A Treason of Truths

by Ada Harper

  Mother sighed. “Must you make this difficult?”

  “Torture doesn’t work,” Lyre said. “Not if you want the truth.”

  “I’m aware. Besides, I trained you for torture.” Mother pushed away from the wall and dusted her hands before looking up. “I wonder how you’ll handle isolation.”

  Lyre’s smile dropped. “What?”

  “You always were clever at people. So I’ll take the people away.” Mother rapped on the door. “If you decide to talk, Lyre, we’ll be listening.”

  “Mother!” Lyre was moving before she thought it through. The door closed just in time for her fist to land against it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  She had to stop pounding when her knuckles began to bleed. Then the echo died away into an unending, susurrus buzz. The lights. Lyre glanced up and groaned. Grated. Nothing to be done, but sure to drive her mad in time.

  In less time than most.

  Lyre had learned how to hold up under interrogation, under torture. She could have lasted that. But she was going to fold in isolation. Fast. Faster than most people. Mother had chosen her torture well. And make no mistake about it: it was a kind of torture. Even when she’d been an underworks rat, Lyre had been surrounded by people. Watching people, talking to people, figuring out what people were thinking, how people worked—that was her genius. The worst parts of her days had been retreating to her self-made nooks to sleep, with only herself to figure out. But even then she’d had the ghosts of people. Clanks of pipes, distant thuds and footsteps, electronic chatter. The flotilla had never been a quiet place.

  But she wasn’t on the flotilla anymore, and it was quiet, so quiet. At first, she counted seams in the cement. The room was well lit, empty but clean. Even the seams were clean and rounded. No grit, no sharp edges. Nothing for desperate fingertips to get a grip on. She ran out of seams fast.

  There was a steel depression of moving water in the corner to piss in. Food was dispensed through a ration pack that slid through a slot on the wall. After she ate and slept twice—and without stimulus, which was the only real way to count the passage of time—she was certain the buzz was a firm B sharp. Light and wavering to B flat at long but regular intervals. Lyre silently counted between the notes and, there you go, she had a measure of time.

  So she knew that it’d taken another four hours past that to recall what the B-sharp-B-flat buzz reminded her of. A minuet. Music. And just like that, she heard the soft slip of satin against polished stone. The clink of glass, the murmur of politics at a low simmer. Lyre closed her eyes. The lights of Sabine’s coronation had been faceted with aetheric crystals—a ridiculous, nonsense use for them, a frivolity, but the requisition had shored up support from the northern lords and even a party turned into a political tool to wield in Sabine’s hands—but, gods, the effect had been stunning. Muted light fluttered and roiled like butterflies through the air, painting Sabine’s cheeks in a glow at the center of the crowd.

  Lyre stopped fighting the memory and she was there. Not in the crowd, of course, never in the crowd. The coronation ball had been held on the highest floating platform the estate had, and it floated off the spire of the Ameranthine Court like a halo. It reminded Lyre too much of her floating home, and she’d spent the entire shindig uneasy, perched near a pillar at the edge to avoid any Cloud Vault dignitaries who might be looking for her. To watch for the next threat—which since the foiled assassination attempt had been a regular occurrence—in the drifting crowds.

  Or she’d tried. Sabine was luminescent, the flame all the nobles flocked to. A gown the color of the night sky lit up with tiny jewels, silver and gold thread to match the Corvus—now newly crowned as Roucheux—House torque. Hair wound in artful waves around her head, as if held in place by will alone beneath a new, sharp-edged crown.

  It was all quite impressive, the sharp and the soft, but personally, Lyre lived for the little flashes of brown skin. The way light melted over her cheeks, around full lips, before puddling into soft shadows at her collarbone. The velvet turn of her wrist as she lifted her glass, humoring this noble or that diplomat seeking the new empress’s favor. A knowing, guarded smile bracketing white teeth. Wine and victory coloring her lips.

  Lyre’s own mouth was dry. Yes. It was a good thing there had been no sinister attempts at the empress’s coronation ball, because Lyre would have missed all of it studying the rise and fall of Sabine’s every breath. Sabine’s gaze was a practiced thing. She’d pick through the courtiers, acknowledging this noble or that rival with a calculated dip of the chin and move on.

