Nkiruka hazarded her own smile. “You’re not that ancient, surely.”
“Aren’t I? I feel it in me, despite your courtesy. But I’m not here to discuss my age. We must talk, Nkiru.” Her familiar name. Less formal. It did nothing whatsoever to put her at ease. “I think it would be best if we didn’t do so here. Will you walk with me?”
Nkiruka swallowed. “I thought you wanted to sit.” She cringed inwardly. Part of her had meant it as gentle teasing, since he seemed amenable to it today, but instead it came out like the protest of a child.
But Adisa ignored it. Slowly he rose and held out a hand, beckoning. “I do. But my position requires that I not put my own desires first. Please, come.”
That was pointed. Sharply so. He led her out of the main hall and into the winding corridors again, the ship closing in around her in a way that was comfortable rather than claustrophobic. It was more comfortable than the hall had been, and depending on their eventual destination, it might be a good move after all to avoid conducting whatever business he had with her in that great open space.
Except that, after a few minutes of walking, it became apparent that they were heading upward. Up toward the High Fields and the Arched Halls.
She sighed.
“You know that this could go in a particular direction,” Adisa said as they climbed the winding stair that would take them to the wide stretch of rolling meadow. “Or at least I could get there by particular means. I could sidle my way around to it through pleasantries and conversation that made you no challenge and no threat, and then when you were lulled I could let my real object stand, and force you to deal with it by surprise.”
He fell silent again, and Nkiruka let the silence linger, not because she didn’t want to break it but because she honestly had no idea how to do so. She had always found Adisa somewhat intimidating, though he had never been anything but kind to her in the few times they had interacted beyond a glance and a passing nod.
“I could do those things,” Adisa said. They were passing through the meadow now, the wood rising up ahead of them with its treetops kissing the curved, transparent ceiling and the sunlamps set into the spiderweb of its frame. “But I think there would be no real surprise in it for you. More, I think it would be an insult to you. You’re not a stupid woman, Nkiruka. I know it. You know it. Everyone else is well aware.” He halted and abruptly faced her. “Why else would they come to you the way they do?”
Nkiruka shifted from foot to foot. There wasn’t really any point in denying it. “You know of that, then.”
Adisa smiled faintly. “Of course I do. It’s a difficult thing to not be aware of, and in my position I have to make it my business to know things. So,” he continued, starting to walk again. “I won’t take that approach. Instead I’ll be direct.”
But he said nothing else until they were under the spread, interlaced branches of the Arched Halls, the dimness settling around them like a blanket, along with the quiet creaks and whispers of the trees and the distant singing of those observing old rites.
As every time, the glowbugs came to her. Nkiruka lifted her hands as the two of them walked and the little specks of light circled her fingers as if she herself was bringing them into being.
She could feel Adisa watching her.
“The council has decided that we must choose a new Aalim within two weeks’ time,” he said. “You are the foremost candidate at this point. I need to know whether, if called, you’ll serve your people.”
He didn’t stop, didn’t turn to her, but she gazed at him, her mouth working. It didn’t matter how he came to it. There it was in the end. Here, in this moment, she was being asked to choose.
She closed her hands and the glowbugs flew off and were gone.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. The corners of her eyes prickled and stung.
Adisa stopped. This time he halted her with two hands on her shoulders, and when she scrubbed the tears from her eyes and looked up at him, she saw that his face was grave.
“You must know.”
“I don’t.” Didn’t he realize what he was asking? Didn’t he know what it meant? She was opening her mouth to let those words go when it hit her like a slap to the face: of course he knew. “I have a woman,” she said, still barely above a whisper. “Satya. I mean to marry her.”
“I know it.” Adisa gave her shoulders a gentle squeeze and let his hands drop. “So you know that I would prefer not to ask this of you.”
“So don’t ask it.” Nkiruka turned from him and started to make her way toward the deeper halls, half-blind, almost blundering. “There must be others.”
