Carnival

by Elizabeth Bear

  The pungent stinging scent of wire‑plant sap would serve to conceal her own body odor.

  She crammed herself into her impromptu shelter as dusk was growing thick under the trees, controlled her breathing, and resolutely closed her eyes.

  Kusanagi‑Jones sighed and tugged idly at his shackles, galling his wrists and pulling at the shallow knife cut on his forearm. He didn’t shift either the three‑centimeter‑thick staple they were locked to or the beam behind it. Apparently better bondage equipment had arrived during the night. And when he’d been lying on the ground in the center of camp, flat on his back from the paralytic agent the insurgents had used to bring him down, he’d seen several more good‑sized shelters all overhung with holographic and utility fog camouflage. At least two aircars had gone out after Lesa. The entire camp was under a false rain‑forest canopy, all but invisible from the air, probably protected by IR and other countermeasures.

  Coalition technology. Which also explained how they’d managed to shut down his wardrobe. Miss Ouagadougou wasn’t the only Coalition agent on the ground here.

  Somebody was running guns.

  And the nasty, suspicious part of Kusanagi‑Jones’s mind–the one that tended to keep him alive in situations like this–chipped in with the observation that he and Vincent hadn’t been trusted with the information. Which told him that they weren’t the primary operation in this theater.

  They were the stalking horse. And the real operation was an armed insurrection.

  Who’d miss a couple of disgraced old faggots anyway? And if Vincent happened to get himself killed in theater by enemy action, it wasn’t as if Katherine Lexasdaughter could complain, no matter how much pull she had with the Coalition Cabinet. Which made sense of yesterday’s unutterably stupid grab for Vincent in Penthesilea, too. It gave the Coalition one more big black check mark in the invade New Amazoniacolumn to present the Governors.

  At least he was more comfortable now. They’d permitted him access to a privy, and the shackles gave him enough slack to stand, sit, or even stretch out on his back if he crossed his arms over his chest–and enough slack to kick the “food” they’d brought him almost far enough away that he didn’t have to smell charred flesh every time he turned his head.

  The water, he’d drunk; it was clean, and there had been plenty of it, and if they wanted to drug him they didn’t need to hide it in his rations when another dart would work just fine. He had tried a few bites of the bread, but there was something cloying about the taste and texture that made him suspect it contained some ingredient he didn’t care to consume.

  He’d wait. He wasn’t hungry enough for it to affect his performance, yet.

  It was best that Lesa had escaped. She had a better chance of getting back than he did, and a better chance of being heard when she did so. And Kusanagi‑Jones was safer in captivity anyway. Less likely to be raped or tortured–and they hadn’t tried anything yet, though he wouldn’t bet his ration number on it–and more likely to survive the experience if they wanted to use him to extract something from Vincent.

  He wouldn’t be held as a bargaining chip, though. Not if they were already receiving Coalition aid. Presuming they knew who they were receiving it from. Which was presuming a lot.

  He shifted again, wishing he could rub the torn skin under his manacles or his cut shoulder. His docs weren’t dependent on the power supply of his watch or his wardrobe; they used the kinetic energy of his own bloodstream to power themselves, a failsafe that kept them operational as long as his heart was beating. And they were doing an acceptable job of preventing infection, and even speeding healing, but the wounds could hardly have itched more.

  Another damned irritation, like the hunger and the dehydration making him light‑headed in the heat.

  He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the post, and tried to think as Vincent would. What purpose would holding him serve? What was he doing alive?

  There was the obvious answer. Bait.

  “You know,” Kusanagi‑Jones said to the air, “he really only brings me along so they’ll have someone to take hostage.”

  He was bait. A hook in Vincent. Because the Right Hand had missed Vincent, and the Right Hand was taking aid from the OECC. And if anything happened to Vincent, while Katherine Lexasdaughter couldn’t very well take the OECC to task for it, she could certainly demand some kind of retaliation against New Amazonia for so carelessly disposing of her son. And if she didn’t, the Coalition could.

