by Karen Healey
And she’d left me ignorant and in despair.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I could see the sense in it; though Lat was on her side, Diane wasn’t on mine. When my captor played with her electronic toy, she could ask me anything, and I’d say whatever I thought she wanted to hear to make the agony stop. I could easily have betrayed the plan then; Tegan had kept quiet to get us both out.
I should probably forgive her silence.
But Diane’s hands on me, her mouth against my ear, telling me exactly what she was going to do—
I wrenched my head away from the memories and took refuge in my body instead. I could no longer feel the eyebrow cut; the neck wound had swallowed all my minor aches into its overwhelming mass, like a red giant star expanding and burning up the planets around it.
Someone was saying my name, over and over, and I blinked back to myself. Joph was kneeling by the bed. I was holding her so tightly my knuckles were pinkish-gray, but her voice was soft and reassuring.
“We have to change vehicles now,” she said. “Can you stand up?”
I discovered I could, and with Joph holding my arm I could even walk, my feet dragging and my neck flaring with every step. There were lights on in this part of town. Tegan was limp in Lat’s arms, and the previously unseen driver was opening the door of a dark blue four-seater. I thought that I should probably know who he was, this dark-skinned man with the red locks, but my brain was hazing out again, flashing white across my vision. There was a fumble of movement, and a long high-pitched noise that, to my embarrassment, came out of my own mouth.
Then I was sitting down, and Joph asked me a question to which I couldn’t respond, and the blessed cool spray of her micro injector hit my shoulder. I slid gratefully into the deep black of sleep.
The tattered wisps of dreams clouded my vision, so that when I woke, for a moment I saw plain gray walls and furniture bolted to the floor and Diane’s beautiful, horrible face—the only bright thing in that place—and her hands reaching out for me.
Then I woke up the rest of the way, jerking myself upright in the middle of a wooden bed that creaked in protest. I was in a well-lit dusty room crammed with tarnished mirrors, faded pictures of old landscapes, tiny china people, and dozens of other things wedged onto tiny tables and shoved into shelves. My heart thrummed, but the pain in my neck and the strangeness of my surroundings were reassuring. I had not dreamed my rescue. Joph had come for me, and Tegan had escaped, too.
And Lat had helped us out. That was less pleasing, but I couldn’t damp down the wild rush of joy. I was free. I could go home at last.
Back to the terra-cotta house with the fountain in the cool courtyard. Back to the yellow earth, and the tang of salt in the air, and the call to prayer five times a day. I’d never thought I’d miss the call to prayer. It was a reminder that I was different, that my classmates and siblings and mother would be talking to their God, while my father and I stayed silent. But that call—God is most great! God is most great!—that was part of home, too. Here, my atheism wasn’t unusual. It was everything else that made me a freak, and when I went home, I’d be a freak no more.
I was still wearing the clothes I had worn to the fund-raiser, chrome pants and vest entirely out of place in this ancient room. The golden cords had tangled around my body as I slept. Remembering the way Diane’s fingers had brushed my skin as she adjusted them, I tried to yank them away, but succeeded only in tugging the whole concoction down to one wrist. The knots were too tight to loosen with my teeth and one free hand; it would take a blade. The air was chill. I found the blanket from the floor and wrapped it around my shoulders, wondering when someone would come to let me out.
Ten or twelve minutes afterward—an embarrassingly long time—it occurred to me that the door might not be locked.
I had been imprisoned for six months. During that time, I had been escorted everywhere, to everything. The nights I had been unpunished, I had been left physically alone to sleep, but I was watched, always. I could carry out no task unless I was given specific orders or permission. I was told when to eat, to wash, to exercise, to rehearse, and to sleep.
And no doors opened to my hand. Trying to force one had resulted in Tegan’s most severe punishment of all, and I’d never tried again.
I had not successfully opened a door since the morning they’d taken us away.
But I was safe now, I told myself. Or at least, not in immediate danger. The implant was gone, and Diane was not here.
