by R. K. Syrus
No time for payback. I’ll help this couple, maybe they can help me get clear. They might know where I can find a good vehicle, or even a sat phone. Get to safety. Call the cavalry. Figure the rest out. Bryan, have I got a story for you that beats the battiest stuff T-Rex ever made up!
Sienna nudges the woman into the corner as she prepares to ease open the door. “We’ve got to get moving.”
“No we don’t, outlander.” She pushes back. “Even if I don’t see your smooth face, I would know you are a foreigner by the utter nonsense you talk, with our words in an accent which is perfect. If you really knew us, knew this place, you would know there is no ‘out from here’. Not for us. Where do we go they don’t find us? Are you going to take all of our family, our children, and their children? No?”
The woman quietly hacks the last word out as though it were a stubborn pomegranate seed stuck in her dry throat. She puts her hand on the man’s shoulder and guides him back down to sit against a wall.
“No, I don’t think so,” she hisses with finality. “Here, we go through what we must. Maybe they let us go, maybe we disappear. But what is certain, what we Wise Tribes know, is when you outsiders come, you only make things worse.”
Still speaking in hushed tones, the woman’s indignation fades into rhetoric. She points to Sienna’s torn clothing, which reveals her shoulder and presumably the yellow rose tattoo.
“You, you, foreigners.” She rolls her eyes. “With your immodest dress and body-art tattoos—is that astrology? Sorcery? Ach! Save us from blasphemy!”
Now she’s just ranting. Sienna hopes she won’t have to gag her hostess. Fortunately, the opinionated prisoner pauses, considering something. After a moment of straight-up staring, she asks, “Why do you come here?”
“To serve. Protect the innocent. To make a difference.”
“Phah!” It’s a good thing the local woman is dehydrated, otherwise Sienna would have a coating of Khorasani saliva to go with the rest of the filth on her torn Army shirt. The woman shakes her head.
Sienna’s saving them. And the old bat is giving her guff?
“Listen to my words, elderwoman,” she hisses back in the harshest Khorasani accent she can manage, which is pretty darn stern. “Are you calling me a liar?”
The woman doesn’t flinch. “Maybe it is a truth. But we of the Six Hills are called the Wise Tribes. And it is not your truth. Not all.” She studies Sienna. “You answer like my grandchildren when they have done something wrong. All practiced, reciting. Yes, even with my old eyes I can see you are still young and not shamefully plain. And not so dumb, either, to escape from these jackals. Why you not stay in America? You could have rich husband, easy life. But no. You risk everything. Why?”
I should move. These two—they’ve given up.
Instead Sienna gives voice to something in a way she’s never expressed to anyone else. “To find… someone. Someone who took something from me.” While this cell is small, her voice seems even more meager.
The woman nods, seemingly kinder now, in the harsh way of desert people. Revenge and payback, these things all Khorasanis understand in their souls.
“And if you find this person,” the woman asks. “What he took from you, will you get it back?”
“I… I don’t know.”
Sienna took some local currency off Ghazan. She hands it to the woman. “Here, you might need this. Hide it.”
“I know what to do.” The woman snatches up the cash. “Finally you offer something useful.”
She waves Sienna out. The weary, canny woman concludes the coast is clear at the same time Sienna’s years of training tells her the same.
“Now you go.”
The woman inclines her head slightly to the left. It is a subtle, polite gesture of acknowledgement one sees exchanged by women passing each other. An elegant and friendly motion if a woman is clad in ḥijāb or chadri. This woman is not. She and the man have been stripped nearly naked.
“You have been kind to us according to your own naïve, foreign ways,” the local woman says. “For that I give you the blessing of our wisdom. We the Wise Tribe of the Six Hills say: Beware, for the wound that bleedeth inwardly is the most dangerous.” In a motion that is half pat, half push out the doorway, her companion signals their time is done. “Lock the door after you.”
Sienna eases the door open. Air hangs hot and still. She slips out. As the door eases shut, the matron’s final admonishment follows.
