Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (25 page)

The Big Time

It’s almost impossible to run with someone else steering when you don’t know the way. Particularly if three of you are running and only one leading. Not impossible, as such, mind, but very, very difficult. A dozen times I stumbled as Brisbois pulled us in a completely new direction, taking Simon and myself off at unexpected angles.

The result was that, by the time we found ourselves at the edge of the sea, I had no idea how we got there. I hoped that meant that neither would the people following us be able to find us, though of course that was no guarantee. I mean, they might have known where we were going all along.

But as far as I could tell, no one followed. We’d come to the end of a blind, twisting alley which might very well have been not even an alley at all but someone’s footpath from a beach house to the sea, and stopped so suddenly I almost toppled face first into the drink.

Brisbois turned and barked a question at me. It was so sudden that I processed it not as words but as sounds. Or perhaps he’d used the patois of the seacity and my imprinting was starting to wear off. I had a moment of panic over this, and then he repeated, “Can you swim?”

I blinked. “Yes.”

It wasn’t a given. In Eden, water is the most expensive commodity, and most people never see enough of it together to learn to swim. I never had. But Simon had been amused at my reaction to the ocean and had arranged for me to have lessons.

Brisbois said, “Follow me.” He dove into the ocean, tugging Simon along with him.

As I dove in and swam under the cold water, I had a moment of panic, because in the water at night, lit only by faint moonlight from above, I thought I wouldn’t be able to see Brisbois, much less follow him. Then I felt a touch on my shoulder, and a slight pull. I had to assume the large, calloused hand was Brisbois’s.

I don’t know how he herded both Simon and myself to safe port. After a while I could see them, like shapes in the water, and swam on my own, until we came to something like a rock.

It seemed like Brisbois had hit the rock hard and then the rock swallowed him. But people who’ve been swallowed don’t reach back to grab someone else and pull them in. I assumed there was some sort of water-sealing membrane there. Or at least I hoped so, because otherwise I was going to hit my head really hard.

I couldn’t really see what I was swimming into. We were over ten feet down, and it was at best a murky, diffused light, kind of like a candle seen through several layers of dark cloth. But I could remember perfectly where Alexis and Simon had disappeared, and I plunged in after them in the exact spot.

Something opened and rolled over my body. The other side was dry and lit, and I put my hands up to catch myself, as I pulled myself from a flexible membrane, dragging my legs in.

A bit of water had come in with the three of us, and there was maybe an inch on the floor of a small chamber lit with what seemed like, after the darkness outside, blazing light, but was in fact a sort of diffuse and greenish illumination.

As I came in, Brisbois shouted something that I couldn’t understand.

Simon and Brisbois were standing, with their hands up, and I’d no more come to my feet than a voice spoke from somewhere above. “And you too, Madame, hands up.”

Brisbois made a sound at the back of his throat that indicated he was at the very end of his patience. “This is stupid,” he shouted to somewhere above him, his voice sounding like he would very much like to blow up into a series of screams. “Why are we not being let in?”

The voice from the other side sounded vaguely amused, but mostly very tired. “Because the Patrician is dead, so when he swims up, we have to wonder about his real identity.”

“Am I also dead?” Brisbois bellowed. “I said the right countersign.”

“Yes, indeed,” the voice said. “Which is why we haven’t filled the chamber with water and locked the entrances yet. There’s always an opportunity for that.”

“I talked to Jonny,” Brisbois said. “He knew we were coming this way. He should have alerted you.”

“And that’s the rub, because he didn’t,” the voice said. “And now we can neither reach Monsieur de LaForce nor Mademoiselle Bonheur. Therefore, we can’t verify where he is nor what he told you. And finding the Patrician alive after we saw him dead is, pardon me, a rather unbelievable thing. Doctor Dufort, who is also missing, has the capability to perform surgery to make almost anyone look like anyone, and it is not much to say that he could have created replicas of the Patrician and Brisbois.”

“In two days?” Brisbois asked.

“Who knows how long this has been planned,” the voice said, and the tone had a hint of a very Gallic shrug behind it.