I wrapped the blanket tighter, padded to the door in my silver slippers, and paused, my hand an inch away from the doorknob.
This could all be an elaborate trap. A test of how well I had adapted, with Joph suborned, and Lat on Diane’s side all along. And Tegan could be either an innocent dupe or a willing participant in the scenario. After all, what word had she said to me? She had been motionless the whole time. And what had I seen, really? Darkness, and an alley, and the inside of a ambulance that could have driven in circles. I had nothing but Joph’s word to rest my hopes upon.
I trusted Joph, I did. I knew I was giving too much weight to baseless fears. But I had to put my left hand on the back of my right and force it to the knob. It turned, easily, soundlessly, and I flung the door back with as much violence as I could muster.
If Diane was waiting on the other side, ready to laugh at me, ready to reclaim me, I did not want to go to her hesitant and timid. I wanted to go fighting.
The door flashed out, rebounded off something set behind it, and slammed back again. I had gained the impression of a room as equally old-fashioned, with a small, rickety table and a small, dark-haired girl in a silver gown seated at it, face turning toward the door in fear and confusion.
I was through the door in the space between heartbeats, as she stood, one hand stretched toward me. I took it in mine.
And then, without speaking, we moved into the touch we’d been forbidden for so long. I wrapped my free arm around her, flattening my hand against the smooth skin between her shoulder blades. Her fingers slipped from mine so that her arms could go around my waist, burrowing under my blanket, thumbs tucking into the waistband under it. The top of her head tucked in under my chin, thick hair warm and soft against my bare throat. I stroked her arm.
That was when I knew we were free. Diane would never have allowed us that hug.
We stood there for a few moments, breathing together, silent in our embrace, and then Tegan muttered something against my chest.
I loosened my grip. “What was that?”
She tipped her head back. “I said, I can’t believe you’re wearing a blanket. It’s like a zillion degrees.”
I felt a smile tugging at my lips. “I’m cold,” I said, as solemnly as possibly. “You have thick blood. It’s all that Welsh in you.”
“What about the Italian part of me?”
“Must be northern Italian,” I decided. “Up in the Alps. Practically Swiss.”
Tegan laughed, that sudden bright explosion that was her true laugh. Not the mannered chime she’d developed for them.
I had never thought to hear that genuine laugh again. I kissed her while the sound still spilled from her lips, as if I could share that joy with her if I caught it on her breath. She kissed me back, warm and teasing, and we broke apart to grin foolishly at each other, giddy.
I saw the shadow sweep across Tegan’s eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted to tell you, but…”
“I understand.”
“But they did such awful things to you. They made me watch.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” I said, and kissed her again.
She pulled away when we came up for air. “I really want to apologize for—”
“You’re making it up to me,” I assured her. I had the uneasy suspicion that I was lying. She’d left me ignorant and hurting, and a simple apology couldn’t fix it—neither, I suspected, would her touch. But I wanted to touch Tegan so badly. I couldn’t wait for her guilt to fade,
nor my forgiveness to be real.
She didn’t pull away again, and our kisses turned serious. It was as if we were locked under the Inheritors’ compound again, that feeling of being the only two people in the world, with sight and sound gone, and touch the most important sense of all. The feel of Tegan’s skin against mine, her hands demanding on my back, the taste of her mouth, the heated gasps of her breath as she kissed a wet line down my throat; that was all there was room for in my head. Her presence crushed the nightmares and the fear and memories of Diane’s hands into a tiny white spark, small and unimportant.
I lifted her onto the table without thinking about it, my blanket sliding away. She tugged me in with her heels in the small of my back, her fingers fumbling at the fastenings of my vest as she crushed her mouth against mine. I wanted to touch her, but all that smooth silver fabric frustrated my efforts, slipping against my palms. I found the zipper at the side and tugged it down, my hands greedy for more of her, all of her—
“We eat off that table,” someone observed neutrally, and we leaped away from each other as if we’d been electrocuted.
