Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  My checking of my own movement must have been noticeable because she took a little step back, startled. “You must let me talk to you,” she said. It was all in a rush, as though it came out impelled by some violent emotion. “You must. Luce is going to send you in there and—”

  “The Good—Lieutenant Colonel Keeva is not sending me anywhere,” I said. “He has told me he’ll give what help he can, but in fact he can give no help, so I’m free to stay and will be sheltered but there’s no help for Simon.”

  She stomped her foot, hard. “That,” she said, “is just what I mean. He’s sending you in there with no help at all, and you can’t go. You just can’t. If you do, you’ll end up dead, and Simon will end up dead and it won’t do anyone any good.”

  I stared at her. “Something wrong with your hearing?” I asked. I rarely allowed myself to be rude. It’s an expensive luxury. But talking to Martha Remy was like howling at a hurricane. “He’s not sending me anywhere. He’s not interested. I can please myself and do what I wish.”

  She narrowed her eyes, but not at me, more like she was trying to sort through something. My rudeness glanced off her as though she had an invisible shield. “That’s how he’d do it. Luce, I mean. Oh, I don’t want you to think badly of him. I rather like him, in a way, which is good since I think he’s permanently attached to our family through Nat—but that’s how he does things. He no longer has any power, objectively. He never had any power, in a way, because before his father died, he had none, but the thing is, he’s learned to get people to do what he wants. He wants you to go to Liberte and rescue Simon. And he doesn’t want his fingerprints on it. But he’s being so clever that he’s stupid, because you’d just get killed.”

  “That’s exactly what he said,” I said. “That it would be suicide.”

  “Yes,” she nodded. “He would. But I don’t think he realized that he was exactly right. He’s not, you see, very worldly. Not really. You can’t be when your entire life was artificial, and you spent fourteen years away from all human beings.” She rubbed her fist under her nose, in a reflexive gesture that looked like something a young child would do. “He wouldn’t realize how you stick out, how odd you are.”

  “Beg your pardon?” I asked, wondering if she were paying me back with rudeness for rudeness.

  She looked at me, but I still got the impression she wasn’t seeing me. Not as Zen Sienna, not as a person she was talking to, but as a problem, a cipher, something to be calculated and weighed. “How could you not be?” she said. “You’re not from here. And you stick out all over.” She sighed, and seemed to focus on me, really focus on me for the first time. “Are you determined to go and rescue Simon, one way or another?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think I have to.” This was not the place to explain to her how I’d been raised with the idea that I owed normal humans service, nor the load of unspoken guilt in my mind because I couldn’t save the one normal human who meant the most to me. Len had trusted me, and all I could give him was death. I was not going to have another death on my conscience.

  This time she was looking at me, looking into my eyes, evaluating me. She sighed. “Well, then,” she said. “You’re going to need Royce.”

  “Who?”

  “Royce Allard,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  And Now You Don’t

  I saw. It started, like all adventures, in a stealthy and convoluted way. We went back to what had once been the Good Man’s palace, but Martha didn’t approach it the normal way. Or, frankly, in any sane way. She seemed to think it was very important to get in without anyone seeing us, even though she had a job within the building and I was a guest there.

  “No, you see,” she said. “If they know we went in, they’ll track us, and figure out where we went. And while Lucius wouldn’t want you to die in Liberte any more than I do, any more than I want Simon to die, it’s very important that he be able to deny that he gave you any help, much less allowed you to get help from our expert in disguise and makeup.”

  “Expert in disguise?”

  “Yes,” she said. “What else? Oh, he would hate it if he heard himself referred to that way. He has a fancy title, something about tactical deception and infiltration, and yeah, what he does is way more than physical disguise. You’re going to need way more than physical disguise. But yeah, that’s what it comes to.” We were walking up a steep, winding street, towards the palace. To be precise, towards the back of the palace. I trusted her, because you have to trust someone, but I thought the whole idea was a little mad. No, a lot mad. It would be the equivalent of breaking into your own living room. “Royce is a Usaian, a convert, and a civilian contractor with the armed forces of Olympus. He is under the purview of the Daughters of Liberty, which are, roughly, under Luce’s control. If we use Royce’s services, it must be without Luce knowing it.”

