by Mark Johnson
Morgenheth stood, waiting for her.
2
“Get up.”
Terese jerked awake, alone on the stone floor. Morgenheth stood unmoving in the doorway. Her arm and leg negators clicked open. How was that possible?
Her stiff muscles, trapped for hours, stretched and rejoiced. Her neck popped as she twisted it. She stood, leaning against the storeroom wall for balance. Light struggled into the small room through cracks that suggested age, and slowly shifting earth.
Behind Morgenheth, stood three motionless silhouettes.
He tossed something that clattered at her feet. “Inspect it.”
Her shockpole! She knelt, gripping it. A quick test of its power sent a thrill of vibration up her arms. Its hum was the comforting sound of her identity: the slim metallic rod, the touch of security. Gods and Polis Armer protect me, she thought. There was no Seeker strategy for infected taking hostages. Why would there be?
“Use it on me.” Morgenheth sounded tired and smelled of stale sweat.
A test, or an excuse to finish her off? She knew she was no match for him. Her sides still ached from the quick drubbing he’d given her the previous evening.
She stepped toward him, shockpole raised.
“No,” he said. “All the way up. Full charge. Let me have it.”
The shockpole’s vibration energy was the energy of life itself, found in all things. Chaos energy, which would be coursing through Morgenheth’s body, was of the Enemy, and harmed all that was good on earth. The two energies were opposites.
Her grip slipped on the pole. “That setting’s for cadvers. It’s fatal, even to uninfected humans!” Too much of a good thing could kill.
“Do it, Saarg!”
Shaking, she pushed the sliding switch to the highest notch and touched her shockpole to the exposed skin above his low collar.
Morgenheth growled and swayed backward. An uninfected civilian would have staggered and collapsed. Even a Seeker would show pain at such concentrated energy. But shockpoles either gave a spark at first contact with infected, or rebounded off them, which meant…
“You aren’t infected,” she whispered.
Armer preserve! She’d traveled three months across the globe with a Head’s complement, chasing nothing. Three months of Pella’s life. Flute lessons, homework, and playtime at the park. Wasted. At least another three months’ journey back across sea and land. Gods, how stupid. The greatest misallocation of Armer Stone’s resources in her fourteen years of service, and she’d led it.
“We’re not Darkness worshippers either, or the pole would’ve knocked me out,” said Morgenheth. “Say it, Saarg.”
“You’re not infected,” she repeated. What in the Gods’ forgotten names was she supposed to do now? Everything she’d expected was turned on its head. “Ah, apologies for the inconvenience, citizens, I’ll return—”
Morgenheth’s snarl cut through whatever words might have tumbled from her. “The Immersion Chamber, Saarg!”
“Yes,” she said weakly. Gods, how much had they learned from the papers they’d taken from the Immersion Chamber? Although it was morning outside, the shelter was growing smaller and darker.
“Don’t make me ask stupid questions. Talk.”
Her cover story was useless. The renegades knew too much. “We were working with Sumadan scientists.” Her words spilled out in a gush. “The Immersion Chamber was designed to purge human bodies of chaos energy, to stop cadverism. It was working, until… you.”
“Seekers working with chaos energy?” Morgenheth growled.
“Don’t get upset,” she said, managing not to swallow. “Our job is combating chaos energy. And those farmers we released back to their villages before we capt—uh, found you? All of them tested clear of chaos. The experiment worked!”
Morgenheth sneered. “Yes, it was a complete success, Saarg.” He stepped forward. “If it worked so well, what are we all doing in Sumad, Saarg? What happened?”
She took a step back from the large man. “I have no idea. I hadn’t been there for weeks.” She paused to lick her lips. “Whatever it was, drew the runes and saved your lives. With all the evil that happened down there, you can’t blame us for thinking you were infected.”
Morgenheth sighed, his shoulders slumping. “It pulled us out of our pods so we wouldn’t suffocate like the rest, Saarg. It was gone by the time we woke up. We got out of Polis Armer before you Seekers came for us, hoping we’d find answers here. We haven’t.”