  But now and then, dark eyes found Lyre’s in the shadows and oh... That pause, the incremental progress of a smile that was something other than planned. It fizzed like bright champagne in Lyre’s skin. An unfamiliar lightness, something like joy, had opened up her chest. Lyre had stayed drunk on it the rest of the night without drinking a drop.

  And then, after nobles had been impressed and agendas had been seeded and she had finished winning every battle with rose oil and guile, Sabine took her hand and guided Lyre confidently to the new royal suite. And when the door had closed and Sabine turned to grin at Lyre, everything had ignited. The solemn barnacle girl was still there, but the empress was bursting through, like weed through pavement. Victorious and elated and on fire with the future only she could see. Could shape. She said, “We did it.” And she looked at Lyre then like she...

  Her cheeks were wet. Lyre opened her eyes and scrubbed the hot tears from her face. Sabs. My Sabine. Lyre had wasted her time, her loyalties, her truths, her treasons. Even with the dull buzz and dishwater light of the cell overhead, she could still hear the faint strains of a minuet and satin-clad feet. Lyre pulled her knees up and faked sleep. Anything to hide the wave of regret that rose with bile in her throat.

  * * *

  Lyre would not speak, that much she was resolved. But days passed—weeks? It felt like weeks, but she kept count of her daily rations and knew it wasn’t—and it felt time to start planning for two things, either escape or her eventual mental breakdown.

  Which was not far off. The ghosts of time she’d wasted whispered in her ear regularly now. She’d dream she’d managed a wild escape back to the Empire only to wake up, sweaty and with grit on her tongue, to start the silence all over again.

  And since this was a Vault holding cell, Lyre had less than nothing to work with. The only hope was to craft a confession that got her out of this cell, but she’d seen the pity in Mother’s eyes. Mother could smell a lie, but she wouldn’t even care if it was true. A story, any story, was all they needed and then she’d be executed as a terrorist and as a traitor.

  Unless Lyre gave them a bigger threat. It would have to be a good one, to sway Mother, and seeded with a bit of truth. Crafting a good lie was all about the truth. Truth and preparation. She was halfway through concocting a Syndicate terrorist organization based on her contacts in the Syn and Olivia’s Whisper tales—maybe she’d toss Liv in there for believability, Lady knew the woman could take care of herself, even without a royal puppy dog following her around—when a slither of noise distracted her.

  Lyre had catalogued all the scant noises that seeped through the thick permacrete walls of her cell. She’d had the time, counted out in her monotonous minuet. This was different. A distant beep, which sounded to her trained ears like a proximity sensor. Footsteps. Then nothing.

  It was the quiet, after something blessedly new, that drove her to her feet. She had to be smart, she had to be meticulous, but she had to do something. Another day in this cell and she’d stop being able to trust her own senses. Her senses were all that she had left. She kicked the wall. It wasn’t hard to make her disused voice sound like gravel and sand. “Mother. I’ll talk, Mother. But not to a damned wall like this. I need—” Careful, not too much truth, just enough. The desperation was real enough. “I need some air.”

  The response wasn’t i
nstantaneous. Lyre knew how these things worked. Some lackey monitoring the feeds had to call someone, then call someone’s someone, on up until it reached Mother. Then if Mother was worth her salt as an interrogator—gods knew she was—she’d have Lyre cool her heels, get a little more distraught. Lyre knew her role. She paced, took increasingly labored breaths, repeated her demand—then pleas—at regular intervals.

  It took a while to convince Mother that she was sufficiently broken. When the door finally slid open, Lyre wasn’t certain herself whether it was entirely pretend. But fresh air moved on her face. It was still the canned, triple-filtered air of a bunker, but after an eternity of marinating in her own body odor in the cell, it felt like a sea breeze. Lyre took big, greedy gulps. For show, she reminded herself, not because she’d been reduced to crying over a bit of moving air.

  The hall was empty, of course. Mother was too cautious to come herself or use a fallible guard on Lyre. But as she took a tentative step out into the hallway, a clicking whirr followed her footsteps. AI sentries, loaded with armaments even Lyre didn’t recognize, followed her every move from ceiling mounts.

