Carnival-SA (35 page)

“You make it sound almost as if we’re not bargaining chips.”

Robert smiled, teeth flashing white in the darkness. “You’re almost not. You won’t give me your word?”

And Kusanagi-Jones opened his mouth to lie—

And could not do it.

He could justify his failure in a dozen ways. The simplest was to tell himself that if he gave Robert his word and broke it, here, now, under these circumstances, he would become useless as an operative in any capacity relating to New Amazonian culture, forever. Their system of honor wouldn’t tolerate it. But it wasn’t that.

“Thanks for the drinks,” he answered, and shook his head.

And Robert grunted and stood, and made a formal sort of bow with folded hands. “Don’t forget your fruit,” he said, and turned to rap on the door, which opened to let him leave. By the time Kusanagi-Jones finished the fruit, the hut was as dark as the one he’d woken up in. He dried slick hands on his filthy gi, and then clutched his chains below the shackles, holding tight. Leaning back on his heels, pulling the heavy chain taut, he began to rock back and forth against the staple, trying to limit the pressure on his wounded arm.

Something sniffed Lesa’s lair in the dark of night, the blackness under the shadow of the trees. Whatever it was, it found the wire-plant discouraging and continued on its way. Lesa slept in fits, too exhausted to stay awake and too overwrought to sleep. She’d never spent a longer night. In the morning, the cheeping and whirring of alarm calls brought her from a doze as the skies grayed under an encroaching sun. Lesa froze in her paltry shelter, jammed back against the leaf litter that cupped her meager warmth, and held her breath.

There were three of them, two males and a woman. All carried long arms—the woman in addition to the honor at her hip, while the men had bush knives—and one of the males and the woman held them at the ready. The third had his slung and was nodding over a small device in the palm of his hand. They conferred too quietly for Lesa to make out the words, and then the woman leveled her weapon and pointed it at Lesa’s tree. “You might as well come out, Miss Pretoria. Otherwise I’ll just shoot you through the vines, and that would be ignominious.”

Lesa’s cramped limbs trembled as she pried herself from her cave, collecting more long superficial scratches from the wire-plant as she pushed it aside. She stood hunched, her resting place having done nothing to help the spasm in her neck, and stared at the taller of the two males. His hair was unmistakable, a startling light color that Lesa was almost tempted to call blond, though nobody classically blond had survived Assessment. He was out of context, though, and it took her a moment to place him. The shock of recognition, when it came, was disorienting. Stefan. Stefan, the gentle male who worked as a secretary in the Cultural Directorate. Under Miss Ouagadougou.

Not a direction in which Lesa had been looking for conspiracy.

“Your hands,” the woman said, continuing to cover her while the second male slid his detecting equipment into a cargo pocket and came forth to immobilize her wrists. No cords this time, but ceramic shackles joined by a hinge that allowed only a limited range of motion. At least he cuffed her hands in front of her and the smooth ceramic didn’t irritate her lacerated wrists. He stepped back three quick steps and grabbed Stefan by the shoulder, turning him away. The woman didn’t let her rifle waver, and Lesa watched her for several moments, and then sighed and sat down on the mossy log, her bound hands in her lap.

Backs turned or not, she could hear more than they intended her to. And it wasn’t reassuring. Robert’s name was mentioned, followed by a mumble that made the woman snap over her shoulder, “I don’t give a damn what
she
thinks.”

“If we take her back to camp, it’s just one more decision to make in the end,” Stefan said. He turned, and caught her gaping before she could glance down. His mouth firmed over his teeth, an expression she understood. A duelist’s expression, and one she’d seen on the faces of stud males before a Trial.

“It’s too much risk to keep her alive,” he said, and Lesa let the breath she seemed to be holding hiss out over her teeth, and, for a moment, closed her eyes.

“And too much risk to shoot her,” the woman said. Lesa opened her eyes in time to see Stefan answer her with a flip of his hand, but she continued. “She has family in the group, Stefan. I don’t think anybody’s going to be comfortable with the idea that their relatives aren’t safe—”

“Do you suppose they thought we’d be able to overthrow the government without bloodshed?”

The woman bit her lip. “I don’t think they expected their lovers to be shot out of hand.”

