by Mark Johnson
She took a new paper from her desk: an official printed Sumad Reach material request form.
Her throat thickened. Telling Toornan about the Immersion Chamber would have been the absolute right thing to do, but impractical. Doubtless, honesty was the best policy, but she should have shown that honesty and righteousness three years earlier. Adding to Toornan’s confusion for the sake of simplistic idealism wouldn’t help the situation and might put him at risk. She’d keep her burden private and, one day, she’d tell him the whole truth.
Once he was safe.
Lingering, flickering ashes pushed their smoke out of the wastebasket and up, out the window, drifting into the night and up to the stars, as the string concerto came to its gentle conclusion.
14
Terese arrived after ninth bell. Toornan had drawn the classroom’s blinds and taken a seat in the padded teacher’s chair at the front of the room. Anyone happening upon him, with his thick Sumadan jersey turned up at the collar, would believe he’d come to be alone after a long day on patrol. Or simply to get away from his shared room.
Terese chose one of the many old, slowly cracking student seats, their metal legs flaking brown paint. The chairs were probably older than she was. The hinged wooden desk she leaned on looked even older. It looked exactly like any of Armer Stone’s classrooms. If not for the pictures of ancient Sumadan leaders and saints and the overlarge map of Polis Sumad on the wall, she might’ve been back home.
“We’re safe,” she said. It was much easier to clear her head in this room, far from people, noise, electric devices and residential vibration mechanisms.
Toornan exhaled, chest sagging onto the desk. “How are you?” he said.
“I go to work, get glared at by the other three heads, come home, check for letters from Pella, write to her, have dinner and go for a walk. Sometimes a whole day goes by and I don’t speak to anyone.”
“My roommate and his girlfriend encourage me to get out the apartment most nights so they can have it to themselves. Last night, I made a point of getting drunk and reading a book in my underwear in the main room.” He gave a self-deprecating smile. “It’s my little act of rebellion. I’m doing what I can on my end. Somehow, it’ll help you.”
Terese snorted with laughter. She hadn’t laughed in a long time. It felt good. “Every little bit helps, Toornan.”
He continued. “Daraam, Gember, Jools and I came here for some lectures on Sumadan history,” he said. “No one comes here after hours.”
“It was a good idea,” she said. “How’s your mentorship?”
“Pazga’s always cranky about something. Now she’s got me working on sensors. Tells me I’m too reliant on my eyes and that I’ll miss things if I rely on them and don’t analyze the metrics. It can’t hurt, I suppose.” He didn’t seem convinced.
Terese had always wanted to ask about his eyesight. “How are your eyes so good, anyway? How do you do it? You’ve the best eyesight of anyone I’ve ever worked with. No one even comes close.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I always saw everything. I was ten when I realized no one else could see as well as me. I’d be looking for something and I’d just… see it. Or I’d see the people I was looking for, or mechanisms, if I’d lost one. What I’m looking for sometimes jumps out, not like words on a page, but actual, real objects.”
Terese’s mind tripped back to the renegades, minutes after they’d been taken. Zalaran Morgenheth had hinted he’d seen her face through her helmet.
“Have you ever been able to see through anything?”
“What? No. How could I do that?”
“Never mind,” she said.
There was a lull, a space in which Toornan sat back and scratched at a splinter on his chair’s armrest. She rubbed a sore spot on her knee.
“I’ve been wondering,” he said finally. “I doubted you a bit, I admit.” He raised his hands. “No, I don’t mean you were paranoid, but more like you’d found something secret but not necessarily illegal. Then last week, right when you’d predicted, Jools’s complement left. It was like you said: they headed out the western gate, going west. Full plate, into the sunset with two electric wagons with massive water casks and boxes big as coffins.
“Jools said their missions were in the Hem Kader district, out west. So I was surprised when they disappeared after three miles.”
Terese’s fingers ceased their rubbing.
“I know. They were getting hard to track, but still I shouldn’t have lost them so easily.”
