep breath and shakes her head as if to clear it.
‘I just can’t understand it, captain. It truly was him. Not a ghost, nor an illusion. It wasn’t glamour or a mask. It was Rol, but he had given up everything. How can that be?’
Fel shakes his head. ‘I can’t explain it,’ he says, and it is the truth. He wouldn’t know where to begin. ‘But he is not the first, and he won’t be the last.’
Tyl frowns. ‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that things are going to get worse and that our enemies won’t always be easy to see, or to face. I know that you think I am a fool, but I mean it when I say I trust the commissar, and you should too. I swear to you that I will explain everything, but I can’t yet. Not until I know it is safe to do it.’
‘Captain,’ Tyl begins. ‘What–’
‘I can’t,’ Fel says, but he makes a quick motion with his hands, in the battle-sign that only the Duskhounds use.
Enemies, it means. Surrounded.
Tyl’s eyes turn wary. She nods her head slowly.
‘Understood,’ she says.
Fel realises there is something amiss the moment he enters his quarters and the automated lumens flicker on. He draws his pistol on instinct and scans the room. His carapace armour and his weapons are still secured by genetic lock. His kitbag is stowed and the handbound book of litanies is sitting where he left it on the thin mattress. The blanket is folded neatly and undisturbed. There are no boot prints, save his own.
It’s the table that’s different, or more precisely the two tin cups he left on it. They are the ones he uses for making windfall tea and reading the leaves. The ones he takes with him when he goes to see Raine. One of them has fallen onto the floor.
Fel treads lightly as he crosses the room to where the tin cup is rolling on its curved edge, catching in the draught that blows through the gaps in the mortar of the walls. He nudges at the cup with the toe of his boot, and it rolls a little more, but nothing else happens. Fel exhales a long breath, then shakes his head.
It’s the day, he thinks, making him paranoid.
He holsters his pistol, then stoops down and picks up the cup. It is the one that he gives to Raine. He scored a pattern of thorns into the rim of it, because you should always read from the same one so that the fates don’t get tangled. Raine laughed when he first explained it to her, but now she understands and she listens. Sometimes she even lets him tell her what he sees in her fate.
Fel has never tried to hide from Raine what he feels. There would be no point, even if he wanted to, because she would see right through it, as she does with everything. But they have never acted on it, no matter what Tyl might think. Fel has no doubt that he means something to Raine, but she is a commissar, and he is a soldier, and that means something too.
Fel goes to put the cup back down on the table, and realises there is something else amiss. Something that doesn’t belong, and makes him flinch to see it. It is a twist of metal, with a red glass lens set into it and silver cables coiled up like insect’s legs. It’s only when he puts his hand out and takes hold of it that he realises what it is. An augmetic lens.
Lori Ghael’s augmetic lens.
‘Cass,’ Fel shouts, and it’s all he gets to do, because as soon as the lens breaks contact with the metal of the table he hears a familiar sound.
A charge triggering.
There’s a deafening roar and a flash of light and a huge pressure wave. The room turns around him and he ends up on the floor on the other side of it, by the door, struggling to breathe. Struggling to see. Fel tries to get to his feet, but only makes it halfway before falling again. He puts his right hand out to catch himself, only to find that it is gone, and most of his arm with it. It is just blood and bone. Jagged shards of shrapnel have buried themselves in his chest and his stomach. He is bleeding badly. Really badly. All over the floor.
‘Hells,’ Fel manages to say, and it uses up the last of the air in his lungs.
He hears Tyl shouting something over the ringing in his ears and sees her move into his narrowing vision as it washes in shades of grey. He wants to tell her to get clear in case there’s another charge, but he can’t get the words together. Can’t see her clearly. Tyl’s words become a rush and a mumble until he can’t hear them at all. The world disappears and leaves him in darkness, just like those isolation chambers. Shapes in the shadows. On the edge, with his heart going arrhythmic, and the rest of him going numb. Fel hears a different voice. Raine’s voice.
Until the end, she says.
Seventeen
&nb
sp; Consequences
The medicae facility used to be the scholam’s own hospital ward. It is all tiles and steel, and it catches the echoes of machine noise and of the wounded. Catches the echo of Raine’s boots on the tiles as she pushes her way through to where they have taken Andren Fel. All of that noise is a rush and a roar, like the ocean.
Like the explosion.
