Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) (5 page)

Reese gritted her teeth and directed her attention to their jail. The ground was packed earth strewn with yellow straw; there were no windows, and a wall of thick metal lattice faced the corridor. In addition to the lattice, she spotted red lights lining their door, indicating an operating halo field... not something she wanted to touch, but something Irine could possibly disarm since it didn’t encompass the entire wall. The air was stale and warm, tinted here and there with earthier scents. Their cell formed the end of the hall; all the other cells were empty. She thought of the cell she’d seen upstairs and the figure lying in the back.

“Hirianthial,” she said—slowly. The consonants in the name seemed to exist only to add a lilt to the vowels.

The sound of his hair against his back announced him. She wondered how he could walk without making any other noise. She didn’t like it. “There was a man upstairs.”

“Dead,” he replied. For once the accent, the blanket-soft baritone fell flat. “Bait for me.”

“They knew you were rooting for information.”

“Of course. It was foolish to think otherwise.”

Reese frowned at him. “And you stuck around?”

“I had a duty.” A wry smile ran to the corner of his lips. “Granted, I should have remembered that part of that duty included returning to the queen with the information she sought, but even Eldritch make mistakes.”

“Mistakes,” Reese repeated, eyeing him. “With so much at stake.”

He shrugged, a tiny motion involving the ends of his shoulders. Had she not been watching him, she would have missed it. “I became angry.”

“Angry?”

He was staring out through the bars, but even in profile she could see his face change. Harden. The red of his eyes seemed less like wine and more like blood, like the color Reese saw on the inside of her eyelids when she wanted to explode. The doctor, the alien, the inconvenient object of an unwanted mission, those faces became masks, and something darker looked out. “I found a man whose tastes were repellant, even for a slaver.”

For some reason Reese didn’t want to ask what those tastes were. She didn’t even want to ask, “What did you do to him?” but by the time she realized that she didn’t want to hear the answer the question had already escaped her.

“I set his house on fire. With him in it.” He didn’t look at her, but even in profile his lack of expression terrified her.

“REESE!”

Irine’s wail dragged her attention away, and she crawled to the Harat-Shar. The tigraine had Sascha’s head cradled in her arms and she was rocking, her ears flat and eyes wide. “Reese, what’s wrong with him? Why won’t he wake up?”

“He’s not ready to wake,” said a steady voice behind Reese’s shoulder.

Reese jumped. “Stop doing that!”

“Doing what?” the Eldritch asked absently as he slid past her to Sascha’s other side, running a hand above the tigraine’s face.

“Sneaking up on me,” Reese said. “At least have the grace to make a little more noise.”

“Grace and noise aren’t usually associated with one another,” Hirianthial murmured.

“What’s wrong with him?” Irine asked the Eldritch. Reese could hear none of her typical skepticism in her quivering voice and she wondered at this instant trust. Was he influencing her mind?

“There’s nothing wrong with him,” Hirianthial said, his voice gentle. “He isn’t ready to wake, that’s all.”

“But this burn—”

“Just a palmer,
alet
. He took no greater harm from it. He’ll wake soon.”

Only then did Irine look at Reese, still holding onto her brother’s body. “Captain?”

“He’s a doctor,” Reese said. “He’d know better than me.”

“What about Bryer?” Irine asked after a moment. “Is he okay?”

“Everyone’s okay,” Reese said. “We’re just in a bit of a fix.”

Irine’s gold eyes flicked to the walls of the cell. “Yeah, I see that.” She looked back at the Eldritch. “This is him, isn’t it? Our spy?”

“At your service,” Hirianthial said.

“I guess you already have been,” Irine said, stroking Sascha’s mane.

Reese sighed and turned back to the bars. She prodded the back of her molars with her tongue, searching in vain for any minuscule deposit of chalk that might have stubbornly clung to her gums. Her stomach was going to kill her. “So how many people are guarding us?”

