Price of Ransom (7 page)

She went straight to the captain’s suite, not wanting to see how the Ridanis chose to dispose of the remains. Inside, she found Yehoshua and Pinto, both armed, and the Mule, sitting uncomfortably in the couch and chair that furnished the outer room.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Unconscious,” replied the Mule, drawing the word out into a long, sibilant flowering on the
s
. “I cleaned him up as best I could and discarded his clothing and left him on your bed. Was that well?”

“Well enough,” interrupted Yehoshua in a sharp voice. “I
knew
he was a psychopath. Void bless us, I’ve never seen anything so horrible. He ought to be committed to an institution.”

“Just remember,” said Pinto, drawling slightly, “that we would have all been dead. Between you and me, I’ll take that trade any day.”

“If he indeed does have some strange ability that allows him to”—Yehoshua paused, struggling for a word to embody a concept none of them truly believed in—“
exist
inside a window, then he damn well could have disarmed them, couldn’t he?”

“I’m
glad
he killed them,” Pinto replied with unexpected fierceness. “Vanov’s the one who killed my father, isn’t he?” He looked at Lily for confirmation, but Yehoshua replied instead, harsh words that provoked an equally heated response from Pinto. Lily heard only the tone, not their words, because a sudden flood of memory, of the last moments before they had gone through the window, choked her. Vanov had killed her.

Pinto stopped talking. They all stopped talking, seeing her face.

Yehoshua stood up. “Do you need to sit down?”

She let him guide her to the chair and sit her down. “He killed me,” she said, dazed by the discovery. “He fired the pistol. I should have been dead.”

“Who killed you?” Pinto asked.

“Vanov,” said Yehoshua slowly, trying himself to recall the sequence of events. “I knew he had the gun against your head.”

“Ah.” The flow of the exclamation gave it a sagacious flavor. “You have overlooked the obvious conclusion,” the Mule continued, having gained their attention. “Hawk
also
thought you were dead. It would explain the—severity of his reaction. He is not particularly stable, and his attachment to you is deeper than most. And he is not in any case fully human.”

Pinto just blinked, looking confused. Lily did not reply.

“What do you mean?” Yehoshua demanded. “He’s not ‘fully human.’”

The Mule smiled, a peculiarly out-of-place expression on his half-sta face. “Like recognizes like,” he replied. “I knew the moment I met Hawk that he is, as I am, a half-breed.” He turned his gaze from Yehoshua’s disbelieving face to Lily’s quiet one. “But to more than that, I cannot answer.”

Lily sat, remembering the bridge of La Belle Dame’s
Sans Merci
, where the aliens—what had La Belle called them? Where the je’jiri had run their prey to ground.

The other three waited. Eventually it became clear to her that they expected an explanation. And even, perhaps, in the face of the circumstances, that they deserved one.

“I just found out myself,” she began softly. “After Blessings. His father is human. His mother is one of an alien species called je’jiri. They’re hunters. I saw them—” She halted, unwilling to share the memory of what had happened on La Belle’s bridge. “I saw them,” she repeated, ending the sentence there. “They’re not like us.”

“Enough like us,” said Yehoshua, “that mating could produce a child.”

“I don’t know how that works, or how usual it is in League space to find half-breeds. But not very usual, I don’t think. The je’jiri don’t approve of it.” The comment seemed even to her ears ridiculous, a gross understatement of the bloody aftermath of their hunt. The man who had been killed on the
Sans Merci
had not looked so different from Comrade Vanov and his compatriots.

“Is that why Hawk is so unstable?” Yehoshua asked, continuing to press the issue.

Lily looked directly at him. “Yes. That’s why. His—attachment to me isn’t”—she hesitated—“It isn’t a
human
attachment. That’s why I can’t abandon him.”

“So you expect us to continue serving on this ship with him running loose?” Yehoshua’s voice was rough. “After what we’ve seen he can do?”

“It’s true,” said Pinto, finding his voice. “I’m not sure he shouldn’t be locked up. It almost gives me sympathy for Finch.”

The Mule hissed slightly, laughing.

Lily stood up. “All right. I agree to keep him quarantined in my cabin until we get to League space, where I’ll hope we can find a doctor, someone who knows more about this than we do. The lock is manually coded to my imprint alone in any case. Whatever else he can do, I don’t think he can walk through walls.” She walked across the room to the door that led into the inner chamber.

