The woman on the comm screen frowned, her elegant lips pursed. She was one of the top people he had access to, stationed in the halls of power on Terra. Not as high up as the ancient things in their climate-controlled towers on Terra, living on a diet of hormones and concentrated nutrients, stumbling through the hollow shell of their rule while the real rulers did the work beneath them. In truth, he wouldn’t want to talk to them anyway. There would be no point.
“This is a sensitive matter, Mr. Sinder.” The woman regarded him with narrowed eyes, passing a hand down the perfect angles of her face. “You understand that. This isn’t merely a matter of getting the formalities taken care of. This isn’t just about stamping and turning in the proper paperwork. If you’re allowed to do this, you and your people will have to be granted the highest clearance available. In terms of access to information, you would be the equivalent of both a top executive and a top administrator. I can’t hand that kind of thing out like candy.”
“I understand.” Sinder took a breath, trying to keep his impatience from showing. None of this was anything he didn’t already know. “If you could expedite the process at all, if I can give you anything that would make the whole machinery run a little faster—”
“Send me whatever intelligence you’ve compiled. I’ll need to take this up the chain.”
So the ancient ones would need to be brought into it. The Founders. Old gods, fog-minded and weak-willed, thinking they were strong enough to resist death itself, when in fact they were simply too afraid of it to face it. Sinder felt increasing scorn for their apparent belief that their desperate, hollow half-life was perfection, instead of the effortless, intrinsic thing he imagined perfection must truly be: an existence in which pristine, perfect life was so deeply written into the code that weakness and death would never touch it. To even hint at disrespect for the Founders was one step from blasphemy, though Sinder was almost certain that more than a few people held his opinion. The Founders were the fathers and mothers of everyone. They had set down the foundations on which the Protectorate was built. Their word was law.
Their word was bullshit.
“Whatever you have to do.” Sinder inclined his head; a tiny version of a bow. “I appreciate you taking the time to consider my request.”
The comm screen flicked off, and Sinder sat back, letting out a sigh before he went about the business of compiling and sending the pertinent files.
Of course no part of this could be easy.
Suddenly restless, he got up and left his quarters, heading out into the corridors in the direction of the bridge. But halfway there he turned and started on the route that would take him down to the gym. He wasn’t dressed for a workout, but his traveling clothes would do, light and loose as they were. Even if he only lifted some weights, it might take the tension out of his muscles. Maybe he could even sleep after.
It was second shift, the ship alive in its own version of midday, but the gym wasn’t especially crowded. It was a relatively small facility, with weights, a few treadmills, and a ring for practicing hand-to-hand combat. Adjacent to it was a firing range. The idea of using that was briefly attractive—but no. No, he needed to work his body. His body was the thing getting in the way.
It was strange. He hardly ever felt like this. Then again, he tended to get a good deal more in the way of sleep.
He was only mildly surprised to see Alkor on one of the benches, the muscles in her arms straining as she hefted a hand weight, her silver hair pulled back in an even more severe knot than usual. He had been able to perceive under the crisp lines of her uniform that she kept herself toned and strong, but now he could see how true that was. He took a seat beside her and smiled. For her part, she glanced at him, nodded, and turned her attention back to her reps.
“Sinder.”
“Captain.” He paused, watching her, then went on. “I wanted to say, I appreciate your flexibility.”
She flicked her gaze up at him again, arching a brow. “I’m not even stretching.”
He laughed lightly. “You know what I mean. I realize you wanted to be done with this mission a good many days ago. I won’t forget your dedication. And I’ll make sure important people are aware of it.”
“I’m not doing this for pats on the back.” She shifted the weight to her other hand and began another set of reps. “I told you, I care about a job done right. I’ll see this through to the end.”
“Regardless. I appreciate it.”
“Did you hear back yet?”
Sinder shrugged, got to his feet and headed over to the sets of weights, selecting fifteen pounds to start and returning to the bench. “I spoke to someone. She said she had to run it up the chain. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m confident.” He flexed the weight upward, enjoying the pleasant strain. “We have him. All we have to do is get him.”
