by S.
The drell tilted its gleaming head as the round, pebble-like eyes fixed in her direction. The bird hopped toward the discarded knife and pecked at it so the dull blade flashed in the sun.
“Northtown is two days’ walk,” Third Eye said, breaking the silence. “If either of you got injuries, that’s your hard luck. You’re walking anyway.”
“We ain’t injured,” Gairy said. “Just hungry and tired, but we can walk.”
Third Eye nodded. “We’re gonna tie your hands. Shyiine are thieves and—”
Senqua bristled. “I’m not a thief!”
“And they’re liars, too,” he went on, heedless of her protest. “Crowfinger’s both, so it’ll be him tyin’ you up. He’s had enough acquaintance with knots and ropes to know what will hold and what won’t.”
“That I have.” Crowfinger leaned the rifle against the rock. “I’ve got rope in the pack.”
“Best go fetch it.” Third Eye pointed the revolver at Senqua like a steel finger. “You two, get down on your knees and wait for him to get back. If either of you gives him a hard time, I suspect you know what will happen.”
“Yeah, guess we do,” Gairy said.
Senqua knelt on the ground, wincing as the rocks bruised her knees. A few yards away, the drell plucked strands of hair caught in a clump of grass until several hung from its thick beak.
“She’ll make a nest with that,” Crowfinger called as he walked up the slope. “The drell likes you, She’s-A-Man, but I do not think she likes the Druen much.”
Gairy doesn’t like her much, either.
Third Eye circled them, keeping the revolver steady as he walked, heels grinding against the rocky soil. “Mother will decide if you two have any use. If you don’t, kindest thing she’ll do is strip you naked and send you walkin’. And if she really don’t like what you’ve got to say, I suspect we’ll find a way to collect your bounty. We don’t let just anyone stick around. It ain’t a charity there.”
“You sound like Neiro,” Gairy muttered.
Third Eye’s laughter sounded like two rocks slamming together. “That so? Well, you live long enough, maybe I’ll tell you a story about that.”
Senqua cleared her throat, trying to ignore the gun barrel pushed so close she could see her distorted reflection against the steel. “Is Mother Gray the leader of Northtown?”
“That’s enough lip from you two. Here comes Crowfinger with the rope. Might be you’ll find out more, if Mother likes you enough.” Third Eye shrugged, the left, loose sleeve rippling in the winter wind. “If not, you’ll have bigger things to worry on.”
As Crowfinger uncoiled a thin nylon rope, the drell strutted close, croaking deep in its throat.
Father used to say crows and drell could speak to the dead. I think he was right. Is this one trying to tell me we’ll be dead soon?
The rope slid around her wrists, tightening until it pinched her skin.
Hammer on Glass
Leigh woke with a smell like scorched metal thick in her nostrils. For a moment, she stared into the shadows, confused, her mouth as dry as bone as the last cobwebs of sleep faded away. Then, she sat up and rubbed her neck, gone stiff from dozing in the chair behind the acacia desk.
“You’re awake.”
From the darkness, a black-clad figure drifted forward, its eyes burning gold.
Leigh’s throat went tight. “Kaitar?”
The wraith blinked. “No. Were you dreaming of him?”
“Sairel.” Leigh slumped in the chair, confusion and fear replaced by aching fatigue. Sairel turned away, and she saw it had only been the lamplight reflecting against his opaque eyes. Nearby, the tattered threk prowled in its eternal hunt. Vore and Garv had fitted it together as best they could, but it was a poor sight, split at the seams and minus its Worm Glass eyes. The charred Neuro-Cyth sat atop the threk’s crest, scavenged from among the warehouse debris after they’d burned Verand Eleid’s body.
Leigh kneaded her neck again. Outside, the wind had risen to a howl; before morning, the town would be assaulted by a full-blown sandstorm. Not a Bloom, but bad enough—all the work they’d done in the fields that morning would be wasted effort.
Swallowing that frustration, she said, “I didn’t mean to sleep. What time is it?”
“Close to dawn. Perhaps four in the morning, or a little after.” From where he bent over the Veraleid, Sairel shrugged. A loose ahn’raka robe hung from his tall frame, covering all but his hands and face and making him appear more ghoulish than ever. “You were only asleep a short while, but I thought you’d like to know that I’ve almost finished repairing the Veraleid.” He motioned to the dented transceiver. “Niles managed to crack the cell casing, but the cell itself was intact. I had to splice a few wires, though.”