“You’re not going in there?” Yehoshua asked, amazed and horrified at once. “
Alone
?”

“He won’t hurt me. It’s the one thing I
am
sure of.” She paused before touching the panel that would shunt the door aside. “Yehoshua. Escort Lia up here. I’m going to want to talk to her after I’ve checked on Hawk.”

“Do you wish company?” the Mule asked unexpectedly.

She considered the offer, but at last shook her head. “No. Thank you. This is best done alone.” She touched the panel and stepped inside the other room.

The door sighed shut behind her. Kyosti lay on the bed. At first she thought he was asleep, but as she watched him he shifted, muttering words in too low a voice for her to make out their sense.

She approached the foot of the bed cautiously. His eyes were shut. His head turned on the coverlet. Muted red still tipped his hair and his fingers. A slight stain streaked his jaw just below his mouth. The Mule had put him in a clean white tunic and trousers. He seemed unhealthily pale against the stark fabric. He had never seemed so pale before.

She was about to speak his name, softly, when he abruptly sat up, so sudden and violent a movement that she jumped back, bracing herself.

“Lily!” he cried.

A pause, and she realized he did not see her, but was looking at something, some sight he alone could see. He was not aware of her at all.

“I saw him and he said to me, Hypsiphrone, although you dwell outside me, follow me—”

Lily had no idea who Kyosti thought he was talking to. His eyes had opened, and they focused on a spot halfway between the bed and the wall. His voice was low, but it had an edge on it, as if he was just clinging to the last vestiges of calm.

“—and I will tell you about them. So I followed him, for I was in great fear. And he told me about a fount of blood that is revealed by setting afire …”

“Kyosti?” she whispered. She took a step toward him.

“There was no water on Betaos. It was only sand. But it got sticky when her blood leaked into it. It gave off a sweet smell, that combination. No one could ever explain to me why that was.”

“Kyosti.”

He continued to rave, on and on, describing incidental details about a place called Betaos. And then another place, called Helsinki, and a room, and the texture of a chair and the smell of spring flowers opening in the cool morning air. Mixed with the scent of death.

Lily knelt on the bed and reached out and cupped his face in her hands.

“Kyosti.” She was more frightened of his complete nonrecognition of her than by anything that had happened before. Violence, or accusations, or pleas, she could have dealt with. But now she was afraid that he had lost his mind.

He did not respond to her touch, not even when she put her arms around him. He only continued to talk, gesturing with his hands as he described more precise details, mostly of scents, to his unseen audience.

She let go of him finally because it was too painful to her to think that he no longer knew her—that she could be obliterated so easily from his world. It hurt. Worse than any physical wound, because still, after all this time, she had not brought herself to the conscious point of admitting how much he meant to her. Because it was too late for the admission to make any difference: that she had sheltered him all this time, shielded him from the consequences of his attacks on Finch, from his murder of the asteroid miner who had once been her lover, for the most shameful reason: that she loved him. She would have cried, but she no longer had the luxury of such a display. At Roanoak clinic her tears—unplanned, surprising even her—had made him come with her. He had said she would be better off without him. Maybe it was true. But maybe
he
would have been better off to have stayed there, to continue his work unconstrained by attachments. And yet—

“Kyosti,” she said, trying one last time.

He continued talking as if he had not heard her. His speech was deteriorating into a language she could not understand, sprinkled with words she did. She stepped back to the door, laid her hand on the panel.

He broke off in midsentence and looked straight at her. She took her hand off the panel, feeling a sudden thrill of relief.

“Don’t lock me up.” He spoke to her as he would speak to any unsympathetic stranger. “Please. Don’t lock me up.” It was almost as if he was begging her. He sounded very young and frightened.

“It’s only for a little while.” She moved toward him. “I’ll be here with you as often as I can, Kyosti, but you have to understand—”

“Don’t lock me up. Please.” Like a broken recording or the decayed loop of the
Forlorn Hope
’s distress beacon, he was simply repeating some phrase from his past that her movement to the door had triggered. He was not talking to her at all, really. “Don’t lock me up.”