  Vincent’s abduction and death was probably a good enough excuse that the Governors would allow the OECC to go to war against New Amazonia. And if anybody in the Cabinet suspected that the recalcitrant leader of the Captain’s Council on Ur was plotting with a bunch of hysterical and heavily armed Amazons, the death of Katherine’s son at the hands of such might be seen as a good enough way of putting an end to any revolutionary alliances.

  And wasn’t it just a damned shame that Lesa had already left, and Kusanagi‑Jones didn’t have any way of transferring that particular startling deduction to Vincent.

  He could reconstruct the scenario easily enough. Lesa had followed Katya, caught her about to join Stefan and the rest of the revolutionaries, and Katya’s controller had taken Katya “hostage” with a weapon they both knew was loaded with stun capsules, but which Lesa would think lethal. After Kusanagi‑Jones rode to the rescue, Katya had had the presence of mind to establish herself on the winning team by incapacitating her colleagues…until Kusanagi‑Jones let his guard down long enough to get shot in the back like a rookie. And the Right Hand had seen a chance to reset its trap for Vincent.

  Kusanagi‑Jones closed his eyes again, settled his shoulders against the unfinished wood of the beam, and tried to ignore the pain in his shoulder enough to nap. It looked like he’d be wanting to escape after all.

  He dozed intermittently through the heat of the afternoon. His disabled wardrobe dragged at his body and trapped the heat against his skin, raising irritated bumps, but the docs were working well enough to seal his wound. Occasional shadows across the gap under the door told him when he was observed, and the sweat rolled across his forehead and down his neck to sting his eyes and his cuts.

  He didn’t think they’d unsecure him after dark, and was surprised when, as the light was failing, the chain around the doorpost finally rattled and slid. A moment later, the door cracked open and a big silhouette filled the frame.

  The door shut behind it and Kusanagi‑Jones heard the chain refastened by someone outside.

  “Michelangelo,” the man said, as Kusanagi‑Jones was still blinking his eyes to refocus them after the light. “I am truly sorry about this.”

  It was Robert. As he approached, Kusanagi‑Jones pushed himself up the post, determined to meet him standing.

  He found the apology somewhat specious, but this didn’t seem the time to explain. So he grunted, and considered for a moment how best to absorb the injury if it came to blows.

  But instead, Robert crouched just out of range of Kusanagi‑Jones’s feet and began pulling things from the capacious pockets of his vest. He laid them on the floor, bulbs of some cloudy yellowish fluid and three pieces of unfamiliar fruit. One was knobby and purple‑black in the dim light, the other two larger and creamy yellow, covered in bumps that reminded Kusanagi‑Jones unpleasantly of his current case of prickly heat.

  “I brought something you can eat,” Robert said, without rising. His shiny black boots creased across the toes as he balanced lightly, the insteps and toes daubed with clotted mud. Bloused trousers were tucked into the tops just below the knees. His head jerked dismissively at the flat leaf Kusanagi‑Jones had shoved as far away as he could. “I didn’t expect they would have taken any care about it.”

  Robert edged the offering forward, while Kusanagi‑Jones watched, feet planted and chained hands hanging at his sides. He kept his eyes on those creases across the toes of Robert’s boots, and not on the hands, or on the food. Or, most important after the e
ndless heat, the liquid.

  “What’s in the bulbs?” he asked when Robert had pushed them as close as he meant to and settled back on his heels.

  “Dilute bitterfruit. Electrolytes, sugars, and water. Factory sealed, don’t worry.”

  “Can’t exactly pick it up,” Kusanagi‑Jones said, moving his hands enough to make the shackles clank.

  Robert folded his arms over his knees and looked up, mouth quirking, the faint light catching on the scars that marked his shaven scalp. “Don’t you know how to juggle? Use your feet.”

  Kusanagi‑Jones sighed. But he knew how to juggle.

  He leaned against the pole, angled one leg out and braced it beside the offerings, and used the ball of the other one to roll the first bulb onto the top of his toes. Then he planted the second foot, shifted his weight, and used the first to flip the bulb into his hands.