She took a breath, forcing her voice to steady. “You were unjustly treated, Morgenheth. And on behalf of Armer Stone Chapterhouse, I apologize for mistaking your infection. It happens, sometimes.” Although not on inter-polis infected hunts, it didn’t. “It’s a mistake I will gladly correct when I return to Armer.”
Morgenheth shook his head. “I’d like to believe you, Saarg. I’d like to let you walk away, but let’s not pretend things are that simple.”
Was he about to slam a knife between her ribs?
Think fast, Terese!
“Wait, listen,” she stammered. “Look. The reason I’m here in Sumad is to make sure our involvement in the Immersion Chamber doesn’t get out. It wouldn’t just be me losing my job; the entire chapterhouse would be dissolved!”
Morgenheth didn’t move or speak.
“I have more to lose than you, if this gets out. You’re four people whose lives were… changed. Armer Stone employs over two thousand people. How many of them will be able to stay Seekers if this gets out? It’s madness for me to try bringing you in.”
Please Gods, let them believe me.
Morgenheth’s head tilted. “A truce, Saarg?”
She held back a relieved sigh. “We have one another over a barrel,” she said, fumbling for words. “The mission has twelve, um, eleven months left with Sumad Reach Chapterhouse. If I can keep the other Seekers off your scent—easy if you’re not infected—you won’t have to go writing anonymous letters to Sumad Reach, or the newskeepers, here or back home.”
He stroked his beard. “We abducted you in front of your complement. Infected don’t do that. How are you going to explain this to them?”
“I’ll figure something out. I’ll say I escaped while you four were screaming in pain all night.” She pressed on, in case their mystery medical condition was a sensitive subject. “If we keep away from one another, we both win. I go home, you stay hidden.” She decided to push her luck. “But you lot will have to hide well, and not kill anyone.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
“No, I think it might be. It’s human nature to have bad luck sometimes, but I’ve read your files. All of you have left bodies in your wake. Except you, Dantet. Your stepfather is still in the asylum. If you four can’t not murder anyone for a year, we’re all in trouble. You might not be Darkness worshippers, but you are murderers.”
Faster than her eye could follow Morgenheth lunged, grabbing her by the cuff of her plate armor, and lifting her, leaving her feet dangling. Their eyes were level. She stared into furious blue whirlpools, dark as sin.
“None of us murdered anyone, Saarg! You don’t know what happened to us!” he hissed in her face, his hot breath reeking.
“Even if I tried, I couldn’t defend myself against you, Morgenheth.” She managed to not stammer. “Go on. Hit me.”
He dropped her.
She lay on the ground staring up at her captor.
He spat. The spittle hit her face, running down her cheek.
“We’ll vanish for a year if you don’t search for us. Get out. Go find your complement. And try not to abduct and experiment on anyone for a year. I hear that’s illegal.”
Terese wiped her cheek slowly, not allowing herself to look away. She stood, ignoring her thumping heart.
She spread her arms to indicate the broken shelter and landscape outside it. “Enjoy Polis Sumad.” She turned and strode past Zale. Three shaggy outlines watched as she walked past them and
out through the shelter’s shattered door.
Another hot Sumadan morning had begun. She sweated the moment she emerged from the shelter, one of an ancient cluster resting in a large clay hollow. None would have heard her, over their bizarre screaming, if she’d called for help last night. Save lions or cadvers. Or both.
If the sun was rising there, then that way was north. Further in, toward the Center. Hopefully her complement was in that direction. She would find some running water pipes along the way, and her shockpole functioned perfectly.
“Everything will be fine,” she declared to the universe, refusing to look back at the shelter’s gaping entry.
She kicked a nearby stone. The impact sounded dull and unsatisfying, and the stone bounced off to one side and rolled in a circle before falling and stilling. Heading home, over the bumpy clay ridges that Cenephans called hills, and around ancient ruined settlements that made her feel watched, Terese Saarg left the Refugee Territories.
