A Treason of Truths

by Ada Harper

  Lyre took one more moment to admire that face—gods, yes, this was the woman she happily followed into hell. But if her muscles were sore from this, then Sabine’s had to be exhausted. She nodded and braced her way downward. “On we go, kids.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The echoes of panic still shivered under Sabine’s skin as they felt their way down into the darkness. Without the ocular shell, Sabine’s entire right side was a wash of nothing. Shadows that roiled and reached out. It was disorienting, but that wasn’t what disturbed her. An ache like an echo welled in her joints and pooled in the fine, nearly invisible scars tracing her right eye. She’d been at the mercy of nano-agents before. Known the terror of having your own nerves and sinew turned against you. Suffocated under the weight of knowing each breath was at the mercy of tiny, mindless machines just waiting to gnaw your pulse from the inside.

  Compared to that, losing the socially easing appearance of her right eye was nothing. The prosthetic shield had always been a calculated choice anyway. The pieces of her eye that Maris had been able to salvage were just that—pieces. It’d healed nicely. But “nicely” and “how one expected an eye to look” were different. People had surprisingly narrow views about eyes, Sabine had discovered. It was easier to wear the silver piece that sat like a shield over her right eye.

  After a time, Sabine had grown so used to the silver in her reflection she’d stopped seeing it, even if the rest of the world never did. That was why they were making such a fuss now. But the appearance of her right eye wasn’t Sabine.

  Sabine was Sabine.

  And she would burn away anything else that did not serve that.

  Almost anything. Lyre hopped the final gap to the minor oubliette that she’d declared a safe spot and helped Sabine to solid ground. Kitra had not stopped fussing over her the whole way down, so the familiar, brusque manner in which Lyre guided her was a kindness. The junction where they stopped was an oversized concrete bowl, crumbling away up one side to reveal a broken sliver of connected tunnels. The bowl was a wide space, and difficult to keep everyone in view with her new narrowed vision.

  “Is all well, Your—oh.” That was Alais’s voice, to her right. It irritated Sabine to turn her head. Her right side was mostly light and shadow now, with the odd visceral pulse of nanite presence. Gods, the Vault was teeming with it. A roiling kind of aura that limned the walls, the floors, even Cian and Alais.

  Everything but Lyre.

  “Fascinating,” Cian mused.

  “Are you in pain?” Alais asked carefully.

  Sabine had the distinct impression that she was looking to Lyre for confirmation as she asked that. It rankled. “The only pain I endure is dealing with—”

  “She’s fine,” Lyre said. Her hand drifted to the small of Sabine’s back, pressing her away from the edge, verbal and physical. “We’ll rest for a few minutes but we should push on. These tunnels are a maze, but mazes are good to get lost in.”

  “You seem to have no trouble navigating them,” Alais said, and Lyre’s voice sharpened.

  “We haven’t even scratched the surface. We need to evade the Vault security and find a way off this pleasure barge before it eats us.”

  “Any ideas?” Alais’s voice held a goading lilt that Sabine didn’t understand. Really, no one was allowed to talk to her people that way, she shouldn’t—

  Damn, she needed to stop forgetting that.

  Lyre shrugged. “I had a gander of the known maps before we came,” she answered vaguely. “There’re service shuttles at regular intervals along the outside of the flotilla, but that’s going to be a long haul. Through enemies actively hunting us. Not to mention the native creepy crawlies they have down here. We need a plan.”

  “I may have something to contribute.” Cian pulled his glasses off. They’d stayed miraculously on through the tumult down the chute, and now his long fingers swept along the sides and plucked a handful of what had seemed decorative dots off the side. He passed them around. Each was a thin oblong piece of silver. When Sabine’s finger brushed one, it appeared to activate and swelled to about the size of a gumdrop.

  “Should we get separated, we should at least stay in contact.”

  “Comms?” Lyre shook her head. “We’ll only be telling Sylvere exactly where we are.”

  “Not all of us have relied solely on the Vault for advances in technology,” Cian said primly. “These devices were specifically brought because of their Syndicate-grown encryption.”

