by Bella James
The Centurion's face betrayed nothing but his impatience with her frailty. "Your message has already been sent. Now. Please answer fully as you can. Where is the rebel base where you were held?"
Livy blinked several times, as if thinking. "In the Forbidden Zone. Inside the Void! There are creatures there." That shudder was authentic. The damned scorpion! "They're huge! They've grown so enormous – "
Rather sharply, he said, "No. Concentrate. Where is the rebel camp?"
"I told you. It's inside the Void. All sand. And heat. And insects – "
Before she could get started again, he said, "How many people are there?"
"Oh, I don't know. I think it's the main base. I think there were about 200 people there."
Selene screwed up her mouth in distaste. "It's not possible that 200 people are causing problems all over the lands. How many, girl? Or were you at some stupid sub camp?"
Livy started to cry. "I don't know! I was so scared! There were big bugs and I was all alone and people were mean to me." She caught sight of Selene's expression and realized she was overplaying her hand. She was an Alpha, after all. "I'm sorry," she said, pulling herself together. "I was just so scared."
SHE HEARD the big guard's booming voice as he left the room with Selene. "Pointless, little bit dim, how she ever managed Alpha, and not like we can get there with that – "
Livy didn't even permit herself a smile.
SELENE CAME BACK in minutes later. "I have no time. He thinks I'm in one of the bathrooms."
Livy nodded. She sat bolt upright in the bed, waiting for whatever would come next.
"You'll be moved to the capitol soon enough. Julia has already been taken into custody. She understands her role. This is for you from her. When you've read it, eat it."
Livy blinked at the slip of paper. "How long here alone?"
Selene's features softened. "You're safer here than anywhere else. But I would assume not longer than overnight." She started for the door.
"Wait!" Livy hissed before the Centurion got the door open.
Selene turned back.
"Did you read this?"
A nod. "Yes."
Incredulous, Livy demanded, "How could you not tell me this?"
"All will be well, Livy. We know and we're working on it."
She gave Livy a long look, then turned away. The door closed behind her.
LIVY FOUND her way out onto the roof of the hospital by moonlight. She was the Chosen of the Plutarch. Her fiancé was coming to take her home. All luxuries and attention were given her. The top floor of the hospital was hers, sealed off from lower floors.
Not sealed up from above. No one expected trouble from that quarter.
Livy let herself out into the moonlight. Softly, she whistled, and waited until the rustle of wings announced the arrival of the bird.
The falcon perched on the wall that surrounded the roof of the hospital. Livy slipped to the edge of the roof, holding out her hand, reveling in touching a wild bird of prey. The breast feathers were downy, but the wing feathers were stiff and barbed. The bird stared at her with obvious intelligence, perched on the low wall wouldn't ancient looking taloned feet. It allowed her to tie the message to its foot, and to whisper the names of the rebels to it before it launched into the night air.
Livy, left behind, shivered. At night, the blazing inferno of the desert was cold. She was not yet in the capital city. She was nowhere near safe.
She was cold.
The message she had sent would force the rebels to a different plan.
Her message read: Plutarch holding sister Pippa hostage in brothel. Not waiting for rebels to free. Going tonight. When Pip is free, will set wedding to Plutarch. Will send falcon.
And the revolution can begin.
The End
THE REVOLUTION
THE ARCADIA TRILOGY
CHAPTER 1
O livia Bane cursed the full moon as she crouched low on the high wall that surrounded the seat of government in Arcadia. Even wearing night black, she ran the risk of being spotted if silhouetted against the bright late summer moon.
Less than a week had passed since Livy had been overtly found, seemingly dazed, disoriented and ill, by the Centurion Selene and returned to her rightful place in the palace of the Plutarch, John Malvin. The miraculous rescue of the Plutarch's fiancée after her kidnap by rebel forces had led the news across the lands of Arcadia, Tundrus, Oceanus and Pastoreum.
No news traveled into the Void, the inner desert ringed by the Forbidden Zone, but only the castoffs of Arcadian society, the Untouchables, lived there. The Untouchables, and the rebels.
And the rebels already knew.
For Livy, returning to Arcadia was a tightrope walk between exposure as a rebel plant, returned to take down the Plutarch any way possible – and tumbling back into the luxury of a city with electricity, electric vehicles, art, culture, refinement, beauty.
Beauty, tinged always with torture and death. The Plutarch's rule was absolute. Anyone could be accused of treason, the penalty was always death, and no one spoke for the accused.
Livy checked that the silver metal arm cuff was still hidden under wraps of black cloth. The rebels had placed the sleeve on her when she was still their prisoner rather than their prize. It had a dampening effect that wiped out the tracer the Plutarch had affixed to her ID chip – the tracer wire that not only meant he knew where she was every instant, but which could be detonated from a distance if she was somewhere considered dangerous to the ruler, the capital or the Aristocracy.