3
“I don’t know, sir,” Terese said.
She stood at stiff attention before Keeper Lijjen, forcing her legs to remain straight and her chin high, not allowing herself to scratch the persistent itch at her side but letting her eyes blur and not focus on the dark-skinned Keeper. Some part of her had to stay relaxed or she’d break entirely.
Lijjen neither moved nor spoke.
On his desk, a small inset bulb within the rectangular recording artifact blinked steadily as it had in each ‘debrief’ she’d endured in this room. They were gifts from the Seekers’ patrons: the Royals, within Polis Sumad’s Center.
“You suspect why I summoned you though, Head Saarg,” Lijjen said after Terese had been silent too long. His elbows rested on his thick wooden desk, his fingers intertwined.
Terese kept her face neutral. Here we go again.
Keeper Lijjen was trying to break her. That would be understandable, had he suspected her involvement with the Immersion Chamber back in Polis Armer. But he’d shown strangely little interest in it.
“My research report on standard infected subjugation theory was insufficient and incomplete, sir?”
“No.” Lijjen didn’t blink his brown eyes or shake his perfectly groomed head.
Terese stared at the stacked bookshelf behind the Sumadan, just above his head, wondering how it would feel to pull the whole thing down on him.
“My procedure during the recent group patrol led under Head Murrat was not to standard, sir?”
“No!” Lijjen barked. “Use what little sense Polis Armer bestowed upon you and tell me why you’re in this room, wasting my time and oxygen!”
“I… I don’t know, sir. My… cataloguing… of local chaos surges is unsatisfactory?” She didn’t have to fake her stutter. Damn the man, he’d rattled her.
It was how Lijjen’s harassment worked. He pressured her, demanding responses only he could fathom, wanting to confuse and exasperate her into mistakenly revealing something damning. He never smiled, but, sure as cadvers prowled the night, Lijjen loved their regular cat-and-mouse sessions, taking joy in the protracted, miserable hunt.
He could still learn that the Armer Seekers had managed the Immersion Chamber. Even now, she sometimes woke in the dark of night, thinking herself back in the Immersion Chamber, mechanical breathing apparatuses clanking and wheezing to keep their dependents alive, sustaining and purging three hundred lower-class civilians.
But, to her relief, Lijjen was intent on the improbable fact that four men in their early twenties had incapacitated her twenty Seekers in seconds, before abducting her.
The Keeper stayed silent, likely waiting for her to speak. Sometimes she played along and allowed herself to look vulnerable and foolish in the hopes Lijjen believed she’d revealed everything. Unlikely, but she needed something to hope for.
Lijjen broke his silence. “If you respected this career, you’d know why you were here. The Seeker custodianship is a lifestyle, not a job. Your mind and heart are elsewhere, and I am tasked with holding you to account, on an almost daily basis, to the myriad disgraces you have brought upon Polis Sumad and Armer!”
He punctuated his words with hard taps on his polished desk. This sort of dressing-down was usually reserved for those of Assistant or Missionary rank, not Head Seekers. Was he implying she deserved demotion, or had he run out of good reasons to chew her out? Seekers failed cadver takings often enough, and although frustrating, it wasn’t shameful.
And he still hadn’t said what she’d done wrong!
“You’ve made Sumad Reach a laughing-stock with your failed taking.”
Nonsense.
Of course, he wouldn’t believe a word he’d said. Instead she was supposed to believe, or at least pretend she did. She’d been isolated and almost forbidden to speak to her own home complement and had begun questioning her own memories of the failed taking. No one could endure these accusations and humiliations for three months running without questioning themselves. Taken on its own, this morning’s harangue was a laughable farce. But constant badgering over days, weeks and months had worn her down. She did doubt herself more than ever. She was making more mistakes now than she usually did, both in written reports and field work. Or was she imagining that?
What did the accursed man want to know, if he wasn’t interested in the Chamber?