  “Which explains how you were able to smuggle it in past the Vault scans. Tricky, that.” Lyre sounded impressed, if grudgingly so. Sabine had to agree. Though the planning required foresight that made her pause.

  “Who else had these on the flotilla? The guards you left behind are surely being searched as we speak—”

  “Oh no.” Cian made a pitying sound, which took too long to place as a laugh. It didn’t sound right on the strange man. “You never trust your bodyguards. Even with available blackmail, any government official makes it standard operating procedure to assume their guards are paid quite well to report on their movements, at the very least. I prefer to maintain personal lines of communication.”

  The level of paranoid madness was unfathomable. The Empire was built on duty and House loyalties. Even after hearing stories from Olivia, Sabine was perpetually aghast at the cultural differences. “How does the Syn cooperate enough to even function?”

  “A shared sense of survival, desire for profit, and dislike of the Empire, of course.” Cian tucked the comm device in his ear and tapped it twice in demonstration. “I had my personal pilot listening in, but seeing that the entire craft has gone silent, I would assume the only other compatible comm device is lost in a burning wreckage somewhere over the coast. We can assume a reasonable level of confidentiality.”

  “Sensible,” Lyre mused before slotting her own comm in. She sounded far too comfortable with the whole madness for Sabine’s tastes, but she supposed that was a requirement of spymastering. Sabine would stick to arguing with nobles, thank you very much.

  * * *

  “Sylvere’s connection to the agent is reliant on network transmissions. Reach is superficial at best, down here. If we get deep enough into the underworks, the signal should weaken and break entirely. We’ve got to keep moving.” Lyre tilted her head toward the crumbled viaduct beyond their shelter. “And hopefully find a light before breaking a leg.”

  Sabine considered the absolute dark of the path. There was no light. Even squinting with her left eye, the ground dropped out of view a meter out. There was nothing but darkness and the squirming aura of shadows.

  Wait. Not shadows. Sabine allowed her gaze to relax. The squirming presence of nanites, disgruntled distortions that pulsed like a headache, sharpened into focus. The weave of world available to no one else but her. And with everything positively soaked in nanotechnology in this place, it painted a path. For a moment, she was able to forget the old terror simmering in her veins. “We may not need one.”

  She indulged in the rare occurrence of catching Lyre off guard with that, for just a moment, before striking over the first hurdle of torn permacrete.

  “Sabs—ugh.”

  “Watch your step there,” Sabine added.

  The grumbling got louder as Lyre caught up. “You can see?”

  “No. Not precisely.” Sabine tilted her head. It wasn’t precisely seeing, the pulse and weave. It was a plucked string of static and gaps of nothing, which, without enough light to see, her mere mind could pick its way around to compose a map of the world around her. Like feeling air currents. An echolocation of miswired nerves. She took another step. Live nano-growth twitched and pulsed under her feet, like fish in a stream. Plants of some kind. They had taken over the rubble overhead, making the path smoother if one was careful. Good. “Veer to your right three steps.”

  The certainty i
n her voice was practiced, and so was Lyre’s reaction. For all the friction between them, like two sunstones burned by their own sparks, the roles of command and trust had always been so easy. She heard the soft breath of air, released without malice. “You heard the lady.” Lyre raised her voice, “Everyone grab the shoulder of the person ahead of you. Let’s get cozy.”

  A warm palm curled around her shoulder. Chapped fingertips brushed softly at her exposed collarbone. Lyre never saw Sabine as merely a crown, but she never tried to deny that it was part of her now, either. Sabine’s eyes stung. She focused on the plant-choked path ahead, calling out minute corrections.

  Cool air brushed her cheeks. Sabine paused, orienting herself. The viaduct walls fell away here, permacrete having finally lost the fight to the underworks’ native flora. Thick ropes of the plant had grown together, spanning the gap left behind. It was barely wide enough for them to cross single file, but a blurring of the nanites said the top growth of vines was older, hardened and sturdy over the younger plants that supported it. It should bear their weight, if they risked it. A dim glow dotted something up ahead. It was as good a direction as any. It wasn’t as if there was an easier path back.