  And now we were on a beach, and I was wondering exactly why, and what this had to do with going to the palace. It was a very pretty beach, with golden sand, probably imported and set on the black dimatough frame of the seacity.

  If I hadn’t known that the seacity was artificially built, grown on a poured dimatough frame, I’d have thought it was natural. Of course, the seacity had been built more than two hundred years ago, and it would have been at the mercy of natural forces ever since. This was a little beach, with golden sand extending to the ocean, a few boulders—real or artificial, I couldn’t tell—and, to the inland side, a growth of shrubs and trees near the rising black wall of a cliff that formed the structural support for the rising tiers of the rest of the seacity.

  Martha plunged doggedly into a cluster of bushes, and it took me a moment to realize that she was doing it carefully, too, so as not to bend or break any of the branches, not to tear any of the leaves. I followed her, imitating her as best possible. She punched a part of the black wall that looked like every other part of the black wall, and then did something. There was a dancing of fingers on the dimatough, as though it were a screen and she were entering a complex code. I couldn’t see anything, and the movements were so intricate, it would take a long time learn, I thought.

  Part of the cliff slid away. She reached back, without looking, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me in. I don’t like being touched by strangers. I really don’t like being touched by strangers. I ground my teeth together and endured.

  She pulled me into a tunnel of sorts, as the unconventional door we’d used closed behind us. It was a tunnel, but it looked far more like the corridor inside a well-appointed home. The floor was some sort of tile, the walls and ceiling were off-white ceramite, and there was diffuse light from somewhere.

  “Where?” I said.

  “It leads to the palace,” she said. “To Luce’s room.” She looked over her shoulder. “It’s a great secret, and I only reveal it to you because I know you’d never—Because I trust you. It would be easy—”

  It would be easy to send an assassin. Which meant that either Martha Remy was out of her ever-loving mind to be showing it to someone who would shortly be going into a place where she might be subjected to torture; or that Lucius Keeva was not as important to their war effort as one would assume. And then I started wondering if Lucius had told her to do this. It seemed unlikely, I thought, that she would dare reveal a secret of this importance, one that could lead to a neat assassination job, without his permission. It felt wrong.

  This is how paranoid you could become when everyone was playing secrecy games. I started wondering if I was crazy or they were.

  At the end of the tunnel there was another code typed on an invisible screen. It made me realize you’d have to have your hand just so, and in just the right place. I wondered what would happen if you were slightly off, and had a strong feeling it was the sort of thing I didn’t want to know, not really.

  “It’s not as unsafe as it seems,” she said. “If more than two people are detected in here, and if at least one of them isn’t familiar to the surveillance AI, everything will lock,
both sides, and Luce will know.”

  “Surveillance,” I said. “Won’t there be recordings?”

  She shook her head. “No recordings. Only an automated system. In the same way,” she said, in a low voice, as the door started to slide open, “this door won’t open if there’s anyone but Luce in there.”

  “But Luce—”

  “He won’t be there,” she said, and once more I wondered exactly what he knew, what she knew, and if they’d arranged all this together.

  We left the hallway for a large, white-carpeted bedroom, furnished in polished pine furniture. It looked much like the guest room where I’d changed after showering, but the bed was larger. Then again, Lucius Keeva was a large man.

  There is something intrusive, I think, about seeing the bedroom of someone you’re not intimate with. Bedrooms are so much a part of a person, a place where you remove your clothes, where you are yourself, and safe from intrusion from the world outside. There’s always something, in anyone’s bedroom, that will surprise those who don’t know him very well.