Livy checked to make certain the arm cuff wasn't gleaming silver in the moonlight, but nothing shone under her black sleeves. She adjusted the coil of black rope she'd brought with her and stretched out one long, black-clad leg, preparing to climb again. The arm cuff made climbing a little more clumsy; it was worth it to know she couldn't be tracked. The rebels removed it before Livy was "found" in her dazed and sickened condition and taken back to the Plutarch, but Selene had been able to bring the thing to Livy in the city – there were times Livy needed the Plutarch to know exactly where she was and see the tracer in her ID chip working. And there were times she needed the exact opposite. The easiest thing would be to remove the ID chip that was embedded in her wrist and simply carry it when she needed to be tracked and leave it in her rooms when she needed to move anonymously while making everyone believe she hadn't left those rooms. But then if she needed to scan her chip, people would notice it wasn't embedded.
People like the Centurions who were loyal to John Malvin - Plutarch, not Oliva Bane – Rebel.
Below her the Centurion guards paced their watches, low conversations rumbling among some of them. The walls around the Plutarch's palace stood 15 feet high. The guards looked up from time to time, but rarely. Attack from above was not anticipated. The rebels were currently taking the battle to the Centurions in the villages. But with the Plutarch's bride recently returned from being held hostage by the rebels, there were more guards out on either side of the wall.
Just not on the wall. The belief was even if the rebels came in an ornithopter, the machines, though whisper silent, would be heard and spotted long before they could attack.
Livy sucked in a quiet breath, anchored her foot on the higher wall, stretched out until her fingertips could grasp the top, and then used the strength of her leg to pull herself up. Though she'd trained and become stronger in the Void during her increasingly voluntary captivity of two months, she still had more lower body strength than upper.
Once on the higher wall, she flattened herself into a plank position, head turned, cheek against stone, unmoving, breath held, until she was certain no cry was coming – she hadn't been spotted.
Even then it took her some time to build the courage to move again. A wind was picking up and though it was nowhere near hard enough to even make her lose her balance atop the walls, it made her feel more insecure up there. Maybe it would create enough shadows from banners moving in the wind and tree
branches waving to distract the guards. Maybe it wouldn't. If only the moon would go behind the clouds! But Livy had to move if she was going to free Pippa. She'd told the rebels she would do nothing toward the rebellion until Pip was free. With plague spreading through the villages and across the lands, they were in no position to argue with her. Livy's place beside the Plutarch was too important to the rebellion.
And Livy couldn't cross the rebels too much. Her parents had been brought to the Void when Livy was tested, riding a sand snake and bringing it down, harvesting the venom-rich fangs and handing those – with a certain amount of disdain – to the supreme council of the underground rebel city of Dawn. The fangs had felt cold in her hands, and hours later, her skin had still been chilled.
After the festivities and feasting, her parents were taken back in the night, returned to Agara in Pastoreum, gifted with one of the fangs as some kind of horrible memento. Livy woke to find them returned to the plague-riddled lands, unsafe from Centurion attacks that followed any rebel excursion into a village. She was told it was her parents' choice – after all, the rest of Livy's family, her brothers and sisters, including her very ill youngest brother Tad, were still in Agara.
Maybe her parents had agreed. But in part it had been the rebel's decision. If they had any doubts about Livy's loyalty to the cause, they could at least trap her into obedience.
She was running out of time to find and free her sister and put in place the pieces of the rebel plan. The timeline for Olivia Bane's wedding to the Plutarch had been moved up drastically. Her days were spent in a welter of fittings for a wedding dress so complicated it could easily convey several different messages – that of ownership by the Plutarch, of elevation to the ultimate status outside his own, the virginal state of the bride, the sexual nature of the breeder of the race, and the last, the way the dress flared at the knee but fit bindingly close from hips to knees, that she neither needed to toil or move fast – or that she even had the option. It was a dress to encompass status as Aristocracy and slave all in one fall of white satin and as such, it was a wonder of communications.
With the dress to speak for her, Livy would barely need to open her mouth. Except to simper at her new husband.
And demand the return of her sister, if that hadn't happened yet.
Doing that on national television, some of which was even broadcast into the provinces where laborers struggled year round to provide the capital with luxuries and themselves with a hand to mouth existence, would mean she got what she wanted – because the Plutarch's public relations people truly believed they could make him out as benevolent – and her sister would be released from the Arcadian brothels.
Once the joyous reunion of sisters was arranged and broadcast, with Livy agreeing to whatever tale was spun to explain it, the Plutarch would probably declare Livy an enemy, at least within his administration. Her freedom would be curtailed and she'd have to rely on Selene, the Centurion devoted to her, and to the rebels working from outside.
Like Julia, her former dorm mate at the Institute.
Enough, Livy thought. Hovering above the streets of Arcadia that ringed the palace, she wanted to move faster. Looking up, she caught her breath. There were clouds blowing over the moon. Finally!
The instant the world darkened, Livy rose smoothly, black figure against the black backdrop of the night. She began to run along the top of the walls, her desert-toughened feet clad only in a rubbery cloth sock that allowed her to climb the stones of the walls and use her toes to grip and push off. She moved fast and easily – she'd run so much in the Void, much of it on rock and some in a soft, sucking sand that was like a hot, thick sea, she could run easily for long distances.