  “A narrow bridge of sorts, ahead.”

  Lyre’s fingers tightened a fraction against her skin. “Take it slow.”

  “Just follow my lead.”

  “Story of my life,” Lyre said, and Sabine’s lips quirked.

  It was a barb all soft-edged, the kind of teasing Lyre had harassed her with in Sabine’s best memories. The kind of familiarity Lyre had withdrawn from in the past few weeks. It made an irrational spark of happiness warm her cheeks. Ridiculous, considering the situation they were in, but Sabine reached up to curl her fingers over the hand on her shoulder. “We’ll take it slow.”

  The vines flexed slightly when Sabine left the safety of the tunnel. It was a curious kind of twitch, enough to cause alarm. But they didn’t move again as Lyre and the rest joined her on the bridge and began a laborious creep across the gap. The air was still on either side of her, her vision narrowed to the tiny walkable path, but Sabine could feel the thrum of nanite life woven up and down the chasm. So much plant growth. How long had it been left unmonitored in the underworks, anchoring its roots deep into the foundations of the flotilla? Or was it the flotilla anchoring the plants?

  “What was that?” Alais’s voice was a step beyond Lyre, pitched low and urgent. Sabine had been so intent on making sense of her own private world that she hadn’t noticed the sound. There was a constant background shuffle. A low, dry slither, like leather slipping against skin. It almost—but not quite—muffled the occasional staccato snap of something wetter, and there, distant and cut off, something like an animal. A growl then wounded yelp, cut off and final.

  It wasn’t a single occurrence. As Sabine focused, she could hear similar sounds repeating, farther down the chasm, then overhead. She twisted, trying to track it. There had been packets of tighter static woven into the walls, silver clumps in her mind that she’d dismissed as part of the plant life. She could pick out legs now, heads, creatures of alien shapes and sizes. But they weren’t...moving. Or rather, they were, but in a pained, struggling sort of way.

  “Oh,” Sabine breathed, making sense of it.

  Farther ahead, a shape was pinned against where the rubble picked up again. Rangy body but a darting shape of head that reminded Sabine of her brother’s wolf. It still had enough energy to fight, twisting and snapping at the silvery threads winding around its haunch.

  “Sabine.” Lyre’s fingers tightened and she felt her shift closer against her back. “This growth we’re walking on. Vine shaped? Overgrown and ropy?”

  In the pitch black, Lyre must have still felt Sabine’s tremble as she nodded. Lyre swore loudly, all sense of caution gone. “Creepers. Get off—!”

  The bridge bucked beneath them. Sabine flung herself to her knees to keep from falling off. She reached out for a handhold and yelped as thick vines whipped out of her reach and angled back to snap at her.

  A strong arm yanked her back before it could close on her wrist. Lyre’s grip didn’t loosen. She propelled them forward, though she couldn’t possibly see the way the vines were unraveling beneath them. “Off the bridge, go!”

  Lyre was strong enough that Sabine barely kept her feet under her to guide them to the jut of viaduct at the other end. Sabine caught a glimpse over her shoulder of the thick ropes of bridge unraveling, and beyond it the silhouettes of the others, faint and stumbling as they flung themselves back the way they came. No way to know if they made it. The vines rose, like a thorny wave, blocking her view.

  Their feet scrabbled, finding purchase on solid permacrete. Lyre fairly threw her over a jut of stone. Sabine landed hard on her hip and rolled. When she stopped, she had lost all sense of orientation—and Lyre.

  Sabine started to push herself up, but a low growl made her freeze. The wolflike silver beast was not far off, and appeared to have won its battle with the vines, if only barely. She’d landed closer to the glowing moss, enough that the light cast the creature in silhouette where it hunkered against the rubble.

  It growled again at her, pained and warning. Sabine didn’t have time to flinch before it lunged. A flash of bone white and a lash of fur and something worse brushed across her cheek.

  And past it.

