But this one was her problem.
Erelah shook her head and turned wet eyes up at her. “I can’t make her stop.”
Sela pocketed the shiv. “There’s no one here, Erelah. Just you and me and your brother.”
She is here and Valen is not. He was worth a dozen of her.
A part of her wanted to tell her to suck it up or rage at her, as she had done with those psych-damaged ‘scriptors. If what Erelah suffered was all in her head, she could control that too.
Instead, she gripped the girl by the upper arms and urged her to her feet. “Come on. You should rest.”
The girl came with her, compliant and weak as they stepped back out into the common passage. It was clearly dangerous to let her roam the ship alone. Sela guided her back to the storage space that served as Erelah’s room.
It was not until the backs of the girl’s knees hit the edge of the cot that she looked around, as if suddenly aware of the change in setting.
“Don’t lock me up again!” She attempted to pull away.
Sela forced her back down.
She squatted to her level, hands still gripping Erelah’s arms. “Listen to me, Erelah. You have to fight this. If you are anything like Jon, you have the strength to do that. You have made it this far. You have survived nearly two years on your own. Do this for your brother, if you cannot do it for yourself.”
She folded under a choking sob.
“Maintain, soldier. Am I clear?” She released her hold and straightened, standing over her.
Erelah swiped at her eyes. She opened her mouth as if to speak but then nodded ardently, like a child fearing a reprimand.
A bleating sound echoed down from the command loft.
What seemed like ages ago, Sela had programmed the nav-comp to alert her with course changes. She did not trust the flight computer, or more accurately, was not about to place blind faith in the contents of Phex’s stellar nav charts.
There were quite a few things on this ship that she didn’t trust. Even if the girl seemed calmer now, it was unwise to leave her unattended.
After one long judging stare, she turned to leave. “I’ll wake the captain. He’ll tend to you.”
“No. Don’t tell Jon.” Erelah grabbed her sleeve. “Please.”
Sela pulled away with an irritated grunt. The girl’s theatrics now challenged the last of her patience.
“I know you don’t trust me,” Erelah said. “It’s not your fault. It’s how First made you.” She looked up at Sela with queer solemnity. “But I know what you think.”
As the met the girl’s stare, Sela felt a sudden surge of heat. It prickled from the base of her skull and down her neck.
She took a step back, retreating to the threshold. There was something very wrong with Erelah Veradin. It was as if the girl bore some contaminant. Sela wanted no part of it.
“I am a danger. I am a liability. They should just retire me. Like any one of those battle-burned ‘scriptors.” The expression on the girl’s face became stony. The meter and tone of her words drew out, became measured, precise. Her heavy Eugenes accent flattened into perfect Regimental. A chill rose on Sela’s skin as she realized the girl was doing a nearly perfect imitation of her voice. “End me so I can harm no one. Retire me… like you did cadet Stelvick.”
Stelvick.
Sela’s heart flattened.
“What did you say?” she hissed. The hairs rose on the back of her neck. She had told no one. Ever. Not the drillers during the inquiry. Not the other booters in her cluster. And certainly not Jon. In fact, the story she had told him, though highly edited, was the only confession she had ever made about Atilio’s conception.
Erelah sagged back to the cot. She dropped her head into her hands. Her mass of dark hair fell over her face.
“Now do you see?” she sobbed. “I’m hollow and stuffed full of other people. I open my mouth and someone else talks.”
Sela stiffened. Her eyes began to water. “This is some trick. How do you know about Stelvick?”
Erelah shook her head. The lilting Eugenes accent was back when she spoke again: “You knew you had to be the one to stop him. The drillers wouldn’t have cared. And when you did it, you were sad for him. It was the first time you had ever killed. You never looked away. He slid down the wall. There was blood everywhere. You stayed and you watched… and you watched …until he stopped breathing. No one else was going to get hurt by him. You made sure— ”
“Stop it.” Sela backed away. This was impossible. How could she know?
Sela refused to believe in such fantasy as mind-readers and oracles. They were stories for children and entertainments on the holo-web. No one could delve into the mind of another and see their secrets.
Unheeding, Erelah continued to ramble. Her words were quick and pleading. “You can do what I can’t. Kill me. Before it gets worse.”
“Madness,” Sela seethed, triggering the door shut just as Erelah opened her mouth to speak.
Without a backward glance, she made for the command loft to the call of the nagging nav-comp. Once the course correction was satisfied, she would wake Jon to deal with his sister.
28
/Retire you? As if Tyron would really do it/
The overwhelming surge of pressure in Erelah’s head tightened until it felt as if her very skull would split and the thing that dwelled in there would crawl out of it. She doubled over, fingers digging into her scalp. It had taken all the control she could manage to keep Tristic at bay when Tyron was in the room. Now the beast redoubled her efforts. It was a thunderous onslaught, making all the others before seem weak taunts.
/Tyron. What an insufferable nuisance. What gall she possessed to think she could defeat me. Me!/
Erelah could not gather the strength to stand. Her jaw was clenched shut beneath the steady pounding of pressure-pain.
/You have not known agony until now. Your brother and his breeder will know it ten-fold./
She released a shuddering sob. Her vision blurred under the haze of tears.
