A Conspiracy of Whispers

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A Conspiracy of Whispers Page 36

by Ada Harper


  Leaving him alive. Alone. Galen’s injured thoughts guttered and stalled. There was a distant boom of fighting. He strained to sit up, even that a feat. Belatedly, he realized there was still something closed in his fist. He opened it.

  An aetheric sphere. Galen thought again of the splintered pieces in Olivia’s pocket. The crystal shivered in the well of his palm as a foreign vibration filled the air.

  * * *

  There was something about knowing you were going to die that was beginning to lose its shine. Perhaps familiarity just bred contempt. Olivia had died enough lives in the past weeks that she felt simply a deep sense of disappointment when she realized one of the two aetheric skippers in her pocket had broken in the scuffle. Each member of her team had been outfitted with one, and she’d taken one for Galen, certain they’d find him alive. Now he had his, and Wallis’s sphere was warm in her hand, but there was the small problem of keeping it long enough to matter.

  An angry assassin at your heels has a way of clarifying things. She would lose. It wasn’t even a question of contest. Wallis was bigger, stronger, faster. Better trained, better muscles and reflexes, fresher for fight, more experienced. Olivia knew of only two ways to beat opponents like that.

  Option one: run. Olivia could do better than run, she could fly. She couldn’t think about Galen, broken and bleeding on the ground below, she had to draw the danger away from him. Chase me, chase me. Olivia pulled, pulled, pulled. She would be black holes and flowers and sirens in flight, for him, to buy him more time.

  The ruined catwalk of the roof surrounded the glass maw she’d seen from below. Olivia skidded on the rain-slick surface and threw herself against the wall behind the stairwell door. Rainwater ticked off her shoulder. The air had a new heat, the shiver of ozone burned her nose, like a gun warming up. The skipper. She could hear the groan of metal inside marking Wallis’s climb. Her hand landed on rough concrete, then hefted a stub of stone. Her fist tightened over it. It’d do.

  The door opened, and Olivia swung hard.

  Wallis was expecting it, of course. Every Whisper trick Olivia had was one Wallis taught her. They went down in a series of grabs and counters, skidding along the wet roof. Olivia managed a lucky break, trading a broken finger for a shove that brought them up a few feet apart.

  But always: Wallis was faster. Her gun was up and level before Olivia finished raising her head.

  “Give it. Now.” Wallis’s voice carried an order.

  Olivia’s lip was split. Her face was warm with injury, matching alarms coming in from her left hand, right ribs. The keen in the air was palpable, growing in intensity. Olivia took a step back.

  Wallis advanced. “Or I take it from your corpse.”

  “Where would be the fun in that?” Another step. A papercut smile hit her lips. “I don’t think you want to shoot and risk losing this thing. Again.”

  The roof edge sent a hot gust up her back. She held the sphere over open air, knowing it left her exposed. She could have jumped with her gear again, but there was no escaping the blast radius. Running would just give Wallis a chance to overtake her and the sphere. She hoped desperately that Bowen and Alais had encountered fewer problems and gotten the others out. The rain was beginning to let up. No. The rain was beginning to evaporate, the air turning humid and roiling. That wasn’t a good sign.

  “I’ll take my chances rather than fry to death. I will take it. Submit, caricae.”

  Wallis said it like an order. Not just an order, a command. Trying to intimidate, twinge at base instincts to comply, appease. But Wallis wasn’t an altus who could push. Wallis wasn’t her altus and even he couldn’t make her do what she didn’t want to do. Olivia didn’t feel cowed; just tired. The heated rain was boiling against her skin and she was tired. Of the way the world looked at her. Like property.

  “It’s all yours,” Olivia said. She let the ball fall from her fingers. It dropped over the edge of the roof.

  Option two: cheat.

  It was a kind of relief, the wave of giddy exhaustion that swept her. The sphere made no noise where it fell, dropping quick into the gloom behind her. Wallis made a noise, but Olivia couldn’t hear it over the roar of pulse heat in the air. She could make out the snarl of her lips, though. “You suicidal bitch.”