“There are.” Adisa was following her easily, his voice low and calm behind her. “None of them half as promising as you. And Nkiruka—Nkiru.” He stopped her with a hand on her arm and she faced him, flushed, so much angrier than she wanted to be. This time when he spoke his voice wasn’t much more than a murmur. “You know the consequences for refusal. Nothing will ever be the same for you. I’m here to tell you now that you will be asked, because I’m only one member of the council, one in a group of many, and I won’t be able to dissuade them from you. They wouldn’t consider romantic attachments a sufficient reason. They never have before.”
“‘Romantic attachments,’” Nkiruka echoed scornfully, and barely stopped herself from spitting into the dirt. The once-welcoming Arched Halls now seemed to threaten her, branches becoming hands reaching down for her, intending to clutch and squeeze. “That’s all they are? I’m not suited, Adisa. Do you think I would be fighting it like this if I were? Do the suited ones say no?”
Adisa was silent for a few moments, and Nkiruka gazed at his unreadable face, trembling. She had overstepped. She had overstepped so far. But she was no longer certain where the line was. Maybe it was moving.
“Many times.”
Nkiruka closed her eyes, tears escaping down her cheeks.
“I saw her dancing,” Adisa said softly. “The death-dance. Her knives in her hands, burning with life. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I never have since. I would have made her my wife. Lived out my life with her. Not a day goes by, Nkiru, when I don’t wonder what might have been. Not one day.”
Nkiruka took a long, shuddering breath. She knew it. Most people on Ashwina knew. But he had never spoken of it, nor had Ixchel. The subject had never been so blunt, so soaked in pain. “Maybe you never should have had to choose.”
“Maybe. Nevertheless. We did. And you remember Lakshmi. I know you do. We all do. She chose—and then in the end she chose poorly. She chose one over many, after she had sworn to do the latter, and now she no longer walks these halls. Regardless, she had to choose. So will you.” He glanced away from her, up into the branches through which the stars shone. Somewhere among the tangled roots of the place, Ixchel had been laid to rest, but there was no record of where, and those who had interred her had done so under the influence of shala, their memories blurred and muddied.
She might be anywhere. So she was everywhere.
“Will I?”
Adisa looked down at her again, and what she saw on his face was kindness and hardness and a sadness so deep and so vast it was like gazing into the night itself.
“Yes, you will. Sooner or later, my dear, we all must.”
“Well, this might actually be a step up.”
Together, Adam and Lochlan stared at Aarons. Lochlan coughed a laugh—he had grown to respect Aarons in the past day, if not exactly to like him—but this seemed like the babbling of a crazy man. “What?”
Aarons lifted his bowl of sour mush. “We have food, such as it is. They gave us water. And we’re alive. Tell me that’s not at least sort of better than we were doing before.”
“Yeah, mitr, I think you might be working from a different definition of ‘better’ than I am,” Lochlan said dryly.
They were seated on a set of dirty crates set against a wall of one of the shacks—helping to hold it up, as far as Lochlan could tell. Since the
y had stepped inside, they had been left alone, and the people even appeared to be taking pains to avoid them. But they were being watched, and from all sides. Not only by the guard towers but by the ragged people of the camp, peering at them from doorways and makeshift alleys and from under lowered brows as they passed. When a harsh horn blast had announced supper, they had experienced their first real close contact with any of the camp’s other inhabitants, but even crushed together in a line to receive a plastic tube of water and a bowl of watery gruel, no one had spoken to them, and no one had met their eye.
No one was looking at them now either. People were heading inside their shacks. Threads of smoke were drifting up here and there as the chill of the night descended, prisoners taking what snatches of warmth they could make with whatever they could find. Everyone seemed exhausted, stooped, some nearly staggering. More than a few trembled, holding their hands close to their chests.
They must be suffering from lack of wholesome food as much as anything else.
Lochlan glanced down at his bowl and, twisting his mouth in distaste, tipped it back and drank the last of it before tossing it to the ground.
“Tastes like hydrated nutrient powder.” He made another face. “You know, like chalk.”
