Alliance of Exiles

by Caitlin Demaris McKenna

  “We’ll need to prevent Mose Attarrish from escaping or finding a means to hurt himself or us.” Shomoro removed a blob of clear, resinous material from her cloak pocket and handed it to Daikar. “This is almost identical to the spitstone Veert naturally secrete. It’s harder than Osk blade enamel; he won’t be able to cut his way out, or detach any shards to use as weapons.”

  That would just leave the weapons Mose already had for them to deal with. Daikar turned the chunk of spitstone in his hand, extended the tip of his blade and tried to score it. The material felt as unyielding as stone—more, even. When he lifted his blade, its surface was as smooth as before.

  “Why is it clear?” Daikar asked. He’d seen the Veerten seastacks rising from the bay of the An Sea that Anmerresh partially encircled. Their basalt bases were accreted with spitstone additions in tones of pinky beige and tan, sometimes translucent, but not this air-clear substance.

  “Stone’s team put it through a chemical process to make it transparent,” Shomoro said. “This way we can embed surveillance cameras at strategic locations. We can even reinforce the window without sacrificing the view.”

  “Is that really the most important consideration?” He strove for an even tone, but some sharpness must have leaked through, because Shomoro narrowed her eyes at him. “Whatever we say, we’re converting this apartment into a prison cell.

  Security should be the priority, not aesthetics.”

  “This isn’t about aesthetics,” Shomoro said. She reached out for the lump of clear spitstone, and he returned it. “If Pri is right, Attarrish may be open to working with us. But he won’t be if we alienate him by treating him like a prisoner.”

  “But he wil be our prisoner,” Daikar said.

  She blew out a sigh in which he heard the faintest hint of exasperation. “We don’t have to throw it in his face,” she said.

  “How we treat him right after his capture could make all the difference.” She went to the window, gazing out at the underground architecture. “I don’t want this to feel like a prison cell.

  We’re supposed to be offering Attarrish a chance for freedom, not a move from one captivity to another.”

  “If he is the Project’s captive,” Daikar said too quickly. Shomoro looked back over her shoulder at him. She seemed about to say something when Yurll ambled over.

  “Daikar.” Yurll peered down from her three-meter height.

  “Stone could use your help mapping the surveillance camera placements. Their infrared eyes aren’t ideal for identifying the best angles of observation.”

  “I’ll be right there,” he said, happy for an excuse to slip away from the conversation. But the metallic dread in his belly told him he’d put it off about as long as he dared.

  It was late evening when they finished mapping the layout and surface area of the apartment. Stone had already departed to arrange for the production of the spitstone and a work crew.

  Except for the places around sharp edges and angles where the spitstone would lie thicker, when they were finished the modifications would be almost invisible except for a new sheen on the apartment’s hard surfaces. It would be like living in a glass cage, Daikar thought—one that would repel every attack Mose could throw at it.

  But as he and Shomoro rode back up in the elevator, Daikar was thinking about the other rooms: the ones Water Dancer had hinted at her knowledge of, in other vault facilities that from the outside looked no different than the one they had just left. Except those rooms were true cells, in high-security black sites.

  As the elevator disgorged them into the purpling evening of a terrace lined with transport funiculars, Shomoro broke a silence that had become oppressive. “You had something to say before Yurll diverted your attention.”

  “Yes. I’ve been wanting to bring it up with you for a while.”

  The expression she turned to him was open and expectant.

  “Is it about Mose?”

  “Let’s just get home first.”

  Home, of course, could have been either of their apartments—but in the end, drawn by something unspoken between them, they settled in the living room of Shomoro’s, each with a cup of their favorite tea. The drinks had been his suggestion, partly as a means of stalling, but also to make her as comfortable as he could before he broached this most uncomfortable of topics.

  Hunkered down on a cushion before the table, Shomoro sipped at her spiceleaf tea. “All right, what’s bothering you, Daikar? Is it something about the plan?”