  In Lucius Dante Maximillian Keeva’s room, it was the stuffed giraffe. I’d met the man, I’d heard his history, I’d even seen him in action as part of an expedition to commandeer a strategic asset. The last thing I expected of Lucius was that he would sleep with a stuffed giraffe. And yet, there it sat, three feet high from chest to head, with a too-happy smile on its face, looking out at the world with shining glass eyes.

  Martha saw me staring. I couldn’t help staring. I thought she was going to explain the giraffe, but then she shrugged, as though thinking that no explanation would be enough.

  To this day I have no idea why Lucius Keeva has a giraffe on his bed. And I don’t intend to ask.

  We crossed the bedroom, and then she got cautious. We went out of the bedroom, turned a sharp right, went through what looked like a closet, then up stairs that had a distinct “maintenance area” look and down another set of stairs, then through another closet, and into a different hallway. Every step of the way she looked out before we emerged, to make sure no one was around.

  Not only didn’t we come across any guards, we didn’t come across anyone, until Martha knocked at a door at the end of a hallway lined with shelves piled with anonymous boxes.

  From the other side, a voice said, “Yes.”

  She opened the door, stuck her head in and said something. The voice that answered her spoke too low for me to understand the words, but it reminded me of Simon’s voice. Not in timbre or tone, but in some indefinable way. Indefinable, that is, until I met Royce Allard.

  Martha led me into a room that looked like a laboratory’s offspring by a styling parlor. There were machines and screens, mirrors and vials, and then there were chairs, set in front of what were clearly vanities of some sort, if vanities were really serious and high tech.

  Royce—introduced that way by Martha—was a large man, built on the mold of Lucius or Alexis. He had blunt features, a shock of reddish-brown hair, arms that looked like he lifted weights at his job every day, and eyes like a shrewd monkey. Which might sound unkind, but isn’t. Just like the eyes of a monkey can look out of place, staring out of incongruous features, so too Royce Allard’s eyes looked incongruous, much too bright and intent for his blunt features. He looked at me, and his eyebrows went up a little. Then his hands went to the side of his waist, and then he spoke and I understood why he reminded me of Simon. He had the same accent, which wasn’t quite like a French accent in historic casts, but was close enough. “You want her to pass unnoticed in Liberte?” he asked Martha, and sighed. “Wouldn’t you want me to do something easier, like, say, hide a full-grown elephant in my armpit?”

  I frowned. “I’m not an elephant,” I said. One thing is not to wish to take offense, and another to remain quiet while people around you are acting like mental patients.

  He smiled. “Indeed not. And that’s the problem. Most people, male or female, will see you and remember you.” He shrugged. “Well! This will be a challenge. I always hear it’s important to have a challenge, so one doesn’t grow stale. When I finish this work, I’ll be so fresh I might as well be a beginner again.”

  He led me to a chair and sat me down. The work he did involved a lot of machines, both for measuring things and for changing things. I wish I could tell you precisely what he did, but the truth is, I couldn’t even follow it. He worked silently, and all I can tell you is that at some point semi-permanent caps went on my teeth, which changed their shape, and that something of the same sort went inside my cheeks, which changed the shape of my mouth and my features. And yet, none of it was permanent, and none of it felt any different once it was in.

  All right, maybe the teeth. I kept getting the persistent and unshakeable feeling that my teeth were too long for my mouth, but I couldn’t tell which parts of them were different.

  My eye color was changed too. Not lenses. There was something injected. There was something injected at various portions of the procedure into various parts of my features, and I can’t tell you exactly where or what it did.

  At one point I asked if the makeup would survive bathing, and Royce shook his head, which alarmed me, but then he said, “Not makeup, as such, understand. It is subcutaneous. It will be absorbed, in a couple of weeks. Earlier if I remove it. But until then, you are completely safe in your new appearance, safe through immersion and baths, and exposure to sun and anything. Your new appearance is your new appearance, impervious to all the things your normal appearance is.”