Pulse thundering against her ears, she collapsed to her side on the deck.
With numb and tremulous fingers, she pulled the tiny vial from a pocket in her ruined jumpsuit. Tyron had probably never known it was in the medistat kit.
Xiocine. A common tincture. Healing if used carefully on a wound. Deadly if ingested.
Here was escape.
She had fantasized about this before: finding a rip in the skin of this world and slipping through.
“This time.” Erelah realized she had spoken aloud. She looked up.
Tristic was gone.
The pressure in her skull had vanished. The beast’s hold could only last so long. The harder Tristic pushed, the shorter her onslaught.
I don’t know how much more I can take.
Tyron wouldn’t stop her; she was busy in the command loft, wallowing in her own mire of self-loathing. Even if the soldier were in the very room, she would probably cheer Erelah on. Jonvelish likely slept under his aching mound of guilt.
Would he even surface to care?
Erelah swiped impatiently at her tear-streaked face then gingerly removed the vial’s seal. The glass ticked against her teeth as her nervous fingers quivered. Her tongue recoiled with the taste of the first droplets. It was overpoweringly acrid.
“What are you doing?”
Jon’s voice erupted as he darted through the doorway.
Quickly Erelah turned away, seeking to drink the remainder. His hand slapped the vial away. It landed with a tiny, unimportant tink! on the deck.
“What is that?” Jon demanded. His anger was undermined by the fear in his face. “Erelah?”
She tried to back away, pushing with weak legs along the floor. Her mouth. Her lungs had become lazy. Mist flooded the edges of her vision.
Would this little bit be enough? Please, Miri, granter of mercies. Let it be enough.
She soon had her answer as the black tide engulfed everything. And she gave he
rself over, gladly.
“Erelah?” His hands roughly seized shoulders that belonged to someone else. She watched more than felt.
Come on. Wake up!
His commanding voice was tinny, disconnected. Another unimportant tragedy being acted out somewhere else.
The black tide filled her mouth, nose. Covered her eyes. To the last, her ears were still buffeted by the unimportant sounds.
wakeup...erelah…ty!...getdownhere
---
The shouts of the far-away drillers carried in angry echoes against the walls of the maze-like bunkers in the kennel compound. Here all the walls looked the same, save for the large painted numbers that gave each place its name, and thus its level of importance and use. Just like the people there: drillers and booters. Tightly shaved heads. Dark eyes in varying shades of carefully-bred Eugenes brown. Gray single suits with colors and designations over the breast that suggested levels of importance and use. They all tended to look the same, sometimes even up close. The color of Sela’s hair was a secret even from herself until her first assignment, when she was allowed to grow it out.
She was aware of other sounds too: the scrape of heavy boots, the rasp of wet labored breathing, the relentless pounding of her heart in her throat.
Stelvick looked different far away and close up. He was a towering beast. Except now, he looked smaller, deflated. In a sense, that was what was happening to him. He was deflating, a hole made in him, allowing what was within him to escape into a growing maroon puddle on the floor.
The same maroon, once slimy and warm, now cooled between her fingers and on the hilt of her combat knife. Sela had seen blood before, often her own, from times on the training mats, but this was not hers. This belonged to Stelvick.
He had collapsed against the wall, legs akimbo, back slumped under the large number designating their clusterbay. His chest heaved. His hand clutched at his neck, unable to staunch the flow of blood.
Sela squatted down, staring. Her eyes locked with his. Even silenced, he radiated hatred. A sneer always lingered beneath his surface. There was no wonder or surprise in his eyes. They contained a poisonous acceptance of the grim. As if somehow he knew that this had been his designated ending.
“My strength is the soldier beside me.” Sela recited Decca. Perhaps then he would understand. This was a mercy. She did this for the others, her kennel mates, to protect them. She had removed this canker that would have weakened them as a group. And she was prepared to bear the punishment for it.
“Ty! Help me!”
Sela bolted upright in the grav bench, surroundings realigning against the memory.
Jon shouted once more. This time she could hear it from the vox panel in the wall and from the corridor below the command loft.
Sela climbed over the back of the grav couch and down the ladder to the common passage.
“Jon?”
“Here! In here!” It came from Erelah’s room.
She turned the corner. Jon sat on the floor. Erelah was a limp shape draped across his arms. Her head flopped back lifelessly. Sela thought of the red welts Erelah had carved into her own arms. Perhaps one had gone too deep.
I should have woken him sooner. Not allowed the nav-comp to distract her. Or permitted the self-indulgent review of memories best left hidden.
“What’s happened?” But she did not step closer. Even now, she hesitated to touch the girl.
“I cannot wake her.” His red-rimmed eyes pleaded up at Sela. “She drank something. There was a vial in her hand.”
This was a mercy.
Immediately she felt guilt she saw the tormented expression on Jon’s face.
Erelah’s breathing came in shallow gulps. Jon shook her. Her arm flopped.