Grunting against the dull throb of bruises and sore muscles, Leigh sat straight, forearms pressed against the desk’s abyssal surface, smooth as a mirror and broken only by the dim glow of the lamp. There, her own reflection peered up, an unreadable mask with eyes the color of onyx. It was the face of a stranger, one who showed no sign of fear or weariness at all.
“I haven’t gotten into Niles’s VDA yet,” Sairel said.
“You’ll be able to transfer the VDA files to your Shelf?”
“Yes. Providing I break his passcode.” He paused, cocking a brow. “Were you dreaming of Kaitar Besh? I never got a chance to meet him, though I wanted to. I saw his files some years before I was sentenced to the Junk.”
Leigh frowned. “Why did you have the files on Kaitar Besh?”
“We had files on all the Enetics being kept by the Sulari. You do realize the whole idea of Enetic slavery started as a means of keeping track of who and where they were. The Cynops wanted all Enetics on file, though they couldn’t simply be everywhere at once to do it.” Sairel drummed his fingers against the Veraleid. “Your people proved useful for the them in that regard for a very long time, didn’t they?”
Fury blossomed in her chest like a poisonous rose, and Leigh wondered how tangled the web of politics and deceit really was, or if there were any end to it at all. Only a season ago, she’d had no other ambition than to do her duty and earn a little water and food, but now such simplicity seemed as insurmountable as the Sand Belt.
Hiding the turmoil as best she could, Leigh rose and turned toward the stairwell.
“Where are you going?”
“To wake Neiro. He’ll want to know the Veraleid is ready.”
Sairel’s brows creased. “Just a moment. Regardless of what you may think, I wasn’t making an idle comment earlier, Captain Enderi.”
“This isn’t the time—”
“It is the time. Afterward, you can go and wake Neiro if you think that the best course of action.” His nostrils flared as he took a deep breath and let it out in a long, low sigh. “Tell me, do you know what a Cursor really is, or why we were all imprisoned?”
Impatience blunted her tone. “No, Enforcers aren’t given lengthy history lessons about what’s happened in the east. We learn how to protect caravans on escort runs, how to use Firebrand and guns, and how to set up static-nets.”
“Practical skills for survival out here,” Sairel agreed. “If I promise to keep this brief, will you listen? I’ve been trying to get someone to listen for two years, including the man who spent an hour blaming the both of us for Verand Eleid’s demise.” Turning his eyes toward the ceiling, he smirked. “He wanted to hang me and probably had a thought or two about throwing you in a cell. That’s what Syndicate do, Leigh.”
“You said this would be brief.”
Sairel patted the stuffed threk; eyeless though it was, it still seemed to watch everything.
“Crowned and blind,” he said, running a thumb along the Neuro-Cyth’s ruined spires. “Very much like the Cynops themselves. Now, listen. Cursors were made by the Syndicate under the direction of the Cynops. . . ah, but I won’t go into the whole history now. Suffice to say, Verand Eleid came up with the project with the hop
e of using Cursors to hunt down gemmin and turn off whatever pieces of Toros were scattered about. Eventually, the Harpers got their fingers into things and weren’t merely content with stopping gemmin. They consider all Enetics abominations, and want them wiped out. Sometimes, they used Cursors to do that.
“Fortunately, The Cynops and Syndicate see little use in genocide. They find it more practical to contain and control Enetics, to use them for research. The Cynops have long worked to find a cure for Cynopsia, you understand.”
Leigh nodded; she’d heard the term mentioned before and had some idea of what Cynopsia was, but it seemed as foreign a notion as most other things from far-off Avaeliis did. “They think Enetics can be used to cure the disease.”
“Yes, but we’ve no time to discuss all that now, do we? Another day, if you’d like to hear it.” Sairel touched the Shelf port at the back of his neck. “Cursors were being used like Enetic bounty-hunters, and I was one of those. I was also Verand Eleid’s assistant, and I knew he had ties with a group of Enetics—the Scavvers, they called themselves—who were trying to fight back against Harper genocide and Syndicate research projects. At some point, I suppose Verand began to pity us, but it’s impossible to know for certain what goes on in the mind of a Cynops.”
“If you’ve something to say about all this, you’d better come to the point,” Leigh said, hoping he’d end the conversation. The more she heard, the less she liked the story, and dread had begun to crawl in her gut like a nest of angry ants. “It will be morning soon, and we need to wake Neiro so he can call off the Enetic water ban.”
A blank expression crossed the Shurin’s face, somehow more natural there than obsequious smiles. “Has anyone ever told you about Lein Strauss?”
Bile rose hot in her throat, turning her voice hoarse. “Why are you asking me about Lein Strauss?”
