Ahmed poured himself a full glass and admired it for a moment. He almost set the pitcher down, then looked to the prisoner. “Oh, where are my manners.”
He poured a second glass, set the pitcher down, and picked up his own. With perfect poise, he gingerly put the glass to his mouth and sipped, crossing his legs and idly tapping one foot as if watching a performance. He sipped at the glass, repeating the motion with deliberate slowness, but quick enough to quench his thirst. His eyes lingered on the prisoner while he refreshed himself.
He drained the glass, holding it above his mouth to allow the last few drops to splash onto his tongue. With a satisfied lick of his lips, he picked up the second glass and held it at arm’s length.
The look in the prisoner’s eyes was one of intense desire. Severely taxed by the inflicted burns and the Sis-B coursing through his system, dehydration and lack of nourishment drove his body to cannibalize itself to fuel the rapid healing. His athletic frame was already thinning and his cheeks looked more hollow. The glass sweated icy reprieve.
“I happily offer you this. This could end,” the prince promised with a smile, mimicking genuine compassion. “All you need to do is answer my reasonable, little questions. Not so much to give, is it? For a glass of cool, refreshing water? And more importantly, for this to stop. For the pain to end.”
Once again, the prince glimpsed Mr. Delta in his peripheral vision, leaning forward. Over the course of the interrogation, Mycroft’s lackey had periodically rocked forward and then back at odd intervals. Distracting to say the least, and Prince Ahmed now suspected it had little to do with his line of questioning.
He wanted to pin the man with a glare and demand what he was doing, but resisted the urge. He could see the want in the prisoner’s eyes. It was a look that Ahmed was familiar with. He was close to breaking the Rebel; he could feel it. One could use a stick or a carrot, but the quickest way to get what I want is to use both at the same time.
The silence stretched out, the tension in the room palpable.
“Nǐ tā mā de.”
There was the slight movement from Mister Delta again. He tried to put it out of his mind and concentrate on the prisoner. He shrugged gracefully and placed the glass on the floor, still visible as a temptation.
“Well I feel refreshed,” he said, smiling and sitting down again. “You know, I do admire your spirit. You seem so resistant to pain. I hope you keep it up. I’ve never had a subject as resilient as you,” he said, examining his nails. “I wonder how long you can resist? Days? Even a week perhaps, until you’re little more than burned skin stretched over bone. Every ounce of muscle burned from you from the inside out.”
He sighed theatrically, getting to his feet once more. “Perhaps I have been too lenient with you. I’ve usually found these techniques work, but maybe it’s time to get a little more serious. You still retain all your fingers,” he said, leaning forward and tickling the restrained man’s hand with his manicured nails. “You still have that luscious mane of hair.” He stroked the silken, black hair. “You still have vision in both of those killer violet eyes of yours.” He tilted his head forward and whispered like a lover in one shell-like ear. “You still have the organs of a man, but I can take that away.”
The prince gave his prisoner a wicked, sweet smile. He didn’t expect the headbutt.
As the prisoner’s forehead impacted with the bridge of his nose, the prince felt the crunch of his nose breaking and bright red blood coursed through his beard as he staggered sideways. Ahmed felt the Rebel’s fingers first touch, then clench in a deathgrip in his hair. Before he could react, with a grunt of effort and a popping sound the prisoner contorted and lunged for him, teeth bared. Biting the only part of him the prisoner could reach, Ahmed felt teeth clamp down onto his ear.
Ahmed screamed as teeth met through the cartilage, the prisoner shaking his head like a dog tearing at a bone. Instinctively, the prince brought his flame to bear. Swirling fire wreathed both hands.
The shout of ‘no!’ burst from Mister Delta as Prince Ahmed reached towards the prisoner’s face with flame hot enough to incinerate.
Suddenly, with a bang, the king was in the room and Ahmed faced the far steel walls. Stunned, Ahmed shook his head. The snapping sound of displaced air echoed like a bullwhip in the small confines of the holding cell and Ahmed’s addled thoughts belatedly pieced the events together.