  Sabine opened her eyes at a squint. A coil of vine writhed in the wolf’s jaws, ragged at the end where it had been ripped from the root. Over her shoulder, a flailing stub of vicious vine still swayed in her direction. Sabine scuttled to put space between them and carefully regarded the wolf—that was surely what it reminded her of now. “Thank you.”

  The scrawny beast dropped the vine, licking its maw once as if to test its taste. Then it picked it up and limped away into the dark of the tunnel.

  “Gods dammit, Alais, come in or I’ll wring your scrawny altus neck.” Lyre appeared at the top of the rubble, tapping at her makeshift comm as if that would make it work better. The dim light afforded just enough to study her for injuries, which was exactly what Sabine did. An ugly-looking slash bloodied one of her knuckles, a splash of red against a dust and dirt backdrop. Sabine supposed she wasn’t in much better condition. A hand checked her frayed braids. Damn.

  She looked up. Lyre was giving her a scrutinizing look in turn, and opened her mouth to say something before jerking her chin. “Alais?”

  Sabine’s comm wasn’t in her ear. She swept the floor with one hand until she found it pressed in the dirt well of a paw print. She gave it a decisive dust-off before clicking it into her ear.

  “—back to the chute. Hell of a tumble without Her Grace’s spooky sense.”

  Sabine cleared her throat.

  “Long may the empress reign,” Alais added, more droll than appeasing.

  “All accounted for?” Sabine asked.

  “More or less. Those things got a finger on Kitra. Ripped half the meat from his biceps, but we stopped the bleeding. What was that, anyway?”

  “Creepers. Techs call them reclaimer vines,” Lyre answered with a distracted air as she kicked another torn root away from Sabine. “Engineered to reclaim organic material around the flotilla—break it down and repurpose it. Supposed to stay neatly in the sewer and disposal lines but obviously nothing has decided to stay where it’s supposed to down here.”

  Lyre was well informed. A stir of unease distracted Sabine from Alais’s response.

  “—in any case, the prime minister did something to the moss on the wall that he believes will keep them at bay.”

  “Something?” Lyre interjected.

  “Phosphor. A pulse band has a minimal enough charge to ignite it.” The Syn Prime Minister sounded pained that he even had to explain himself.

  Lyre gave a grudging huff. “Yeah, guess that would work.”

  “How long will it take us to reg
roup?” Sabine asked.

  “We can’t.” Lyre gave her a stony look. She glanced over her shoulder at the vine-choked rubble. “Look, the creepers left a gap at least eight meters across. We can waste time trying to find a way across—during which we’re sitting ducks both for the creepers and whatever else the Vault is sending down here—or we can keep going and keep in contact with hopes to regroup farther down.”

  “And at the same time making it harder for Sylvere to track and debilitate us,” Cian agreed.

  “Which we still don’t know why he’s doing,” supplied Lyre bitterly.

  A sliver had lodged in Sabine’s palm. It irritated, like everything else about this scenario. The decision was an easy one to make. “I’m not leaving this flotilla until we find out.”

  Silence on the comms was mirrored by Lyre turning to her with an incredulous curl of the lip. “Right. Make your way down the chute. There should be a juncture a ways down that leads you to a viaduct. Check in first if you decide to die. Lyre out.”

  Lyre tapped the comm off without breaking eye contact. She offered a hand and yanked Sabine to her feet with slightly less grace than fitting for her station. There was enough light from the glowing moss that Lyre guided her own path over the rocks. “This way, Highness.”

  “This means you’re returning to my service?” Sabine hated the stiffness in her own voice, the way the light in Lyre’s eyes flinched to something less than it was.

  “Nope. But you’ll still trust me to get you out of here, yeah?”

  Regret welled in her chest, buoyed by a softer feeling. Trust was never a matter of duty, with Lyre. Unlike Cian, Sabine could have every warning in the world and she’d still leave her heart wide open for the wounding blow. She had no protection from Lyre. Not from that quarter. “Lead the way,” Sabine said.

  Lyre’s palm fit in hers, and they descended farther into the underworks.

  Chapter Fifteen