by Lucia Ashta
“Now will you tell us?” Tanus asked.
“Ye—” The ninja turned his head to throw up. Tanus and Dolpheus backed out of splatter range but didn’t otherwise let up. The man heaved and lay back, exhausted, in a puddle of bile.
I watched him give up. His chest trembled as he released a loaded exhalation. Then he began to breathe with more regularity. “Yes. I’ll tell you everything. Please just don’t hurt me anymore.”
“Who are you?” Tanus asked.
“We’re mercenaries.”
“Did you hurt these women and children?” Tanus asked.
The ninja hesitated before saying, “No.” My heart sank as I processed what this lie might mean. No wonder the victims had shut down their ability to feel.
Dolpheus hadn’t pulled away from the violence, but he turned his head now. He looked to the side, away from the man on the ground beneath him, and I witnessed fury and a deep, terrible sense of injustice. It was then that I learned I could trust Dolpheus. He understood right from wrong, even if he was willing to employ more violent means than I would to right what needed righting.
“What were you really planning on doing with the women and children?” Tanus pressed.
“We were going to sell them. Really.”
Tanus’ voice took on a frightening edge. He too would do what needed to be done to correct iniquity. “Don’t lie to us again,” he said. If I’d been on the receiving end of those few words possessed of an edge as sharp as a knife’s, I wouldn’t dare lie to him. The ninja moved his head only slightly, but it was a clear nod. He’d received Tanus’ unspoken threat too. As bad as things were for the ninja, they could get worse.
“Now,” Tanus said. “What were you really going to do with these people?”
The ninja sighed. I knew what would come next would be truth. He regretted it even now, but it would be truth. “We were taking them to the royal city.”
“What for?” Dolpheus ground the words out with forced patience.
“To… slap them around a bit. In public.” It became clear that slapping around was not what these men had intended to do. What they would have done would have been far worse, a kind of constant dying while still living.
“Why would you do that? Why would you go where you could be apprehended to hurt these people? If you meant to hurt them, why go to the royal city to do it?”
“Because that’s what we were paid to do.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
All it took was the combined raising of eyebrows of both men pinning him down. “Okay. Okay. We were supposed to take the people to the royal city and there beat them and… do whatever else we wanted to do to them. We were supposed to make a show of it. Draw a crowd. If any guards tried to stop us, we were supposed to fight them until we were overcome, and then we were going to run for it.”
“Leaving the women and children behind,” Dolpheus said.
“Yes.”
“Why would anyone want you to do this?” Dolpheus asked, sounding as bewildered as I was.
“Olph.” Tanus’ voice was soft and filled with the heaviness of foreboding.
“What?”
“We know why someone would want to do this.”
“We do?”
“We do.”
Dolpheus stared at his friend until his eyes widened in comprehension. “Oh shit.” A few seconds passed. “But no. That’s going too far. Do you really think he’d do it? This would make him flat out evil.”
“Lila said it already, and maybe she’s right. If he can do this, then who knows what he’s capable of.”
“Holy fuck, Tan. This is bad. This is really, really fucking bad.”
“What? What is it?” Lila asked from her place near me. They ignored her. Instead, they asked the ninja one last question.
Tanus spoke the words in the way that a man does when he doesn’t want to hear the response that he knows is coming. “Who hired you to do this?”
“I don’t know his name. He didn’t tell me.”
“Come on, man. Don’t make us hurt you any more,” Tanus said. “You’re not stupid. You’d know who you were working for before taking on this kind of work. Tell us his name. Now.”
“It was Aletox. Lord Aletox.” Those were the last words the ninja kidnapper ever said.
EIGHTEEN
I WONDERED who Aletox was that the discovery that he was behind these kidnappings and intended assaults could deflate Tanus the way it did. Tanus was the only one to turn his back as Dolpheus put a quick end to the suffering of the last of the Dark Warriors, if that’s who they really were. I wanted to turn away from Dolpheus’ blade, but I didn’t. Perhaps it was a dose of the same morbid curiosity that makes drivers slow down when they pass car wrecks, craning their necks to catch a sight of another’s suffering, even if they find no joy in it.