“Might be hydrated nutrient powder,” Adam said, draining his own bowl and discarding it beside Lochlan’s. “Or chalk. Both’re cheap, and I don’t get the sense that they care all that much about keeping these people alive. Or healthy.”
Aarons grunted. Lochlan nodded. A woman and two children stopped in passing, the children—a girl and a boy—staring at them with huge eyes. The woman appeared to be in her early thirties, her black hair cut short, her skin a deep brown—almost as deep as Kyle’s had been, though not quite. Hesitantly, Adam waved, and after a moment of apparent internal warfare, the girl darted forward and scooped their bowls out of the mud, backing away just as swiftly with her gaze locked on them, as if she expected them to lunge at her.
“No, hey,” Lochlan said, lifting a hand. “It’s okay, you can—”
Muttering something, the woman ushered the boy and girl onward, and they were lost in the maze of shacks.
“You see her?” Adam murmured. He was looking after the small family with a strange expression. Almost, Lochlan thought with a ripple of unease, haunted.
“Yeah, she seemed fucking terrified of us.” Aarons scowled—if possible—even more than he already was. “How’s that make her any different from anyone else here? Seriously, I know I’m intimidating, but come—”
“No, I don’t mean that.” Adam was rubbing his hands together, almost dry-washing them. Lochlan put out his hand, closed it over Adam’s, and Adam met his eyes, his own as wide as the children’s had been.
“The woman. Her hands. Did you see her hands? Lock, they were shaking.” He drew in a sharp breath. “What did she call this place? The woman who picked us up? ‘Quarantine.’ Shit, I can’t … I don’t know why I didn’t think of it until now.”
“Adam—” Lochlan could feel the direction this was going in. He could feel the shape of it as if it were emerging from the darkness, weaving itself into sense second by second. A quarantine. Yet, clearly exhausted, malnourished, and generally hopeless as these people were, none of them had any obvious signs of contagious disease. No explosive coughing, no sneezing, no lesions, no rashes or flushes of fever. Of course, not all serious illnesses would have visible signs, but even so …
“Look.” Adam spread his hands out in front of him. “In a place with conditions this bad, wouldn’t you expect to see some sick people? Sick in really obvious ways, I mean. Imagine if they were Bideshi.”
Aarons hunched forward, narrowing his eyes at him. “You’re saying … Holy shit, Yuga.”
“They’re all Protectorate,” Lochlan said. He knew it, now. They had only taken a close look at the one woman and her children, but now that he thought back, there had been more. People in the line had stumbled, nearly fallen—he had chalked it up to weariness and hunger, but now he wasn’t sure. And there was their appearance, their eerily perfect features, even worn and haggard and filthy. Like Adam’s, more than one way.
“They’re all Protectorate,” Adam echoed. “And they’re all sick with what I had. This is what they’ve been doing with the people who can’t be ignored anymore, Aarons. When there were too many of us to exile, they had to find another way.” He pressed his palm against his mouth, then let it fall. “I never thought … I should have.”
Lochlan lowered his head. He hadn’t thought either, mostly because it was unthinkable. He’d supported sending Adam away, but the truth was that exiling someone dying and in need of help and comfort would be one of the most shameful possible acts for a Bideshi. People were exiled for other reasons. Transgressions. Crimes.
This … Never. Never for any reason.
“Fucking hell.” Aarons didn’t sound horrified. He fell silent, and the three of them were quiet for a few moments. Lochlan reached once more for Adam’s hand and held it, and to him it felt as it always did: like an anchor.
He could only hope his was the same for Adam.
“So why haven’t they simply killed them?” Aarons asked, glancing around at the camp again. It was now almost deserted, but for sickly lights showing from inside the shacks and the few thin lines of smoke. “That would be a lot easier. If they can disappear these people, you’d think dumping them in a pit somewhere would be nothing to them.”