  The leaden feeling in his guts intensified, then all at once vanished. What he was about to say wouldn’t be easy for her to hear, but he hadn’t felt good keeping it to himself. Daikar found her gaze.

  “Water Dancer came to me about a week ago. She was of the opinion Mose should be remanded to one of the Council’s high-security detention facilities.”

  Her pupils widened, then narrowed as her gaze turned inward. He caught a whiff of irritation in her scent. “She did register her misgivings about the current plan with me. I told her she should trust that we know what we’re doing.”

  “I found her argument convincing.” He let the statement hang between them, holding her gaze in the silence that followed.

  “Her argument?” Shomoro said in a low voice.

  “We may know what we’re doing, but we don’t know Mose.

  Not anymore.” He looked into his cup of kam’na, feeling no appetite for the rich, slightly salty brew. “If we let our guard down around him at the wrong moment, treat him as anything less than a clear threat, it could cost your life.”

  She placed a palm on the table. “Then we won’t let our guard down.”

  But he was already cutting the air with his hand. “We will.

  At some point, we will. You, because you want to believe Mose is being forced into this, and me, because he’s my—he was my friend.”

  She drew away from the table. “What are you saying?”

  “Water Dancer has her own supporters among the Council, and with them the authority to detain Mose indefinitely.”

  He made himself look at her, despite his urge to turn away.

  “When Stone’s team has Mose in hand, she will tell me where to send them.”

  For a moment, incomprehension blanked Shomoro’s expression; then she rose abruptly from the cushion. One of her front knees bumped the table and it wobbled. “To a black site?”

  “A secure site, yes.” Her forgotten cup of spiceleaf tea was tilting dangerously, and Daikar steadied it. When he looked up from the table, Shomoro was standing at the window with her back to him. Though he couldn’t see her face or smell her this far away, he could read the tense unhappiness in every line of her back and shoulders. She said something, but it was so quiet he had to ask her to repeat it.

  “Why even tell me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve obviously made your decision already. Why take the risk I might tell Yurll or Whalg-General?” She still didn’t look at him.

  “I won’t stop you from doing so,” he said. She knew as well as he what would happen if she did: The High Council was capable of acting swiftly when a majority of its members were aligned, but like all governing bodies it was just as capable of interminable debate when those members were not in agreement. This would be one of the latter times, he was sure, and they were welcome to their arguments. Let the councilors debate what to do with Mose when the object of the discussion was contained.

  Daikar felt too restless to continue sitting. He snatched up their cups and ferried them to the sink. Speaking to the wall above it, he said, “I told you because I thought you deserved to know. And to hear it from me now, rather than once it was done.”

  “How considerate of you.”

  He turned, startled by her tone. Daikar could have counted on one hand the number of times he’d heard her use that bitter, sarcastic voice. And she’d never directed it at him before.

  “Did you think even for a moment about how this dec
ision of yours would make me feel?” Shomoro asked.

  He approached her slowly, raising one hand to her shoulder.

  “You’ve been under a lot of stress. I can’t imagine what it’s been like, living under this threat. But we’re going to fix this. We’ll make it so you never have to get near Mose—”

  “It could have been me.”

  The words stopped him half a body length from her. He let his hand drop. “What?”

  “If the White Arrows hadn’t captured me first, I could have ended up in Mose’s place. Working as the Project’s assassin.”

  She stepped backward, placing a precise body length between them. She was staring at him with wide eyes, as though he were about to attack her. “If our roles were reversed, and I were being sent here to kill Mose, it would be me the two of you were about to imprison indefinitely.”

  “But it’s not,” he said. “You’re here, and Mose is out there.

  That’s the reality.”

  “He was your friend,” she said in a near whisper. “And you would still do this to him?”