Out of anyone else’s mouth that would have been a joke, but to Toornan it was an admission of defeat. Even at twenty-six years, the man didn’t understand how remarkable his eyesight was.
“Five nights later, I was watching that space and they reappeared. They were trudging and, Gods, did they look tired. Whatever they were doing, they weren’t on holiday. But you know what I realized when they came in the gates?” He spread his hands. “Their plate was no dirtier than when they’d left, but the wagon they took was dustier. Terese, wherever they went, they weren’t in their plate.”
Terese felt a chill. “My team used a safe house to keep our plate, before heading on dark ops,” she said. “But our shifts lasted weeks, not five days. I can’t think of any purpose for a Seeker dark op that quick.”
Toornan bit his lip. “So, your old squad were on dark ops?” It wasn’t something officers were supposed to mention to one another, even between officers of the same rank. But at this point, old rules were irrelevant.
“Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “Point is, there’s no deep immersion or dark ops that last only five days. Unless we believe a group of missionaries and heads have been reduced to performing simple recon.”
“Unlikely,” he agreed. “What about priority retrieval of mechanisms or artifacts, like you thought? That timeframe’s about right, then. And it would explain why they use the electric wagons with those great metal boxes.”
“No,” she said. “Retrievals aren’t scheduled. Jools’s excursions would be planned weeks in advance.”
“Ah.”
“The Hem Kader district,” she said. “What do you know of it?”
“Centuries ago, it was abandoned after a civil war wrecked it. There was no rush to repair or resettle it until the last few decades, when the Royals decided to revitalize it and gave out some permissions and currency to developers. It’s got a strange mix of economic, structural and infrastructural growth, depending on whatever corruption the developers are into. It’s not as bad as the Refugee Territories, but there are powerheads and ruins out there to coat any plate with dust.”
Terese pushed back in the chair—difficult, given how it’d been designed to make leaning back uncomfortable.
“So, Jools’s complement were hiding their plate armor, but keeping the electric wagons? So civilians in the Hem Kader wouldn’t recognize them as Seekers, I’d say. There’s got to be something of interest out there.”
He shrugged.
She’d known she’d run up against a barrier like this eventually: A point where she’d have to take a more aggressive step toward the answers.
And a step closer to being discovered.
The Immersion Chamber’s dead were owed those answers. Patzer knew the renegades, and Lijjen had suspected her of… something. She had to find the connection, and if she stopped now, she’d be betraying both Lord Armer and Lord Sumad. If this was what it took to be able to look Pella in the eye and tell her the journey was worth it, then so be it.
She gripped the desk. “I have a plan, Toornan.”
He leaned toward her, eyes wide.
“One I can’t share.”
15
Terese jumped when the knock came, ten minutes early. She cursed under her breath. Her preparations were barely complete. She forced a smile into her voice. “Coming!”
The wave device’s volume was set to a pleasant level, to a station playing mostly popular Sumadan pieces. Terese dusted her freshly laun
dered silk blouse, checked her reflection in the mirror on the back of the door, and twisted the handle.
Jools Teeber beamed at her from the other side of the threshold.
“Terese!” she shouted, pushing a bottle of wine at her.
“Jools, come in.” They kissed the air at each other’s ears. “You’re looking so well.”
“Thanks,” Jools said. She lowered herself onto Terese’s couch. “It’s this new exercise that Gam and I’ve started. It’s got to do with keeping your core active, and he’s taught me how to really cook skinleaf. They’re doing it all wrong in the commons galleys because it’s cheaper to skip parts of the process.” She sighed. “I wish we had skinleaf back home.”
“We do, I think,” Terese said, “but it apparently doesn’t grow as well as here.”
Jools plopped onto a padded chair. “They do everything with it, here. Young skinleaves for protein, old skinleaves as leather replacement, and when they grow it, it produces minerals for the other vegetables, so it’s more efficient to grow it even if you don’t want to eat it. And do you know it has no common relatives in the plant kingdom? No one knows where it came from! It’s something else, all right.”