Adam shook his head, eyes wide and face slightly pale. “I don’t know. Maybe we can find out.” Abruptly he got to his feet, twisting his hand free from Lochlan’s. “We have to talk to them, find out more. We can’t just sit here, I need to—”
“What you need to do is rest.” Lochlan stood up beside him, touching his arm. He had seen this in Adam before, this determination to do whatever he thought was right, whatever the consequences for himself, and each time he had dragged Adam back from the brink, but each time it was tiring. “They’ll all be bedding down, anyway. You waltz into their houses and wake up their kids— I don’t think that’s going to make you many friends, chusile.”
“I can’t wait.” Adam turned on Lochlan, his eyes wilder than they had been. “Lock, this is … This is what I came out here for. This is what I was trying to find. I didn’t know it then, but I came back to help people. These people need help.”
“And how exactly are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know.” Adam spit the final word out and stalked a few feet away, raking his hands into his hair and tugging at the strands. When Lochlan glanced back at Aarons, the man shot him a warning look. Get a handle on him. “I’ll figure it out. I can’t do that by … I’m not going to drag an answer out of the air, Lock, you know that.”
“I know a lot of things,” Lochlan said softly. Soothingly. Once this had been the kind of thing Kae had done for him, kept his manner smooth when Lochlan had been passion and jagged edges. Settling calm over him with his even, controlled temper. Lochlan had never been good at doing that for himself. “I know these people are scared, Adam. I know they have every fucking reason to be. And I know that if you charge up to them all ‘Hi, my name is Adam Yuga d’Bideshi and I’m here to save you but I don’t know how yet,’ you’ll only freak them out, badly. They’ll think you’re insane. You need to be careful about how you do this. And you can’t do it when you really are pretty much out of your mind.”
He moved forward, curled his arms around Adam’s waist from behind and pressed his lips to the nape of Adam’s neck. “Rest, chusile. Rest with me. We’ll plan in the morning.”
Adam tensed—and then let out a long breath, relaxing back against Lochlan’s chest. For a moment the rest of the world fell away—the horror of the camp and the fear of the future, and it was only them, orbiting each other in that dance they knew so well by now.
We fit. We fit better than anything.
“Rest where?” Aarons said from behind them—his tone less gruff and the words less poi
nted. “I got no idea how we’d find a vacant shelter, and I’m guessing we wouldn’t be in for the most pleasant night bedded down in the mud.”
“You can stay with me.”
As one, they turned. Standing behind them all, her hands folded in front of her, was the woman they had seen before, the one who had led her children away. They weren’t with her now, and in the garish light that came from the guard towers, she appeared older than she had before.
Adam pulled himself free from Lochlan’s arms and took a step toward her—slow, hesitant, raising his hands. “Are you sure? That would be—”
“That would be very kind,” Lochlan finished. In happier surroundings he would be turning on the charm full blast, but that felt wrong here, so instead he worked to keep his outward self calm, undemanding. Be like Kae, he thought. Kae would be perfect here. And suddenly, in a wave of dull pain, he missed his old friend so much. “We’re new here, and I—”
“I know.” She gave them a thin, wry smile. “That much is obvious. No one gets much out of being neighborly here, at least not right away, but usually it doesn’t cost much, either, so we tend to hang together if no one makes trouble. It’s all we have here.” She pointed at Aarons, who looked back at her with his unscarred brow raised. “Why is he dressed like a peacekeeper?”
“Because he was one,” Aarons said gruffly. “Not anymore.”
The woman nodded. “You’re not the first one I’ve seen. There are peacekeepers in here. They got fucked like the rest of us.” She sighed and glanced over her shoulder. “I need to get back. Are you coming?”
“Yeah. Yeah, we’re coming.” Adam nodded at Lochlan. Come on.
Together they walked down a row of shacks and then another, turning to the right and heading toward the fence. There was no rhyme or reason in the way the shacks were constructed, no indication at all that they’d been constructed by whoever had established the camp. The prisoners appeared to have been given a pile of scrap material and instructed to fend for themselves.
The woman stopped and gestured to a shack on the end of the row, nearly pressed up against the fence itself. It wasn’t large, but it looked strong and tidy, and there was even a window beside the plastic-covered doorway, shaded in the same material.
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