Encrypted (39 page)

How nice. Tikaya had found people as amiable
as Bocrest to be her new captors.

“
She is.” Parkonis rested
a hand on her shoulder.

A thousand questions for him burbled in her
mind, chief among them how he was alive and what he was doing with
relic raiders, but she would wait until she could get him alone to
ask. As long as he was here to vouch for her, she might have the
freedom she needed to investigate those weapons and plot their
demise. Maybe she could even destroy them before the marines showed
up.

Colonel Lancecrest returned, his face
composed, though frustration still tensed his body. “You
Starcrest’s ally or his prisoner?”

“
She’d
never
ally with that monster,”
Parkonis said.

Tikaya climbed to her feet, pushing back
dizziness. She touched her temple. Whatever Parkonis had used to
render her unconscious was gone.

“
Captain Bocrest is in
charge.” She decided to give them information that didn’t matter.
Maybe she could gain their trust if she seemed to hold nothing
back. “He kidnapped me from my parents’ plantation and threatened
to kill my family if I didn’t translate these runes for him. I have
no loyalty to him.”

“
And can you?” Lancecrest
asked. “Translate this gibberish?”

Parkonis turned curious eyes toward her.

“
Some,” she said. “I’m
learning more every day.”

Lancecrest jerked his chin at Gali. “Test
her, witch. See if she’s telling the truth.”

Gali scowled but stepped forward. She
cracked her knuckles and flexed her fingers. Lancecrest closed in
on Tikaya.

“
Test?” she
asked.

She had never failed an academic test in her
life, but somehow she doubted these people wanted to assess her
ability to categorize vowels. Lancecrest stepped behind her,
reinforcing her supposition by taking her arms in a viselike grip.
An inkling of what they meant to do stirred in Tikaya’s gut, and
she tried to pull away from him. He held her firmly.

“
Telepath?” Tikaya asked
Gali.

“
Yes.”

“
Just in case the oath you
took matters to you, I do
not
grant you permission to poke around in my
thoughts.” Numerous people on the Kyatt Islands had a knack for
telepathy, but it had never concerned Tikaya since back home there
were strict laws against intruding without permission.

“
We’re not on Kyatt,” Gali
said. “No one here to enforce oaths.”

“
That’s when they matter
the most, then, isn’t it?”

The woman stepped forward without answering
and raised her fingers. Tikaya tensed. Cursed sea, she did not want
someone rooting around in her mind, reading her memories, maybe
replacing them with more acceptable ones.

“
I’m sorry, Tikaya,”
Parkonis whispered behind her.

In other words, he was abandoning her. He
must not have much power in the group. She could not help but think
about how Rias had started out with no power amongst the marines
and he had never failed to fight for her. She pushed thoughts of
him from her mind. They could only get her in trouble here.

Gali’s cool fingers prodded Tikaya’s temple.
Something itched inside her mind, like stitches being pulled out.
Panic gripped her. These bastards had no right to her thoughts. She
yanked her head back.

“
Hold her still,” Gali
growled and reached again.

Tikaya kicked her in the gut. The woman
doubled over, clutching her stomach and gasping for air.

Lancecrest forced Tikaya to the ground,
leaned a knee into her back, and shoved her face to the floor. She
tried to twist free, but he wrenched her arms until she gasped with
pain. Her cheek smashed against cold rock.

They were too strong. Her fate was
unavoidable.

Gali’s hand came down on the back of her
head, nails gouging skin. Tikaya felt the other woman’s annoyance,
not just in those tense fingers but in her mind.

Images from the last month were dragged into
her surface thoughts. Tikaya tried to fight it. She thought of
cutting cane on the plantation, her family, school, childhood
escapades, anything but—

Rias.

The foreign presence in her mind focused on
him, tearing into any thought related to him. And there were a lot.
Tears formed in Tikaya’s eyes at the pain the invasion brought, the
disdain she felt through the woman’s link. The experience was bad,
maybe worse than Ottotark’s attack back in Fort Deadend. For the
first time in her life, she regretted not studying the mental
sciences. A practitioner would have known how to block a
telepath.

