The Seek (27 page)

Until it happened.

Kyn turned, and saw Mirren sparring with a huge Haitite. And she was holding her own. She was back to back with Kendis, as they had been taught, but she countered every blow that came her way, and landed some of her own. She, too, had found the rhythm of these beasts. She was anticipating, and scoring.

Then the Haitite on Kendis snaked through his defences, and pulled him up by his neck. Kendis broke free, using his sabre like an axe to chop and tear. But as the Haitite dropped him, Kendis fell slightly to the side, and Mirren’s back was unguarded.

Kyn watched as a smaller Haitite turned to focus on the girl, seeing the vulnerability, and lifted his spear.

‘No!’ Kyn’s cry was lost in the noise of the battle as she watched the spear pierce the air towards Mirren with the true beauty of an archer’s prize.

She could almost see it connecting with the strip of pale skin that showed between Mirren’s sharp black bob and her red collar. It would be the perfect shot — true and bloody.

Kyn’s focus narrowed to this: the spear, shooting towards the girl.

Kyn’s heart seemed to stop inside her chest.

But the spear didn’t connect. Asha — tall, blond, and handsome — stepped into its path, raising his shield too late. The spear found his neck instead, rupturing the skin of that long, regal neck and opening it to the elements. Asha went down, first to his knees, then rolling face down into the grass.

Kyn sprang to his side, shaking him, trying desperately to pull him up. She wanted to throw her body over him, wail and beg Tabi’s forgiveness for sending him away. She wanted to cry fairy-tale tears on him and make him come back to her, to Tabi, to all of them.

Asha looked up at her, mute confusion in his eyes as blood bubbled from his mouth.

Of all the things she could think to say, all the things she should say, Kyn could only manage, ‘Asha? The Enforcers?’

Asha closed his eyes and then flicked them open, an urgency in them. ‘Ask Symon,’ he said. And then he was gone.

A loud cry a few inches behind Kyn roused her. She turned, and spun to her feet. The cry belonged to a Haitite, dying slowly at the end of a sword. A sword held by Symon. Plunged deep in a Haitite who had been coming for Kyn in her moment of agony and vulnerability.

The other group, Symon’s group, had arrived.

‘We made it,’ he said. ‘Brutal over there.’ He looked down at Asha and shut his eyes briefly. ‘Here too, I guess.’

‘Move,’ Kyn screamed at them all, aware that the resistance had thinned enough that they might make a break for it. ‘To the cave.’

A high, pained keening broke through the fog that had filled Kyn’s ears the moment she saw the spear rip into Asha.
Tabysha
.

Kyn turned to Symon, and pointed to where Tabi had fallen on Asha. ‘Carry her,’ she said. ‘I’ll cover you.’

‘No, Tabysha groaned, struggling to her feet and pulling on her bother’s arm. ‘Carry
him
, Symon.’ She pointed at Asha.

Symon looked down at the bloodied Asha, and then flicked a quick glance at Kyntura.

‘Please, Symon,’ Tabi said, her voice quiet but desperate.

Symon bent to pick up his lifeless friend.

***

Kyn had never expected she would become a trainer. It was not in her blood the way the fight was. In the end, the choice had not been hers
.

She sat limp and exhausted among the remnants of her class, watching the seven moons of Tyver rise like tombstones over their heads
.

‘There were only three left,’ Jedro said, shaking his head. ‘The best class we ever had.’

‘Now there are none,’ Kyn answered, feeling nothing, not even the rage she could usually summon when one of her class went down
.

‘One,’ Jedro corrected her. ‘You.’

Kyn stood slowly, taking his hand. ‘They taught me all the best things I know,’ she said, feeling dull agony beat at her brain. ‘I’m nothing without them’ she said
.

‘Yes, you are,’ Jedro said. ‘You’re a teacher.’

She shot him a look that would freeze the very ground they sat on, if it hadn’t already been solid ice
.

‘If you don’t,’ Jedro said, his voice reasonable, ‘all you learned, all they taught you, will be lost, eventually.’ He sidled over next to her. ‘This is how you make them immortal.’