It was the mysterious dark-skinned, red-haired driver—not so mysterious now, when I wasn’t shocked and hurting. I knew him.
Carl Hurfest was the only reporter Tegan had known well enough to go to for help when she’d wanted to tell her story. That didn’t mean she liked him. Hurfest had a reputation for being incorruptible and unafraid to ask the hard questions, and he’d asked Tegan the hard questions twice—once, just after she’d first ventured into her new world, and again shortly afterward, at a prepared interview the army had set up for her.
I’d watched that interview. She’d melted down on camera, but not before I saw her, incandescent with rage, alive with passion as she told Australians to wake up.
“You are not the future I wanted,” she’d said. “I wanted you to be better. Be better!”
And I’d thought, reluctantly, I really like that girl.
And I hadn’t liked the reporter who had baited her into this frenzy.
But the third time Hurfest and Tegan had met, he’d helped her tell her story to the world. She hadn’t trusted him, though. Neither did I.
“Hello, Hurfest,” I said, and stood in front of Tegan while she put her dress back together. She was flushing bright red. “Couldn’t you knock or cough or something?”
Hurfest shrugged. “I did both, several times. You were busy. Lat went upstairs after my first attempt to interrupt you, but he’s more of a gentleman than I am.”
I found a certain satisfaction in the thought that Lat had seen Tegan kiss and touch me, but Tegan’s blush only deepened. Which was less satisfying.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, and he sounded sorry, or at least like someone making a sincere attempt to sound sorry. “But we need to fill you in on the situation. The information Tegan was privy to was necessarily limited, and I imagine you have plenty of questions, Abdi.”
Still keeping Tegan shielded from him, I nodded. I had all the questions in the world. Starting with, where the hell were we?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Chorus
We were underground.
Joph’s great-great-aunt, Celia Davies, had been famously eccentric and fabulously wealthy, both traits her descendant had inherited. The complex was on family land, and it had been dug out decades ago, when things had been heating up between China and Japan. Miss Davies had decided to provide a secret haven for her enormous extended family, just in case one was needed. So she’d hired various contractors, paid in cash, and quietly constructed a massive rabbit warren under the old stone cottage that had been her childhood vacation home in Bendigo, about two hours away from Melbourne.
“All off the books and untraceable,” Hurfest said, leading us through the corridors. We passed a few strangers as we went, people who looked at Tegan and I with concern, or pride, or something that looked startlingly like awe. I automatically smiled at them until I realized I didn’t have to. “Celia Davies was really something. And when China and Japan didn’t go to war and Australia didn’t get pulled into it, most of Joph’s family forgot it was here. It was used for storage, sometimes, which is why we have all this junky furniture. But it doesn’t officially exist.”
“Who are these people?” Tegan asked, as a bright-haired man pushed himself thin against the wall so we could pass unimpeded.
“Key members of the Save Tegan movement,” he said easily. “You really made an impression, Teeg.” He smiled at her. She didn’t return the smile, and he hesitated a bare moment before resuming the lead.
I’d seen at least nine unfamiliar people, which was interesting, all of whom had been armed, which was even more so. I considered the headless SADU guard I’d seen on our escape route and watched Carl Hurfest’s back. His shoulders were set back, his steps sure. And the people in the halls looked at him with respect.
The Hurfest I’d known hadn’t been liked, but he’d been respected, especially political liberals like the ones in Bethari’s clique. Famously, Hurfest told the truth, and on a few occasions, he’d told it at some personal risk. There were whispers that he’d managed to outface government threats to confiscate his media license by threatening to go public with every unsubstantiated rumor he’d picked up in twenty years of political reporting. The substantiated rumors, of course, he’d already told.
For no real reason, I’d assumed Lat was in charge of the Save Tegan movement. The evidence indicated I’d assumed wrong. And Hurfest wanted us for something—or, at least, he wanted Tegan, or he wouldn’t be making such an effort to be nice to her.