Prince Ahmed whirled with murderous intent to meet the look of King Heinrich. Those pale blue eyes vibrated minutely, like a rattlesnake shaking its tail. An infinitesimal sign that indicated extreme danger. By comparison, the prince’s own temper felt like a flimsy thing. With enormous effort, the flame around his shaking hands subsided.
“I didn’t order you to kill him, Prince Al Aziri. I told you to get the information we needed out of him. He is too valuable a—”
“He bit me! That fucking Rebel scum—”
“Interrupt me again, Prince Al Aziri, and I’ll do worse than bite you.”
Bald-faced truth mixed with contempt sounded under the king’s calm reply. Heinrich stepped forward, his edges blurred and hazy as his quantum tag fluctuated around him. Thus impervious to harm, he advanced on Ahmed with an even stride that knew nothing of haste.
He remembered his father’s stories of the Monarch War. During a particular battle where King Heinrich faced a thousand men and machines, he had simply teleported them all twenty feet underground. This was a man, like his father, like King Barrett, who had killed not thousands, but millions who stood against him during the war.
Ahmed felt blood course from his nose and ear, staining his clothes and trickling through his beard. “I … I … Your Majesty. I apologize. My temper got the best of me.” Ahmed spared a glance towards the Rebel.
More fear blazed from the prisoner’s violet, wide-eyed expression now than he had elicited after hours of branding. When the Rebel noticed Ahmed’s baleful gaze, he smirked with bloody lips and spat out a piece of his ear. Rage flared within Prince Ahmed again and he balled his fists, but his path was blocked as Heinrich stepped forward and held out a shadowy, blurred hand.
“He’s goading you. He seeks a quick death so he doesn’t reveal his secrets. Leave. Go have your ear tended to,” the king commanded.
Teeth clenched painfully tight, the prince nodded, making for the door.
Delta endured the heat and smell without complaint for two hours until its dramatic conclusion. His head pounded, exacerbated by the heat from skimming the prisoner’s mind repeatedly as the prince applied his brand over and over. Now, King Heinrich had taken command.
Heinrich’s first action was to simply give the man the glass of water. The king stepped closer to him and the prisoner hissed like an angry kettle in alarm. The restrained man eyed the king for a long moment before raising his head to drink. When he finished, the king moved to the jug and refilled it, repeating the procedure.
The prisoner licked blood from his lips and spoke. “I know what you’re doing. A bit of a tall order to have one of the men that killed half the world play the role of the compassionate savior.”
English at last. Delta dived back into the prisoner’s mind, hoping to see more, only to have the same indecipherable, strange images appear in the skim once more.
The prisoner was clever or advised by someone clever. He kept his thoughts in Mandarin as the king sat in the recently vacated chair and scrutinized the prisoner. After a moment Heinrich instructed the attending physician to fix the dislocated shoulder the prisoner had given himself when lunging for the prince.
Despite his best efforts, the prisoner kept his secrets. Delta didn’t understand Mandarin. But he could almost see the meaning behind the shape of the man’s thoughts when he focused.
Images flitted across the skim, tenuous emotions attached to them. Strokes of black on white, a brush of ink caressing the page appeared. They were the images of images. An artist’s interpretation of objects that conveyed different meanings.
I really dislike foreign languages. They muddle the waters. So many different images. Why can’t he just make this easy and think in the king’s English? Mr. Delta sighed behind his mask and refocused.
Script flowed in monochrome shades. Bit by bit, he started to pick out colors. Each represented an idea that he couldn’t quite decipher, and each was tinged with emotion. If there was one thing all people shared, it was emotional range. Reading emotions was Juliet’s forte. It was not his. He struggled to interpret emotional range and his head ached. The images read like a series of impressionist paintings.
Every now and again, an image of a person appeared with a rainbow of complicated emotional attachment accompanying it. An attractive black woman with a gold-edged feeling of love and a faint sense of loss coalesced.
Several strokes of a brush followed, accent marks coming last. Or perhaps punctuation? I can’t tell. I suppose I should suggest that to King Barrett when we return. To broaden my education.
