He is still figuring out just how he feels about that when he finds himself bathed in blinding light from above.
He peers over his shoulder and sees two divers in mesh re-breathing suits, likely the same two men he waylaid in Fritaun, descending toward him in heavy gear. Their lamps, mounted atop their helmets, pierce him in cones of light.
He has lost. They have an unlimited supply of air. He only has a pair of exceptional lungs. They have what amounts to armor. He only has flesh tanned to leather by the tropical sun. They have light capable of cutting through the deep water; he has darkness which they have taken from him. They have weapons he can only guess at: he only had the stealth which, he now realizes, they were always prepared for and which they can only see as the asset over-estimated by one naïve old man. If they want to drag him back to the white-haired man for more questioning, or even back to whatever torture facility that the forces in power have erected in place of the hellhole he once escaped, there is nothing he can do to fight them. His freedom, his fate, is in their hands.
There is no point in trying to out-swim them. Even if he gets to the shed before they do, the most that would accomplish is place a locked door between him and them. They will be able to starve him out, or worse, seal him in.
He can only wait for them as they paddle toward him, and with whatever breath remains in him throw what will likely be an ineffectual punch or two, to demonstrate what defiance he can still afford.
The two men descend to his depth and right themselves. Both carry flechette guns. One also carries an opaque plastiseal sack. They smile at him through their masks, though there seems no particular malice in it. The one with the sack unclips it from his belt and offers it to him, indicating with a nod that he should take it.
Draiken has no choice, so he takes the sack from the diver’s hand. It is not very heavy. Whatever it contains is about the size of his fist.
The diver points downward, smiles again, and with his partner begins his ascent.
Draiken does not have the time or the inclination to chase them for answers. The encounter has eaten up too much time. The need to breathe is burning in him. If he’s to get back inside the shed, and what passes for safety, he has to start making up time now.
So he goes, with the sack tied at his belt.
It is a near thing.
But once he is past the airlock and inside the little room so much smaller than any cell where he has ever been held against his will, once he has dried off in the bathroom and once he has brought his breathing back to normal, he regards the parcel with apprehension.
He doesn’t think it’s a bomb. He doesn’t think it’s anything that can present any physical threat to him.
But he knows that whatever it is must be meant to destroy him.
He should discard it and forget it exists.
But in his old life he was tasked with ferreting out secrets. He is constitutionally incapable of abandoning one, no matter how malignant in potential, to the darkness and silence.
He must know.
So he opens the sack and looks inside.
* * *
Five days later, he breaks surface in the waters near the Glass Cathedral, physically resigned to the swim that, because of the countervailing currents he will have to fight, will not take him back to the launch or to Fritaun, but to one of the lesser islands in the same island chain.
When he gets to where he’s going he will have to rest up and embark on a series of shorter swims, from one outcropping of land to another, until he can get back to Fritaun and with luck a ride back to the reef where he anchored his launch. As a result he has more than one reason to feel relief when he pops his head above water to blink in the first sunlight he has seen in several days, and hears a familiar skimmer, sitting idle about twenty meters, power up when its pilot spots him.
It’s the boy Squall, looking bored as he greets Draiken with the friendly derision even the best of the young traditionally have for the old. “Is long-time, greybeard. Kenned I could have waited here another fiveday, sixday, waiting on your raisined flesh.”
“Good to see you, too,” Draiken says, as he climbs aboard. “How did you know I was here?”
“The Pinkies spilled afore they flit. Took the fat one wif ‘em. Paid fine coin for me to wait for ye.”
Draiken freezes. “And?”
“Give ye ride, wherevers. Course yours. Considered it favor to save yet from drowning cramps. Why? That rude?”
Draiken is half-tempted to say yes, that the offer of a ride paid for by his enemies is neither wanted nor appreciated, but the truth is that his limbs ached for days after his return to the shed, and that he feels his age more than he ever has before. Besides, it would be an insult to the boy, who has never been anything but a loyal friend. So he sighs, “No. That’s fine. You can take me to my launch, if it’s still there.”
Squall adjusts the saddle for an extra passenger. Draiken gives the boy directions and they’re off.