“And we also say: Those who plant thorns must never expect to gather roses.”
28
Sienna ducks into the hall. The small stream in the gutter runs more thickly with the mixed blood of three dead men added to its flow. It trickles by the door to the couple’s cell, a metal tombstone. Quietly, Sienna steps over. Those two are going to gut it out. Here. In Artuk’s world. Maybe they would go south, to the Fertile Spear. Maybe they already rejected the idea of putting themselves under the Serpens banner of Worldwide Help. She doesn’t have time to wonder about other people’s choices.
People dickering about the Buy It Now price for my head? I got other worries.
Still, the beat-down pair deserve one last solid. The local militia will soon be busier than a one-eyed cat watching nine mice. Their top priorities will be looking for her and avoiding the wrath of Artuk and this mudarris guy for losing her in the first place. She’s seen enough horrors of prisoners forgotten in cells without food or water. She cannot obey the tough old matron’s last request.
She twists the key off in the lock. Passing the other cells, she does the same to each one. Unlock, snap, on her way to the stairway. It’s time to leave this no-horse town.
Past a plywood hatch onto the roof, Sienna feels direct sunlight on her body. The warmth makes her realize she’s bruised and cramped down to her core. Sienna’s aching face reacts to the pain. The pain of freedom regained. She feels her swollen cheeks crease with a wide Cheshire Cat grin. The hurts and indignities she has suffered are overtaken by the thrill of escaping that dank cell, which was supposed to be the last place she’d ever enter alive.
And underneath her cautious relief? Something else. Something she does not want to acknowledge. Not even here. Not even now. A longing, within her, deep and dark.
I won’t listen. Not today. Got to get away, quickly, quietly.
Though… a reconnoiter can’t hurt, just a quick one. Artuk and Khalid will expect her to make for the fastest way out. There’s time. She makes it to the top of the jail roof and climbs to the next building over. There, Sienna crawls under a rusted water tank. She looks down. The view only makes her want to smile more. Despite the pain, despite the blood oozing from the socket that used to hold a molar. Lucky tooth.
In the dusty streets below, a pantomime of confusion and suspicion bordering on hysteria plays out. Artuk’s village fighters wear farming and street clothes. The new guys, Khalid’s men, wear crisp black desert gear. There are no official markings or hastily painted slogans on the SUVs to indicate who sent Khalid. This mudarris, he’s a mystery.
The two groups of fighters are nearly at each other’s throats. Artuk’s men pad around, circling. Khalid’s SUVs have taken up defensive positions in the square around their ace in the hole. The visiting team rolled into town with a ridiculously heavy piece of ordnance. It is a much showier piece of military bling than an ordinary heavy machine gun. The back of an open-ended truck is weighed down by a Soviet-era quad ZSU anti-aircraft gun. The Zeus, as it’s affectionately known in terror circles, would look comical mounted like it is. It would, except for the weapons system’s ability to level every house in the village in a few minutes. That kind of random destructive power isn’t comical at all.
The villagers must be wondering if the interlopers have stolen her to avoid paying ransom. On Khalid’s mind must be the possibility the village elder has killed his own men to fool them now th
at her head has an opening bid.
Unarmed villagers—shopkeepers, bicycle repairmen, farmers, herders, beggars—they all know a fight is coming. The dry air is electric.
She ducks down, rolls over, and contemplates the sky. Admittedly not standard procedure during a prison break. Sienna stares at the wide-open blueness certain people never meant her to see again. She withdraws into shadows, and watches. And waits.
Jittery men brandish pistols, grenade launchers, and long guns. Shutters slam down, children are whisked inside. In the dust of the alleyway below, a soccer ball rolls aimlessly. The locals will take shelter in basement sanctuaries, behind thick stone walls. Later, after the mayhem, they will carry on as the hard people of this hard land always do.