Terese popped the cork and poured wine into two pear-shaped glasses.
“Oh, Terese, you and your nail polish. You’re obsessed with it!”
Terese froze in horror. There, right beside the cheese and crackers, was her small vial of Armen nail lacquer. How could she have missed it? Nerves, too many nerves. A survivable mistake, nothing had been ruined. Yet.
She swept the lacquer bottle up protectively, cradling it in her hand and searching for a plausible excuse. Once the ‘lacquer’ she’d put in Jools’s empty glass hit her, Jools couldn’t suspect anything, or the results wouldn’t be reliable.
“It started with Pella going through a varnishing phase, and we got into it together. It’s something from home I can cling to, I suppose.”
Jools gave a happy shrug. As if to say, ‘We all need something to keep us going.’ Terese clinked her glass to Jools’s, and they sipped.
For a time, they ate, drank and spoke of small things. Jools giggled when Terese attempted a bad joke.
“You’re handling this all well, Terese. I mean, the… you know.”
It was a pleasant surprise that she could speak honestly.
“I can’t take it personally, Jools. You were there. My part of that taking went perfectly, and the whole complement knows. I had to spend a month in the Wastes with Sumad Reach’s favorite Cenephan bounty hunter, and even he couldn’t find them. I haven’t humiliated the Seekers, no matter what Lijjen says. For some reason he needed a scapegoat.”
“You’re good, Terese. Don’t forget that. We’ll all vouch for you. When we get home, I mean.” Jools looked as though she would say more but stopped herself.
“Thanks.” A small silence became a long one. “There… there’s a reason I asked you here tonight.”
Jools looked down.
“Jools, no matter how badly they treat me, no matter what happens when we get home, only I have the authority to release and transfer you. And in six months I’ll grant that transfer. If you want it.” She crossed her legs. “But you only get one transfer between Polis per lifetime, Jools. If it doesn’t work out with Head Kedden, you can’t come back to any Armer chapterhouse.”
Jools looked up, the corners of her eyes wet. “It’s a good rule, Terese. It’s there for a reason. But it’s at the back of my mind every time I look at him. I don’t know what to say because if I bring it up, then it could be the start of us falling apart. Or if it’s the start of something better, then that scares me more. Because he can’t come to Armer. His career is so much further ahead than mine, and, it’s not like he’s going to make babies and stay at home with them. But if I stay, who’ll look after my mother once Da is gone? And then…”
She paused and put her head in her hands. “This has to sound so stupid. I’m sorry. When I say it out loud it sounds so stupid.”
“It’s your brain, Jools. You’re listening to it too much. There’ll always be another reason to do or not do something. Stop making lists of things that could go wrong. Just stop thinking about everything outside him, and ask that inner voice you keep trying to shut up because you’re scared of the answers.”
Jools didn’t take down her hands, and, right on schedule, burst into tears. The nail lacquer worked, thank the Gods.
“Oh dear,” Terese said, feeling a little guilty. She wasn’t the naturally nurturing type. Sometimes she envied men, who could just clap other sobbing men on the shoulder and wait for them to finish. Now she had to ask Jools more questions about something she’d clearly already decided, and pretend the answer wasn’t blindingly obvious.
“Get up. You’re coming for a walk. No, stop that. Who cares who sees you crying? It’s dark out anyhow. Look, we’ll walk in the courtyard.”
Into the corridor, and finally away from her apartment.
For some reason Terese’s mind drifted back to the hideaway that she’d shared for one night with Patzer and his friend Drool. Something about the stories they’d told about their infected and cadver hunts. She must have been very drunk that evening, because she couldn’t remember even one of those stories. Why was she thinking of that?
“I’m sorry,” Jools sniffed. “I’m not like this. You know that, right?”
“You’re going to be making the defining choice of your entire life in six months, Jools. I’d be acting like you as well. Let’s talk about something else. Um, I know you like Polis Sumad, could you tell me about the places you go when your complement leaves? Tell me about the architecture.”
