The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) (31 page)

50: Ruby’s First Fight

An hour and a half later, the group slid through the same doorway that Fox had first taken Ruby through. She walked in the middle of the single-file column, but nonetheless, when her turn to cross the threshold came, she tensed, expecting a welcoming committee.

Instead, the hall was empty.

They snuck through corridors, Conroy in the lead, Marcelle just behind, Hugh in the back, and Lya just in front of Ruby, so that Ruby had to hiss at Lya to keep up from time to time. Conroy’s idea of a joke, maybe. Ani and Onor walked right behind Ruby, crowding her whenever Lya slowed down.

She kept expecting to see or hear people, to find a fight.

Instead, she heard their own footsteps and breathing, and from time to time a whispered command from Conroy. She wanted to go check on her hab, to see if it was even still registered to her. Surely there hadn’t been enough time for that to change, but she couldn’t abandon the group or risk being alone. If she did anything that stupid, Colin would have a reason never to let her out of his sight again. She dragged her focus back to her breathing and to the corridor and to the immediate moment and place.

A sound came from behind them, a woman, calling Ruby’s name.

She turned, calling back, “Lanie!” Next to her, Harold. A tall blond man and a short blond woman, both in blue with multicolored necklaces she could actually see from a distance.

Ani and Onor and Hugh stood between Ruby and her friends, Hugh with his stunner up and pointed at Harold. “Hugh, no!” Ruby called.

Hugh dropped his stunner a few inches. Ruby piled out of line and hugged Lanie. “What’s happening?” she asked.

Lanie shook her head. “I don’t know. We were told to watch for grays out here and to report anything we saw.”

“You won’t, will you?”

Harold laughed. “Obey? Lanie? She’s so happy, you’d think we’d already landed and she was playing under the sky. But you’re lucky it’s us you found. They’ll kill.”

“Kill?” Ruby swallowed. “What do you know? Where can we find people?”

Lanie looked at Conroy, who had shown up just behind Ruby. “They tell us you’re going to kill people. But you’re not, are you? You wouldn’t?”

Ruby swallowed and shook her head. “Not if we can help it.”

Conroy answered from over her shoulder. “Not unless we’re threatened.”

Lanie stiffened. “If you kill people, we won’t keep helping. You have to promise to do your best to be nonviolent.”

Conroy pointed at Hugh’s scarred face. “He got those marks for being late, for putting himself in danger. Maybe someone could have just helped him instead of beating him for it.” He pointed at Onor. “His parents were killed for getting reds in trouble when they broke their own rules.” He looked down at Lanie. “We’ve all got stories like that. We’ve all lost friends or family or had them beaten up or locked up. We’ll do our best not to hurt anyone, but you just told us they’d kill. Do you really expect a bloodless change?”

Lanie blinked back tears but stood her ground. “Do your best.”

Conroy’s voice softened. “We will. And we thank you for your support. Do you know where we can find . . . the people who aren’t on our side?”

Lanie shook her head. “I can’t give away my own. But I won’t report you.”

Ruby swallowed. “Even Sylva?”

“I haven’t seen her.”

“Okay.” Ruby gave her another quick hug, Lanie frail and thin in Ruby’s arms.

“Okay, go on,” Lanie said. “We’ll go the other way, say we were scared and outnumbered if Ix pops up and shows that we met here.”

Seeing friendly faces should have bled some of the tension out. But it didn’t get easier to slide through the eerily empty corridors. They took a shortcut through one of the big rooms that were usually full of people working in small segregated spaces. Ruby’s heart danced against her ribs. So many places people could hide. If Lanie was right, there was no one here, but what if she wasn’t? What if Sylva or Ellis had lied to Lanie and Harold, or changed plans, or had people tracking their progress through the level?

Conroy didn’t like this place either. He’d gone dead quiet, every bit of him clearly alert. He started moving faster, not quite running.

They were all in now, and they’d be through pretty quickly.