Stefan nodded, still staring at Lesa, who managed another shallow breath around the tightness in her throat. “It’ll have to look natural, then,” he said. “That’s not hard. There are plenty of ways to die in the jungle. Exposure, fexa, sneakbite.”

He glanced around, and Lesa wobbled to her feet. The woman leveled her rifle again, her squint creasing the corners of her eyes.
Thank you,
Lesa mouthed at her, but she only shrugged and shifted her grip on the rifle.

“Here,” Stefan said. “Mikhail, give me your gloves.”

The second man pulled a pair of hide gloves from another cargo pocket and passed them to Stefan. He tugged them on, his eyes on his fingers rather than Lesa as he made sure they were seated perfectly. And then he walked toward her, past her, and began tugging at the mess of wire-plant until the bulk of it was on the ground, the long stems dragging down from their parasitic anchor points in the canopy. Nests fell in showers of twigs and twists of desiccated parasitic moss, two yellow-gray eggs shattering on the ground and one bouncing unharmed on a patch of carpetplant.

When he’d freed most of the vines, Stefan placed his hands carefully between thorns and gave the plant a hard, definite yank, enough to sway the strangler oak it rooted in and bring another shower of twigs and dead leaves down. A glistening black Francisco’s macaw swooped down, shrieking, and made a close pass at his head, fore-wings beating wildly and the hind-wings folded so close to its body that the gold primary feathers merged with the tail plumage.

Stefan ignored it completely, even when it made a second pass, close enough for the claws of its hind-wings to brush his hair. “Bring her up here.”

Mikhail and the woman started forward, though she waited until Mikhail had a good grip on Lesa before lowering the rifle.

Lesa made them drag her. A few scuffs in the earth might be revealing, if the right person found her body. If anyone ever found her body.

She shook her head. Negative thinking. She
would
find a way out of this. Mikhail unlocked her cuffs, but by then Stefan had her arms too tightly restrained for her struggling and feet-dragging to make any difference. But she kept squirming and kicking anyway, until fighting made the thorns of the wire-plant Stefan wound around her bite that much deeper. Then she sagged, dead weight, but he hung her on the plant like so much laundry anyway, vines winding her wrists and crossing her chest, thorns sunk like hooks into her skin.

When Mikhail released her and the thorns took her weight, she couldn’t even scream. She choked out a whimper, bit her lip, managed to pull it back to the barest whine. Her flesh stretched against imbedded thorns.

Mikhail backed up, scrubbing his palms against his capaciously pocketed trousers, and the woman looked down as Stefan draped a few more vines artistically across her chest. Then he also moved away, frowning at his handiwork. Lesa could barely see him, though the morning had grown bright. Her vision was empty at the edges, and every breath, no matter how shallow, sank the vine’s three-centimeter thorns more deeply into her skin. Some of them shattered, stripping off the vines, but there were many more, and they were fresh and green.

They took her weight.

Stefan dropped out of sight. Lesa heard scuffling, but couldn’t turn her head. A moment later, he reappeared, sliding from under her log with her improvised club in his hand. He weighed it across his palm, and then took good hold of it and smashed at the ground with a croquet-mallet swing. Whatever he was doing, a few blows satisfied him. He whirled the club overhead, and slung it tumbling deep among the trees. Mikhail stared down at his feet, and flinched when Lesa couldn’t hold back another whimper.

“Right,” Stefan said, grabbing the woman’s wrist in a liberty that would have shocked Lesa under other circumstances. “Come on,” he said, and paused long enough to smile up at Lesa. “Pleasant dreams, Miss Pretoria.”

Then he herded his companions away.

They were out of sight, and Lesa considering her options for the least painful method of breathing, when she felt the first savage, stinging bite on the edge of her foot and jerked stupidly against the thorns, and cried.

Stefan had broken open a nant’s nest. And while they might not think humans were good eating, they were more enthusiastic about driving off something that might be the predator that had attacked their home.

Except this predator didn’t have anyplace to run.

22

KUSANAGI-JONES WAS STILL AT IT LONG AFTER SUNRISE, but he thought the staple might be loosening. He heard a faint clicking now when he rocked it against the wood. When it went, it would go all at once, and he’d find himself sprawled flat on his back in the dirt. At least the chains and the staple were steel, unlike the manacles. They’d make a reasonably effective weapon, once the other end was no longer bolted down.