The memorized directions came back easily. The twists and turns of the streets and the walls that surrounded those streets led her inexorably from the palace of the Plutarch to the first of the pleasure palaces themselves, placed disturbingly close. One step above Untouchables, the beautiful Gammas worked in the brothels, their lives filled with body conditioning, beauty treatments, hair and nail and skin procedures, beautiful clothes, the best food and never too much or too little of it. And their lives were filled with horror and brutality at the hands of the Aristocracy and the Centurion. Not every Gamma survived every encounter in the pleasure palaces and the word pleasure spoke most often only of the client's pleasure.
There ahead of her was the first of the brothels. Tall, built of marble from Tundrus, it glittered against the night, even with the moon obscured. Livy doubled her pace, running for the wall directly opposite the roof of the palace. If she missed what she meant to do, she could be injured or killed. She'd told Selene where she was going but not how she intended to get there. Her own private Centurion was now loyal both to Livy and to the rebel cause. If she thought Livy was in danger, she'd override every command to keep her safe – even Livy's own.
Pushing those thoughts out of her head, Livy cleared a white space there, only listening to her body as she ran, leaping up each gradation of wall, four large leaps and a straightaway that allowed her the momentum she needed to leap, tucking and rolling as she flew through the stretch of space between the top of the wall and the roof of the brothel.
She hit only a little harder than she meant to, wincing at the noise as she rolled across the roof and caught herself, dropping into a crouch, one knee down, foot arched, the other foot up on toes, bent, ready to sprint if any kind of cry of alarm sounded.
Long seconds she controlled her breathing and listened.
There was no alarm raised.
The moon slid clear of the clouds. Atop the white marble edifice, she was easily visible again. Livy pushed herself up and ran for the edge of the building, uncoiling a length of black rope as she ran. In less than a minute, she had dropped the rope over the edge of the building and started her descent to a balcony that should only be accessible from inside the brothel.
In less than another minute she was inside.
The first thing she noticed was the breathing – heavy, rough, asthmatic.
Oh, please, oh, please, she thought, without bothering to finish the thought. If she could make it to the door without seeing what was going on in the bed, that would be so good. But though her eyes were dark adapted, and the room lit with low lights, she'd only gotten a glimpse of the layout. If she tried to run across it, she'd either run directly into some piece of furniture and bring the place down around her ears while simultaneously announcing her presence to everyone, or she'd run into a closet and have to start all over.
Cautiously, Livy looked up, her heart pounding. She couldn't decide which was worse – walking in on a client and a Gamma, or having them both watching her curiously, waiting for her to notice them before spreading the alarm.
She was totally unprepared for the nice sight that met her eyes. A mountain of a man, one of the Plutarch's less vile advisors who she'd seen at various meetings, slept with his mouth open, half snoring, half wheezing, one arm flung over his eyes. Even then she might have worried that was too much luck and that he was actually awake and watching her from under his bent elbow, but the man hadn't moved and the sound hadn't changed since Livy catapulted onto his balcony off the rope.
Without waiting another instant she made for the door.
The hallway was plush. The floor in the room had been covered with thick, warm rugs, and the hallway was too. They stopped the sound and warmed the marble walls. Livy let herself into the hall, wincing at the sudden light. It still wasn't bright, but it was more than what she was used to.
More than what the sleeper was used to, also. From behind her he gave a puff and a querulous, "What's that?" before she heard him subsiding. As the door clicked shut behind her, she heard him begin to wheeze again.
She let out a very short breath of relief, then turned to survey the hall. She was now trapped, for better or worse, because every room was going to lead to a pleasure palace den, either occupied as this one, or occupied worse – by clients actively pur
suing their pleasures.
And how was she supposed to find Pippa? No one she knew had ever talked with anyone who had worked in a pleasure palace. That made sense – Alphas didn't mingle with Gammas. She also didn't know anyone who had frequented such a place. Or rather, as evidence of the cabinet member sleeping in the other room suggested, she did know them, but not to identify and even if she had, she'd never have asked them. No one on the Plutarch's staff could be trusted. Not because they all were bound to agree with him. She thought several of them probably had different policies in mind, different philosophies, different tempers. But because to disagree with the Plutarch often resulted in death.
She paused at the junction of two hallways and reflected that eventually some of the Alphas from her graduating class would eventually find themselves in positions of power and some of them might abuse that power by frequenting exactly such brothels. The only cold comfort she could gather was that by then anyone they'd gone to school with who had failed so completely in their tests as to wind up Gamma would have long since been banished to the Forbidden Zone, too old and unattractive anymore to serve.
And that, she thought, was not happening to Pippa. Nothing was happening to Pip after tonight.
No. She slowed, lay the side of her face against the cool stone of the wall and very slowly eased around it far enough to see down the next hall. It was empty.
And no. She wasn't leaving Pip in this place. Not for any amount of time. But it would be longer than just now. She'd have to leave her tonight. The only way to keep Pip safe would be to beg the Plutarch to release her. Then Livy's intended could either act surprised, shocked, even, benevolent and the hero, rescuing her little sister. Or he could bargain with Livy, whatever it was he wanted in exchange for Pip.