A Passage of Stars

by Kate Elliott

  “Fifty-seven seventy-eight,” she directed.

  An interminable fifteen minutes passed. But at last the truck slowed and stopped and the engine cut off with a last cough.

  “Cursed whore-mother tattoos,” snapped the driver. “They’re just asking to be shot.”

  The trooper undid the doors, swung them open. Lily scrambled out—to see Jenny in full mercenary’s rig coming out of the shuttle’s hatch. Lily ran forward. Jenny lowered her gun.

  “Lily!” Her eyes cast back to the truck. Dents puckered the red stripe along one door that identified it as a Security vehicle. “I thought you were a fugitive.”

  “They’re Jehanists.”

  “So they say. Let’s board and get clear. Where’s your pilot—” Her face froze in astonishment. “Damn my eyes. It’s Isaiah’s tame monkey. Grown up.”

  Pinto halted. “Go fly your own tupping ship—”

  Lily grabbed his arm and squeezed, hard. “Jenny, this is Pinto.”

  “I know you,” said Pinto suddenly, still staring at Jenny. “You were—the Mughal banquet—the blond—”

  “A friend of yours is on that shuttle.” Jenny’s voice sliced through his indecision. “So move it up.”

  Recognition flooded Pinto’s face. “Aliasing,” he said in a breath. “She disappeared.” He pulled away from Lily and jogged toward the shuttle. Bach followed him.

  Lily turned back toward the truck.

  “Lily.” Jenny’s voice cut hard and urgent through the air. “Move it up, woman.”

  “There’s just one thing, Jenny. I have to find Kyosti. He works in Roanoak.”

  “What—old blue-hair?”

  “I’m sorry. If you have to leave me, do it. But I can’t go without him.”

  Jenny sighed, and her mouth turned down. “All right, Ransome. I’ll give you two hours. But these pretty soldiers stay with me until you get back.”

  “But—”

  Jenny cut off the driver’s protest with one motion of her gun. “You’ll stay with me. Round up your boys and give me your guns. How do you expect to find him?”

  Lily, divesting the four troopers of their guns, turned to the driver. “Where’s Roanoak E Depot from here?”

  “Less than half a kilometer. Straight down Mash Avenue.”

  “Then I can find him. Two hours, Jenny. I’ll return this then,” she added to the driver, slipping a hand-size stunner into her boot. She set out in the preferred direction at a lope.

  Most of the loading berths sat empty. A Security truck roared by and she dodged just in time under the confines of a raised platform. And, looking up, realized it was a rail shoot that connected with the cargo tracks. She followed it. Branched to the right where it met the main tracks and jogged down them. A warehouse loomed on her left. The tracks rose, arcing up into a bridge. She crouched at the rise. Off to the left she saw a gate, crowded with troops inside and a fluid mass of people outside. Surely that must be Mash Avenue. She dropped off the height of rail and ran along the side of the decrepit warehouse toward the gate. Broken concrete, cracked and jagged, polluted with shoots of green erupting up through it, caught at her feet, but she neither lost her balance nor broke her stride.

  Old warehouses, long deserted by their shattered windows and half-slung doors, covered her approach to within twenty-five yards of the gate. The crowd sounded a steady undercurrent to the louder noise of an altercation at the gate. A woman’s voice screamed words at the phalanx of troopers stationed behind the broad entry gates. A low vehicle pushed forward, nosing the metal mesh until a single shot shattered through the sound of the engine, and the vehicle backed up abruptly. People yelled and shouted and dashed out of its retreating path.

  But there was an exit gate, a smaller, one-way set of bars and barriers. About six troopers watched it, but their attention was mostly focused on the entrance. An incredible shouting broke out away down the avenue.

  Honking and shouts accompanied the slow advance of a Security vehicle. The crowd threw itself on it, battering at the metal sides, shattering windows. Troopers opened the gates, charging through to aid the vehicle. Any number of civilians pressed into the port. Lily strolled across the median strip, up to the exit gate.

  “Excuse me,” she said to the trooper who stood blocking the first section of the gate. “But I need to get out.”