A yell.

A man in the back, not one of them. A red. Stunner pointed.

One of the women behind Ruby fell, making a small, vulnerable sound and then a thud as her head hit the floor.

Three people shot back, the stunner beams visible only as subtle changes in the air. The only sure signs of the short, fat guns working were flashes of light from the muzzles.

All the shots missed.

Two other people popped up from different workspaces, a blue and a red, firing their stunners, ducking again before Ruby could register who they were. Two more grays fell. A couple she’d met once but didn’t know well. She tripped over an uneven spot on the floor, bruising her shin.

The return shots did no good.

Ruby picked up a stunner from one of the people on the floor, holding it awkwardly.

“Through the door. Out! Out!” Conroy barked.

As she passed Conroy, following his orders, she saw him stand on a desk, hunting for a better view. He shot twice, and she heard someone yell. Brave. At least one of them could shoot. He’d be a target there, though. A glance back showed Hugh on a table, too, and a knot of people between her and him. Enemies. She recognized a few faces, no names.

Lya stumbled in front of her and landed on her hands and knees.

Ruby bent down, the heat of a stun beam passing where she had just been. She kept going, eating the floor, spreading herself flat, half on top of Lya. “Crawl,” she whispered.

Lya whimpered.

“Now.”

Lya started pulling forward, way too slow. Ruby pushed her under a desk and followed her, the two of them huddling together.

Onor stopped in front of them, Ani across from them, her face a darkness in the shadows. She watched Ruby with eyes bright and full of fear and reproach.

Voices called. Conroy grunted once, then Ruby heard a thud. She glanced up, saw that he was still there after all. She knelt and stood quickly, checking for Hugh.

She couldn’t see him. “Hugh!” she called, realizing her mistake just as Lya scrambled out from behind her and started heading the wrong way.

Onor tried to block Lya, but Ruby grabbed him. “We’re going. Now. It’s just stunners. Nobody’s dead. I need to know if Hugh is okay.”

Onor shook his head, his eyes wide and worried.

She jerked her head back at the door. “How do you know it’s safe that way either?”

His lips thinned. Lya was getting too far in front of her, crawling like a madwoman. Ruby launched herself after the fleeing woman. She heard Onor and Ani right behind her.

They passed Conroy. He was unhurt, still ducking and rising and shooting. “Out!” he screamed at them.

She glanced up and saw how angry he was. He wasn’t looking at her, and his anger was for far more than her. She fed off it, liking the anger. It fit a fight, felt good in her belly. “Lya,” was all she said to him, and then she put her head down and kept going. She heard a few whispered words between Onor and Conroy but couldn’t make out what they said to each other.

It seemed to take a long time and a lot of crawling, and each movement was scary. Then Lya rounded a corner in front of her and screamed.

Lya collapsed, still screaming.

Ruby only hesitated a second before peering around the corner. Hugh was on the ground, face down, and a small man dressed in blue was hitting him with a stunner in repeated bursts. The man’s face was scrunched up and full of fear and hatred.

Ruby screamed, “Stop!” Onor leapt in front of her, put his head down, and plowed into the man, sending him crashing into the floor. Onor landed on top of him.

Ruby crossed the five steps between them and took the stunner from the man’s twitching hand, then stepped on his hand, hard. He grunted, partly from her ravaging his fingers and partly from the blows Onor rained on his side.

Ruby turned to see Lya cradling Hugh’s face in her lap, his eyes sightless and staring. Lya’s head hung down, her hair covering her face, the ends of it sweeping across Hugh’s forehead.

Ani was already kneeling beside Hugh, a hand on his neck, feeling for a pulse.

Conroy and Marcelle rounded the corner. Others followed.

“Onor! Stop!” Conroy commanded. Onor ignored him, slamming his fist into the man’s side with a desperation that looked completely wrong on Onor.

“Stop!” Conroy shouted again, and this time Onor gave a final blow and stood up.