“I’ve counted six,” Hirianthial said. “Two personal guards and four up the corridor.”

“Six,” Reese repeated, musing.

“There are five of us,” Irine said from behind them.

Reese said, “They have palmers. And the keys.”

Irine shrugged and didn’t reply.

“The ship’s coming tomorrow to pick them up,” Hirianthial said after a moment. “Presumably we’ll be going with them.”

“So we have...what, twenty-four hours to break out of here, overwhelm six people, get to the
Earthrise
and flee far enough to lose a slaver-ship?”

“Twenty-two,” Hirianthial said. “Days here are shorter than Alliance mean.”

“Wonderful,” Reese muttered, rubbing the bridge of her nose.

Hirianthial’s voice sounded quietly behind her. “You need only secure your escape from this cell, lady. You were captured and put here only to inconvenience me. If you disappear, they will not bother to track you. It’s me they want.”

“I can’t leave you behind,” Reese said, irritated. “You’re the debt I have to pay. If you rot here, I’ll have to do something else and I bet it won’t be any easier.”

“The Queen isn’t expecting you to save me if the odds are overwhelming,” Hirianthial said.

“Well, six guards isn’t overwhelming,” Reese said, then stopped. “Did you say...the Queen?”

His voice was quizzical. “Of course. I thought from our talk that you’d concluded she was your mysterious benefactor.”

Reese turned, setting her back against the bars. The Eldritch’s face remained composed, but somehow she could still sense his confusion. A polite confusion. She couldn’t quite mesh this courteous facade with the darkness revealed by the memory of the slaver. “Are you trying to tell me that the Queen of the Eldritch saved me from bankruptcy?”

Another one of those miniscule shrugs. “It seems that way.”

“Damn,” Irine said in wonder.

“That makes no sense!” Reese exclaimed. “What would a queen want with me? How did she even find me? Why would she bother?”

“Why did she bother with me?” the Eldritch said. “But she chose you and she cares what becomes of me and here we are. Why question it, lady?”

“I’m not your—”

“—lady, so you say,” Hirianthial said. “But you are an instrument of a queen, so what shall I call you instead?”

“My name is Theresa Eddings,” Reese said. “I am the captain of the TMS
Earthrise
. And you will call me ‘Reese’ because that’s what people call me. Not ‘lady’ and not ‘madam’ and not ‘princess’ or whatever else you can come up with. Just “Reese.” Or ‘captain’ if you insist.”

“As you say,” he said.

Such polite words, such courtesy, and yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was going to call her whatever he wanted, and damned what she thought of it. Reese pursed her lips and eyed him skeptically, but his expression never changed. With a sigh, she steadied herself against the bars and rubbed her temple. “These guards. Do they ever check on us?”

“They check about every hour. They don’t always come within eyeshot, but I can sense them.”

She glanced at him, then back at her crew. Irine had curled up around Sascha, her striped tail wrapped around his so tightly she could barely tell which inserted into which spine. Bryer remained unconscious. This was what she had to work with. Reese sighed and looked back at the Eldritch. “Can you set the guard on fire when he comes? Then we can grab for the field key and make a run for it.”

The Eldritch stared at her, white brows lifting. “Lady—Captain—do I look like a magician to you?” he asked.

“You did say you set someone’s house on fire. How much harder is a person’s clothes? If you were sent for your special talents....”

He laughed then, a breathy, quiet thing. Reese had never seen someone laugh without relaxing; it seemed unnatural. Did all Eldritch have this extreme control over their bodies?

“Good God! I can’t break the laws of physics at a whim, I’m sorry to say. The Queen sent me because I’m one of the few non-touch telepaths, not because I can set things on fire by staring at them, or teleport or anything equally preposterous.”

The hairs on the nape of Reese’s neck bristled beneath the tangle of her beaded braids. “How was I supposed to know? Your world is so cloistered it makes a monastery look positively cosmopolitan! I didn’t even know it was your Queen who sent me to rescue you... how do you expect anyone to know
anything
about you under circumstances like those?”