  Wallis was on her, gun forgotten. She didn’t go for her scruff, or even vital points, really. The Whisper was a thing of fists and rage and cruelty that Olivia probably deserved, deciding they both would deserve their fate. Wallis for her action, and Olivia for her years of inaction. She acted now, striking, scratching, biting against impossible odds.

  She tasted blood. And the horizon was turning crimson.

  Wallis’s weight disappeared from her chest in a stutter of rifle fire that cut even over the skipper roar. It came and went like another annoying detail, as unimportant as the way red light bloomed across the clouds above her. The sky was clouded; she couldn’t even see stars before she died.

  She’d seen Galen, but she’d still left constellations of words unsaid. When this is all over, I’d like to take you there. It seemed unfair, so she closed her eyes. Living tasted like salt and blood and ozone grit. She held it all on her tongue and swallowed. The heat was a cresting wave on her cheeks.

  Red turned black, a shadow fell over her. Colliding into her and blocking the swell of heat. Olivia pressed into the roof again—again, gods dammit was Wallis going to fight her all the way down to hell or—trembling words breathed against her cheek. Arms wrapped tight, body blanketing her. She opened her eyes. For one fraction of a second there was Galen—a cleft of cool shadows against a blinding swell of light.

  A hand cradled her head. His forehead pressed to hers. His mouth moved, words she couldn’t hear but could feel. And the world broke up into red heat and white fire.

  Chapter Thirty

  Olivia had a handful of very rare, very specific nightmares.

  Waking up in a Syn medical ward featured in all of them.

  So she really couldn’t be blamed when she finally dragged her crusted eyes open and made sense of the cool white tile over her head. Processed the low quiet beep of unseen devices. Felt cool sheets on her exposed skin, the slow sludge of drugs in her veins. Sensed an unknown presence at her side. And promptly grabbed them by the throat.

  “Whu—Not Syn! Not Syn!” Yoshi’s voice came out a little pinched.

  If Olivia had been in possession of all her faculties he probably wouldn’t have been able to speak at all, but her groggy hand missed his throat. Yoshi sat in a chair with ridiculous gold wolf-head carvings, an embroidered blanket on his lap. Proof enough she was still in the Empire. She made sense of a dimmed room of monitoring equipment. A familiar pulse to the lights that she’d come to associate with CHARIS. Ameranthe then.

  But... Yoshi. Was here. Olivia blinked, belatedly releasing his shoulder. Without an anchor she swayed a little. “Yoshi. What...?”

  “I’ve been dying to ask you the same thing. You’ve been out for four days.”

  Olivia allowed Yoshi to ease her back against the bed. She noted the faint silver scars of nanobot treatments on both her arms and frowned. “You first.”

  Yoshi sketched what he knew. Bowen’s team had pulled her and Galen from the rubble of the senate building. Wallis had evidently succeeded in breaking a number of bones before the skipper hit. Olivia’d been in an induced sleep while the physicians treated her. In that time, Sabine had been busy. The insurrection was all but routed, Virgil and Wallis’s lesser allies either turned themselves in or scattered to the winds. Lyre was having a heyday chasing down the senators and nobles who’d unwisely thrown their lot against them, but the tide of public support confirmed the insurrection was crushed. Helped by the fact that Galen’s reputation now included the legend of the Red Wolf, rising like a vengeful phoenix to stride from the flames and red ash of Meteore.

  Olivia re
membered the condition of his injuries. “I highly doubt Galen was striding anywhere.”

  “Shh, it’s a good story. Plays great on the holos,” Yoshi said. And then, reading the fear in her eyes, he patted her hand. “He’s fine, too. Been lurking down here like a frantic puppy. Dr. Maris finally had to threaten to tranq him if he didn’t get some sleep.”