Sienna only half-lied to the old woman in the cell about her origins. Her mother was born in Khorasan, as was she. Maybe what she feels is her connection. No time to wonder. Only time to act. And survive.
To do that, she has to be realistic about her ability to run or fight if she’s forced to. After all that trauma, maybe the surge of adrenaline is the only thing keeping her up. Maybe she’s a hair’s breadth away from being paraplegic like Ennis. A combat medical case she studied comes to mind. A French Legion convoy got hit by an IED. Three feet of rebar went through the gunner’s torso. He used it to prop himself up in his turret. Claimed he didn’t feel any pain until they got back to base.
She feels along her spine. Nothing much there. No jutting vertebrae. No gaping rent in her flesh or cauterized gouge where the power source had been. Just the standard-issue body of one Colonel McKnight, plus some smooth bits. These are firm and painless areas where the main bulk of the RAPTEK formerly sat on her shoulders and hugged the middle of her back. The part that held the power pack and other gizmos.
I gotta start reading user manuals all the way through.
Some stale water is caught in the pipe of a roof tank. She washes off mud and blood. Underneath the grime, a slick fiber-optic material is fused into her. It is warm and looks different than she first thought. When it was brought to her attention, she was kind of preoccupied.
The stuff is sunk in between the bones of her forearms, ulna, and radius. It is not a stripe. Not like Kinesio tape at all. The embeds trace latticework in three dimensions as wide as a quarter inch, fading to a wisp, then curving and expanding. Blue-green and translucent, the material has a slight luminescence. Or maybe it’s just sunlight and shadows and her throbbing head playing tricks. Whether this is borrowed light being conducted by optic piping or some inherent radiance, she cannot tell. It’s a little like filigree gilding. No. Not decoration. Not deformation, either. This is not her, yet it is. If she concentrates, the patterns are almost like… language?
The smell of recreational smoke wafting up ends her self-scrutiny. Two armed village guards stand in the alley. One puffs a hand-rolled cigarette containing what passes for local tobacco weed.
“I tell you, those bastards took her,” the taller one says. “So they didn’t have to pay for her head.”
The pair have decent cover. If general shooting starts, they will not be the first ones hit. They feel at ease enough to enjoy a smoke and talk about local economic matters.
“It was a whole suitcase full of money,” the second one says. “Probably more in the cars. Not that we’d see any of that coin in our hands. Artuk is too greedy, the old bastard.”
The other one spits in agreement. “He must have eighteen sons by now, and I hear he’s getting a new wife in the spring—URK!”
“What you say?” The shorter fellow leans back around the corner. “I told you smoking those things would—URK!”
29
The two militiamen were paying close attention to the scene of rising belligerence in the village square. Sienna crept up behind. One glanced back at the wrong moment, and it was over for them both. As her conscious mind raced through the best ways of taking out the watchmen, her new ability and older inner self cut to the chase. She found two jagged rocks in her hands. In a blink, they were no longer there but neatly severing the spinal columns of the combatants.
One slumps over his rifle like a limp marionette. The other slides down the brick wall, leaving a dappled smear as mouth and nose exhale a final lungful of tobacco smoke. Sienna stops questioning the source or nature of her abilities. Inside her throbbing skull, her fighting mind takes charge.
And it has company.
Sarge Bryan called it the racht. Where he got that term, she never learned. It is a part of her that urges her to do things. Terrible things. It was born the same time she was. Five red gashes inscribed its brief, eloquent creed on her body and her soul. Sienna knows this, though she’s probably never been able to put the entirety of it into finite human language. The racht is in her, just dying to come out and play. She suppresses it with practical thoughts.
She picks up a flat stone a couple of inches in diameter. It floats in the palm of her hand. She’s aware of a tingling sensation. The energy feels like when you’re pressing the ends of two magnets together, positive to positive. The energy is seductively powerful. Her body is the source. She realizes instinctively that she can control the speed projectiles fly by changing how tightly she grips them before letting go.