She had heard it, even from the other wing. Felt the tremor through the stone.
Raine’s hands are already fists, but now she curls them so tightly that her knuckles ache with it.
Nuria Lye sees her coming. The medic is standing beside the curtained-off bays. Her scrubs are bloodsoaked, and there is some in her hairline too. She opens her mouth to speak, but Raine doesn’t give her chance.
‘Does he live?’ she asks.
Lye nods. ‘Just,’ she says. ‘It is bad, commissar.’
Raine knew it would be, but that doesn’t make it easy to hear.
‘Let me see him,’ she says. ‘See how bad it is.’
Lye runs a hand through her hair and sighs. ‘Yes, sir,’ she says.
Lye takes her over to one of the bays.
‘He is in and out,’ she says. ‘On a good deal of meds. He won’t be able to tell you much, if anything, and I’d beg you not to press him.’
Raine nods. On the face of it, she is there in her capacity as commissar, to find out what happened and punish those responsible. That’s what Lye sees, because that’s what Raine lets her see. But Raine knows where she can lay the blame for this, and so much else. The visit is because she cares, and Raine realises exactly how much when Lye pulls that curtain back.
Andren Fel is cut as if by a dozen blades. Shallow wounds mark his face and throat, and there are dark circles of blood on the bandages around his chest from much deeper ones. He is stuck with intravenous needles for pain medication, blood and fluids.
‘He was full of shrapnel,’ Lye says, in a low voice. ‘He’s lucky he made it here, the amount he bled.’
Raine is only half-listening. She is looking at where they have had to cut away Fel’s right arm, almost to the shoulder. Raine takes a breath and smells counterseptic.
‘Leave,’ she says to Lye.
The medic does as she is told immediately. Raine’s voice allows for nothing else. The curtain behind her falls closed again. Raine waits for Lye’s boots to recede before she approaches him. Before she speaks.
‘Andren,’ she says.
He stirs, just barely, but he doesn’t wake or answer her. Raine wants to say his name again. She wants to shake him just so that he’ll wake and speak to her because she can’t stand how still he is.
‘I warned you,’ she says. ‘But you wouldn’t walk away. You had to be so honourable.’
She shakes her head. ‘I wish you had walked away,’ she says.
‘Not dead yet.’
Fel’s words stun Raine. His voice doesn’t sound like his own and when he opens his eyes, they are glassy. His pupils are like pinpricks in the grey.
‘No,’ Raine says, softly. ‘Not yet.’
She moves closer. Close enough to reach out and touch him.
‘What happened?’ she asks him.
He frowns and she sees the fingers on his good hand curl.
‘I can’t remember,’ he says. ‘Not a thing but fire.’
His words are halting. Raine can see how it hurts him to talk.
‘It’s alright,’ she says, and her words are halting too. A different kind of hurt. ‘I will hunt down the ones who did this. This, and everything else. I will break every last one of them.’
Fel nods. ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I know you will.’
Raine looks at the mess that is left of his arm and listens to the rattle of his chest as he breathes.
‘Andren,’ she says. ‘I am sorry.’
He shakes his head.
‘Until the end,’ he says. ‘I swore it.’
‘I know,’ Raine says. ‘But it is too much to give.’
‘No,’ Fel says. ‘It isn’t. Not for you.’
Raine shakes her head, because he’s wrong. It is too much to give and it is too much for her to take, too, because despite how hard she has tried to keep her heart her own, she has failed. She has allowed herself to care. To trust.
To love him.
Raine takes hold of his good hand and laces her fingers in his. She means to say it, then. To tell him exactly what he means to her. But his grey eyes have closed, and he is still and silent again, save for his breathing.
‘Rest easy, Andren Fel,’ Raine says, though she knows he cannot hear her. ‘I still have stories I owe you.’
Tyl has washed her hands with boiled water, scrubbed them until the skin is red, but still she can’t get rid of the blood under her fingernails.
Her captain’s blood.
Tyl looks up from her hands at the sound of footsteps as Raine emerges from the curtained medical bay. The commissar’s face is set in the same way it always is, giving away nothing. Her eyes, though, are an altogether different story.
They are full of pain, and rage.
Tyl feels guilt then at her earlier words, and the way she scorned Fel for giving up his heart.
‘Commissar,’ Tyl says, before she can change her mind. ‘A word.’