“Your complement are lax in discipline and lacking ability,” he snarled. “Problems follow your every step and your attitude is disrespectful and ungracious.” He paused to gather his breath, his dark skin flushed from his tirade. “And your explanation of your escape from your quarry makes no sense.”
Lijjen hadn’t blinked yet. Snakes didn’t blink either.
“What did they want, Saarg?”
“Like I said, sir, they wanted to know what had freed them and made the runes. When I didn’t know they told me to go.” The indisputable fact the renegades were not of the Darkness was too ludicrous to be believed, and skittered too close to her involvement with the Immersion Chamber.
A blank glare, then: “What do you want, Saarg? Right now. Tell me.”
Her mouth dropped open. He’d never asked that before. Why now? Did he think her confused enough by now to make a fatal mistake?
There were so many answers. But there was no right answer for Head Saarg in this room, ever. So, she chose the truest thing.
“My daughter, sir. I want to pack and leave this instant and return home to her. It hurts to be away from her.”
Speaking the unvarnished truth after so long was cleansing. If her answer had surprised Lijjen, he gave no sign.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
“Such a brash statement speaks to your true nature. Your willingness to abandon your duty to the Gods for sentiment. To put your impetuous priorities above the wellbeing of Polis Sumad Himself.” Lijjen smiled for the first time in weeks. “I suspect you’re functioning at your best. One cannot expect Polis Armer’s bestial children to behave respectably, I understand. Such a basic, selfish wish displays the lack of restraint that brought about your ill-favored daughter. Typical of your origin, it is, however, unacceptable in Polis Sumad. Though still, within this office, you take pride in your moral failure and call it strength, excusing your loose morals and easily corrupted virtue, Saarg.”
Terese’s chest tightened and she took a long, slow breath. She wouldn’t react. She couldn’t!
Lijjen stopped for a quick sniff. “The Seeker tattoo on your back is all that separates you from public recognition of your disgrace. You’ve risen far above your competence. And only now, far from your enablers within Armer Stone Chapterhouse, do you finally receive the consequences of succumbing to your common urges.”
Her heart’s alarmed thumping spread through her body like wildfire. To her throat, unsteady legs and tingling hands. Her face burned. Unbidden, a wet streak betrayed her on her left cheek, then the right.
Lijjen hadn’t sunk to this level before. He’d stopped just short of accusing her of harlotry! And to bring
Pella into this? She was no shame, but Terese’s greatest accomplishment and joy. Her best friend. A beautiful little girl, full of laughter and love. Yet to Lijjen, Pella was just another angle of attack in his ridiculous mission to break her!
Gods above, she was trembling. Probably visibly. Whether in rage or shame she couldn’t tell. Oh, to hit the man! To grab him by his straight, starched white collars and yell at him that sometimes precautions failed.
No…
“Yes, sir,” she croaked.
Another interminable wait. “What did you say, Saarg?”
A breath.
“I’m sorry, sir. For letting down Polis Sumad Himself and Polis Armer. And Sumad Reach Chapterhouse and Armer Stone Chapterhouse.”
Did Lijjen’s eyelid twitch? Had he realized he wouldn’t break her? There’d be no putting her on behavioral report for insubordination or ‘conduct unbecoming’. No restricting her to quarters. Not today. That artifact’s blinking red light couldn’t condemn her if she didn’t say anything wrong.
Was he disappointed he’d not pushed her over the edge?
And she still had no answer for why she’d been called into his office.
Lijjen nodded brusquely. “I should think so. And pull yourself together, girl.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“You will take two Missionaries into the borderlands of the Refugee Territories.”
She shook her head. “Sir?”
No warning or introduction. He was still trying to push her off-balance. What did he want to know so badly? There was nothing of interest or value to him in her mind, save the Immersion Chamber. But he’d asked little of that.
“There’s been smuggling, refugees trading mechanisms. You’re to shut down the trading posts I indicate.”
“Trading posts, sir?” This wasn’t a Seeker’s work. It barely qualified as work for the Street Keepers—Polis Sumad’s legal enforcement gangs.