“And you’re really that sure?”
“I am.” He let out a hard breath. “I know I have no proof. But I feel it. He’s there.”
She paused, wiping sweat away from her forehead, peering at him. “You’re a strange man, Isaac Sinder.”
He laughed once more. “It’s not the first time I’ve been told that.” He fell silent, thinking, then glanced up at her, suddenly oddly shy. Shyness wasn’t common to him, but it came along with the memories that were washing over him, so he didn’t resist it. “When I was a child, I think everyone was a little put off by me.”
Alkor set the weight down and retrieved a bottle of water from under the bench. “You didn’t have many friends?”
“No, I had a few. Not good ones.” He shrugged again, a little awkwardly, an echo of much older, much worse awkwardness. “I was … focused inward. I thought a lot. Spent a lot of time alone. It served me pretty well, in the end.”
“I guess I can see how it might.” She was still studying him, and as he continued to lift, he found himself enjoying the scrutiny. “What was your major? In university?”
“Would you believe philosophy? With a focus in ethics?”
“Actually, yes.” She favored him with another of those small smiles. “You’ve shown repeatedly that you’re a man of convictions. Pragmatic, but …” She rolled a shoulder. “I think I can respect you. Even if I don’t always agree with your … methods.”
Sinder barked a sardonic laugh, shifting to his other arm. “That’s a relief.” And it was. He wasn’t sure when he had started to care what Alkor thought of him, or why—though he did. It was important, of course, that they have a good working relationship, but although the captain could be exasperating, difficult, and altogether prickly … he liked her.
Which he didn’t often do with anyone.
Alkor inclined her head in mock graciousness. “I do believe you’ll get Yuga, for what it’s worth.” She hesitated, then went on. “Do you really think he’s that great of a threat?”
He stopped and stared at her. How could she still question something so self-evident?
But then again, she might not see as clearly as he did. She was a soldier, first and foremost. Her mind was made for specifics, for the completion of clear tasks, and larger scale thinking was perhaps beyond her. As it should be. So he nodded, trying to appear as patient as he could.
“He might be the greatest threat we’ve encountered in generations. Not because he’s one man, but because he isn’t only one man. Alone, he might be barely more than a nuisance, whatever ability to destabilize he might possess, however much he might try to sow seeds of doubt and disloyalty. But there was Kerry. Now there’s Aarons. We have to assume that he has other friends in high places. It might be a conspiracy the scope of which we can only guess. And the Bideshi …”
His voice darkened. Very little of the whole business made him afraid … except this. “They’ve showed that they’re willing to attack us now. After generations of relative peace, they might well be massing for direct conflict. Not only with us but with everything we are. Adam is part of the reasons for that. I know it. He must
be. More than connected—he’s the center. Dead, he’s once again merely one man, and we lose our one chance to comprehend what’s actually going on here. How far it goes, how far it might go. We lose our one chance to truly understand what’s already happened.”
Alkor nodded. “So what’s the camp?”
Sinder blinked. “What?”
“The camp he’s supposedly hidden in. It’s one of ours, we know that. But I know the locations of all Protectorate detention centers, even the black sites, and I’ve never heard of this one. What is it?”
Sinder’s eyes narrowed. “She didn’t say. But …” Might as well tell her. She would know soon enough. “Its purpose seems to be the barrier here. We don’t have clearance to know what it is. Whatever it’s for …” He shook his head. If it was secret, it was for a reason, and it wasn’t his place to question it. He started lifting again, sighing.
“I don’t like it,” Alkor said quietly. “I don’t even know why. I just … There’s something about it that doesn’t feel right. If we—”
All at once, Sinder’s muscles seemed to disintegrate. There was a wobble, a tremble, and all the tension in them disappeared, the weight dropping to the floor with a reverberating thud. Around the gym, people paused and stared in his direction. Sinder stared back, wide-eyed, then down at the weight.