  The trooper stared at her, started at the sudden commands from the entry gate, where civilians were pouring around the Security vehicle and through the gate. Lily was out through the gate before she got any reply.

  She had to shove through the crowd, but no one hindered her because she was moving in the opposite direction. At last she cleared the worst congestion and found the avenue. The traffic was definitely against her, but all on foot. At the gate she had seen untattooed people. Now, as she walked down the broad avenue as quickly as she could without running, she saw fewer and fewer unmarked faces.

  These people were headed away from the direction she was going in. Some at a run. A volley of shots, faint and snapping, echoed out along the avenue until the swelling noise of human agitation covered them. A cluster of youths smashed a shop window with rocks. One at their fringe grabbed at Lily. She brushed him aside, went on. Glanced back once, but they had scattered into the shop, looting.

  The press of crowd increased against her, pulling her one way, pushing her another, but she fought forward, shoulders hunched, as if against the winds of Unruli. Came out into the plaza fronting Roanoak E Depot. And saw what the crowds were fleeing.

  Tumult. Turmoil. Perhaps it had once been a riot. The debris of the protest—clubs, torn clothing, bodies—lay still beneath the agitation swirling over it. Someone hit her, full collision, and she was knocked off her feet. Rolled, came up crouched, but no one had stopped. Another body brushed roughly past. Screams, shouts, uproar. The crack of command. Five precise shots.

  A gap opened, and she could see the depot. Emerging out of it, in an exact line, the stark white uniforms of the Immortals. They advanced step by commanded step. The crowd roiled away from them, recoiled back. Shots peppered into the swarm. Those who reached the line of the Immortals were dispatched with ease by a flash of slim, metal clubs that seemed choreographed in its ruthless efficiency. The crowd broke under their advance despite the amazing disparity in numbers.

  Lily swore under her breath, retreating with the crowd until she could separate off and, pushing along the edge of the plaza, duck into a side street. It would be hard enough to retrace her way to the clinic—and with this …

  Distant commands: “Break line and pursue in order.” Lily ran, took a side street, and another, and came out on the edge of a tiny, withering park, hardly larger than her apartment. She paused to catch her breath and her bearings.

  A sudden rush of running and yelling, followed by a flurry of shots. She threw herself behind a bench. A group of Ridanis ran past. One staggered, blood seeping at her abdomen, and fell. Six of the others stopped, grabbed her, pulled. But four Immortals, practically sprinting in step, surrounded them and with a supreme economy of effort beat them until there was no motion left. And turned to face the bench. Lily stood up.

  Two men. Two women. They studied Lily with eyes of inexorable dispassion. Lily had a vivid vision of Jenny in such a uniform. She grinned. Hopped the bench casually, raised one hand and with the other tipped the gun out of her boot and onto the ground. Then she sat on the high back of the bench, feet on the seat itself, and folded her arms in front of her.

  “Even though you aren’t a tattoo,” said the woman with the bars of highest rank, “why shouldn’t we shoot you?”

  “Because,” replied Lily, “I’m going to meet my lover.”

  Two of them laughed.

  “Say it’s true,” said the officer. “Why should we let you meet this lover, tattooed or not?”

  Lily stood up and jumped lightly to the ground. “Because I challenge any one of you, no weapons, to single combat. If I win, you’ll let me go.”

&n
bsp; Two laughed.

  “If you lose?” asked the officer.

  “Your choice,”

  “All right.” The officer nodded at one of the men. “Make it quick.”

  He divested himself of weapons, put them in the keeping of his comrades. They backed up to give him room. Lily came forward. More dirt than grass under her feet. She tested it under her boots, getting a feel for her traction.

  He lunged. She sidestepped, caught him with a clip to the back of the head before he could pull up and turn, caught the back of one of his knees with a kick. But as his balance broke backward, he fell into it, rolled and pushed up onto his hands, booted feet thrust into her abdomen.

  She doubled over, gasping, but kept the force of his roll tumbling backward and flipped him over her. They both spun up to their feet and away. A dull ache spread out along the muscles of her belly. He rubbed his head, and smiled.