“When I connected the Cyth-wire to Verand’s Shelfing, it created a temporary ripple in the Dregma.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Sairel stepped so close Leigh caught a whiff of the Harper’s Hand he’d washed with. When he spoke, his breath smelled of the strong tea Sokepta had made him drink. “I’m not surprised. They’ve kept most people out here willfully ignorant, and why not? Very few people have the time to listen, or care enough to do so.” He spread his hands wide. “Dremga is the term for the Toros frequency, and it’s particularly strong out here in the Shy’war-Anquai. I’m not going to bother you with the details, Captain—I get the impression you want me to get to the point of all this.”
The desk’s surface felt smooth beneath Leigh’s palms as she braced herself; whatever Sairel was about to say, she would probably regret hearing for the rest of her life.
“Lein Strauss.” Sairel rolled the name on his tongue as though tasting it. “Was a Cursor. I knew him years ago, though I never worked very closely with him. I’d been assigned to the Harpers by that time, you see. Ah, it’s complicated. No one has told you any of this?”
Leigh managed to speak despite the leaden fear growing heavier by the second. “No, I’ve never heard any of this mentioned.”
“When Neiro was exiled for his role in protecting Verand Eleid’s Enetic rebellion, he was exiled to the Shy’war-Anquai. Verand was sentenced to Permanence, but you know this bit already. What you don’t know was there was a Cursor sent with them to stop any gemmin or hostile Enetics roving about.” Sairel’s mouth curled into an ironic grin. “Lein Strauss took his chance and got away from Neiro rather early. I believe it was six or seven months after they arrived here, in fact. That’s the report I got, anyway. They may even have had plans to send me to track him down and kill him, but I’ll never know; the Cursor project was outlawed before I ever found out for certain, and I spent the next few years on the run myself.”
“Why didn’t we Enforcers know about this?”
“Maybe some of them did.”
Orin.
The numbing fear drained from Leigh as though someone had pulled a plug. Sairel’s unblinking gaze never wavered as he watched, waiting for her to say or do something, but she could only wrestle the awful sense of betrayal, worse than any cracked rib or bruise.
Orin wouldn’t have covered up something like this, would he? Neiro might, but not Orin. Not my captain.
Lowering herself into the chair, Leigh forced herself to look at the Shurin.
“How do I know you’re not a liar?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “You don’t. Neiro would say I was lying, and so would any Harper, were they here to ask. They would tell you I’ve nothing but malice and a lust for revenge driving me, and they’d be right. . . in part. But ask yourself this; what proof you’ve seen that I am a liar?”
“I’m tired of you answering with a question. I’ve no proof that you’re lying, but I’ve none that you aren’t, either.”
Sairel narrowed his eyes. “If I had a mind to kill you, I’d have done it while you slept. I’m not your enemy. . . and you’re not mine. If you were, you’d have shot me instead of taking me to Neiro.”
He’s only saying these things to manipulate me. . . maybe he really is working for the Syndicate.
Try as she might, Leigh could not quite convince herself of that. The urge to march up the stairs and knock the truth from Neiro Precaius grew until it was a physical ache.
“You’re angry,” Sairel said.
“Yes. I am.” With an effort, she steadied her voice. “Do you have any more to say?”
“One last word, and then I’ll keep my tongue. I’ve spent years in a place that was fit for no living being. I crawled through a sewer full of shit and death to escape that place, and I will do whatever is necessary to never go back. If that means serving Dogton—”
Words spoken only weeks ago echoed in Leigh’s ears, louder than the Shurin’s voice.
“I will cooperate. Not for you, Evrik Niles, or because I’m afraid of being in the jailhouse, but because I know what a squatter town is like. I will not let Dogton become one.”
“—then I would—”
She held up a hand. “I’ve heard enough for tonight.”
With a click of sharp teeth, Sairel fell silent. Wordlessly, he reached for the transceiver’s dangling mouthpiece and held it out, waiting. Leigh regarded the palm-sized device, hating it, wishing she could hurt it away along with everything else that had happened since Gren Turren had gone missing. The world had still held hope then, but now, the only choices she had led to darkness, and there would be no telling if there were any light at the end—and maybe there never had been a light to begin with.
“Turn it on, Sairel. There’s no need to wake Neiro. I’ll send the transmission myself.”
About the Authors
J. Ray and S. Cushaway reside in the snowy wastes of northern lower Michigan. When not spending time with their daughter and two grumpy old cats, or working on writing-related projects, they enjoy dabbling in music, art, and online RPG gaming.
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