It is a pleasant ride. For the first time in years, Draiken looks on the world around him as something other than potential battlefield. He feels the salt spray on his face and the sun on his back and the razor sharp line of the horizon and he thinks of all the decades he spent with these things reduced to relative background noise. He thinks of the years before that when his life was a series of feints and counter-moves, attacks and defenses. He cannot say he misses it and he cannot say that for all he did in those years, that the world he knows has become one iota more safe.
They are almost halfway back to his launch when Draiken is moved to ask: “Squall?”
“Ee, Greybeard?”
“Are you happy here?”
“Where here?”
“Here.” He includes the world in an expansive wave. “This world. Greeve.”
“What not to be happy?” the boy inquires. “Sun, fish, friends and full belly.”
“Have you never considered going anywhere else? Seeing the greater universe outside Fritaun?”
The boy considers that, pausing just long enough to howl as he leaps his skimmer off a choice wave.
Then he replies, in toto:
“Done ye no real good, has it, greybeard.”
* * *
Draiken’s launch has survived the last week intact. He performs an extensive search to determine whether its contents have been disturbed or if any tracers or listening devices have been installed. But as far as he can tell, everything is exactly where it was when he left it. He thanks the boy and sets course for Fritaun, unsurprised how hard his heart now pounds in his chest.
Once in town he goes to the public shower and scrubs a week’s worth of sweat and salt from his skin. He then goes to a clothier he knows, who agrees to discard his ancient fisherman’s rags when he walks out with a respectable suit bought off the rack: far from a perfect fit, but he does not have the time or the patience for custom tailoring. It is enough to put aside the man he has been for too many years, and claim a man of an entirely different sort.
His next stop is the set of stairs heading up to Aletha’s balcony.
He arrives just as her most recent customer leaves, wearing the guilty look some men cannot suppress when they leave the workplace of women like Aletha. He says nothing to the man and the man says nothing to him. A few seconds pass before Aletha steps out, looking so fresh and collected in her beauty that she might have spent the last two hours arranging every hair to achieve the look. She offers her well-dressed next visitor a professional smile before performing a quite comical double-take and embracing him.
She embraces him. “John! They told me you were all right when they left you, but I didn’t dare to believe them!”
He doesn’t return her kiss. “Hello, love.”
“Are you…upset at me? They didn’t give me any choice, over giving up the fat man. They were armed. There was nothing I could—”
He does kiss her then, but on the forehead, a fatherly buss that has nothing to do with passion. “I’m
not upset with you, love. Not for surrendering to superior forces, or returning to your trade in my absence. I have no claim on you there, and I don’t look down on you for it. Seeing you well makes me happy. But I would like to speak with you for a few minutes, if I may.”
“All right,” she says, uncertain around him in a way that he’s never seen before. “Inside?”
They enter her bedroom. Her little two-tailed native pet, familiar with her routine, jumps off the bed and scurries for a hiding place. But Draiken stops just past the threshold, and Aletha is halfway across the room before she realizes that he is no longer following.
Her hand jumps to her throat, clutching a little bell she wears on a ribbon around her neck. “Something is wrong. I’ve never seen you so cold.”
“Not cold,” he murmurs. “Resigned.”
“What?”
“I must know, love. Did the fat man say anything else before they took him?”
“Nothing that he didn’t also say in your presence.”
“I remember one point he made, before your drugs took effect: that you and I could love each other.”
She swallows. “Yes.”
“He was right, I think. I even think he was trying to be kind. I think…declaring myself would not be a bad thing. He was right. It would not be difficult for me to love you.”
She gestures at his fine clothes. “Is that why you’re dressed the way you are? To court me?”
“I am very sorry to say no. I’m dressed for travel. As soon as we’re done here I’ll be headed north to the main island…where I’ll be seeking passage off-world. You’ll likely never see me again. But you shouldn’t think you meant nothing to me.” He reaches into his jacket pocket and removes a small black cube, which he turns over in his hand before placing it on her vanity. “They gave me this before they left.”
He taps the cube as he sets it down and it projects the three-dimensional image of his own face, as it looked when he was a younger man. The lines are gone from his cheeks, the gray is gone from his hair, and the expression of the rotating head in the projection is not that of a man long-defeated but a man ready to face any challenge that confronts him.
Aletha says, “What is this? A goodbye gift?”
