A pleasant heat bloomed in his belly beneath the soothing chill of the gel. The radiant warmth of the heat room was doing its work, unknotting his muscles and liberating accumulated toxins in the rivulets of sweat that coursed down his bare skin.
Sweat glistened on Shomoro’s chest and shoulders as well, cut glistening paths downward from the hairline of her pale mane. Her scent, growing pungent and earthy as it warmed in contentment, called forth a deeper heat from his solar plexus that ran down his belly to the end of his tail. If circumstances had been different, Daikar might have reached forward to stroke her mane and nuzzle the sensitive gland under her throat. It had been too long.
But there was a queasy uncertainty in his stomach under the warmth that would not go away. The fight just past had been different than any before, and not just because of his role in it. Daikar had seen something in her eyes at the end, sensed it in her whole aspect, just before her sword hilt had taken him in the stomach. His chest felt cold despite the room’s radiant heat, remembering how the anguish in her eyes had disappeared, replaced by cold anger. As though some channel had been changed inside her. Even her scent had changed, the bitter tang of grief and agitation giving way to hot metal resolve, almost like a neutral guard scent but at the same time so much more—active. Alive.
He’d been silent too long, he realized as she drew back.
“What is it?” she asked.
Daikar sighed. “I’d resolved not to ask you about it.”
“Now I have to know.”
“At the end, just before you beat me, you—seemed to change.” He made a vague gesture that encompassed her, as though tracing her aura. “It was like a different person took your place, for a moment.”
To his surprised relief, Shomoro didn’t deny it, or look blank, or laugh in his face. Instead, a wry, lopsided smile pulled at her lips. “Ah,” she said, “you met Shomoro of the White.”
Daikar suspected it was his own face that looked blank. “That sounds like a bladename.”
She jabbed confirmation. “It’s mine. At least, that’s all it was until—after Za fell.”
When she’d been taken by the White Arrows. Imprisoned and interrogated—no, say it—tortured.
He was grateful when Shomoro went on without further questions from him. He didn’t know what they would have been.
“It’s incredible what you can endure when you’re not really there for it,” she said. “White was a place I could step into, when things got—too bad. The dissociant drugs they gave me helped, I think. Eventually, she gained a certain autonomy.”
“And you were able to . . . to bring her out on command?” Daikar tentatively finished the thought.
“Not exactly. More like she came out when I needed her. When I need her.”
He sensed the rest behind Shomoro’s vague description. Her sub persona emerged when her survival, her very existence was threatened. As he must have done during their spar, the hateful things he’d said striking toward her core as surely as any blade would have.
Renewed guilt roiled his stomach. “I didn’t know. If I had, I would never have—”
“It’s all right,” she said, a touch forcefully. “You were right, I have to be prepared. Both of me.”
He tried to reflect her wry smile from earlier, but it dripped off his face. The heat seemed to be tightening the skin of his scar, making it itch abominably. He bowed his head to hide the grimace, but he was either too slow or Shomoro was too observant.“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I can’t help thinking about Mose.” He gave in and rubbed at the scar until some of the irritation abated. “We used to spar together, back in Za.”
“You never told me.”
Daikar tapped the scored flesh under his eye. “He was the one who gave me this.” At her sharp inhalation, he added, “It was an accident. My fault, actually. But Mose was guilty for weeks afterward.” He frowned. “And I’ve been trying to figure out how the Osk who couldn’t stop apologizing for injuring me could possibly be the same one who’s been out there killing sephs.”
Shomoro studied the stone floor as she absorbed this. “I don’t know,” she said.
“But maybe that’s just it,” Daikar said in a rush, before his nerve failed him. “He is a different person now, and the Mose I knew is dead. If you could change so much, why not him?”
“I’m still me, even if I have a passenger now,” Shomoro said, raising a brow. “People don’t change. Unless they’re forced to,” she added less certainly.
Exactly. He had no idea what forces had worked on Mose in the interim, or their result. He had only a vague shape of dread.