As soon as Kyn saw that the ship was out of the cave, she knew it was going to be bad. She advanced on it, those that still lived trailing behind her, bloody and beaten. Maybe it was because the ship was so white; maybe it was because everything was so still after the battle; or maybe it was because it was out here, where it shouldn’t be — but it looked like a tomb.

Kyn assumed Krysto had moved the ship out here. She could see they had been working to clear away the rocks from the mouth of the cave, presumably to enable a fast getaway. Little did they know the Haitites would find them. As she moved gingerly to the other side, she saw they’d been working to repair the skin as well.

Kyn turned to Symon. ‘We won’t have long before they regroup. I’m not really sure why they withdrew.’ She pointed to the ship. ‘Will it fly?’

He nodded. ‘I reckon we could have flown it out of here even as it was yesterday,’ he said. His face was swollen and bruised down the left side, and he was still carrying Asha's body over his shoulder. Kyn could only imagine how heavy the big man must be. Tabi was staying close to Symon; she was silent, but Kyn could see great shuddering sobs making her shoulders rise and fall as Symon laid her lover at her feet and Tabi slid to the ground beside him.

Five others remained: Mirren and Kendis, Seren and the wounded Tyrin, and one sole survivor from her last class. Her heart went out to him. She knew how it felt to be the last man standing.

‘Right,’ she said, steeling herself. ‘I’ll go first.’

‘Right behind you.’

She could have told Symon,
no, it’s my job
. But she didn’t have it in her. More than that, she wanted him there. She watched dully as he laid Tabi gently on the ground and spoke quickly to Mirren and Kendis, who formed up around her. Kyn took one look at her frozen, tear-stained face before she slid open the entry hatch and stepped in.

Instantly, she was assailed by the smell of blood. She knew it well. Salty-thick and metallic, it curled into her nostrils like a taunt.

She found the first one in the corridor, his head torn from his shoulders and discarded beside him. He had been sweet, that one, a little shy. Sirto, but a good, plucky fighter. What could he have done to save himself in here? Nowhere to move.

She found the next on the floor near the hatch, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. The singer: Jetrin. Always humming under his breath. Unnaturally good humour. She wondered how it had been for him. She pressed on, feeling Symon close behind her.

‘You okay?’ They were pushing through to the navigation bay. She knew what Symon meant.
Krysto is here somewhere. Are you going to cope?

‘I’m fine,’ she said, not wanting to him see whether she would be or not. She turned, almost bumping into him. ‘Do me a favour?’

He nodded, dark eyes on hers.

‘Take those two through to the keep?’ She didn’t want the others to see them. Not like this. Not after everything else they’d seen and done on this day.

He nodded again. ‘Want to wait while I do? I can take you up top?’ He motioned up the nav bay.

‘No,’ she said shortly, and he hesitated. She nodded again.

She turned back towards the bay, wondering exactly where she would find him. It was pointless, playing do-over, but she couldn’t help it. If only she had played that last conversation with him a little differently. If she’d known, if only she’d known this would happen, she would have told him
yes
. None of it would have had to be real. She shut her eyes and willed herself to be able to turn back time, like she had wished she could a thousand times as a child, after that night, dancing on her veranda in the blackness before the lights came. But this time she wanted to turn it back so she could give him this one thing. Nothing else had to change. But she could have just let him go out thinking someone loved him, wanted him.

Instead, she’d given him nothing.

She pushed through to the navbay. He had put up a good fight. His angelic face was slashed with cuts, his hands were bloody and long bloody trails darkened his Avenger reds. In the end, she could see, it was his throat. Cut from ear to ear, like a macabre smile. Her stomach churned and she grasped the nearest seat firmly. She would not be sick. She would hold it together.

She bent down, and tucked one piece of too-long, dirty-blond hair behind his ear, unsure where the urge to tidy him had emerged from. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her face very close to his. ‘I’m just so sorry.’

She stood, the world spinning a little as she did. She looked around. Everything appeared to be in order. She needed to get him out of here so they could get back to Earth Five. She knelt again and placed her hands under his arms. He was tall and strong, a dead weight. And she was exhausted. She tried to lift him onto her shoulders, but she sagged under the effort. She tried another time, feeling her fragile grip on self-control slipping away as he bounced off her again.