Sela stepped closer, crouched, and heard the crunch of glass. She shifted her foot and looked. On the deck lay the shattered remains of a tiny black glass vial. She stiffened. Xiocine. An anti-infective that could be fatal is ingested. It was one of the tincture ampules from the med kit that she had flung from the bunkroom under the spell of her temper. She had not bothered to reclaim it from the floor.
Jon looked at it, then up at Sela. The accusation was plain in his voice.
“Did she drink that? Was it that? What did she drink?”
A wave of icy heat paraded down her scalp. She was not going to be held responsible for this. If Erelah had truly wanted to end herself, she could have easily opened an artery with her makeshift shiv.
“Xiocine.” Sela straightened. “From the medikit.”
There is no way this is going to be my damn fault.
Jon’s narrowed eyes told her otherwise. “How did she get that?”
Sela straightened. “I didn’t give it to her.”
“The damage is done,” he muttered, holding Erelah’s face in his hands.
Sela grabbed the Cass’s depleted medikit from the storage locker nearby and threw it to the floor. After a frantic rummage through the pockets, she found it: the emetic.
“Here.” She shoved the bottle into Jon’s hand. “Make her drink this. It’ll bring it up.”
He looked down at the bottle and then up at her. Distrust. She had never seen distrust on his face.
“I didn’t make her do this, Jon!” Kneeling, Sela roughly pulled back the sleeve of Erelah’s arm. Maroon dotted the girl’s skin in angry hashes. “She wants to destroy herself!”
His expression collapsed. “Help me.”
“Get her mouth open.”
With trembling fingers, Jon cradled that pale jaw and pried open her clenched teeth. Sela uncapped the bottle and poured its contents into the girl’s mouth. Erelah bucked, pushing against Jon. He held her firmly, hand over her mouth.
“No, baby sister. Swallow it. Come on.”
Erelah struggled against him. Finally she relented. Jon brought his hand away.
“Get her on her side,” Sela instructed.
Jon turned her, stroking her back as she coughed and heaved.
“I don’t think that was enough,” he said. “She needs a real doctor, a medic.”
Sela stood. “Searching the nav charts for something like that would take days. She may not have that long.”
Considering its source in Phex, she had little reason to take what information she found there to be trustworthy without thorough investigation. There was simply no time for that.
“Think, Ty!” Jon cried. “There has to be something.”
Sela inhaled sharply. “Lineao.”
“What in the Known Worlds is Lineao?”
But she was running back along the command passage, already climbing the rungs up to the command loft.
She hoped that the priest had meant what he said about seeing her again, and about having to help those in need. There were no other options. Collapsing into the grav couch, Sela pulled the navsys up and found the redirect for the next flex point. It would take half a day, but it was all they had: Tasemar.
29
Tasemar, specifically this sparse little town clinging to the edges of the ruined government complex installed by the Regime, was not as Sela had left it. Remarkably, it had become a thriving epicenter, full of life.
Where had all these souls been when my team was fighting its way up hill? Cowering in their homes?
In the market at the base of the hill, Sela received immediate answers regarding the priest. Lineao was well known, having become something of a local legend. The story the merchant told her was of a priest that had stood firm in faith and guarded the Temple of the Miseries. Under different, less desperate circumstances, she would have chuckled at the name. It was apt in so many ways. No one seemed to mention the bloody state in which her team had left it. Or that Lineao had been more prisoner than protector. She was not about to correct this revisionist history.
“Are you sure this priest will help?” Jon asked. He righted his stance and adjusted his hold on Erelah’s body. “You did not exactly part on the best of terms.”
Where once protoc
ol would have dictated they use Regimental, they employed Commonspeak within earshot of the crowds of Tasemarin that now filled the streets and passages.
“We have to try. This is the best chance she has.” Sela studied the press of bodies. She gestured in the direction of Lineao’s temple at the crest of the hill. They fell in with the foot traffic making its way there, Sela trying her best to part the crowds as Jon followed in her wake, carrying Erelah.
Once more, she found herself leading a frenzied hike up the hill. To Sela, the cracked stone path riddled with dry weeds had seemed so much steeper, treacherous on her first arrival here with her team. It had been abandoned then.
Now the Tasemarin packed the passages with a near-frenzied joy. First had declared this place renegade, not worth the expenditure of resources to reclaim it, she learned.
There was singing, excited chanting. Banners fluttered from windows. Children scampered among the crowd. Merchants sold goods from carts and rugs spread out on the walkway under the blinding dwarf suns.
They reached an open square, some kind of town common that had once marked the entrance to the government complex her team had been sent to secure. The crowd swelled there. Their shouts and chanting seemed angrier. She caught glimpses through the press of bodies: a burning Regimental standard cast upon a pile of rubble. A corpse tied to a post, dressed in a dark gray uniform very much like one she used to own.
She quickly looked away, tamping down a strange, untethered feeling.
My son died for this.
---
Lineao was not hard to find. As their ragged party crested the hill, she spotted him speaking to an old woman, laughing. He seemed taller, less frail than during their first encounter, but his dingy brown robes were unchanged. When he saw Sela approach, the mirth evaporated from his face. His expression was stony but unsurprised as he looked from Sela to Erelah’s limp form.
Allies and Enemies: Fallen Page 23