After minutes that felt like hours, the
presence in her mind dissipated. The hand left Tikaya’s head.

Awareness of her surroundings returned. The
weight on her back. Her labored breaths. Gali’s boots before her
face. Parkonis’s silence. A hot tear ran down her cheek and
splashed on the floor.

“
Well?” Lancecrest
asked.

“
You can’t trust her.
They’ve duped her into working for them.”

Tikaya focused on their words, groped for
equilibrium. And she frowned. Duped? What in her thoughts had
suggested that?

“
They must have known she
would never willingly help Turgonians, not after they decimated our
islands in their war. Admiral Starcrest made her believe he was a
prisoner, too, and gained her trust.” Gali snorted. “He tricked her
into thinking he loves her, and—this is lush—that the two of them
are going to destroy the weapons together. Dear Akahe, Tikaya, I’m
embarrassed for you. I could see it if you were eighteen, but
you’re not young enough to be that naive.”

Stunned, Tikaya said
nothing. The woman had been in her head, read all her thoughts,
and
that
was the
conclusion she had come up with? How could she possibly think
Rias’s friendship—his love—had been a ruse after all they had gone
through?

The weight on Tikaya’s back lifted, and she
pushed herself to her knees. Gali stood before her, arms across her
chest, pity and annoyance wrestling for room her on face.

“
Love?” Parkonis asked in
a soft, stung tone.

Tikaya winced. She would have told him about
Rias, but not like this. Maybe the woman would have the humanity
not to share everything. But she was shaking her head.

“
You would lecture me on
my oath when you’re sleeping with that man?” Gali looked over
Tikaya’s shoulder. “Sorry, Parkonis, but your faithful fiancée has
been sheet wrestling with Fleet Admiral Starcrest.”

Tikaya remembered an earlier thought where
she had lamented having no females to talk to out here. She decided
to rescind it.

When Parkonis said nothing, she risked a
glance at him. He was staring at her, mouth hanging open, eyes
bulging. Not angry, not yet. Still in shock.

“
Parkonis,” she said
quietly, trying to ignore Gali’s cold stare. “As far as I’ve known,
you’ve been dead for more than a year. The
Eagle’s Spirit
went down at the end
of the war. You never wrote, never sent word. I had no idea I’d
ever see you again.”

He closed his mouth, turned his back, and
walked away.

“
Leave us, Gali,”
Lancecrest said.

The woman shrugged and headed for an empty
stretch of cavern. Between one step and the next, she disappeared.
An illusion shrouding a camp, Tikaya guessed.

“
Come.” Lancecrest offered
a hand.

Tikaya eyed him, surprised he had not simply
grabbed her and yanked her to her feet. She got up on her own, but
she did follow him as he walked away. He led her past bat guano
piles and to a portion of wall engraved with a column of
symbols.

“
I’ve only been here a few
days,” Lancecrest said, “but I gathered from my little brother that
Parkonis wasn’t as good of a translator as he’d hoped. Atner
actually wanted you on his team from the beginning. Can you tell me
what this says?”

Tikaya hesitated, but it was such a basic
sign that she saw little reason to withhold the information.
“Lights.”

“
What?”

“
It’s a panel to control
the lighting level.”

“
The lighting? You’re
sure? Parkonis thought these panels might have something to do with
the web.”

Tikaya slid one of the symbols up, and the
lighting level in the cavern increased. Down and it decreased.

“
Damn,” Lancecrest
said.

“
What’s the
web?”

Lancecrest turned toward the invisible camp.
“Lork, show her the web!”

A gaunt, wispy-haired man appeared. He
lifted his gaze toward the ceiling, and Tikaya felt the tickle of
the mental sciences being used. A bat flapped down from the
shadowed stalactites and soared toward the weapons room. Before it
flew anywhere near the glass, a small explosion lit the air like a
miniature star exploding. The bat did not have time to squeal in
pain. Its charred body fell, causing three more explosions on the
way down. Nothing but ashes remained to trickle to the floor.