More brush strokes, this time with additional colors. Fear, stinking of yellow rot, hovered around some of the flitting characters. There was no complete imagery, though the faces of several others flashed quickly into view. Are these his family? Wait, that’s … Juliet …
Her face was unmistakable. Caramel skin, deep brown eyes, and gorgeous, smiling features framed by long brown hair: his sister had grown into a beautiful woman. He could still see his younger sibling from the Facility in that warm and affectionate gaze. Those loving eyes had not changed.
Why her? Why now? What are you hiding her for? More brush strokes. Black ink ate up the white space in between pictures. Colors floated just behind them, like a soft blue neon lamp behind the newspaper. Sky-blue defiance asserted itself subtly but constantly in the background.
A vague sense of recognition suddenly materialized when he remembered what the prince said about his feet. I’ve seen this man before.
A decade ago, he was sitting on a carpet. Surrounding him were his siblings, Juliet among them. The door flew inwards, knocking the white-coat unconscious. At the end of a short discussion, this man and the tall black woman with him took Juliet away. Minutes later, the whole Facility collapsed in an explosion, and Delta floated in pain and darkness until Mycroft retrieved him.
That’s it.
The woman that Delta saw back at the Facility all those years ago and more recently in his mind, she was his—lover? No. His wife. You were both Rebels. You are now here. You still have Juliet.
As he struggled with his own memories, more images of Juliet arose in the skim. Edged with golden hues, he could feel the emotional intensity that surrounded them. Juliet crying, and being comforted by this man on the x-frame and his wife. Juliet laughing, and a sense of triumphant joy. These weren’t the emotions of a cold and ruthless rebel towards a useful team member. This was far more personal.
He thinks Heinrich will kill him and is thinking of his family. He thinks of Juliet like she is his own child. In shock, he tried to delve and examine these feelings more, and then stopped. If he’s lived with Juliet he’ll know what a deep delve feels like. He was just lucky he’d been skimming all this time, trying to make sense of the images revealed. Like a knife, another realization twisted slowly inside him; this man cared for Juliet in a way that he’d never experienced from his own father.
Mycroft had always maintained a distance between them after rescuing him from the ruined Facility. His father’s emotions and thoughts remained forever masked behind a mental shield so strong that nothing crossed it.
While Delta struggled inwardly with these thoughts about his long-lost sibling, he nearly jumped at the thought directed at him by King Heinrich. It was crystal clear, demonstrating long experience with thought communication.
‡I am going to try something, Mister Delta. Pay close attention and skim his thoughts.‡
Silence stretched out like a vast and empty chasm that wanted to be filled with words. Heinrich sat forward in the chair. “I know your face, Rebel. I’ve seen one like it before. Recently, in fact.”
The prisoner remained tight-lipped, but cerulean confusion colored the images that Delta received.
“Thalia. Retrieve the images of the Rebel I looked at earlier.” A swirl of holographic lights coalesced into an image of an older Asian man and tears formed in the Rebel’s dark violet eyes.
‡Xu.‡ Delta heard the syllable clearly. The gold-edged glow of familial love, the same when he thought about the black woman or Juliet, blossomed around the word.
“I see. You’re close to this man. Your father, perhaps? He’d be the right age,” Heinrich said with a note of satisfaction. “Would you like to know what happened to him?”
Delta felt a rising wave of emotional intensity from the prisoner and the colors increased in vibrancy. The king was certainly adept at discovering and exploiting weakness.
“I wasn’t sure if you knew he’d been captured. We’ve been unable to communicate with our own timeline, so I’m thinking you can’t either. You don’t know what happened at the Rebel base you left from.” The king paused, tilting his head to one side and giving the prisoner time to answer.
‡Anything? Cough lightly if I’ve captured his attention, Delta.‡
The swirl of black shapes and vibrant colors ended. Delta sensed an increase in interest, and it caused the prisoner to think in English as Heinrich spoke to him.