  “Just for lil’ old me, eh?” Lyre muttered, feeling a bit more herself. It always cheered her up when people were straightforward enough to point guns at her.

  The hallway continued to the right, so Lyre did too. The air was clammy but clean, an underground kind of feeling, and she was beginning to suspect her location. The Vault advertised itself as a simple floating colony of scientists, a ship without a port, but in reality even scientists weren’t that foolish. The Vault had a warren of obscure bunkers, constructed in secret and kept that way, dotting the wilds of foreign nations. Obscure little tuckaways that always lay within a day’s journey of the flotilla’s usual airspace. Lyre had learned of their existence but never of a mission actually using one. It appeared she’d become a case above her own pay grade.

  The hallway spilled into another, with a series of unmarked doors, all locked except for one. Lyre opened the door and stepped into a familiar milieu: four walls, a chair bolted to the floor. An interview room. Interview, of course, being the nice word used on blueprints. There was a distinct slope in the floor and a rust-colored drain. No second chair, but Lyre suspected Mother would prefer to stand over her in her defeat.

  Lyre suspected she was in for another long wait.

  * * *

  No buzzing minuet to keep her company this time, but it didn’t feel much longer when the door clicked open, allowing the sound of brisk footsteps and beeping alarms to bleed through along with Mother. Two guards accompanied her, weapons drawn, and Lyre submitted to the cuffs they placed on her wrists and ankles, locking her to the chair leg. It seemed only polite, really.

  “Talk,” Mother said as the guards left and before the door had even finished cycling its locks. All business, all steel.

  You brought me a candy bar when I was sick with myrtle flu. I was eleven. Feverish and homesick for the sewers. Remember that? It was a silly thought, but it settled a weariness into Lyre’s bones. The difference between the woman who had been unequivocally in charge of Lyre’s life, since childhood, but still had managed, up till now, to make it feel like a benevolent dictatorship. A big sister. A big sister who also beat you when you failed. Maybe being around Sabine had just showed Lyre what real leadership was. Gods, Sabine.

  “Sounds busy out there,” Lyre said, both to buy herself time for her lies and because she was curious. It had been dead silent when she’d been let out of her cell, and it was hard to control sound in a buried tin can.

  “Nothing of your concern,” Mother said. Brisk. Cool. Then why the alarms? Mother was nothing if not singularly focused, however. “Now: you said you would talk. Or shall I return you to your quiet?”

  The reminder of her cell made Lyre flinch internally, but she let none of it show on her face. Instead she let her shoulders drop, a drop of defeat, a warning pinch of nihilist knowledge that Mother would pick up. “Doesn’t matter much, I guess.”

  Mother was a careful fish. She inspected that hook from all angles, suspicious and knowing, before letting it catch her attention. Lyre almost thought she wouldn’t go for it, but then Mother’s eyes narrowed. “You think you know something. Talk.”

  So Lyre talked. It was a struggle not to whip out every trick of credibility in the book. In training, they’d often been set up with tests like this. Challenge a stone-faced superior, like Mother, and make them believe what they knew was a lie. Show off what they learned. But lying too well would be as bad as lying poorly. Lyre made sure her train of thought derailed randomly, picked up again on something unrelated, jumped tracks.

  Mother’s attention eventually began to drift. She checked new data on her wrist occasionally. That was okay. Lyre’s goal wasn’t to convince Mother she was telling the truth, just to weave it flawed enough to plant a seed of doubt.

  She’d just started peppering in embellishments borrowed from Olivia when Mother’s eyes sharpened to flint. “Whispers.”

  Lyre had been about to divert into another ramble but hesitated, not sure where Mother’s attention was yet. You never asked questions during an initial interview. Once a subject began talking, you let them dig their own grave first. She didn’t have to fake confusion. “Yes...the Syn—”

  “Your ring, it had government sanction with the Whispers?” Mother pressed.