‘Let me help you.’ Symon’s voice behind her was very gentle. She didn’t protest, but stood back and let him lift the boy who had been her lover. He rose with him on his shoulder. ‘He was a good man,’ Symon said, meeting her eyes levelly. ‘And a crack shot. We wouldn’t have made the trip here without him.’

Kyn bit her lip. ‘We would have all been better off.’

‘We couldn’t know that.’ Symon edged past her into the corridor. ‘Take a moment, Kyntura, sit. You’re going to need to ride up here with me on the way home. Work the guns.’

She shot him a look. ‘Will they bother? They know they have us.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. They hurt us today, but we hurt them too. They’re somewhere, like us, licking their wounds and working out what to do next.’

Symon exited with Krysto over his shoulder, looking back at her as he said, ‘I’ll see you back out there.’

Kyn nodded and sat down in the seat that would have been Krysto’s on this return journey.

Images of him crammed her mind — leaning against the wall in the club; lying underneath her, his hands on her breasts; flying like a wild bird in the rounds. Her legs felt weak and watery, and she was suddenly very tired. Her eyes stung and she wanted to lie down. She imagined it, just lying on the smooth, cool granitium floor and letting someone else work out how to get them back, and what to say to The Council. She touched the smooth syntton of the seats, imagining she could feel the imprint of his warmth there. He had been alive, and now he was dead. Like she was alive, and could be gone in the next moment.

Life was very short.

It suddenly made all the things she had been so scared of — scared of having and scared of losing, like all the other things she had lost — seem insignificant. Life was short and brutal. An image of Symon flickered in her brain. Why did she run from the things that made it bearable?

***

It was the night of her eighteenth birthday, and she had not told him she was leaving tomorrow. He would not know, he would never know. She knew this with complete certainty; she knew that Pietr would never tell. Not even for his own son, whose heart would break. There could be no exceptions to the rule
.

He had turned eighteen a few months before, and as she had grown more angry and rebellious he had grown more studious. She would tease him about how he always had his nose in a V-tome, learning about some new thing, or, more often, old things. Although he liked to say they didn’t let them learn nearly enough about the old things
.

But right now, as she waited for him at the usual place, tummy flutters built inside her
.

A surprise; he had said he had a surprise
.

She felt warm hands on her eyes from behind. ‘Hey birthday girl,’ he whispered in her ear, sending shivers tripping down her spine. ‘Ready to rock and roll?’

He slid around to the front of her, and her breath caught. He had been having this effect on her a lot lately. He had grown so tall and handsome. She didn’t notice it as much when they had been hanging out together a lot, but when she hadn’t seen him for a couple of days it was like a physical jolt to take in his beauty. Tonight he was dressed in black
—
some kind of high-necked jacket and tight black spandos. Thick black boots completed the look, although she knew he wouldn’t have been trying to achieve any particular look. Even if fashion hadn’t become a dirty word since the Apocalypse, he would have had no interest. He was a scholar, from his mother, and a fighter from his father. Things looked good on him because he was gorgeous, not because he tried
.

The train of thought surprised her. Gorgeous? Since when did she think that? As she turned it over in her mind, she knew it was true. His black hair was short, but not shorn, as was the preference among the other young men they knew. The others liked to emulate Avengers. Not Symon
.

His deep brown eyes were framed with lashes that belonged on a girl, and would have looked feminine had they not been part of that altogether masculine face
—
hard cheekbones; strong jaw, fine brown skin. He’d inherited his looks from his mother, who Kyn could recall had been a beautiful woman. Kyn’s own mother had been to school with her
—
and had often puzzled about why such a beauty had ended up with grizzly Pietr Proctor
.

Looking at Symon, Kyn was just glad she had. They’d made a beautiful man, and he was her best friend
.

Or something
.

‘Ready,’ she said, sliding out of the seat and taking the hand he offered
.

‘Good,’ he said, holding out a long red strip of material. Oh no. What was this? Did he know?

She studied his face, but it was light and playful. This was what she loved about him most, that he could be so serious and intense one moment, and so puppyish and funny the next. The boy she had grown up with, growing into a man any woman could adore. She shook the thought away, knowing she mustn’t think such things. It had been a long time since Symon Proctor had tried to catch and kiss her. And she was leaving tomorrow. Forever
.