“They’re gone,” Conroy said as he knelt on Hugh’s other side. “But we have to get out of here. This is a trap.” He glanced at Ani, recoiling at the stunned look in her eyes, and put a hand beside hers. “We have four down. We’ve just enough people standing to carry them.”

He looked at Lya and shook his head.

“I know,” she whispered so soft that Ruby could barely hear her. Lya had become a wraith in that short time, a stunned shell of a human being.

“Stopped his heart,” Conroy said.

Ruby choked back a soft, keening sob, earning a glare from Lya.

“We’ve got to go,” Conroy said.

Ruby stood up. “I have someplace closer. Trust me.”

“Do you
know
it’s safe?”

She hesitated. “I’m as sure it’s safe as I am that home is safe anymore.”

Conroy gave her a wry smile and closed his eyes for a moment before opening them and saying, “Very well. Don’t lead us wrong.”

She swallowed. “I won’t. We’ll all fit where I’m going. I promise.”

51: Foxed

Ruby’s handprint still opened her door. She didn’t realize how afraid she’d been until it actually worked. She stood just inside the door and directed the pairs of people supporting groggy stunner victims to come in and lay them out on the couch and the bed.

“Hey!” Dayn’s voice protested, sleepy and angry all at once.

Ruby glanced up to see him coming out of her bedroom, shirtless, with his hair mussed from sleep. “It’s okay,” Ruby called to him. Then she told Conroy and Onor to put Hugh’s body on the floor. She’d have liked someplace more respectful for him, but the couch already held one person and both beds were full.

Lya collapsed beside the body, her hands shaking, her face so white she looked physically ill. Conroy crouched beside Lya, talking in soothing tones.

The hab was so full it felt almost like a twisted echo of the party on her debut night. The shock of fighting, of even being here, played out as wide-eyed stiffness in some, exhaustion in others. It set Onor pacing. She hadn’t thought past getting here, but now what?

When she felt Dayn grab her arm, she turned on him, too tired to be handled. “Get them water,” she snapped.

He stepped back, startled, and narrowed his eyes at her.

“You told me to get a backbone. I got one. Get these people water.”

To her surprise he went into the kitchen. Ani followed, and they came back balancing three glasses of water each. Marcelle and Onor helped deliver the water, both curious and a bit shocked. But then she surely didn’t look any better.

Fighting sucked.

After everyone had a place to sit and a glass of water, Ruby backed Dayn into the wall near the door and looked carefully at him. No colors, no way to really tell where he stood. Of course, he’d just woken up. He didn’t look like he’d been fighting, but rather—and incongruously—like he had always looked. As if nothing was going on at all. “Are you one of us?”

“Yes.”

She stared at him. He stared back, solid and sure of himself, smelling cleaner than anyone else in the room, looking more confident than anyone except maybe Conroy. She bit at her lower lip for a moment, then said. “Good. Then go home. You’re next door. You can watch out from there. We need rest.”

Dayn stiffened.

She should use him. “Can you warn us if the fighting comes this way?”

He gave her a quick nod, unhappy and barely acquiescent, and started for the door.

“Oh, and knock when you want to come back.”

He reeled as if her words had slapped him, but he went. She let out a long sigh, feeling a little flash of triumph inside the horror of Hugh’s death and the awful fight. Then she reset Dayn’s door access so he’d
have
to knock.

Marcelle blinked at her, her mouth open, but no words came out. Finally, she stammered, “Who . . . who was that? Where . . . where are we?”

Marcelle’s diction was nearly always perfect. A sign of how much stress the fighting had put on them all? Onor was looking at her with intense curiosity as well. “This is my hab,” Ruby said. “I live here.” She sighed.

Marcelle looked around with interest and Onor frowned but said nothing. Marcelle asked again. “That man. That wasn’t Fox?”