  Robert applauded lightly, so Kusanagi‑Jones lifted an eyebrow at him and angled his body from the waist, a bow amid clanking. Then he raised his hands to his mouth, the cool, sweating bulb turning the filth on his palms into mud. He tore through the stem with his teeth.

  The beverage was an acquired taste. It stung his mouth like tonic water.

  It might be nasty, but it cleared his head. He drank slowly, so as not to shock his system, and then retrieved the second globe the same way as the first before he said anything else to the patient, motionless Robert. “So,” he said, weighing the soft‑sided container in his palms, “what price charity?”

  “No price.” He hesitated. “If you gave me your promise of good behavior, I could see you moved to better quarters.”

  “Don’t pretend concern for my welfare.”

  “I am concerned,” Robert said. “We’re freedom fighters, not barbarians. And I’m sorry your arrival here was so rough. It was improvised. They were under instructions not to harm you or Vincent, or Lesa.”

  “You make it sound almost as if we’re not bargaining chips.”

  Robert smiled, teeth flashing white in the darkness. “You’re almost not. You won’t give me your word?”

  And Kusanagi‑Jones opened his mouth to lie–

  And could not do it.

  He could justify his failure in a dozen ways. The simplest was to tell himself that if he gave Robert his word and broke it, here, now, under these circumstances, he would become useless as an operative in any capacity relating to New Amazonian culture, forever. Their system of honor wouldn’t tolerate it. But it wasn’t that.

  “Thanks for the drinks,” he answered, and shook his head.

  And Robert grunted and stood, and made a formal sort of bow with folded hands. “Don’t forget your fruit,” he said, and turned to rap on the door, which opened to let him leave.

  By the time Kusanagi‑Jones finished the fruit, the hut was as dark as the one he’d woken up in. He dried slick hands on his filthy gi, and then clutched his chains below the shackles, holding tight. Leaning back on his heels, pulling the heavy chain taut, he began to rock back and forth against the staple, trying to limit the pressure on his wounded arm.

  Something sniffed Lesa’s lair in the dark of night, the blackness under the shadow of the trees. Whatever it was, it found the wire‑plant discouraging and continued on its way. Lesa slept in fits, too exhausted to stay awake and too overwrought to sleep. She’d never spent a longer night.

  In the morning, the cheeping and whirring of alarm calls brought her from a doze as the skies grayed under an encroaching sun. Lesa froze in her paltry shelter, jammed back against the leaf litter that cupped her meager warmth, and held her breath.

  There were three of them, two males and a woman. All carried long arms–the woman in addition to the honor at her hip, while the men had bush knives–and one of the males and the woman held them at the ready. The third had his slung and was nodding over a small device in the palm of his hand. They conferred too quietly for Lesa to make out the words, and then the woman leveled her weapon and pointed it at Lesa’s tree. “You might as well come out, Miss Pretoria. Otherwise I’ll just shoot you through the vines, and that would be ignominious.”

  Lesa’s cramped limbs trembled as she pried herself from her cave, collecting more long superficial scratches from the wire‑plant as she pushed it aside. She stood hunched, her resting place having done nothing to help the spasm in her neck, and stared at the taller of the two males. His hair was unmistakable, a startling light color that Lesa was almost tempted to call blond, though nobody classically blond had survived Assessment. He was out of context, though, and it took her a moment to place him. The shock of recognition, when it came, was disorienting. Stefan. Stefan, the gentle male who worked as a secretary in the Cultural Directorate. Under Miss Ouagadougou.

  Not a direction in which Lesa had been looking for conspiracy.

  “Your hands,” the woman said, continuing to cover her while the second male slid his detecting equipment into a cargo pocket and came forth to immobilize her wrists. No cords this time, but ceramic shackles joined by a hinge that allowed only a limited range of motion.

  At least he cuffed her hands in front of her and the smooth ceramic didn’t irritate her lacerated wrists. He stepped back three quick steps and grabbed Stefan by the shoulder, turning him away.

  The woman didn’t let her rifle waver, and Lesa watched her for several moments, and then sighed and sat down on the mossy log, her bound hands in her lap.