“Even if everything goes as planned and we capture him,” Daikar said, “part of me is afraid of who we’ll find.”
After a moment, she moved nearer. Her arms went around his shoulders, and they stayed like that for he didn’t know how long.
Chapter Seven
Absolutely not,” Whalg-General said, crossing his muscular arms. His claws clacked softly against each other as he did so, but it was unintentional. He wasn’t in a mood for laughter.
Water Dancer’s pods lit up red and yellow before she damped her frustration. More controlled lightspeech followed, which the box strapped to one pod translated: “At least hear my reasons. Mose Attarrish represents a significant threat to Shomoro’s life, and through her, a threat to all of Teluk. Shomoro’s work is a crucial weave in the fabric of our nanodefenses. If she is seriously injured or killed before that work can be implemented—”
Whalg-General raised a conciliatory tendril, dripping water onto the edge of the saltwater tank in his conference chamber. “Which is why we are taking all the precautions we can to ensure she comes to no harm. Attarrish will be contained.”
He gained the tank’s side with a pulse of locomotor tentacles and leaned his arms on its edge. More rivulets of water dripped onto the tiles, and Water Dancer’s pods twitched, as though checking the impulse to step back.
Whalg-General didn’t quite smile. Water Dancer could use the reminder of whose space she was a guest in. “But containing him,” he continued, “and diverting him to indefinite incarceration in a black site are very different things.”
“So you admit you have the facilities to handle it,” she said.
“I admit nothing you do not know from working in the vault,” he said, growing testy. “We have the holding facilities under the surface, but I will not use them on a Teluk citizen until I know there is good cause.”
“There is good cause.” Water Dancer approached the tank, not shrinking from the puddle of water in front of it. Ripples spread out from the pads of her ambulatory pods like waves breaking around rocks. “An Expansion spy is set to infiltrate Teluk space and assassinate one of your most valuable assets. I thought the High Council had a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to dealing with Terran tools of war.”
“In any other case, that’s true,” Whalg-General said, softening his ear wedges back. “If the threat were an automated probe or drone, we’d blow it out of the sky. But Attarrish deserves at least the chance to answer for himself before we render judgment.”
The Rul seemed to deflate a little at the firmness in his tone, her pods bunching around her central visceral mass, chromatophores coruscating a subdued teal. Her next words were hesitant. “I don’t disagree . . .”
“But?”
“But I’m afraid Shomoro has already decided in favor of his innocence.”
That was interesting. Whalg-General raised a brow. “How so?”
Lightspeech dappled her pods in uneasy green flickers.
“You remember our initial meeting. She floated the opinion Attarrish is being coerced somehow.”
Whalg-General gave a muffled clack of claws. Commiserating laughter. “You have to admit, it’s more palatable than the alternative.”
Water Dancer stamped a pod, sending up a tiny splash.
“She should know better than to look for the easy answer!”<
br />
“Shouldn’t we all.” He sluiced more saltwater over his head.
His skin had begun to dry and pucker in places; it wasn’t as supple and resilient as it had been when he was younger. “If Shomoro were taking the easy way, she would have agreed with your proposal.”
Jade flecks all along Water Dancer’s pods signaled confusion. “What?”
“Lock up Attarrish indefinitely and she doesn’t have to think about him. Doesn’t have to confront him and discover he’s been acting of his own free will.” He smiled, showing the tips of obsidian teeth. “Instead, she chose to learn why her con-specific is doing what he’s doing, even if she doesn’t like the answer. That’s anything but easy.”
He kicked to the far side of the pool and leaned his back and arms against the far edge. “Personally, I’m curious to see what her alliance’s approach will turn up. We may learn more from Attarrish this way than by imprisoning and interrogating him. The baited trap catches more prey than the bare hook, as they say.”