“I’m not such an egotist that I think you would have a place for it. It’s not why I’m showing it to you.”
“Then I don’t understand.”
“They brought this with them,” he tells her. “From the very start, they already knew who I am and where I was hiding. They came prepared with this, in case they ever needed to confront me with that knowledge. In the end, they gave it to me—after first doing everything they could to persuade me, really persuade me, that they had no idea who I was.”
“But, why…”
“I don’t know. It could have been cruelty, but I’ve had days alone to think it over—days that tortured me, Aletha—and I now believe that it was something far worse: mercy. I think they knew that if they just continued to pretend that they didn’t know or care who I was, I might have spent the rest of my life here wondering if they would ever realize their mistake and come back. So instead they brought an old holo of mine from their files and handed it to me at the moment when it would have been easiest for them to kill me, or re-take me, if they wanted. It was their way of saying, see? It is true what we said. Nobody wants to come after you. Nobody wants to take you prisoner. Nobody wants any secrets you might still have in your head. You’re no longer anybody’s business. You’re free.”
Aletha’s lips part, form an attempt at a response, then close again without making a sound. It is only with her second attempt that words emerge. “But I don’t understand. Isn’t that a good thing? Isn’t that a reason to stay?”
“It’s a very good thing,” he says. “And if I were a different man, I’d be content with that and be able to move on to the rest of my life.”
“Then why don’t you? What the hell’s wrong with you, that you would use this as an excuse to throw away what you can have?”
He suddenly feels very, very tired. He casts about for a chair, sees one at her vanity, and lowers himself into it, for the moment looking like he feels each of his years weighing upon his back. “When they had me, years ago…I told them they would never break me. I told them that I’d never belong to them. I told them I would never give up on being a free man.”
“But you have that now!”
For the first time he raises his voice to her. “I reject the implication that they ever had the right to hand it to me, like a treat to a tamed dog.”
Her eyes widen as she takes that in, and then something new appears there: pity. Just by being a woman, she knows all the secrets of this man whose life has been all about holding on to his secrets, and she knows them without any of the extreme measures his old enemies once resorted to, when they defined the problem as an exercise in breaking the unbreakable. “I never would have expected it from you, John. That’s nothing but stupid male pride.”
“It’s not my only reason. They must be still up to the same things they were up to when they had me, and they should not be allowed to continue. But yes, love, pride does enter to it. My life has always been about dignity.”
He stands, hesitates, spreads his arms in acknowledgment that there’s nothing left to say, and turns to leave.
She stops him. “This is crazy, John. What do you even think you’re going to do?”
He faces her again, and looks both trapped and unleashed, at the very same time.
“I’m going to find them,” he says. “I’m going to outfit myself and I’m going to go wherever I have to go to find every single last one of them, and I’m going to teach them the price of declaring a free man… irrelevant.”
ALSO BY ADAM-TROY CASTRO
THE ANDREA CORT SERIES
Emissaries from the Dead
The Third Claw of God
War of the Marionettes (in Germany)
With Unclean Hands*
The Coward's Option*
THE GUSTAV GLOOM SERIES
Gustav Gloom and the People Taker
Gustav Gloom and the Nightmare Vault
Gustav Gloom and the Four Terrors
Gustav Gloom and the Cryptic Carousel
NOVELLAS, SHORT STORIES & COLLECTIONS
Vossoff and Nimmitz*
Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories
Night of the Living POTUS*
Fuel*
Sleeping Dogs*
HUMOR BOOKS
Z is for Zombie
V is for Vampire
*available as a Jabberwocky ebook
For a complete bibliography of all books and short stories, visit Adam-Troy Castro's website.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adam-Troy Castro is the author of the Andrea Cort series, which includes the Philip K. Dick Award winning novel Emissaries from the Dead. His short fiction has been nominated for six Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Stokers. The novella “The Astronaut from Wyoming,” written in collaboration with Jerry Oltion, won the Japanese Seiun Award for Best Short Story in Translation. His twenty books also include Z is for Zombie and V is for Vampire, both of which were illustrated by Johnny Atomic, and the Grossett and Dunlap series. Adam lives in Miami with his wife Judi and three world-famous cats named Uma Furman, Meow Farrow, and Harley Quinn.
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