  A needle of pain pricked at his scar, but with effort he kept from wincing. It was just old nerve damage reacting to stress and his own heightened emotions. “What Mose was or wasn’t back then isn’t important. I’m doing this for y—”

  “Don’t!” Her shout seemed to compress the already small room. “Don’t say you’re doing this for me.” An expression of disgust curled her upper lip and flooded her scent with bile. His stomach curdled as he realized it was the same expression he’d feared to see on her face after his mock attack in the sparring chamber. He’d crossed a line then, deliberately and with her full consciousness of what he was doing. Now he realized he’d crossed another line, stumbled over it unthinkingly.

  “I would like you to leave now,” Shomoro said with deadly politeness, “and not to come back.”

  Daikar left without a word. Though he still didn’t understand why, he knew he’d said too much already.

  Chapter Ten

  Darkness enfolds him, hot and cloying. Suffocating.

  Blacker than anything Gau has known before or since.

  Some part of him remembers it is the darkness of his mother’s cloak, as she presses him to her chest. Carrying him as she stumbles down the tenement’s narrow stairs. Acrid fear—hers? His? Both?—fills his nostrils, below it the charred carbon stink of discharging slug guns. Shouts and shrieks lance through his skull before being drowned out by another fusillade above them. The concrete stairs shake as booted feet pound down them in pursuit.

  He feels the exhaustion trembling in his mother’s legs as she rounds the final landing. The ground-floor apartment’s door is open. Beyond it, Osk faces beckon, their lips drawn back from teeth in fear, though Gau knows they will stay at their posts until everyone is either through, or dead. Two support a trapdoor, a black maw leading down under the building. His mother throws herself toward it, as she did not have time to do then, and a second before the shadows take them both Gau realizes he’s dreaming. The pressure of her embrace melts away, everything melts away, and he is falling—

  Gau awoke tangled in his blankets, a sheen of sweat on his face. He’d pulled one corner of the blanket over his snout as he slept, and he threw it off and thrashed his way free. For a few breaths he sat there, staring at the wall, still half in the folds of the dream. The apartment around him was dusk dim. He and the Djandjer-Pralsh had gone to sleep around midmorning, to await sunset and final preparations. The quality of light meant it must be nearly time.

  He peeked through the crack between the plywood sheets covering the balcony. The setting sun painted the city orange.

  There was still water from the balcony’s catch basin stored in the sink. Gau splashed some on his face. Chills ran over his spine and legs that had nothing to do with the lukewarm water; no matter how long he stood there drying them, his palms were slick with sweat. He rubbed his hands uselessly on his cloak one more time, then left the apartment for the ground floor, padding down the same stairs his mother had fled by twenty years before.

  Lorsk had chosen for a gathering place the same ground-floor apartment where Chii Ril died. It had been left pretty much as it looked then—Gau avoided looking directly at the bullet holes and gouges that marred the cheap sheetplast walls. It was a larger suite, two rooms, but it seemed small with thirty-some Osk packed inside. The Djandjer-Pralsh huddled in groups of four or five, making conversation while they disassembled and cleaned ancient rifles. Each group was surrounded by a lake of oily canvas on which the weapon parts had been laid out in neat, exploded versions of themselves. Several looked up as Gau entered the room and jabbed their snouts at him.

  He gave an acknowledging jab, then paused. At the front of the first room, Lorsk crouched with Jarn and Kevret, the leader of the faction’s engineer corp. The three of them were intently going over schematics printed on flimsies. Beside Kevret, another collection of machine parts had been laid out on a cloth. At a glance Gau could tell it wasn’t a rifle but the half-assembled inner workings of an improvised explosive device.

  Kevret would be using more than one of those before the night was out.

  But that wasn’t what had made him stop. It was the trapdoor in the center of the room in front of the three faction leaders. The hinged slab of concrete was standing open, propped in place by thick metal rods. Gau had seen that door standing open only once before tonight.

  Underneath was a storeroom containing the Djandjer-Pralsh’s central cache of supplies. A tunnel in the back wall exited to the sewers, carved by painstaking hours of using blades and crude tools fashioned from the junkyards around Tarbreak. The only reason the Djandjer-Pralsh still lived was that tunnel; it was how they and the few civilian survivors had escaped the pogrom Lorsk’s campaign of protest had unleashed.