Tanus hadn’t turned from Dolpheus for the same reason I wanted to. Yet I didn’t understand what caused him to walk away from us. An upheaval of emotion appeared barely contained to the features of his face. Who was Aletox? I would have asked Lila right then if talking hadn’t seemed as if it would disrespect the gravity of the situation that lay before us in bright splatters of red against uniforms of black and empty stares. It was like a Quentin Tarantino film, especially the part where no one else seemed affected by the violence as I was, not even the women and children.
Tanus crossed the borders of the Dark Warriors’ semicircle of defense to begin pacing. His eyes pointed toward the ground, his hands at his waist. Then he clasped his hands behind his back and continued walking. It appeared that he’d forgotten us, given over to whatever fresh torment preoccupied him.
When the minutes accumulated and the shock of riding into the midst of battle and death started to wear off, my eyes drifted toward the bodies. I didn’t try to look away. I knew I couldn’t. It seemed important to confront the violence spread before us. The more I looked, the more the Dark Warriors resembled men instead of criminals. Puddles of coagulating blood and crumpled limbs that were far too still overshadowed depraved intentions. All that remained in the black ninja outfits were humans.
Dolpheus had been watching his friend and finally moved toward him. I supposed that it might have been my place as Tanus’ lover to comfort and offer him a lifeline to draw him back from wherever he’d gone. However, I wasn’t sure that I was his lover. I didn’t know if I was who he said I was, and I certainly didn’t know what I could draw him back to when I was largely lost myself.
I dismounted, leaving the reins to hang limply against the ground. I moved toward Kai. He stood above the man he’d killed. I had to sidestep a spray pattern of blood to get to him. “Are you all right?” I asked. I brought a hand to his good arm, a gentle, friendly gesture.
He met my eyes and nodded. “I’m all right—” He stopped himself before he used my title.
I smiled, grateful for the anonymity in front of strangers. “How’s your arm?”
He grimaced as he pulled his hand from where it clamped against his left upper arm. “It’s been better. But it also could’ve been far worse.” He cast a look to the man at his feet. “So I won’t complain.”
“Let me see.” There was a gash in the fabric of his shirt where the blade had pierced it. “Should I rip it?” On Earth, I wouldn’t have asked. I would have torn his shirt open to examine the wound. But on Origins, I had no idea what kind of healing techniques they had. They had mutable clothing made from… what? Mutable fabric? I didn’t want to tear something I didn’t understand.
“You don’t need to tear it. I can take it off.” He leaned down to wipe the blade of his sword against the shirt of his opponent. He wiped it until a series of red streaks that looked like slashes crossed the Dark Warrior’s shirtfront. Next he stood and slipped his sword back into its scabbard. I watched as nimble fingers slid down the front of his shirt where buttons would have been had we been on Earth. What wizardry held the fabric of the shirt together, I wondered. Whe
n he went to shrug out of his shirt, he winced in pain, and I scrambled to plaster what I hoped would pass as a sympathetic smile across my face. I understood that the man on the ground next to us was dead. Still, it seemed like an offense to wipe blood across his body.
“Here. Let me help you,” I said and lifted the shirt from his injured arm first, careful not to tear the flesh that had already begun to stick to the material. Once the shirt was free from his wound, I unpeeled it from his torso. I willed my hands to still and my breathing not to betray my reaction as I saw the scarring. Long, straight scars crisscrossed his back. They were wide and an angry pink against his pale skin, even though these scars were old. There was a sad story here, I realized, wondering if I’d ever want to learn it. It seemed there were enough things upon Planet Origins to break a person’s heart over and again. Just as on Earth. How could the two planets be so similar? They were different planets, for fuck’s sake. And why did the similarities have to be of such a sinister nature?