What had that been?
“I … must be tired.” He picked up the weight—the movement was normal. One by one, everyone turned away again. But the adrenaline in him had taken on a sharper edge, and when he caught Alkor’s eye, she was frowning at him.
“Maybe you’ve noticed that some people are dropping things. Maybe you’ve even felt it.”
“Maybe it’s happening to you.”
“You should maybe get some rest, instead of tiring yourself out even more down here.”
Sinder nodded. No doubt he was only overworked. Wasn’t this exactly what Yuga had been intending? Confuse, worry, sow the seeds of doubt and second-guessing. Letting him succeed would be to grant him one tiny victory, and Sinder wasn’t going to allow him that. He got up and set the weight back on the rack, lifting his arms behind his head and stretching his shoulders.
Really, he was much better now.
“I’ll speak to you soon,” he said, turning to go. “Please make sure that any messages for me are put through directly to my quarters. I’ll take them whenever they arrive.”
“Will do, Sinder.” He didn’t glance back, but it seemed to him that Alkor’s voice still held a hint of the keen scrutiny that he had seen on her face before. “Sleep well.”
He did, in the end. After a drink and some sedatives. But his dreams were troubling, and when he woke a few hours later, there was still no word.
Yuga, he thought. He lay on his back and imagined knocking the man to the ground, standing on his throat until he stopped struggling. Not death but total domination. The elimination of all resistance.
Yuga.
Aarons listened in silence. At the end of it he shook his head slowly, scanning Adam up and down, and Adam’s stomach dropped a bit. Dusk had fallen across the camp, and in Rachel’s shack the lamp was flickering, its power cells clearly running low. Adam guessed that she would have no easy way of getting new ones once they ran out. Light probably wasn’t a luxury afforded to many of the inmates by their caretakers, though the camp did seem to contain a black market of some kind.
Rachel was out on an errand—she hadn’t been clear about what exactly. In the corner, Lochlan was playing a game with the children that involved a series of sticks of splintered scrap wood and a little ball of clay. Adam couldn’t quite make out the rules, though his attention kept being strangely drawn to them.
He had never seen Lochlan with children before.
“Hey.” Aarons snapped his fingers under Adam’s nose, and Adam jumped a bit, turning his attention back to him. “Focus. We need to go over this.”
“Right.” Adam sighed. “I know it sounds crazy. Lochlan and I have—”
“You’re fucking right: it sounds crazy. It is crazy.”
“If we can get these people well, we can get the ships. I’ve gotten a good look at the guards by now: they’re all convinced that no one here is sufficiently strong enough to pose any significant threat. If they’re suddenly overrun by a bunch of healthy people—”
“Even if you can heal everyone here, a significant number of them aren’t what I’d call healthy.” Aarons scowled. “They’re malnourished. They’re exhausted. Dehydrated. They’d be weak no matter what you did. And maybe you missed the part where they don’t have guns?”
“We can get them guns.” Stubbornness rose in Adam, not least because part of him was whispering that Aarons was right. About all of it. “I’ve been watching, and I’m pretty sure the building to the right of the main gate is the armory. If we can get enough people in there—”
“How exactly would you get past the inner gate? Huh? Have you thought that far ahead?”
“I have.” Adam’s jaw tightened. Though maybe it was good that he was getting this kind of resistance. Having to reconsider. Convince. Which he would have to do over and over, if this was going to work. “We obviously can’t go over. I considered rushing the guards when they come to give us breakfast, but with the ones in the watchtowers, they’d mow us down. It’d be a massacre.”
Aarons smiled grimly. “So you can see sense.”
Lochlan glanced over his shoulder and snorted. “Oh, just wait.”
Adam shot him a glare—but Lochlan was smiling at him, and the smile wasn’t cold. So he did believe. Or he was open to it. He had scoffed when Adam had first told him the idea, but otherwise he had been quiet, had listened, though he hadn’t said what he thought.
“We can go under,” Adam said, turning back to Aarons. “We can dig.”