Tikaya stared at the fine pile.

“
The kill zone starts
about twenty feet up,” Lancecrest said, “and extends to the walls.
You see that door in the chamber up there? And the symbols by it?
My brother has—
had
—goggles that make it easy to see them. He got in once by
randomly pressing them with that wizard shit he learned on your
island.”

“
Telekinetics?” Tikaya
suggested.

“
Yes. He lowered a rocket
out, but the code changed before he could get back in, and he
wasn’t able to find another combination that worked.”

“
How could you let him use
that weapon on the men in your fort? The men who trusted you to
command them?”

Lancecrest’s jaw clenched.
“I didn’t
know
.
Atner just sent a note to get out of the fort with my best men and
meet him at the canyon. I still can’t believe he—I know why he did
it, but I can’t believe he made that choice.”

“
Why’d he do
it?”

“
Keeler.” Lancecrest waved
toward the camp, and she guessed he meant the practitioner who had
come out to bestir the bat. “Keeler can see what’s happening
elsewhere. He found out Starcrest was coming and my brother
panicked, figured he had to do anything to delay you
all.”

“
Rias isn’t even in
charge.”

“
Doesn’t matter. He’s
there. And the other man—a captain, isn’t he?—doubtlessly had
orders to requisition half the fort to help flush the
archaeologists out of the tunnels and get the weapons. Atner
probably figured I wouldn’t disobey those orders, even for
him.”

“
Would you
have?”

“
I don’t know. It doesn’t
matter now. Come.” Lancecrest led her to another panel. “What’s
this one say?”

“
Temperature and...” Not
water, but similar to water. “Humidity,” she realized. “Controls
for modifying the cavern atmosphere.”

He sighed. “I was hoping for more from these
panels.”

“
I doubt the instructions
for disabling the security system are going to be on the wall in
the same room
as
the security system.”

Lancecrest grunted and strode to the last
panel of symbols, this one on the backside of the butte and
situated fifteen meters from a tunnel entrance. Tikaya did not have
to ponder long, for she had translated these exact symbols just a
couple days earlier. Her stomach clenched. Rias was not here with
his acidic concoction this time.

“
Don’t let your people
touch anything on this one,” she said.

“
Security?” Lancecrest
perked up. “Weapons?”

“
Cleaning service. What’s
down that tunnel?”

“
Labs. What do you mean,
cleaning service?”

Tikaya nodded. “We’ve seen them so far near
the labs.”

Despite her own words, she prodded an “open”
symbol. An invisible door swung outward, and her breath caught.
Four stacked cubes waited inside, their deadly orifices pointed her
direction.

Lancecrest cursed and jumped back. Tikaya
stood frozen a long moment before her thoughts could push past her
first instinct of fear. The cubes were dormant for the time being.
A complicated drawing on the inside of the door caught her eye. A
schematic? A label on top, a grouping of numbers and symbols,
nagged her mind. There was something familiar about the
arrangement. Oh, it looked like the codes on the instruction sets
in the sphere.

“
Can I get some paper and
copy this?” she asked.

“
If it’ll help. I can get
you the goggles, too, if you want to take a good look.” He pointed
at the top of the butte.

If she wanted to take a look? Strange,
Lancecrest was treating her better instead of worse since Gali
blabbed.

“
Do I have a choice?”
Tikaya asked. “I’m used to Turgonians threatening me or my family
to ensure my help.”

Lancecrest studied her for a moment.
“Starcrest’s a tricky devil on the water, but he’s no asshole who
would play mind games with a prisoner. If he says you’re his woman,
you are.”

“
And that means something
to you?” she asked, not sure whether to be hopeful or
not.

“
I respect him. If he’s
between me and getting out of here alive, I’m still going to shoot
him, but I’m not going to torment you.”