I forced myself to give attention to Kai’s most recent wound. Obviously, he was no stranger to pain. All the same, the gash was ugly. The Dark Warrior’s blade had sliced deep into Kai’s muscle. The flesh gaped open to either side of the cut, exposing the underside of his flesh. I was looking at subcutaneous tissue that I shouldn’t be able to see.
I could feel Kai looking down at me, but I didn’t look up. I couldn’t meet his eyes. If I did, I’d cry. And I didn’t cry in front of others. Not if I could help it. “Lila,” I said, speaking to his arm, “Will you come here?”
Her dismount was inelegant, but she came right over, and I appreciated that she put her usual personality traits on hiatus while we addressed this trauma. She examined the wound unhampered by the emotion I was still working to suppress. “Well, you got yourself cut up, that’s for sure, Kai,” she said. “We’ll have to fuse it back together. The only problem is, I don’t have a tissue fuser with me. I doubt you guys do, and I know this one here doesn’t.”
I appreciated that Lila continued the ruse of my anonymity in front of the victims. Still, she could have done better than “this one.” On Earth, I always carried an emergency aid kit with me on any excursion. I’d used it more times than I wanted. Since I’d been on an expedition when Tanus accidentally brought me over to Planet Origins, it had traveled with me in the pocket of my rain slicker. Of course, my rain slicker was now at Tanus’ home, discarded for the kick-ass sultry wardrobe of Princess Ilara’s preference that met Lila’s approval.
“Maybe Tanus or Dolpheus put a tissue fuser in one of the saddlebags,” I said. Since they prepared so heavily for violent encounters, it would be a logical next step in preparation. “Or maybe they have a needle and thread.”
Lila and Kai’s foreheads scrunched. “What would you want with a needle and thread?” Lila asked.
“To sew Kai’s arm.”
“Really?” Lila asked, looking more bewildered than she had while watching men fight each other to the death.
“Yes. Really,” I said, not trying at all to suppress my impatience. This day had gone on far too long already. Earth seemed the galaxy away that it was, and I did all I could just then not to think of my desire to be back on my home planet. “Let’s wait till Tanus and Dolpheus are finished doing their thing, and then let’s ask them. Can you stay with Kai?”
“Sure. I can stay with Kai,” Lila said with peculiar mirth at the same time that Kai said, “I don’t need her to stay with me.”
“Anyway, where are you going?” Lila asked.
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going anywhere far.
I took the few steps needed to close the gap between the Dark Warriors’ victims and me. I could actually smell their stale, rancid fear in the air like old sweat. The two children had sidled up on either side of one woman. I picked her.
Realizing they might be frightened of me, I looked the woman in the eyes, and then did the same with each of the children she nestled into her waist. It was only once their eyes started widening, and the victims as a group started to show more life than they had since we first encountered them that I recognized my mistake.
I realized what I’d done a second before Tanus’ warning traveled across the worn and beaten ground.
NINETEEN
NONE OF THE VICTIMS SPOKE. However, it was clear that they knew precisely who I was, even if I didn’t. One by one the women and children came to life, fueled by what, I wasn’t sure. I prayed that it wasn’t hope. I didn’t know if I could take it if it was hope that I could change the circumstances of their lives that awakened them to the desire to continue.
I felt Tanus at my side. “You should’ve been more careful, Ilara,” he reprimanded. There was no reason for pretense anymore. “You knew they’d recognize you if they saw your eyes.”
Abruptly, I knocked the veil back from my head. What was the point of it if it couldn’t conceal the one thing guaranteed to give away my identity? “I’m used to wearing contact lenses anytime I’m around people,” I snapped. “You’re the one who made me get rid of them. That wasn’t my idea. It was yours.”
“It’s dangerous to wear anything over your eyes, you know that,” he said, sounding surprised that I should blame him. Whereas I was pissed that he should blame me. I didn’t know that it was supposed to be dangerous to cover your eyes. I barely knew anything. What I knew was diminishing rapidly with every passing moment I spent on this foreign planet.