  When it was all done, he stood me in front of the mirror. I still looked like myself, though my hair was a reddish shade of brown, and my features were…

  It’s hard to explain. They hadn’t so much changed as been made unmemorable. The changes were small, save for the coloration—both my skin and my eyebrows and eyelashes were darker, and my eyes were now brown—but I no longer looked like Boticelli’s Venus. I looked similar enough that someone would say “Oh, you remind me of,” if he were very well educated and had spent a lot of time staring at me. Still, I didn’t look like I’d been made to order.

  The point was that no one, male or female, would spend a lot of time staring at me. I looked like someone who could pass unnoticed in the street. I’d have passed myself on the street without noticing.

  “The important thing,” Royce said, “and the difficult one is to change the way you move.”

  I turned around and the stranger in the mirror turned around too, to face him. “The way I move? Why? Is that particularly memorable?”

  He seemed to struggle for words. “Oh,” he said. “Well…yes. Or rather, it’s not memorable. No one is going to tell you he really likes or dislikes the way you move. It’s just…odd.”

  “No one ever commented on it,” I said, frowning at him.

  He smiled. When he smiled, he looked like a different person, and a much nicer one. “No, I imagine not. No one would notice it in your world, because it would be the normal way to move, or at least close enough. And here, on Earth, everyone knows you’re a stranger, so they would expect you to move and act like a stranger. But if you want to pass unnoticed, something will need to be done. People won’t know what makes them notice you, or what makes them sure you’re not from Liberte, but they will know—they will be able to have you followed and that’s the difference between your surviving and not—potentially. And then there’s the patois, but fortunately we have recordings for that.”

  “Recordings?”

  “Neural recordings,” he said. “Of the movements, too, but that’s harder to upload.”

  “You’re going to upload things to my brain?” I blinked at him. I was used to the science on Earth being behind what we did on Eden. There was a reason for it. They had outlawed most experimentation and research after the Turmoils. Supposedly they’d only outlawed new biological research, but in fact all sorts of technical research and even incidental discoveries had been hidden and never hit the public consciousness. The reason for it was that t
he Good Men had liked society stable. Nothing destabilizes society like new knowledge and new gadgets and new inventions. They’d sold themselves to the people of Earth as bringing stability. And they had. Three hundred years of stability. Even if it required stagnation and massive deaths by attrition and neglect.

  But even on Eden we didn’t have any way to access our neurons, bypassing the conscious act of learning to upload knowledge or training into the brain. “When I was in training,” I told him, “I often wished that there were some way to just upload all the knowledge directly to the brain, without my having to work at it.”

  He chuckled. “Well, there isn’t. This isn’t it. It’s not knowledge of that type. I can’t use neural upload to teach you the multiplication tables, for example, but I can put it in your head so that if you’re prompted to answer two times two, your lips will say four. Does that make sense? Consciously you won’t know it, until you hear yourself say it. It is a lousy way to learn anything, because it will only apply in certain situations, and there will be no…control on your part. No…” he translated his verbal hesitation into a flourishing gesture midair with his right hand. “No way to use that knowledge, but the way that was imprinted. Also, it doesn’t last. It used to be believed, back in the dark ages around the twenty-first century, that eventually this mode of learning would replace traditional learning, that people would buy knowledge packs, and have it uploaded to their minds, as though they were a sort of meat computer. But it doesn’t work that way long term. Sure, if you absolutely need to speak a language for a week or so, we can upload some basic vocabulary, but you’ll speak it with atrocious grammar, unless you respond with a learned sentence to another learned sentence. You’ll be a clever parrot, not a real speaker of the language.”

  “But then, what good does it do me?” I asked. “I thought you’d said I’d have to speak the local patois.”

  “Well, alors,” he said, sounding very much like Simon. “It is the local patois. By which I mean, it is mostly Glaish, with a local overlay. If we give you the vocabulary to understand the overlay, all we need to do on your part is give you an accent, when you answer. You don’t need to speak the patois. Some people never do. Some people rarely. But you do need to understand it, and that’s easy. It is a list of words. You’ll understand the words when you hear them.”