The clatter of the door lock left him plenty of warning that somebody was about to enter, if the murmur of voices hadn’t been enough. He released his grip on the chains and began pacing, wearing out the brief arc permitted. Two steps and pivot, two steps and pivot the other way. Exactly what Vincent would have been doing in his position.

He had less than a meter of slack.

Light spilled in when the door opened with the brilliance of midmorning. Kusanagi-Jones averted his eyes, staring toward the darkest corner of his domain, and waited until the door banged the frame again and the brightness dimmed.

“Michelangelo.” Robert again, standing by the door, his left hand cupped beside his thigh as if he held something concealed in the palm.

“Breakfast already?” Kusanagi-Jones asked. “Seems like you just left.”

Robert’s smile was tight. “Do you remember what I said about the Right Hand not being the barbarians we’re painted?”

Kusanagi-Jones folded his hands in front of him and nodded slowly, the chains pulling against his wrists.

“I was wrong,” Robert said, and flipped something through the air.

Kusanagi-Jones caught it reflexively. A code stick, the sort that worked as a key. He held it up inquiringly, the shackles stopping his hand before it came level with his face.

“Go ahead,” Robert said. He crouched, and began digging in the capacious pockets of his vest. Objects piled on the packed dirt before him. Kusanagi-Jones recognized emergency gear, a primitive datacart of the sort that seemed ubiquitous on New Amazonia, a two-foot knife that Robert pulled from under his vest, a pocket lighter, and the crinkly packaging of a sterile med-kit. He didn’t stand and gawk. He skipped the code stick over the manacles and pried them open with a sigh, careful not to let the chains clang against the pole when he lowered them. He dropped the code stick on the floor and kicked dirt over it, and stepped toward Robert.

“You’re helping me escape.”

“We’re going together,” Robert said. “The team that went after Lesa came back.”

“Without her?” Kusanagi-Jones sank onto his haunches and began picking items out of the pile and slipping them inside his gi, where the belt would hold them in place. Robert had also provided socks and a pair of low boots, which Kusanagi-Jones jammed his feet into.

“Stefan and Mikhail said they found no sign of her.”

Kusanagi-Jones was not Vincent, but even he could read the irony in that tone. He hefted the knife—he would call it a machete—and shoved it through his belt like a pirate’s scimitar. The hilt poked him under the ribs.

“There was a third with them. Medeline Angkor-Wat. The tracker. Who told me the truth, after Stefan and Mikhail went to get coffee.”

Kusanagi-Jones waited.

Robert lifted his head, fixed Kusanagi-Jones with a look that froze his throat, and filled the silence, the way people did. “We might have a chance to get to her while she’s still alive,” he said, and shoved a water bottle into Kusanagi-Jones’s hand. “There’s a GPS locator and a map in the datacart. If we get separated. Medeline’s best-guess location for where they left Lesa is plotted. It won’t be off by more than a few hundred meters. She’s good.”

Unless she’s lying to you
. Kusanagi-Jones pressed his elbow against the pad inside his gi, without voicing the comment. “What about the guard?”

“I brought Chun breakfast,” Robert said. “He should be unconscious by now. And the guards at the gate won’t know you. Here.” He produced a wadded-up dark green shirt from somewhere, and tossed it at Kusanagi-Jones’s chest.

Kusanagi-Jones shrugged it on over his gi. It looked less out of place, and the bottoms were dirty enough to pass for the same sort of baggy tan trousers that Robert was wearing. Robert stood and rattled the door. “Chun?”

There was no answer. Kusanagi-Jones breathed out a sigh he knew better than to have been holding, and waited while Robert pulled the chain through the hole in the door and used another code stick to unfasten the lock.

They had to heave Chun’s unconscious body aside to slip through. The sentry had passed out leaning against the door with his plate in his lap. Kusanagi-Jones carefully reclosed the door, pulled the chain free and slipped it into his pocket, and propped Chun back up as he had been. There was no need to leave the place looking like an escape in progress.

And then, side by side, Robert chatting aimlessly about some sporting event, they headed for the gate.

“Easier to steal an aircar,” Kusanagi-Jones suggested in low tones. “I can hotwire those.”

“They all have beacons. Besides, it’s only about fifteen kilometers. We’ll be fine.”