  Now he began to circle in. He was lithe, strong and straight from his training. He shifted closer, whirled, and attacked. Her dodge cleared all but her shoulder—his fist slammed into that, but she spun with the blow, closing in with an elbow to his face. He slugged her, straight onto a breast. Staggering back, she barely caught his next blow on her forearm, deflecting a kick with a sweep of one leg. His hand, ringed with something metal, skimmed her cheek and tore the skin.

  She dropped, but only into her deepest stance, and took his open belly with a clean reverse punch. He fell like a stone into a heap on the ground. She leapt backward, found the bench, and cleared it so the high back stood between her and the Immortals. Pain throbbed through her abdomen, her chest, her leg; stung like the whip of cold wind on her cheek. Liquid swelled and trailed down her face.

  “We keep our word,” said the officer. “You have until he can walk again.”

  Lily took ten steps back, turned, and sprinted. No shots followed her. Her leg ached with each pounding step. Blood trickled down her neck. Each pulse shot through her chest. She ran all the way to the clinic. Not even tattoos bothered her, and she saw no more Immortals.

  At the steps leading up into the clinic, she had to stop. Not just because she was gasping for air and fighting the spreading pulse of pain, the cramping in her injured leg. There were others wounded. Her first glance, halted, rising as her wind came back, fixed on a child, chest ripped open as if by a rending knife. She heard weeping. A man moaned, clutching an arm to his body; he shifted, and bone showed, sticking through his flesh. Lily stumbled up the steps, trying to avoid all the bodies cast there like so much debris. A tattooed woman in a medical jacket walked among them, clipping tags about their necks. As Lily reached the clinic door, two clinic workers emerged and designated the next patients to go in.

  “Be you have to wait your turn,” said one, laying a restraining hand on her bruised arm.

  She winced. “I’m not here for injuries. I’m here to see min Accipiter.”

  A look passed between the two workers. One nodded. “He be in ward B.”

  She knew where it was. It was the same common room where she had gone—so long ago—when Pero had been shot. Inside the clinic, hush prevailed, a low murmur of talk. Injured Ridanis crowded the seats, sat with the patience she had seen in Paisley—not expecting anything more—in orderly lines in the halls. A worker helped a man limp out of ward B, and Lily slipped inside, the broad door sighing shut behind her.

  Seats, benches, floor: all were crowded with bleeding, torn, wounded Ridanis, a sea of patterns that had, like a common thread running between them, the red markings of blood.

  Kyosti was bent over a boy, hands probing with insistent gentleness at one leg. The boy cried out, and Kyosti, with a skill she could only marvel at, soothed his crying while ripping off the trouser to see the wound better. His hair stood in wild, pale disarray about his head. Blood stained one cheek, dried there as if from hours ago. His medical jacket had once been white; now red mottled it. Strain pulled at the delicate lines of his face. He looked on the edge of breaking down from exhaustion. She thought she had never seen him as handsome as he was now.

  Ridani eyes rose to scrutinize her. Silence unfurled along the room until at last the boy, sensing some emotion outside his pain, shifted his head to look at her. Kyosti looked up at the boy’s face. And, with a slow turn of his head, followed the boy’s gaze.

  For an instant as long as a window they stared at each other, his blue eyes fixed on her dark ones.

  He rose.

  “Lily,” he said “Help me carry this young fellow into the back room. I have to stitch up his leg.”

  She complied. She watched in silence as he worked, efficient as the Immortals. The boy cried, but he could limp out of the room, clean and sewn-up, when Kyosti was finished.

  “Kyosti,” Lily began. He washed his hands.

  “Why are you here?” he said over the rush of water. “That was incredibly stupid of you, Lily.” With a hard wrench he shut off the taps and turned to glare at her.

  “We have to leave Arcadia.”

  “What? Right now? Do you suggest I simply abandon my patients in all their blood?”

  “Kyosti!” She took a step toward him. He backed away. “Kyosti, Heredes is dead.” His expression did not change. He seemed not to have heard her. “Central murdered him. They said he was Pero.”

  Kyosti glanced down at his bloody jacket. “I heard Pero was dead. I thought it was Robert.”