My political instincts were prickling into life. Observe, I thought, remembering my mother’s lessons. Consider.
What did Hurfest want? Power, probably—after a couple of decades of political reporting, maybe he wanted to get in on the game, instead of just talking about it. But there were much safer ways he could become politically powerful; he could have leveraged Tegan’s story into the government’s narrative and made himself complicit with their lies. Instead, he’d chosen this underground lair and a call to action. That meant something. It would be foolish to trust him completely, but his motives were probably genuine. Hurfest really did think that Cox’s government was bad for Australia and that the human-rights abuses it had engineered couldn’t be allowed to go on.
It was comforting, how smoothly my brain clicked back into motion. SADU had hurt me, made me weak. But they hadn’t gotten to all of me.
We hit the end of the corridor and started up a flight of stairs. The girl coming down didn’t flatten herself against the wall. She took one look at us and bounded down the steps past Hurfest, her purple headscarf and long gold dress rippling with the speed of her passage.
“Tegan!” she squealed as she launched herself into Tegan’s arms.
Tegan staggered under the impact, but her grip was sure. “Bethari! I’ve missed you so much!”
“You too!” She looked over Tegan’s shoulder and caught my eye, her teeth sparkling in a wide crescent under her long nose. “Abdi, this is so great!”
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I said, not at all sure about that. Bethari Miyahputri was Tegan’s best friend and Joph’s ex-girlfriend. She was a journalist, a hacker, a cheerleader, and a steadfast enabler of Tegan’s more dangerous ideas. I was happy she hadn’t been imprisoned or hurt after our encounter with the guards in that cryostorage facility, but I didn’t really want to spend time with her.
Bethari was so earnest it almost hurt to have her around. She was a political idealist—like Tegan, like me—but she seemed to have absolute certainty in the righteousness of her causes, which was both enviable and suspicious. She ’casted long diatribes against the ills of society and told every newcomer to our school to be nice to me.
Bethari Miyahputri was probably a good person, but she was so loud about it.
She was focusing back on Tegan, who was still leaning against her. “Are you okay? Stupid question. Ho
w are you feeling?”
“Better,” Tegan said, laughing. She pulled back, and I saw the tears she dashed away. “So much better, thanks to you.”
Bethari’s joyous expression abruptly snapped into something harder. She twisted to glare at Hurfest. “Speaking of that—”
“Not here,” he said firmly. “Abdi and Tegan need to be briefed.” He tilted his head at the hall, a clear dismissal.
Bethari’s face twitched, but Tegan tucked her arm into Bethari’s and began blithely walking back up the stairs, making jokes about her dress. I grinned. Clearly, the Tegan who was happy to challenge the illusions of the powerful was still in there. Bethari played along, smiling slightly as Hurfest gave in with a huff.
I brought up the rear, wishing Hurfest hadn’t seen me kissing Tegan in that living room. It gave him a handle on me I wasn’t sure I wanted him to have.
I should probably work out how I felt about Tegan before we did that again. There was something between us, but there was also betrayal and pain. I remembered the perfect puppet face she’d turned to the world, and my anger trembled in my limbs. Rescue had been coming, and she hadn’t told me. I’d been drowning, hopeless and hurting, and she’d known. I’d been desperately lonely, left without support, and she’d had an ally. I’d been ready to die to make it stop.
I understand, I’d said, but I didn’t.
But I understood the softness of her skin, the sure way in which she’d pulled me closer to her, the ease with which I’d been able to put everything but touch aside. She wouldn’t like it if I told her, but Tegan was good at becoming the center of everything, without even trying. The center of attention, the center of a publicity campaign, the center of a movement.
It would be so easy to let her be my center, too.
But if I did that, I might finally lose myself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fugue
Tegan exhaled when we emerged from a trapdoor built into a stone floor. “Daylight,” she said, pointing to a window.