She had to look away. It was too agonizing to watch him deteriorate into someone confused, reduced to this kind of abject pleading. It was as if Kyosti was not even in the room with her anymore.

“Don’t lock me up. Please.”

And in any case, she had no choice.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and she pressed the panel and left the room, coding it to lock behind her.

In the outer room, the Mule still sat, waiting. Mercifully, it said nothing. Pinto had left. Before she had even had a chance to recover, the door slipped aside to admit Yehoshua and Aliasing.

Lia’s eyes were red, puffed from tears. She had huddled in against herself. Small to begin with, she seemed on the verge of collapsing into nothing. She did not sit until Lily motioned her to the chair, where she sat gripping her knees, shoulders hunched, head down.

At a nod from Lily, Yehoshua and the Mule left. Lily remained standing.

“They won’t tell me how Jenny is,” said Lia at last, her voice so faint it almost dissolved into the hush of the cabin.

“Do you think you deserve to know?” Lily demanded.

For a moment she regretted the harshness of her words. Lia trembled, shrank, and put a hand up to cover her eyes. But lowered it again, although she still stared at the floor.

“No,” she murmured. “I don’t deserve to know.”

She stopped, but there was such a palpable air of her being about to go on, given enough resolve, that Lily kept silent.

“They said they just meant to impound the ship and take everyone back to Arcadia to appear before a court. That’s the way it worked before, in military matters. My mother often dealt with the military arm, and any soldier of whatever rank was always given an appearance before a fair court.”

Lia paused, catching her breath after this first effusion, and looked up at Lily as if hoping that the matter was now explained.

“I don’t understand.” Lily paced to the door and back. “If you didn’t agree with the mutiny in the first place, why didn’t you ask to go with Machiko and the others when we put them off the ship? Fair court or not, I think you know that mutiny is comparable to treason and the penalty is death.”

Lia did not reply immediately. She seemed to shrink farther into the couch, looking so insubstantial as to be almost nonexistent. Her cloud of dark hair fairly screened her face.

“They said—” she began, and faltered. Her voice was so faint that Lily had to approach the edge of the couch to hear her. “They said Jehane had sent them, to bring me back to them. He sent me a private message, while we were still in orbit around Arcadia. Before your accident. Before Central fell. He said he would send for me, when he controlled the planet. He wanted me to be his—” Her voice caught, but she mastered the impulse to cry. “To be his consort.” The words, or some memory of Jehane or his message, seemed to give her strength. “But I didn’t hear anything else from him. And then Pinto and Paisley brought you back, and you were hurt so badly. They said Jehane tried to kill you, but …”

“But you didn’t believe them,” Lily said, feeling tired. She wondered if Lia’s obvious, and long-repressed, love for Jehane had blinded her as thoroughly as Robbie’s idealism had blinded him.

“No,” Lia admitted, sounding strangely matter-of-fact. “That someone else, one of his lieutenants, might have tried—I could believe that. But not Jehane.”

Lily smiled wryly. “Well, I’ll say this for him, he was sincerely sorry to have to do it.”

Lia glanced up. A surge of anger sparked in her expression, as if she was about to argue with this assertion, and then she thought better of it and lowered her gaze to stare at the floor again.

“Then the mutiny came,” Lia continued. “I couldn’t stop it, not by myself. And Jenny”—for a moment she looked as stubborn as Paisley—“I
do
love Jenny, for everything she’s done for me.” She stopped, waiting for Lily to dispute the fact. But Lily could only turn away, glad that Jenny was not here to discover that Lia’s love for her sprang out of gratitude, not sentiment.

“I wanted Jenny to have a home,” Lia insisted. “I wouldn’t have left her without a place that belonged to her. Even when I found out who Jehane was, that he was Mendi, I could have gotten a message to him. But I wouldn’t have left her without the stability of a home, of a family. But she has that now. There’s no reason I can’t go back to Jehane.”

Lily turned sharply back. It was not even that Lia had betrayed Jenny and Gregori, and the entire crew. But the thought that Lia’s action had precipitated the events that had led to Kyosti being locked in the next room, the possibility that his perhaps inevitable reaction to that moment when he believed Lily dead had driven him insane … that Aliasing could calmly sit there and so blithely forget what she had seen on the bridge—