‘Of course,’ Raine says.
The rage is there in her voice too. Running underneath it like water under ice, and just as cold. The two of them walk together out of the medicae facility and into the scholam proper. To the outside, where the wind carries their words away.
‘The rumour mill says that the Sighted infiltrated this place,’ Tyl says, looking at the posted guards, and the gun-nests. The Valkyrie gunships, crouched on the yard like hawks over prey. ‘That they were the ones to plant that device.’
‘And what do you think?’ Raine asks.
Those furious eyes of hers bore into Tyl. It feels as though she can see right through to her soul. Tyl makes an effort to hold Raine’s gaze.
‘I think that if the Sighted were to infiltrate this place then they would have burned the lot to the ground and cut us to ribbons. I think that this was something else. Something personal.’
She pauses and considers her next words carefully.
‘I think that it was done to get to you,’ Tyl says.
Raine’s face doesn’t change.
‘The captain wouldn’t tell me what is going on,’ Tyl says. ‘He said it wasn’t safe to.’ She huffs a humourless laugh. ‘But he did tell me that enemies surround us, and he told me that I should trust you.’
Tyl holds out her hand, palm down to the ground, the way she does when the Duskhounds make their oaths.
‘So this is me trusting you,’ she says. ‘This is me swearing what’s left of the Duskhounds to you anew, on the understanding that we will bleed whoever did this to my captain.’
Finally, there is a change in Raine’s face, and Tyl sees a glimpse of that heart of hers. Fierce, like the captain said. Raine puts her hand on top of Tyl’s.
‘We will bleed them,’ Raine says. ‘I swear it.’
It is falling dark again when Wyck makes his way down to the tankers’ lot. Like last time, it is noisy with the songs of repair and reconsecration. This time, the damage is much worse, though. Every one of the Fyregiants he walks past is blackened and broken, and there’s a space in the line where Mountainsong would rest, if she weren’t dead.
He finds Kolat with Stoneking at the end of the line like always. He’s not on his own this time. There’s another of the crew with him, that idiot who is bigger even than Crys. The two of them are stood up on the Demolisher, talking. Stoneking is torn open all across her chassis and her turret.
‘Hey, Ely,’ the idiot says, when he sees Wyck. ‘I think we’ve a lost one here. Are you lost, infantry?’
Kolat turns and looks. His goggles are pushed up on his head, so Wyck can see the way his eyes go wide, even with the half-dark and the distance. There’s not a hint of that steel smile of his.
The whole thing is almost worth it then, just for that look.
‘Get out of here, Curi,’ Kolat says.
The big idiot shrugs and drops down off the tank. He passes by Wyck with the intent of shouldering him as he goes. Wyck sidesteps it, and Curi nearly loses his footing in the mud.
‘Careful there, armour,’ Wyck says. ‘You spend enough time sitting on your arse as it is.’
Curi scowls and squares up to him.
‘I told you to go,’ Kolat says, as he drops into the mud. ‘Don’t make me say it again.’
Curi clearly knows Kolat well enough to know not to argue. He shrugs again with that scowl still on his face, then he walks away up the line. Wyck looks at Kolat standing there. He’s got a thick-headed hammer in one hand.
‘What are you doing here, Wyck?’ Kolat snarls.
‘What am I doing here,’ Wyck says. ‘That’s not really what you’re asking, is it? What you’re really asking is why I’m still living, despite your best efforts. Despite you ratting me out to my own.’
Kolat raises that hammer of his a little in answer and Wyck shakes his head.
‘You aren’t going to brain me with that,’ he says. ‘Not here, where everyone can see. Not unless you’re as stupid as your crewmate. I didn’t come here for a fight.’
‘You?’ Kolat says. ‘Not here for a fight? Why does that sound like a lie?’
Wyck laughs, because Kolat has never been able to tell when he lies. ‘Either you put the hammer down, and we talk, or I’ll rat you out like you did me. I’ll tell the commissar all about what you did to Edra, and you can see if you walk away from her.’
Kolat blinks and glances up the line where the others are all working, then he curses in his southlander dialect and drops the hammer into the dirt. The head of it buries itself in the mud.
‘Talk,’ he says.
‘Good call,’ Wyck says. ‘Here’s the thing. You tried to get me killed, Ely, and that sits very poorly with me.’
Honourbound - Rachel Harrison Page 33