“Covering your eyes is far more dangerous than the risk of discovery,” he said.
I hmphed in response. The damage was already done. My cover was blown.
“Don’t worry, Your Majesty. We won’t tell anyone you live if you desire that we do not.” It was the woman I’d singled out to approach. The children to either side of her no longer flattened themselves against her body. Their fear was gone. All because of the cosmos that swirled through the irises of my eyes.
I didn’t know what to say to her. I had no idea about political strategy on Earth. I had less than none here. As much as I didn’t feel like deferring to Tanus then, I did. I’d just made one mistake. One was enough. I tilted my head toward him, inviting him to speak for me.
“The princess requires that you keep her survival secret,” Tanus said. “Do you understand why?”
There was a pause before the woman said, “I believe so.”
“You know of the attacks on the Royal Palace?”
“Yes, milord.”
I couldn’t tell if the woman’s use of a title to address Tanus was because she recognized him or because she didn’t wish unintentionally to disrespect someone who kept the company of a princess.
“The people who intended to harm the princess believe her dead. If they were to discover that she lives, they’d try to kill her again.”
“I understand, milord. We,” the woman looked to the other women around her, “all understand.”
“Good,” Tanus said. He sounded convinced they’d protect my secret. But I wondered, would he let these women and children go now that they held a key to my safety?
Tanus turned from the victims and went to Kai. I remained and saw Tanus look at me, thinking that I’d follow him, from the corner of my eye.
I took the woman’s hands. Every single person there, including those I traveled with, stilled in surprise. “Did these men hurt you?” I asked her.
Before answering, the woman’s eyes sought Tanus. The unspoken question of how much she should say to me traveled between them. I wondered at her actions, quick and subtle so that I might not notice them. Was it that she wanted to protect her princess from the truth? Was the loyalty of subject toward her royal rulers that great? It wasn’t like that on Earth. I didn’t think it was, anyway. However, I hadn’t known any princesses there.
I wasn’t sure what message Tanus gave the woman in return, whether it was the go-ahead to speak the truth or to protect me from it.
“No, Your Majesty. We weren’t hurt,” she said. And then I knew. Tanus had instructed
her to shield me from the harshness of the truth.
I looked at her, deliberating. The woman didn’t flinch or retreat from the unspoken charge in my stare. When I became convinced that she’d done what she thought her duty, I let it go. I squeezed her hands. She was too startled to squeeze back. “We’re going to help you,” I said, hoping it to be true.
“Olph, did you bring the tissue fuser?” Tanus called from behind me.
“Fuck, man. No. I thought you grabbed the healing kit.”
I released the woman’s hands and turned. “Do any of you have a needle? And thread?”
“Whyever would we?” Tanus said.
“I do,” squeaked a small, timid voice. It was a girl, one of the two children. “My ma was teaching me how to sew before… they took us.” A shaky but determined hand searched in invisible pockets and came up with a threaded needle. The needle wasn’t made of any kind of metal. It was primitive, perhaps the quill of a porcupine-like creature or the thorn of a plant. Thick thread the length of my forearm hung from its eye. It wasn’t great, but it would do. It would have to.
I took the prize from the girl. “Thank you. This will really help,” I said, and she blushed and leaned back into the woman who wasn’t her mother.
“Now all I need is some kind of disinfectant.” I searched my companions for signs they had some. But all they offered me were unspoken questions. “What about alcohol?” I persisted. “Some kind of liquor or strong, stout drink?” I had no idea what the terms for booze might be on this planet.
“Why didn’t you just say so?” Dolpheus said. “We have that.” He retrieved a shiny, maroon-colored flask from one of the sidesaddles and passed it to me. “What are you going to do with it?”
“You have nothing to repair Kai’s wound, is that right?”
“Basically, yeah,” Dolpheus said, sounding as if he were blaming himself for the oversight.
“Okay, Kai. You might want to sit down for this.”
He looked at me warily but did as I suggested. I knelt next to him. “Lila, will you come to his other side?”