Bitter Angels (37 page)

Then, in a flash, I saw Bianca lying at my feet. Rigor mortis had come and gone. She sagged, almost melted onto the stone. Her deformed head was twisted at an angle you never see on a living human, but it covered up the horrible wound over her right eye and allowed her cloudy left eye to stare up at me. Her arms were bare and bruised. Her flesh hung loose on her broken bones. Black blood crusted her lips and her fingers. If I lifted her head, if I touched her hand, it would be impossibly soft and horribly cold.

Then it was gone.

I knew what it was. It was a hallucination, dug up out of my black hole, tied in with my old training. I had come here wanting to see Bianca, and my tortured subconscious had provided a vision. If it was not the one I wanted, whom did I have to blame?

But the worst part was, seeing her so bitterly, terribly dead was still better than if I’d seen her whole and alive. I wanted her dead. I didn’t want her alive. Alive now would have been so much worse.

I jumped and spun, coming down in a ready crouch, my hand on the stock of my weapon to bring it around.

Amerand Jireu walked into the thin grey light that trickled down from above, his hands up and open.

Stunned and shaking with relief, I rushed forward and embraced him. Slowly, his hands closed across my back. For a heartbeat we stood like that, before I remembered that this was not a son, not a friend—not even a Solaran—and I stepped away.

It was then I realized he wasn’t wearing his uniform—just a stained tunic and loose trousers, with old, well-worn boots.

“Are you all right?” I asked. In the back of my mind, I started working up the chain of requests it would take to get him off world.

“I don’t know,” Amerand whispered hoarsely. “They never took me in.” He said it like a man who had witnessed a miracle, a terrible Old Testament sort of miracle.

“Why’d you send your father to say they had?”

“I was hoping you’d work out what it meant. I…Something’s going on, Terese. I don’t know what it is. But neither one of us should still be walking around free.”

He told me what had happened, how he had witnessed his Clerk’s suicide, what Hamahd had said, and how he had been warned to keep his mouth closed. He’d walked back to his station, expecting to be taken into custody at each step. But nothing had happened. Nothing at all.

“I wanted to make people think I’d been arrested.” He spread his empty hands. “If I wasn’t even questioned, everyone would wonder why. Everyone would believe I’d finally given over, crossed the lines. I’d be…shunned. My network
would disintegrate. I wouldn’t be any good to anyone. I wouldn’t even be able to protect my father.”

I nodded.
You couldn’t look like you were connected to the Blood Family, which is the only comprehensible way you could be free after your Clerk died
.

“If I disappeared for a day or two, and just…came back. It would look like I’d been questioned and cleared. I think. I hope. My father’s waiting for the Clerks to come to our house. If they don’t in the next couple of hours, he’s going to disappear for a little too…” He stared at me, genuinely afraid. “Hamahd said they were using me, Terese. To finish their new network. What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. One more piece in the puzzle. One more piece and I couldn’t see how any of them fit. “I wish I did.”

“But it doesn’t make
sense
.” He whispered the words. A man who had lived his life being overheard wouldn’t shout. “They know I’m running around loose. If they’re using me, why haven’t they even given me a new minder? Why haven’t they come after me?”

“I don’t know,” I said again. “Unless…”

“Unless, what?”

“Unless we really are at the end of something. Unless whoever is running the game thinks you’ve been compromised by what Hamahd said, or that they can afford not to care about us.”
Or unless you really are their spy
.

Paranoia is infectious. It’s also an incredibly useful tool. If you can make people afraid enough, uncertain enough, they will simply stop moving.

I had thought the Erasmus
Saeos
had my cage waiting for me on Fortress. Perhaps I was mistaken. Perhaps they had built it for me right here. The triangle of Varus, Jireu, and Kapa had certainly managed to keep me thoroughly distracted since I got here. Look at me. I was here with him, worrying about what he was doing and what Dr. Varus was doing instead of what had been going on between Bianca and the Blood Family.

“He said to let you get me out of here,” whispered Amerand.

That halted every thought careening through my mind. “Who did?”

“Hamahd, before he pulled away. He said to let the saints…let you get me out of here.”

“Do you want me to?”
Say yes, Amerand. Just say it, and I can pull you out of here immediately. I can get you safe where they can’t overhear you and we can find out what you really know
.

“What about my father?”

“Him too, if he asks.” I touched Amerand’s arm. He was far too young for all he had been through. “You don’t have to stay here, Amerand. All you have to do is ask and I am required by the Common Cause Covenant to grant you asylum.”

He looked at my hand on his sleeve, and I found I could not read his expression at all. “And my mother?”

I drew back. “I’ll do everything I can to help find her.”

Which was probably very close to what Liang had promised him four years ago. Amerand turned away from me,
and faced the shadows. His fingertips rubbed together as if he were trying to scrape something off them.

“What about Emiliya?” he asked softly. “Her too? If she asks?”

Now it was my turn to hesitate. “There’s something you need to hear.”

I told him about finding Emiliya in her empty home, our “pointless” conversation, about how I followed her.

About how I saw her meet with a Clerk.

“No,” he said flatly.