“That was Dayn; he’s used to watching over me, but he lost track a few days ago.” She felt herself grinning and saw Marcelle grinning back. The slight bit of laughter escaping their lips sounded both manic and stressed, and like heaven.

As soon as she regained some self-control, Ruby assigned a door guard and a few nurses and left Ani in charge of making food. Conroy found tasks for everyone else: checking weapons and clothes, stretching, and preparing to leave if they had to. Then he pulled Onor aside and the two of them whispered in a corner.

Ruby sat down in the middle of the room and put her hand on Lya’s back. Lya still cried, soft sobs that made more movement than noise, and she didn’t look up at Ruby or acknowledge her presence. Ruby felt the sobs through her hand and arm, and focused down on her breathing to keep from joining Lya. There was no way she could afford to look weak, not now. She hummed a bit and then sang quietly, choosing songs that everyone would have heard since they were children instead of songs she’d written.

A few other voices took up the songs with her, the group slowly coming to be more matched up emotionally, the familiar melodies and words acting to calm and unify. As soon as she felt like most of the fighters were more composed, she asked. “Conroy, what do we do now?”

“Wait.” He held up his journal. “We’ll get orders soon.” The look he gave her was approving.

“Do you know what’s happening out there?”

He glanced down at the journal, then said, “Not really. Lots of battles. Nothing conclusive.”

Ani brought in plates of toast and two carafes of stim, looking apologetic. “This is what we have. We can each have a piece and a half cup.”

“I should have stocked the larder a bit better,” Ruby joked.

Ani shook her head.

While they ate, Conroy talked tactics and debriefed them, his voice calm.

Ruby got up to help Ani take the plates back to the kitchen and then they went to the privy together. The mirror showed that she looked as bad as she ever had on this level—maybe worse. When she started running her fingers through her tangled hair, Ani handed her a comb.

“You are forever helping me be beautiful,” Ruby commented as she took the comb. “Thanks for sticking with me. What do you think of gray?”

Ani ran water into her cupped, clean hands and splashed it on her face before answering. “It’s . . . fierce.”

“Fierce?”

“You know. Everything feels more intense. Scary. More . . . emotive.”

Ruby handed the comb back to her. She stared at the mirror, noting a bruise on her cheek that she didn’t remember receiving. “If I hadn’t met Hugh . . . no, there’s more. If a pair of reds hadn’t beat Hugh the day I met Fox, I wouldn’t have ever known Hugh believed in me, and maybe none of this would have started. I wouldn’t have sung at Owl Paulie’s funeral, and that was the beginning.”

“You would have found us. Or we would have found you.”

“How do you know?” Ruby found a pair of her favorite earrings and put them in. “Maybe it’s me that would have been killed. They kill the people that scare them.”

“You scare them,” Ani said.

“So now you believe me? About people hurting us?”

Ani looked down and away, her face confused and a bit sad. “Yes.” She pocketed the comb and started out the door.

“Good,” Ruby whispered to the mirror before turning and following her watcher out of the room.

Ani was already running when Ruby came out of the privy. Fox had come, had found them somehow. Maybe Dayn. She should have programmed
Fox
out. Stupid.

Fox stood over Onor, looking down and talking to him, although Ruby couldn’t tell what he wanted. Marcelle sat beside Onor, looking up at Fox, her features frozen in fear.

Before she got close enough to hear what Fox said to Onor, Ruby could see that he held a stunner in his hands. “No!” She screamed, hurtling past Ani and skidding to a stop inches from Fox.

Onor kept his eyes on Fox as he said, “There you are.”

“There you are,” Fox said to Ruby, an odd little echo of Onor’s words. “I’ve been looking everywhere.” Fox glared at Ruby, his hand still pointing the stunner in Onor’s general direction. “I was just asking your boyfriend here where to find you.”

“Stop it, Fox!” Ani snapped, coming to stand beside Ruby.

Onor took advantage of the moment to stand, pulling Marcelle up beside him.