  Ariveth saw him a second before he spotted her. She crouched with the rest of the suppliers who’d sourced the weapons they would be using later tonight. Ariveth rose and wove her way through the huddled groups.

  “We were expecting you earlier,” she said.

  For a moment, his dream pulled at him. “Sometimes I don’t sleep well.”

  A frown tugged at the corners of her mouth. “I wish you’d come and stay with Jarn and me,” she said. “Sleeping alone, in your old apartment . . . it’s not healthy, Gau. All it does is remind you of what you lost.”

  “Maybe I want to be reminded,” he said, too loudly. Several snouts turned to them, and he lowered his voice. “I’ll think about the offer. Later. Did you get the guns?”

  The sharp points of her teeth showed as she smiled. “And then some. Come see.”

  Arrayed on a separate oilcloth were assembled, cleaned versions of the rifles the rest of the faction were preparing, as well as an assortment of long, gleaming metal hooks. Their ends had been cleverly fit into leather sheaths that would fit over a hand.

  Gau crouched and examined them without touching them; it was crucial the business ends remain clean of any Osk DNA.

  “The rifles are Baskar makes, too, I take it?” he asked Ariveth. She jabbed, and gestured at Drej, the supply leader, to explain. Drej was an older oskvan who Gau had heard had lost his right arm to an Urd razorcannon. He tapped one of the guns with the shiny black prosthetic jacked into his shoulder.

  “Teluk mass-printed thousands of these rifles back when its intervention in the Terran-Urd war looked like a winning proposition,” said Drej. “Quite a few have leaked into the shadow markets over the years. They’re untraceable, and all of us have used them before—well, most of us,” he amended with a glance at Gau and Ariveth.

  “The only problem is they’re a bit too generic,” she said. “By themselves, the rifles wouldn’t be enough to throw the Arrows off our scent trail.”

  “Hence your idea,” Gau said, hovering one hand over the metal hooks. He’d been impressed when she suggested using meat hooks to simulate the wounds made by Baskar claws. The leather sheaths to improve grip wer
e a nice touch; it must have taken her and the other suppliers hours to stitch them in place with heavy thread and leather needles, all of it sourced through shadow market channels as illicit as those that had supplied the guns. The Expansion didn’t like commerce taking place under its snout, but the Aival shadow market had grown too entrenched to be rooted out by anything less than slash-and-burn tactics that were likely to bring down the wrath of powerful interstellar business ventures. The Baskar-led Directive, for one.

  Drej looked uneasy, stroking the fingers of his prosthetic hand with his real one. Perhaps a similar thought had occurred to him. “I just hope this doesn’t come back to hurt us. If the Baskar catch wind that we’ve made them a target—”

  “They won’t,” Gau said. “Because we won’t. By the time the White Arrows think about paying a visit to the Baskar communities here, we’ll have already hit them again, with entirely different tactics. They’ll be chasing shadows.”

  “Lorsk seems to think so,” Drej said slowly. He fell silent, as though he realized the lapse he’d just committed—if not in his words, then in his tone. But his silence said what his words wouldn’t: Lorsk had thought a lot of things, had led them from one debacle to the next, from the quagmire of Rreluush-Tren to the even more fatal mire of Diego Two. None of them could admit out loud that their perfect leader had gotten most of them killed and given the remnants nothing to strive for but survival.

  Ariveth touched Gau’s shoulder, and he startled. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You smell tense.”

  Gau inhaled. “Just excited.” He gently removed her hand and stood. “I should check in on the rest of the preparations.”

  Gau stopped to check in at each station, chatting with the groups as they cleaned the shadow market plasma rifles or did practice drills with the metal claws, getting used to their balance and heft. As his circuit brought him near the open trapdoor again, Kevret rose from her place beside Lorsk. With a slight tilt of the head, she beckoned him to the empty kitchenette in the corner of the room. The built-in counters made the space too cramped to be good for drilling or field-cleaning weapons, so the others had left it alone.