“I’m sorry, Amerand. I saw…”

“No,” he said again, holding up his hand, blocking the words. “You may have seen a Clerk speak to her, but he did not
meet
with her.”

“She went straight from talking with me, to…”

“No,” he repeated. “I don’t know what happened. Maybe the Clerks took her family in. They might be holding her people against her good behavior.” He looked sick at the thought and like he wanted to bolt immediately.

“Then why didn’t she go with the Clerk? Why didn’t they take her in? She wouldn’t have simply left if they were holding her mother…”

“I said, no!” His fists clenched, and for one sick moment, I thought he might actually raise one to me.

He seemed to think so too. He backed away. He turned, shaking, trying to catch his breath. He ran one hand through his tightly curled hair. When at last he turned back to me, he seemed unable to speak above a whisper.

“You don’t know her. You don’t know…Do you even know what happened to us? To Oblivion?”

I didn’t understand where he was going with this, but I
was going to have to follow. “I know Oblivion died,” I said carefully.

“It was left to die. Our punishment for rebelling. Our punishment for deciding we didn’t want to be a prison anymore.

“When the system really started to fall apart, the prisoners began attacking the guards, more or less to see what would happen. I was five when I saw my first murder. It was a guard, and it was the first time I saw that they were human, that they could bleed. I cheered.

“After that, the guards started leaving, and we prisoners started helping them along. We even let some of them take whole ships.”

He waited for me to be shocked. I wasn’t. He was a child, a child of prison and violence, how could he not join in a rebellion? It was only human.

“We declared our independence. We thought…my parents thought that Fortress would need us. They needed us to work, to send out to work, to bring work in. That was what they had always used us for, after all. We could force them to negotiate.

“But they didn’t. They were smarter than that. They said fine, you be independent, and they left us alone.

“At first, everyone was ecstatic. We were
free
. But pretty soon, things started to go wrong. You see, unlike Dazzle, Oblivion didn’t grow enough food to support itself. The farm caverns were more for oxygen production than food production. They tried to get some kind of government together, some kind of rationing…but we’d been prisoners too long. Before long, it was all strong men and staking out territory, and when you drink up the water the plants don’t grow, and when the plants don’t grow…” He waved his hand at the air around us.

“And they came to Dazzle, and no one wanted them here, and they had to take what they needed,” I finished it for him.

“Which made Dazzle open itself back up to Fortress, which it had shoved out much more successfully than we had. They had the advantage of starting out with a working economy and a city actually designed for people to live and communicate comfortably in.

“And while we were forced back down into submission here, Oblivion died. Fortress didn’t have to do anything. They just had to leave it alone. No water, no plants. No plants, no air.”

Amerand flexed his hands. “So we do what it takes to stay alive. We bow and we scrape and we sell off our children just like Baby Ds do, but we do
not
give each other over to the Blood Family or their Clerks. No matter what. We are the last of Oblivion’s children. We do not forget how the lights went out.”

He needed to believe it. The alternative was too painful.

“They’re using me,” he said. “I don’t know what for, but I can’t just run away into the shadows, or even into asylum. How do I ever come back if I run away now?”

“It’s up to you,” I said.

He nodded, and he straightened, his military bearing coming back into play despite his worn civilian clothes. “I’m going to come back and take up my station with you
tomorrow. I am going to wait and watch to see who notices and what they do.”

I nodded. “Good plan.” In fact, if he was going to stay, it was the only one. “Now, listen to me very carefully, Amerand. I want us to be clear. Did you mean what you said before? That you want to help us?”

He nodded slowly; his gaze did not flicker.

“I need a way into the Security’s network,” I said. “I need a way into whatever archives there are about movement permits, and I need records from the ’scopes.”
And if they’re using you to work over the system in some way, I need your identity to check it out
.

Amerand shook his head. “We only have records going six months back, and I don’t have access to all of those. The Clerks have the whole picture if anyone does.”

“It doesn’t matter. Even a slice will help.”

He pursed his lips, hesitating. Then he said, “Can you take down a code?”

I activated the screen on the back of my glove. “Go.”

Amerand gave out several long strings of letters and numbers. I tapped them in, encrypted them, and stored them.

Slowly, I pulled off my glove. I stepped up to him and laid my naked right hand against his temple. It was an intimate gesture, suitable for lovers. His eyes were wide and deep and painfully young. His skin was warm under my palm, and I could feel the scrape of his sprouting whiskers. Slowly, I felt an unwelcome but real tide of yearning rise in me.

“Look out for yourself,” I said. “If it gets out of control, come to us. We will help you, I swear it.”

Hope shone in Amerand’s eyes, coming out of a sorrow so deep I couldn’t see the bottom of it. “Thank you,” he
whispered, and he turned away and took off running, lightly, swiftly down the tunnel into the dark. Carrying my spot camera right beneath his hairline.

I stood and watched until I couldn’t tell him from the other shadows.

The man had almost ruined more things than even Torian could easily name. This did nothing for his temper.

“How was this permitted to happen, Master Kane?” demanded Torian.
You know what you did. You know the damage you nearly caused. You feel it
. Perspiration rolled heavily down Torian’s face and the side of his neck still burned despite the recent adjustment to his modifications.