‡There is progress, Sire.‡
Delta projected and felt the slippery contours of the king’s mind once again, impossible to grip. Damn. Delta cleared his throat softly and the king continued.
“You know I had my family taken from me. Everyone knows the story, it’s told to the citizenry as a reason to hate the Rebels. My wife and my boys, taken from me on the Day of White Flame almost fifty years ago, before you were even born. When that blue light, like the northern lights in reverse, flashed across the sky, the drones poured into the underground base. The ground shook and I felt my connection to my world key severed. That was like having something cut off, inside my head. No one knew that a world key could be destroyed, nor of the terrible energy released when it happens. I felt it in my very bones, the devastating loss. I transferred to the far side of the world. I fled. Do you know why?” the king glared at the prisoner fiercely before turning his head aside.
‡Why?‡ Delta picked up the word clearly from the skim and with it an overwhelming sense of curiosity. He was curious as well.
The king stared unblinking at the metal walls of the holding cell, his gaze distant and his tone emotionless as he continued. “I sensed an organic quantum field fluctuation. It is one of the Gifts that the key bestowed upon me. I fled because I could sense a quantum event in the direction of my palace. Only my sons, Michel and Franz, could have produced it. Twin boys. Barely nine years old. I wondered if they also felt the severing, if they were affected by it. I had no time. I transferred to southern Africa, and fell into a coma from the effort.”
Heinrich turned back to the prisoner, and Delta shivered at his hollow expression. “When I awoke, I demanded to know where my sons were, and no one could tell me. The world was reeling from the deaths of tens of millions. My kingdom, my subjects, and my family, who maybe, just maybe had managed to survive. That was the worst, not knowing what happened. Each day lived in hope, and at the end of each, a little piece of my soul withered. Hope trickled away. For years I waited for another organic quantum tag in vain. My family was gone, and I had failed them. I failed as a parent. I failed as a husband. Failed as a protector of my people and as a king. And with the movement key gone, Mycroft’s grand plan came to a crashing halt.” The king fell silent, and Delta received another directed thought. ‡Is he thinking of his own family?‡
Delta coughed again. The information revealed by the rebel flickering through his mind. Xu his father, Liling his mother, Diana his wife, Jay his daughter. Her name is Juliet! You took her from me. He thought with no outward sign of his simmering rage.
The king ended his mo
nologue and dropped his haunted expression when his eyes refocused on the prisoner, who closed his mouth hurriedly.
“I know of no more exquisite torture than that uncertainty: not knowing if someone I love is dead or alive.” Heinrich paused. “This can go one of two ways. If you are here for what I suspect you are, you and your people in this timeline might even be rewarded. You’ll find out whether your father is alive or not and whether you will ever be reunited. This is the hard way, because you must choose to trust that I am a man of my word and telling you the truth. Choose between your few compatriots that are here in this timeline, and the welfare of the loved ones you left behind when you came here. Tell me what I need to know. Do so and I will tell you what you need to know.”
Delta almost fell from his chair at the image he received. A hand-drawn map with six Xs drawn on it, the name of a nearby town notated clearly. White River, accompanied by the clear thought, Mycroft’s key is in Canada. The king’s gaze darted in Delta’s direction as he re-centered himself on his chair. Delta gave an infinitesimally small nod.
The king stood and moved to loom over the prisoner. “The easy way is I make you talk. I assure you that I have no qualms about that pathway. I failed my people once, and millions died, including my own family. Your life and pain is meaningless to me when weighed against the responsibility I have as king to protect my people, and if you think the prince’s Gift can cause you the most pain, you are grievously mistaken.”
Silence hung in the air for a moment, lending weight to his last words. “I’m going to give you time to think this over. When I return, I expect an answer. The hard way, or the easy way,” he said, before turning to the door and motioning for Delta to follow him.
As the king passed the drone standing at attention at the side of the door, he spoke to it. “Thalia. Clothe him, feed him, and cycle some images of the Rebel base in Florida to give him something to think about.”
As the door closed behind them, the king stopped to face him. “Did you get what we need?”
Suffrage (World Key Chronicles Book 1) Page 27