Aarons stared at him for a moment, then coughed a laugh. “Dig?”
“Yeah. They might’ve installed the fences so they go down a ways, but we won’t know until we check.”
“They’ll see us.”
“They actually won’t,” Lochlan said. “Not if we’re careful about where we do it. I went out an hour or so ago, and took a gander at how the shadows lie. About halfway down the left side of the inner fence, there’s a spot where the shacks obscure about five feet of space from either of the guard posts, and there’s no direct line of sight from the other buildings. Not that I could see. There’s patrols, but they’re predictable. It’s absolutely goatshit, but I think it could work. If we get fabulously lucky.”
Aarons looked from one of them to the other, his twisted face even more twisted than usual. Adam watched him carefully, but—also even more than usual—it was almost impossible to say which way he was leaning.
After a few minutes, he coughed and passed a hand over his tousled hair. “Okay. Leaving aside how completely ridiculous that is for one minute, how are you going to heal so many people? What’s your time frame? ’Cause near as I can see, healing this one person almost fucking killed you. There’s hundreds here. Let’s say you can maybe do two or three a day. Maybe. At most. It would take you months. Months that we don’t have.”
Adam was silent for a moment. This was what he kept coming back to. He didn’t need to ask what Lochlan thought. Lochlan probably wouldn’t see any point in trying to dissuade him.
“I don’t know,” Adam said at last. “I … I haven’t figured that out yet. Maybe I’ll get better at it the more I do it.”
“Or maybe you won’t.”
“Yeah, maybe I won’t.” It came in a sudden snap and his fists clenched. “Are you telling me I can’t try? Are you telling me I just waltz out of here and leave all these people behind? Leave those kids behind? Leave what I came here to do?”
“I don’t think anyone’s going to be doing any waltzing,” Aarons said dryly. “But yeah. Yeah, if it was up to me, that’s exactly what you’d be doing.”
“Well, it’s not up to you.” Adam crossed his arms over his chest. Necess
ary or no, talking like this made him so tired, and if he was honest, the weariness from before hadn’t left him. For better or for worse, Aarons was right. This drained him. It drained him dangerously. “You can leave if you want. I’m staying until everyone here is free.”
“Or dead.”
“It’s not up to you, either, chusile.”
Adam looked back at Lochlan, who was gazing at him with grave eyes. There was love there, though there was still anger. And sadness, deeper than he had seen in the man in a long time. Lochlan seemed older now, he realized. His face still held the youth it had had when they’d first met, and fragments of the cocky rogue he had been, but now there was a seriousness there that Adam wasn’t sure he liked.
It reminded him of Kae, and he loved Kae. But Kae was Kae. Lochlan should be Lochlan.
You knew you couldn’t come out of this unchanged, child, Ixchel whispered. None of you. That brat of a boy is finally growing up. You did that. Love him for who he is. God knows he needs it.
“You can’t just save these people unless they want to be saved. It’s up to them. You’re not some hero riding in with shining armor, waving your sword and slaying all the dragons. If you were thinking that, you stop it now.” A hard edge came into his voice, and again Adam thought of Kae. Kae’s words coming out of Lochlan’s mouth. And true. “They know what they want, what they need. If they want to put their lives on the line to get out of here, that’s one thing. But if they choose not to, you have to listen to them and leave them be. I know you care. I know you only want to help. But you have to listen.”
Adam looked at him for a long moment. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, as he considered the concept. Hero. He hadn’t thought of himself that way. He didn’t think.
Had he?
“What if only some of them want to go?”
“Then we help those people the best we can,” Lochlan said simply. “But we let them work it out among themselves.”
This, it was true, hadn’t occurred to him. Why wouldn’t people want to fight back? Why wouldn’t they want to be well, to be free? But there had been a time when he hadn’t wanted to fight, either. Stealing, scraping by, waiting to die—that had been the easier path in some ways, though he hadn’t thought so at the time. Easier to accept. Far more difficult to resist.
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