The stones around her feet are smooth, as though honed into perfect shapes in the bed of some bygone river. They look just like the ones in her illustrated Sunday school books, where young David is shown putting five of them in his pouch before contending for the Valley of Elah championship belt. That bout happened three thousand years ago. Back then, the boy and future king was fighting way above his own weight class. His Philistine opponent’s armor and weapons weighed twice as much as David. He only had a strip of leather.
Sienna has no sling. She does not need one. The men who want to kill her are no giants. But she’ll need more than five stones.
In irregular actions, especially ones involving the tactic called running like hell for your life, being aware is essential. It can often mean the difference between popping a brew with the gang back home and ending up as a prize exhibit in some ghastly deviant’s trophy room.
She does not pick up the weapons of the fallen sentries. They are not suppressed, and she has no idea what affect her ability might have on centerfire ammunition. Volatile primers can be set off by heat or static as easily as impact from a firing pin. She could blow her hand off. She scans each dwelling, looking for signs of advanced com equipment. She looks for anything she can use to help her get out of Dodge.
Best option seems to be a dash for the truck she saw behind a village shop. The owner must be hiding in the basement. It’s laden with supplies and petrol. If she drives away slowly, avoiding lookouts, she will be just another villager departing the anticipated bloodshed. It could work. It might be hours before anyone figures it out. It’s the right thing to do.
Like I said, time to blow this—
“Don’t move, bitch,” snarls a voice behind her. A door swings open and a gun is cocked close to her ear. “This is my place. My jail.”
It is the same man she heard in the street above her cell, and later through the jail door. Old Artuk, in the flesh. Sienna stays still. Artuk has the drop on her and sounds pissed. She raises her hands, palms forward. Her right hand gently cups a stone washed smooth by an ancient river.
“You don’t think I know every inch of it?” Artuk rattles on. “You think you can just sneak around here like… like…”
He sputters, struggling for just the right word to express his thoughts. He finds it.
“Like a BITCH?” The old man is apoplectic as he vents his outrage at her bitch-like behavior.
That curse word is getting old. Don’t these guys know any other terms of endearment?
The lack of gunfire accompanying the curses means Artuk’s pride and greed have, for now, overcome his impulse to just shoot her and flaunt his decapitation
skills. He wants to find out more about what she’s worth alive before committing to dismemberment. Canny Artuk. She prepares to turn around and show him bitch behavior like he’s never seen.
“Don’t you move! I have seen what you did with those two idiots.” Artuk stays a few feet back. “No wonder you are so valuable to the mudarris. Asking for your head was just a trick.”
Artuk crumples a piece of paper in his free hand. “They order me around. Pretend to offer me a dog’s wages. Pah! They want you for themselves.”
What is a human railgun going for on the black market these days? Sienna relaxes a little. This guy’s definitely not going to shoot her now. Dismember her and auction her body parts, maybe. But he’ll do nothing until he finds out more.
Sienna decides on the angle to take. She coos compliantly, “You are a wise one indeed, old master Artuk. I am worth a lot. In fact, I was trying to get away from my people and meet contacts from Russia when I had a small accident. For me, they will pay you gold and currency, whatever you want.”
Then, thinking his concept of money might be as limited as his vocabulary, she adds, “And weapons. Great and terrible weapons, Master Artuk. Your power could stretch over the Six Hills and far beyond, very far. You can hold the TYR Lens and all who depend on it for water hostage to your will. Let us get away from this mudarris fellow, whoever he is, and I will tell you everything.”
Sienna can almost feel the greed vibrating out from the old guy. The per capita income of this area is about the same as a Happy Meal back home. The more Artuk thinks she is worth, the less immediate danger she’s in.
This could even work out better than—
From behind the village chief comes the unmistakable sound of a large submachine gun bolt being thrown.
—or not.
“I knew you were hiding her, you old goat.”
“Ah, Mr. Khalid, there you are,” Artuk says, switching to his own mild and compliant way of speaking. “I was just coming to find you. I have got her!”