Brisbois took in breath, and I felt like the yell that came out would dwarf all past screams in the history of man, but then Simon, who looked far more alert than earlier, reached out and touched Alexis. Just a small touch on the arm. Then he said, in his reasonable voice, “Nothing is going to be resolved through intimidation, Alexis.”

“I set up this system and this—” Alexis said.

“Yes, and? How can they know that?” Simon said. He glanced up at the ceiling, and looked more like himself than he’d looked since I’d met him again after seeing his putative execution. Perhaps the two hours of sleep had been enough to restore him. Or perhaps it was the plunge in cold water. But he looked awake, alert, and back to his normal poise. “Gentlemen, we are at your mercy. Is there some way we can prove our identity, barring finding Monsieur LaForce and Mademoiselle Bonheur?”

Someone said something from the speaker in the ceiling. I didn’t understand it. It had a vague sense of French and the impression that it was unbelievably rude.

Simon rolled his eyes and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid, gentlemen—and I surely hope there are no ladies present—that whatever you’ve heard about the original design of Mules, we are not actually that flexible.”

There was a dead, sullen silence. I got the impression someone had made what they believed was a very clever joke and were shocked that Simon hadn’t deigned to show either offense or shock.

Alexis’s low, muttered
“merde!”
was followed by a sneered “infants.” Just about captured my feelings. I knew what they’d told me in Olympus about my clothes drying very fast, but I was going to assume there was a limit to this capacity. I probably would have dried quickly after a mild rain. Or perhaps it was the salt in the water that had defeated the mechanisms for drying and cleaning the clothes. All I knew is that they were wet, itchy and heavy and made me feel very cold. I was starting to shiver.

Another voice came over the speaker, this one sounding somehow older and more composed than the others. “Monsieur Brisbois, Patrician, Madame, I beg your pardon, I was asleep.”

Alexis let out air, with an explosive sound, giving the impression he had been holding it in for days. “Basil,
grace a dieu
,” he said. “Could you please let us in?”

Basil cleared his throat. “Well, Alexis,” he said. “My subordinates might not have handled this well, but the point is, you know, that they
do
have a point. One of you is supposed to be dead and the other two, at least if the lady is the one who was described to me, were seen leaving the seacity and have been traced, if bank records can be followed, all the way to Olympus, from which stories of their being taken in by Goo—by Lucius Keeva have also been relayed to us. What are we supposed to believe? That the Patrician wasn’t killed, that it was just someone who looked a great deal like him? And that you and Madame Sienna, once safely in a noninsane land, and in the possession of enough credits for a comfortable life for a good many years, came back into this?”

Alexis’s “Yes,” was echoed by my “I had to save Simon.”

This earned me a radiant smile, from the quite unremarkable face, and his brown eyes narrowed a little in appreciation.

But it was Simon who spoke, once more proving that whatever else he was, he was someone designed to react calmly and keep his head under stress. “I understand your problem, Messieurs,” he said, his voice even and polite. “Have you considered genetic tests?”

Another long silence and then the same voice came again, in a pensive tone, “We’d have to send someone in there to collect samples.”

“Indubitably,” Simon said. “And?”

“All three of you, if you are who you claim to be, can move faster than any normal human being and a lot of the bioed ones.”

“And?”

“You could overpower and take hostage anyone we send in.”

Simon rolled his eyes. He had this way of rolling his eyes that would relegate his interlocutor to infant class. “Must I do all the thinking for you? You said before that you had the ability to lock both doors—I presume you have now—and fill the chamber with water. Am I to assume you don’t have the ability to, say, fill the chamber with sleeping gas of some sort?”

Something like a whispered conversation was heard from above.

Simon spoke, his voice very clear, very loud, each word carefully pronounced, as though he were speaking to someone who was not quite intelligent enough to follow adult speech. “You could keep an eye on us, and should we overpower your envoy, you’d know for a fact we were impostors. You could knock us all out, and kill us, and take back your little lamb. Alternately, you could knock us out right now and test us while we’re—”

“No,” Brisbois shouted.

“Why not?” Simon said. “If they are our people, and you seem to recognize some of them, and you say you created this hellish place, so clearly they are, then why not trust them to do this?”

“What if they were infiltrated? What if they…”

The last conscious thought I remember having was:
I smell mint.