  This was very unusual. Lyre flicked a glance at Mother’s wrist band. It was lit up with red notifications. “Yes.” Her “ring” of imaginary terrorist conspirators. Sure, Lyre could work with that. “We had the minister’s sanction. Why else would I risk my skin going back for the prime minister before the crash? Fat lot of good it did me.”

  Calculations were running rapid-fire behind Mother’s eyes, but Lyre, only holding a crumb of the context, had no idea what. Anything she said could slice her own throat here, if she wasn’t careful. She tried for an observation. “Cian wasn’t in pretty shape when I threw him overboard.”

  “But he survived,” Mother muttered. Lyre hadn’t known that. Not for certain. She took a small, relieved breath. Sabine would have her backup cure, if Lyre ended up getting messily executed here. If. Ha. As she sat over a bloody drain. Look at her, Lyre the optimist.

  Mother shook her head again. “There’d be no reason to—”

  “What’s going on, Mother?” Lyre could hear a muffle of activity outside the door now. It sounded almost like a distant fight, growing less distant by the moment.

  “What kind of asset were you to this ring?” Mother lurched, fists clenched. “You were disposable. Why would the Syn—”

  Something heavy and a bit wet-sounding thundered against the door. The locks held against the shudder that rolled through the wall. That was definitely blaster fire. Mother hadn’t been stupid enough to come into a room with Lyre armed, but her hand strayed to her side anyway.

  Then, in the silence, a precise tap. A flutter of knuckles. And five precisely timed ticks.

  And Lyre began to wheeze.

  It leaked out like a broken valve at first, a heady kind of insanity that Lyre knew she should keep behind clenched teeth and watering eyes. Then the tapping sound began one more time and Mother was looking between her and the door with a look like a flummoxed wolf pup, and Lyre had a precise thought of fuck it. She threw her head back and laughed.

  “Dear gods, I have broken you,” Mother said. The wonder and pity in her voice only made Lyre laugh harder. “If your Syndicate compatriots think they can recover you whole—”

  “The Syn don’t want shit from me.” Lyre wheezed to catch her breath. A mad kind of lightness, made entirely of disbelief, welled up in her chest. She crooked her chin to the door. “That’s not a Whisper signal. It’s scout.”

  Her scouts. Her scouts.

  Mother’s confusion darkened into resolve. A shriek came from the hallway. She straightened her shoulders towar
d the door, stance alert and the obvious question on her lips. “What—”

  “Duck,” Lyre mumbled as she dove for the floor. Her ankle was cuffed to the chair, which was welded to the floor, so it twisted something painfully. It was still preferable to the alternative. The door blew in an explosion of cordite-clogged smoke. The light in the room was gobbled up and Lyre felt something large and metal whoosh by her head.

  Bodies moving, a crunch and grunt of pain. When the air cleared enough for Lyre to see again, the room was thoroughly occupied by black-clad figures. Three of whom had completely surrounded Lyre. One grappled Mother to the floor, which seemed an unwise division of labor until Lyre heard a familiar curse.

  “Blue hell, she’s wiggly.” A sliver of pale curls escaped the black mask. Olivia managed to plant her knee on Mother’s neck before ripping her face mask off with a sigh. “Stay down.”

  Lyre could have told her that wouldn’t work. Mother twisted, a counter maneuver designed to throw an opponent off balance, but Olivia was already moving. “Oh no you fucking don’t.” She pulled a device from her hip holster and slammed it down on the meat of Mother’s shoulder. “Liar taught me your tricks, but I’m betting she didn’t teach you mine.”

  Lyre winced as the stunbug delivered its charge and Mother groaned into stillness. She’d be sore when she woke up. Lyre knew that from experience. Olivia busied herself with restraints before straightening. “Lady’s tits, you’ve been a pain in the ass, Lyre.”

  The cat-scratch annoyance in Olivia’s voice was so familiar it was a gut punch. One Lyre realized, belatedly, she hadn’t believed she’d hear again. A lump grew in her throat, and the urge to cry proved entirely irritating. Not that Lyre would ever cry in front of her scouts. She swallowed, and managed, “What took you so long, kids?”

  Olivia gave her a crooked smile. The scout to her right made quick work of clipping the cuff off her feet and helping her up. “We came as soon as we could, ma’am.”