  A knot in Olivia’s stomach eased slightly. The memory, of Galen appearing out of nowhere, shielding her with his body as the world fell down, it’d seemed too surreal to be believed, let alone survived. But Galen was alive. She was alive. She wanted to go to him, but first: “But you—Are Emeric and Jael—”

  “We’re all here, as diplomatic guests, evidently. Sabine made a big overture, somehow got a speech on the pulse holos. Condemning the Syn’s programs and the prime minister and got the Vos provinces involved and it’s all the news has been covering. I don’t know what she said, but a government escort showed up at my door two days ago—thought I was gonna pee my pants, really—and Emeric and Jael had been released and then we were here... We’re...” Yoshi’s enthusiasm died down. He bit his lip. “Emeric is—I can’t say we’re all fine, but we’re all alive and together. That’s more than I’d dreamed of. Thank you, Liv.”

  Guilt curdled in Olivia’s gut. “I didn’t do anything. Sabine—”

  “You sent a godsdamned empress after us. That’s something.” Yoshi’s smile was wry. “It doesn’t have to be all shotguns and bleeding, Liv. You don’t have to save the whole world yourself. Knowing when to trust friends is hard. I’m glad you’re starting to figure that out.”

  Trust. She supposed she had. Trusted Sabine, trusted Alais, trusted Lyre, even. She wondered when her world had become so big and trustworthy.

  Yoshi abruptly flopped across the bed, hugging her tightly before sitting back. “And you. I get here and everyone talks about you like you’re the Lady’s own avatar of vengeance. I want to hear—but, shoot. I was supposed to tell someone when you woke up.”

  Yoshi wasn’t used to living in a sentient building yet. But the fact that doctors hadn’t descended on them meant maybe CHARIS was cutting her a break. Olivia paused, considering the hush, the lack of noise she heard outside the door. Suddenly she’d had enough of recovery. “Maybe you fell asleep.”

  Yoshi squinted at her. “Maybe?”

  “Just for a couple hours. There’s something I need to do.”

  Yoshi looked uncertain. “As long as that something doesn’t come storming in here later all angry altus-y about me letting you out of bed.”

  “Just find me something to wear.” Olivia stood and jolted when her bare feet hit the carpet.

  Yoshi laughed. “It’s the nanobots. You got a major schedule of them, I hear, and I know you never availed yourself to medical treatment much back home to build a tolerance.”

  His amusement was poorly concealed as Olivia set her feet down again. Even the warm air in the room pricked cool goose bumps over her skin. Like every nerve in her body was sensitive and new.

  “It’ll go away after the bots run their course and die.”

  “Just what I always wanted. Dead parasites.” Everything felt stiff and tender and amazing at the same time. Olivia stretched to clear her head as Yoshi dug around in the closet.

  He came up with an aubergine silk thing with green and pink flowers hand-painted across. It was a sign of her personal growth or possible brain injury that she only wrinkled her nose at the garish color before cinching it on.

  Olivia found herself tiptoeing through the estate barefoot, again. Progress greatly improved by no one attempting to shoot her this time. She reached the royal residences with surprisingly little interference. The quiet hum of light from CHARIS’s panels, drifting along the wall with her like some kind of will-o’-the-wisp, likely had something to do with it.

  Which was why she didn’t feel overly paranoid when she reached the door to Galen’s residences and found them unlocked. She opened the door to gold eyes.

  “Hey,” Olivia whispered, scrunching Zahira’s ear. The wolf sniffed the silver scar on her hand and recoiled. Zahira gave her an offended look—so nanobots didn’t smell great to wolves, check—and backed up to allow her inside.

  Olivia closed the door behind her and waited until CHARIS’s soft glow in the panel faded away. There were some things she didn’t need AI assistance with.

  The interior was silent and dark. She left Zahira to sleep in the living room. The master bedroom was a drape of silver and shadows. The light of twin moons fell on a familiar bulk on a platform bed. She told herself she just needed to see for herself. To wipe from her mind the vision of him bleeding and half-dead, to ease the quiet residue of anxiety in her stomach. They would have a lot to talk about before he could forgive her, but she could be patient. She would force herself to be patient. She just needed to see, and she’d let him sleep.

  Galen hadn’t even bothered to pull the covers, and appeared to have fallen asleep like he’d been dropped from the ceiling. He’d stripped his shirt, and loose drawstring pants slung low on his hips. The moons painted magnetic shadows on his tanned skin, dark clefts of muscle and flesh, unguarded paths to explore. Olivia, with a great deal of effort, forced her attention on the silver mottle of starbursts marking his shoulder, his ribs, the strong curve of his jaw. Temporary nanobot scabs that would soon flake away, but she wanted to remember them. Remember what her childish fear had almost lost him to.