  “Don’t you care?” she cried. “It was Taliesin!”

  He laughed, “I’ll believe he’s dead when I put these hands on his cold corpse. Maybe not even then.”

  “How dare you!” she screamed. “How dare you say that!” She flung herself at him, furious with grief, but he dodged her, avoided her blow.

  “Why don’t you go away—I have work to do.” His hands gripped the examining table as if he would fall if it was not there.

  “I’m leaving, Kyosti.” Her voice fell, lost its brief touch of hysteria. “Don’t you understand that? I may never come back.”

  “You’re better off without me, Lily. I’ve only brought you trouble, and I’ll only bring you more.”

  “Kyosti.” The barest whisper. “Don’t make me leave without you.”

  He laughed, short and hard, and let go of the table. “What difference would it make whether I go with you or not?” But his eyes asked something else.

  She bowed her head. She could not meet his gaze. The floor, not very clean, lay in all its neutral glory beneath her. “I left Ransome House,” she said to it. “I left Wingtuck’s Academy. Robbie’s in hiding. And Heredes—” She stopped, voice catching on his name.

  He turned his back to her, picked up his examining kit, fastened his stethoscope about his neck. “And I’m all that’s left.” He made it sound like an insult.

  “Kyosti. That’s not how I meant it.” She moved around the table. “Come with me.” Came up to him, put out her hands.

  “Don’t touch me,” he said.

  While she was still staring, he walked carefully around her and left the private room.

  She could not move. The examining table, thin paper sheet covering its cold surface, metal-smoothed corners, transfixed her vision. There he had gripped with such force. With one hand, tentative fingers, she touched that place. It was cool. He had left nothing of himself there. She swallowed. There was moisture on her cheek, but when she raised a hand to touch it, it was just blood. Here and there her body ached, but it was like an old sorrow, dulling into oblivion.

  After all, she had to get back to the shuttle. Her feet moved as if someone else were willing them to. The door swung back. It took an eternity to get from the private room to the door of ward B. All the Ridanis stared at her deliberate progress. She arrived at the door at last. Best just to leave. But she had to look a last time.

  She turned. Kyosti had knelt before an elderly woman. She had deep gashes all along one side of her body. He examined them, graceful in his competence, painstaking, absorbed.

  Paisley’s story ca
me unbidden to her mind—perhaps some people never could find their true home, like the Ridanis, lost far down the way. Or never recognized it for what it was until they had lost it. To lose Heredes was a thousand times harder than leaving, and losing, Ransome House. But although she had lost Heredes to irrevocable death, she had at least known what he was to her. This time the recognition had indeed come too late.

  In front of all those eyes, tears welled up as she looked at him, and she began to cry. Noiseless at first, until a sob caught in her bruised chest.

  His head turned. He stared at her, as if at revelation. Unfastening his stethoscope, he laid it on the lap of the elderly woman and stood up.

  “Forgive me,” he said to the room at large as he unbuttoned his medical jacket. “But I love her.” The jacket slipped to a crumpled heap on the floor.

  The elderly woman stood up. The rest, those that could, one by one, stood, and when they were all standing they bowed to him, a brief, respectful salute, and averted their eyes.

  He came up beside her and put his hands on either side of her face. “Lily,” he breathed, lifting her so that she looked up at him.

  “I love you,” she said, wondering, because she had just this instant realized it was true.

  He smiled, that brilliant, languorous, suggestive smile she had seen the first time he had smiled at her. “Of course you do,” he murmured, and his lips touched hers, the briefest brush. “Mother’s Breasts, Lily,” he said in an undertone of suppressed hysteria, “let’s get out of here before I have to haul you into the back room.” He let go of her as if she were scorching him.

  He led her out a back way, pausing long enough in an empty storeroom to take two clean medical jackets from a shelf. He handed one to her, put the other on himself, and they left the clinic.

  Roanoak was deserted—silent, empty, seemingly uninhabited. No one walked the streets. Once, in the distance, they heard a shouted command, but that was all: the Immortals, with terrible efficiency, had obliterated the riot.