“He’s my
friend
,” Ruby snapped, “And I’m right here
in my hab
, and I didn’t invite you in.”

Fox looked awry, his hair mussed and sweat dotting his forehead. “You still work for me,” he said.

Ruby let out a bark of laughter. “Surely you don’t think I’m that naïve?”

“That’s why I came. To keep you safe.”

“Put your stunner away.” Ruby kept her voice even. Fox couldn’t know what they had seen happen to Hugh, how much they needed him to put the gun away.

Fox blinked at her, unmoving.

She almost felt sorry for him. Not quite. “Look, I appreciate it all. Thank you. But I have things to do. There’s a battle.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“No. It’s not.”

“Of course it is. I have to keep you safe.”

“Onor’s keeping me safe.”

“I see that.”

“And Ani.”

Fox shook. She couldn’t quite tell what emotion drove him to do that. Some anger, some need to control her. Not all of it. He was scared. She knew him well enough to tell.

She fought an absurd urge to hold him. “Look,” she struggled to control her voice, “I have a job to do here. Without you, I would never have started it, I wouldn’t have known about anything but gray.” Damn it, now her voice was quivering. Surely she was just tired. Exhausted. “I’ll thank you forever. But I want you to go now.” She was breaking up with him, hurting him, forcing it this time. She’d done it inside of herself a long time ago, but this was looking in his eyes. That’s why she couldn’t talk smoothly, why she felt she was repudiating a piece of her soul.

Fox’s eyes darted from side to side, as if looking for a distraction to help him escape.

Onor sidled away from Fox’s stunner. He stood as close to Ruby as possible without touching her. Marcelle stepped between Ruby and Ani, all of her attention on Ani. A guard to guard her from her guard. The irony almost made Ruby laugh despite the tense moment.

Ani didn’t notice Marcelle’s protective stance or how ready she looked, balanced for action. All of Ani’s attention had gone to Fox, and his to her.

Conroy watched, almost amused, and intensely curious. Everyone else seemed to have melted into the walls. They were still there, their presence given away by rustles and slight movement, but they’d all gone quiet.

Ani and Fox stood locked in a staring contest full of deeper meaning than Ruby understood. Ani’s chin quivered as she tried not to cry.

Ruby chewed at her lower lip, not liking the thick undercurrents she didn’t understand.

“Help me,” Fox said.

The look Ani gave him held a tiny bit of pity. She was taller than Fox, more regal.

“I love you,” Fox said to Ani.

To Ani
.

Ruby blinked, even more confused. She held her tongue, watched.

“I can’t,” Ani said, the words barely more than a whisper. “She’s . . . Ruby . . . Ruby has the power to save us all. I can’t leave her.”

Fox dropped his arm. “I . . . see.” His look dismissed Ani then, as if she had been nothing.

Ani took a step back, tilting her head so that she looked over the top of Fox’s head instead of into his eyes.

Fox turned to Ruby, then reached out for her.

Marcelle slid between them, quick and sure, bracing herself so her back nearly touched Ruby’s chest.

Ruby blinked at Fox over Marcelle’s shoulder and then gently pushed Marcelle aside. “It’s okay.”

Marcelle moved slowly, resisting. Once the space between them was empty, Ruby stepped into Fox and kissed him on the forehead. Then she stepped back and stood beside Marcelle. It took a few breaths before she could get out the words, “Thank you.” A breath. “Goodbye.”

He looked stunned, then backed up, stepping around Hugh’s body. “Don’t stay here. The fight’s coming this way. Go to Colin if you won’t stay with me.”

He meant to hurt her with the words. “What else can you tell me? Are we winning?”

“We might have, except I came for you.”

He was lying. He wasn’t going to give her any real information, not now, not in this state. She couldn’t stand the mix of anger and desire in his eyes anymore. “Go,” she told him. “I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”

He left, slamming the door hard behind him.

Ruby felt as if she were being split in two, as if there was a weaker, younger part of her that should be following Fox.