His cheeks colored a faint blue-tinged peach. “Your point is taken, lady. Pardon me.”

Reese snorted and looked away, clenching her hands on the bars. No knives, no data tablets, no pyrokinetic Eldritch, no peppermint chalk, and a hold full of rotting rooderberries. She stared at her dirty, broken fingernails. By the time she found another port she’d have to do some fast talking to get someone to buy the things—

Reese’s chin jerked up. She smiled, feral, and turned to face Hirianthial again. “But what if they
thought
you could set them on fire?”

The Eldritch lifted a brow.

“I mean, why don’t we set things up so that it looks like you’re doing some sort of magic with our help, and use that to scare the guard into letting us go?”

“Do you truly believe we can talk our way out of this cell?”

Oh, he sounded so certain. Reese folded her arms over her chest. “I’ve talked my way out of worse situations.”

His face remained maddeningly smooth. She wanted him to sneer or roll his eyes or something. “Have you?”

“Look, Hirianthial,” she said, “I’m sure I can do this. I know my people can. It’s you I’m not sure of. Can you act? Because if you can’t pull this one off, then it won’t matter that I can do it and the twins and Bryer can do it.”

“What exactly would you have me pretend?”

Was it her or was he actually uncomfortable with the idea of lying? Trust her to find the one Eldritch in all the worlds who actually believed in personal honor. In the books she’d read they’d never had a problem abandoning their beliefs to serve the story. “You’d have to pretend to be what everyone believes Eldritch to be. And don’t tell me you don’t know what that is. If you’re out here playing spy, mingling with pirates and slavers, you know very well what Eldritch are supposed to be like.”

“Supposed to be like,” Hirianthial repeated, and for the first time she heard what she was expecting. Bitterness, maybe. Fatigue. Except he wasn’t looking at her, but at something on the inside of his own eyes. “As if we are expected to fill some void in the universe.”

In the face of uncertainty, Reese did as she always did. “Look, are you up for this or not? Because unless you have some better idea how to get us out of this hole in the ground, we’re going with my plan.”

“Had I had a better plan, we would not have met,” the Eldritch said at last.

“Then let’s get Sascha up. This is how it’s going to go.”

Hirianthial rested his hands on his knees, feeling the guards mill against the edges of his awareness. He could just—just—pick them out past the flares of the people sitting in a semi-circle around him. Where Reese had obtained her ideas about ritual magic he had no clue, but try as he might he couldn’t complain that they lacked dramatics. There was no real magic outside of wild stories of ancient Eldritch mind-mages, of course, and his mental talents couldn’t be intensified by any outside aid, but the concept sounded good and he supposed that was all that counted.

He’d been many things on Liolesa’s little mission. He’d played instruments he barely remembered learning at a tutor’s side for dinner. He’d washed dishes, scrubbed decks, even bandaged a wound or two. He had not yet played the charlatan. All of it galled. That he’d taken on this role to free himself made it only a hint less bitter. Always, his people wanted something of him he wasn’t made to give; his attempts to fulfill those expectations usually ended in failure. While he wasn’t expecting this to be any different, he hoped for the sake of the aliens grouped around him that it would be.

The guard pierced his circle of awareness, heading for their cell. “He’s on his way.”

“All right, people, look calm,” Reese said.

Irine giggled. “This is too silly.”

“It’ll work,” Reese said. “Just remember your lines.”

The Harat-Shar giggled again. Hirianthial opened his eyes and found them all in position facing him. Reese and the two Harat-Shar had copied his stance, palms up on their knees with eyes closed. Bryer, who couldn’t sit cross-legged, kneeled with his hands pressed together at his breast, the feathers splayed from his arms in a decorative fan. One could argue they had the hard part: to remain composed and to seem as if they were concentrating when they knew the farce they were engaged in. Still, Hirianthial hated lying. Obfuscation he could do. Lying wounded him.