He let himself sink until just his head was above water, and his pores let out an almost tangible sigh of relief at the caress of saline. The gesture was meant to indicate an end to their audience, but a moment later the rounded tops of Water Dancer’s pods appeared unsteadily above the edge of the tank. He pictured her straining on the tips of her ambulatory pods to keep him in view, as a Baskar would have craned their neck.
“With respect, Councilor,” she said. “Not all your colleagues share that view.”
His ear wedges stiffened. “Oh?”
“You aren’t the only councilor who has granted me audience regarding this matter,” she said. “Some of them see the same threat in Attarrish as I do, and are willing to support my proposed solution.”
Whalg-General suppressed the impulse to fully submerge, to place a barrier of saltwater between him and this impetuous Rul. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” he sighed.
“What do you mean?” Water Dancer said.
Without wanting to, Whalg-General approached her side of the tank. Water Dancer courteously stepped back as he did so. “Councilor Yurll and I had hoped for this to remain a discreet matter, to be handled by as few security operatives as necessary. There was no need for the Council as a whole to be involved.”
A muted swirl of blues and browns Whalg-General wasn’t sure how to interpret crossed her carapace. “You’ve been hiding this from the rest of the Council?”
Ah, he thought. Suspicion. “Not in general outline. The Council has been apprised.” It had been Shomoro’s somewhat unorthodox solution that Whalg-General and Yurll had decided jointly to keep from arising as an item of debate. If the feeding frenzy of seven councilors with personal and often conflicting agendas could be so generously termed.
“Who has granted you audience?” he asked abruptly, hoping to startle Water Dancer into naming her sponsors.
But Water Dancer was cannier than that. “I’m afraid I too must be discreet on that, Councilor.”
Cheeky land-dweller. “Is that so?” he said. “Did one of them send you to me?”
Water Dancer shrugged her pods. “Councilor Yurll sent me to you. When I told her what I proposed.”
He ducked his muzzle half under the surface, blowing bubbles to hide his smile. At least Yurll was on his side, in her oblique way—rather than refuse Water Dancer herself, Yurll had steered her to him, knowing the Rul’s request would bounce off his stubborn hide. It was Yurll’s version of saying no.
He lifted his muzzle just above water. “And now you know my vote. Good afternoon, citizen.” He blew bubbles until Water Dancer responded with a rather stiff “Good afternoon” of her own, her pods blinking an irritated bright yellow, and left the chamber.
Whalg-General gratefully let his head slip beneath the pool’s still surface. Staring up at the aquamarine glass dome through layers of water, he began formulating the call he would make to Yurll. He could sense the coming fault lines of support that would form on the Council, between Water Dancer’s proposal and Shomoro’s. They needed to ensure as many councilors as possible ended up on his and Yurll’s side of the division, whether through threats, cajoling, or reason, and they needed to start yesterday.
Water Dancer’s call came at the end of a twelve-hour shift, one of three that week for Daikar. In addition to his normal duties sifting the multiple intelligence streams that came into the Council’s Anmerresh branch every cycle, he now had to sit on security sessions coordinated by Whalg-General and Yurll.
The plans for Mose’s capture were being hashed out in fine-grain detail, for all that they rested on intelligence data that was already weeks old. And for all that none of them, not even Daikar or Shomoro, knew exactly what challenges they’d face capturing a seph alive.
As far as he knew, what they were attempting had never been done outside the Expansion. Sometimes, perversely, Daikar wished he could ask the organization that was using Mose, this Project: ShadowStalker, for advice. It would be better than asking Shomoro to recount her own experience of captivity, which was the only model they had. She knew better than any of them what methods were effective in capturing and holding a seph. A good portion of the planning meetings revolved around dissecting what parts of her account might be of use to them.
Shomoro had never asked for a break during these discussions, but Daikar could tell what it cost her. He heard it in the way her voice would grow strained and thick, the words coming in bursts of effort. She’d left the last couple meetings hollow-eyed, wiping a slick of perspiration from her skin in the hallway outside the chamber, where the councilors wouldn’t see.