  Backs turned or not, she could hear more than they intended her to. And it wasn’t reassuring. Robert’s name was mentioned, followed by a mumble that made the woman snap over her shoulder, “I don’t give a damn what shethinks.”

  “If we take her back to camp, it’s just one more decision to make in the end,” Stefan said. He turned, and caught her gaping before she could glance down. His mouth firmed over his teeth, an expression she understood. A duelist’s expression, and one she’d seen on the faces of stud males before a Trial.

  “It’s too much risk to keep her alive,” he said, and Lesa let the breath she seemed to be holding hiss out over her teeth, and, for a moment, closed her eyes.

  “And too much risk to shoot her,” the woman said. Lesa opened her eyes in time to see Stefan answer her with a flip of his hand, but she continued. “She has family in the group, Stefan. I don’t think anybody’s going to be comfortable with the idea that their relatives aren’t safe–”

  “Do you suppose they thought we’d be able to overthrow the government without bloodshed?”

  The woman bit her lip. “I don’t think they expected their lovers to be shot out of hand.”

  Stefan nodded, still staring at Lesa, who managed another shallow breath around the tightness in her throat. “It’ll have to look natural, then,” he said. “That’s not hard. There are plenty of ways to die in the jungle. Exposure, fexa, sneakbite.”

  He glanced around, and Lesa wobbled to her feet. The woman leveled her rifle again, her squint creasing the corners of her eyes. Thank you,Lesa mouthed at her, but she only shrugged and shifted her grip on the rifle.

  “Here,” Stefan said. “Mikhail, give me your gloves.”

  The second man pulled a pair of hide gloves from another cargo pocket and passed them to Stefan. He tugged them on, his eyes on his fingers rather than Lesa as he made sure they were seated perfectly. And then he walked toward her, past her, and began tugging at the mess of wire‑plant until the bulk of it was on the ground, the long stems dragging down from their parasitic anchor points in the canopy. Nests fell in showers of twigs and twists of desiccated parasitic moss, two yellow‑gray eggs shattering on the ground and one bouncing unharmed on a patch of carpetplant.

  When he’d freed most of the vines, Stefan placed his hands carefully between thorns and gave the plant a hard, definite yank, enough to sway the strangler oak it rooted in and bring another shower of twigs and dead leaves down. A glistening black Francisco’s macaw swooped down, shrieking, and made a close pass at his head, fore‑wings beating wildly and the hind‑wings
folded so close to its body that the gold primary feathers merged with the tail plumage.

  Stefan ignored it completely, even when it made a second pass, close enough for the claws of its hind‑wings to brush his hair. “Bring her up here.”

  Mikhail and the woman started forward, though she waited until Mikhail had a good grip on Lesa before lowering the rifle.

  Lesa made them drag her. A few scuffs in the earth might be revealing, if the right person found her body.

  If anyone ever found her body.

  She shook her head. Negative thinking. She wouldfind a way out of this.

  Mikhail unlocked her cuffs, but by then Stefan had her arms too tightly restrained for her struggling and feet‑dragging to make any difference. But she kept squirming and kicking anyway, until fighting made the thorns of the wire‑plant Stefan wound around her bite that much deeper. Then she sagged, dead weight, but he hung her on the plant like so much laundry anyway, vines winding her wrists and crossing her chest, thorns sunk like hooks into her skin.

  When Mikhail released her and the thorns took her weight, she couldn’t even scream. She choked out a whimper, bit her lip, managed to pull it back to the barest whine. Her flesh stretched against imbedded thorns.

  Mikhail backed up, scrubbing his palms against his capaciously pocketed trousers, and the woman looked down as Stefan draped a few more vines artistically across her chest. Then he also moved away, frowning at his handiwork. Lesa could barely see him, though the morning had grown bright. Her vision was empty at the edges, and every breath, no matter how shallow, sank the vine’s three‑centimeter thorns more deeply into her skin. Some of them shattered, stripping off the vines, but there were many more, and they were fresh and green.