The other woman nodded, smiling at Terese’s efforts to strike up a conversation on her pet topic. Holder Moorcam had said that in the early stages, the conversation had to be directed or the subject would fall asleep within minutes. He’d also told her not to waste the solution, for the volume of ‘nail lacquer’ and ‘perfume’ she’d brought with her was as much as Armer Stone’s ancient artifacts could produce within a year. Moorcam hadn’t needed to tell her how worried he was the chapterhouse’s actions would be discovered.
At Terese’s persistent prompting, Jools detailed the distances, roads and paths with unusual precision. The places they’d slept, the strange antiques from Hem Kader, its artists and entrepreneurs gentrifying and developing the district’s forgotten spaces.
Jools spoke about the statue by the open square, the strategically vast open spaces of the Hem Kader, the curious antique shop with its odd clients who spoke so little. The abandoned area the shop operated in with similar shops spread nearby, and the dual-function nature of the new housing and commercial spaces being slowly developed, the sun reflecting off the RimWall at eventide, bustling suburbs where trade was healthy and the people dressed so creatively and in such colors. It was a pity they couldn’t sample any of the food on these runs, but one day she and Gam would sample everything out that way.
The courtyard’s lights had dimmed as night crept on, and their quiet whispers and footsteps drew no attention.
Jools sighed in frustration when Terese asked about her complement’s interest in old things.
“That’s why we’re always out there. Only the Gods know what the powerheads left lying around.”
Terese grabbed her shoulders. “Jools Teeber, as your commanding officer I order you to go back to your room and not communicate with Head Kedden until the sun has risen. If you went now, you’d tell him everything on your mind. And he’d blame me for interfering. Go to sleep, Missionary.”
Jools giggled, gave a sarcastic salute, lunged forward and wrapped Terese in a bear hug, leaving her feet dangling. “Thank you, Terese, for everything!”
“Anytime. But I think you already have your answer.”
As Jools skipped to her apartment. Terese’s smile dropped away.
From the few spare walls devoid of bookshelves, frescoes of the twenty-four Polis in their human fo
rms, including the still-dying Polis Ceneph, looked down on Terese as she entered the library. Its colored-glass windows climbed to the ceiling, where they met the tops of the tall bookshelves and the sliding ladders.
Of all the library’s sections, the map room was the most spacious. Large folders lined the room, inlaid within the white stone walls. Each folder was taller than Terese and contained a dozen maps at large scale.
Terese rifled through the folders. A librarian passed through the map room, her footsteps coming close, stopping then receding. Perhaps just checking if Terese needed help? After all, map preparation was the map room’s very purpose. Terese even had a reason for her presence. Creating the paperwork for such a requirement had again kept her late at the office, re-writing some of Miss Hung Over’s schedules so any scrutineer would believe Terese’s cover story: That she was correcting her colleague’s errors.
Some map folders were dedicated to topography, some tracked the tram lines, and others kept precise notes on the locations of each growth hexagon and water pipe within the Polis. Many folders contained detailed diagrams and layout structures of the Walls in the Refugee Territories. One never knew when such details might be needed.
She stopped at the well-maintained ‘Southern Polis and Territories’ folder. Terese turned each map, the wooden page borders rattling against one another, until she found the map she needed: a large, recent street map of the area surrounding Sumad Reach, including the local suburbs and tram lines. There were the major commercial centers, and there was the Hem Kader.
She retrieved a sheet of waxen, transparent grid paper and a ruler from the library’s supply, then knelt with a graphite stylus to draw the map she’d memorized while Jools had spoken that evening.
Old ruins, street shops, stand-out architecture, artworks, public buildings, hills, gardens, pipes and hexes and every feature Jools had mentioned gradually came into being. Using her subtlest encouragement, Terese had convinced her deputy to imply distances, features and directions until she was certain she could easily find her way through the Hem Kader with this map.