Returning home after the latest meeting, he’d just thrown his cloak onto the nest of blankets in his apartment when the PagePendant he wore around his neck chimed. Daikar answered. “Shomoro?” He parted the curtains on purple dusk; long shadows stretched from the middle city’s terraces and pooled in the lower canals.
“Actually, it’s Water Dancer,” said the voice of a translator box. “Are you free?”
“I just got home,” he said slowly. “It’s been a long day.”
“I imagine so.” Her voice sounded amused. “A full shift, and then an evening meeting on top of that.”
He went still in attention. “Shomoro must have mentioned,” he said.
Water Dancer didn’t answer that. “I wondered if you might want to take the air with me.”
He held the pendant near his mouth without answering for a few moments. Water Dancer had never evinced any interest in spending time with him before. Other than her place on the nano defense research team with Shomoro, he knew little about the Rul scientist, aside from the few things Shomoro had mentioned. He looked for the hook buried in Water Dancer’s offer, the ulterior motive, then immediately felt overly suspicious for doing so. It occurred to him that perhaps the Rul was reaching out because she had the same concerns about Shomoro as he did. They did work together; Water Dancer could hardly have failed to notice Shomoro’s stress-induced fatigue after one of their grueling planning sessions.
He decided to lay aside his misgivings for now. Still, there were limits to what he had the energy for himself. “If you come here, I’ll make us some valchna,” he offered. Valchna was a drink biocompatible with several species, and, he’d heard, much beloved by the Rul.
“Valchna sounds wonderful,” she said.
The drink was almost done steeping by the time Water Dancer rang. Daikar let her in and went back to stirring the brownish roots in the glass decanter, making sure the sediment didn’t collect at the bottom. Bark fragments were beginning to dislodge from the roots, turning the warm water fragrant with the spicy, slightly cloying smell that gave the drink its other name, sweetroot. When Daikar judged the brew had opaqued sufficiently, he poured two bowls.
They sat across the low table, though in the Rul’s case sitting was more like crouching lower to the floor. Her lowermost pods bunched around her visceral mass like root boles growing from the trunk of an ancient tree. He l
et the time pass in silence, savoring the tang of the sweetroot and its slightly soporific effect leaching through his muscles. He gave Water Dancer the occasional glance as she drank, the fine osmotic tendrils of one feeding pod trailing in the brown liquid. Valchna had a reputation for being a social lubricant. As the muscles relaxed, often so did the emotional guard of the drinkers, though cognition was unaffected. The result was often an easier, open flow of conversation, and—he hoped, in this case—one with an uncommon degree of honesty.
“How is it?” he asked at length. Her chromatophores began a complimentary response, sparkles of pink and orange, but before the translator could catch up, Daikar went on: “I think it’s a good batch. Perhaps we should have invited Shomoro to drink with us. She needs it.”
The warm-colored sparkles became edged with bright green. Surprise at his candor? “I agree,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about Shomoro.”
He raised his eyebrows, though he was unsurprised. “Yes?”
Water Dancer pushed aside her bowl. “I’m going to guess you aren’t entirely comfortable with her plan.”
He averted his snout. “It’s risky. But Shomoro knows what she’s doing. Pri, too. The Council trusts them, and I trust them.”
The luminescence that flickered over Water Dancer’s pods was a contemplative brown and auburn. “Are you familiar with the principles of experimental design?”
“Not the way a scientist would be, but yes.”
Water Dancer rose from the table and went to the balcony, returning with a podful of pebbles he recognized as coming from the tiny garden out there.
She spread the pebbles over the table. “In any experiment, you want to define your constants and variables. Pri, Shomoro, the Council, their security, and yourself are constants.” She grouped together a collection of dark gray pebbles. “Mose Attarrish, he’s a variable.” She set a lighter pebble on its own.
“Then we have the elements that could be either—timing, environment, and so on.” One pod pushed the rest of the stones between the neat gray group and the single white pebble.
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