  His skin was air-chilled beneath her fingertips. Olivia hadn’t remembered reaching out, but she drew them along valleys of skin now. His pulse beneath her hand was slow, steady, anchoring her thoughts. Some part of her mind still wondered if she was being selfish, arrogant, thinking she could get away with too much—get away with holding on to this. She leaned in and breathed him in. Stone and sunshine at night. Clean skin and sweat and a foreign tang she suspected was the nanobots doing their work. She closed her eyes and, for the first time, let herself want. She wanted. The strength of it, selfish need curling around her bones, wasn’t something she’d let herself have before. Survival had burned away fear, leaving only want.

  Her eyes had followed her fingertips, studying the vulnerable plump of his sleep-soft lips. So when her gaze moved up to find his dark eyes open she nearly shrieked. Galen’s palm pressed over hers on his cheek to keep her there, fingers easily lacing with hers.

  “Galen.” Olivia forced a startled breath through her teeth, suddenly awkward. She leaned back and his thigh was warm against hers. “It’s creepy when you do that.”

  “Liv.” Galen’s voice was burred with sleep and something more. “You’re the one molesting a sleeping man.”

  “I am not. I was just—I had to...” Olivia’s defense lost air as Galen sat up slowly. He kept possession of her hand on his cheek so she was drawn half into his chest. She put down her other hand to steady herself and was immediately aware of the warmth of his naked hip under her fingers. A flutter of anticipation, equal parts nerves and relief, sank into her spine. “You’re alive.”

  “So are you.” A shadow moved through Galen’s gaze. “Should you be here?”

  Olivia laughed. “Probably not. Yoshi is covering for me but I’m sure—”

  Galen’s look shifted. Olivia caught her breath as she realized he was confused. Oh. Oh, gods, she was stupid. Stupid to think she could walk right in where she’d left off, after publicly embarrassing him, rejecting him.

  Olivia’s hand stilled. Then withdrew. “I...shouldn’t have disturbed you. Right.”

  She slid off the bed and Galen let her. He seemed prepared to let her make her escape entirely, but Olivia found her courage halfway across the room. “When you’re well—I realize a lot has happened and you will have every right...but I’ll be—”

  Galen was staring at her. Like he stared at bombs and wraicath and other unapproachable things. A look that said his preferences were at od
ds with existence.

  She’d walked in with so much resolved, but it burned away to nothing in that look. “I’m sticking around. I plan to grovel until Lyre gives me something to do. So—”

  She reached for the doorknob to pull, only to stumble forward as a tanned hand crossed her vision to slam it shut. It stayed there, knuckles white and pressed against the wood. Olivia whirled and took a step back against the door.

  Galen stared down at her, almost disbelieving. “You’re not leaving Ameranthe?”

  “Uh...” Olivia felt caught on that intense gaze, picked apart. She swallowed and sank against the door. “No. I’m not.”

  “The Lady Alais, you—”

  “Neither Alais or I ever believed we were mates. That wasn’t about choosing, that was—” Olivia sighed a little helplessly. “I chose you. You’re like gravity. I keep jumping and it’s always you where I end up. I know you may not believe me but—”

  Galen’s fingers at her lips tripped up her words. They were trembling. His palm was a whisper of warmth where he cupped her cheek. An ache slipped beneath her skin and pulled. It hurt to breathe.

  Galen’s voice was low, tender in the space. “I would like to kiss you.”

  “Oh.” Olivia breathed, a little lost. “O-okay.”

  And for once, just once, Galen kissed her as she anticipated. As she needed. And oh, after it all, how she needed to be kissed like this. A kiss like a wall, stopping her thoughts. A kiss like a wolf, snapping up her breath. A kiss like stone, anchoring her in. A kiss like sunlight, chasing shadows and warming places so long in the cold. A kiss like everything Galen was, wrapped up and pressed past her parted lips until she tasted nothing but him.

 

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