Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Twelve

The end came with as little warning as the beginning.

Dafyd’s strength returned slowly. He was able to walk from the little infirmary to the food and water, to take his turn on the mat without anyone there to keep him from falling. The nightgown blanket was torn, and its seams were beginning to loosen. He wore it wrapped around his waist like a towel. In the press of bodies and the degradations of time, he didn’t stand out.

Whatever the prisoners of Anjiin had worn when they were taken captive, they all wore rags now. The orange light never brightened and never dimmed. The grinding cold had become familiar. Always unpleasant, always to be managed, but known. Synnia slept the most, either with Jessyn against her for heat or squatting with her eyes closed the way Campar did. Dafyd and Else sat together more often than they didn’t. No one talked about the failed insurrection, but they didn’t talk about much else either. There was nothing to say they hadn’t said, and no one had any new experiences to relay. They were all living the same life in different bodies.

Someone in one of the other self-selected groups had begun a habit of singing, and over time, a little choir had formed. Every now and then, voices rose in religious hymns and dirges or popular songs or improvisations of harmony and cadence that ran on until they stopped. When it wasn’t annoying, it was beautiful. Dafyd was standing in the crowd listening to the falling notes of an old love song when the voice came: the calm, androgynous, perfectly enunciated voice of the apocalypse.

“We will return to symmetrical space. The transition will not be harmful.”

For a moment, Dafyd didn’t believe it had happened. After so long in silence, it seemed more likely that he was hallucinating than that the voice had actually spoken. The man standing beside him—older, bald, familiar without being known—looked around like someone had entered the room, and then put a hand up to press against the low, oppressive ceiling. He’d heard it too. Dafyd’s gut dropped.

“Excuse me,” Dafyd said as if they’d been having a conversation, and turned toward the corner of the chamber he thought of as theirs. A muttering of voices was rising like a wind in trees. He had the sudden, irrational feeling that if he didn’t find the others before the thing happened, he’d never find them at all.

The inversion of time was just as eerie, just as inexplicable, but more familiar. He remembered pressing past a young woman with wide, dark eyes and seeing Campar with his arm around Synnia a moment before it happened. He knew Else would be to Campar’s left and Jessyn to his right. He remembered the relief just before he actually felt it. By the time he saw Synnia’s expression—mouth pulled back in horror and fear—and felt his own comfort evaporate, the effect had passed.

“What’s happening?” Synnia said, then repeated the phrase again and again and again, like she was caught in a loop.

“It’s all right,” Jessyn said. “We’re all together. It’ll be all right.” It was a better answer than I don’t know.

A deep grinding reverberated, loud enough that Dafyd felt it in the soles of his feet. The room shifted, shuddered, and grew lighter like an elevator falling too fast. The prisoners let out a collective gasp. Synnia closed her eyes, her fists pressed against her legs.

“I didn’t think I was going to miss this place,” Campar said. “I’m suddenly less certain of that.”

Whatever the maneuvers their captors were making, they seemed to go on forever. And then, when the hold shuddered, stilled, and went silent, it was all over too quickly. The doors opened, white light spilling through the orange. Dafyd took Else’s hand with his left, Campar’s with his right.

The voice came from everywhere. “You will move out to the platform. Your identities will be confirmed. Exit now.”

A live breeze whipped through the stillness of the prison, reaching back as far as Dafyd. Its biting cold made the constant, grating chill of the cell seem warm. Gooseflesh rose on his arms and legs, but Dafyd hadn’t realized how much he missed the sensation of moving air until he felt the cool breeze caress his face. Jessyn put her arm across Synnia’s shoulders. Campar, his face suddenly capable of a color besides dull, purgatorial orange, was ashen. For a long moment, nothing moved, and then a soft hushing sound came from the doorway. The soles of feet hissing against the deck. Like dazed animals at a slaughterhouse, they shambled forward toward the light and cold.

A new world opened.

Dafyd had expected to see one of the city-huge ships that had come to Anjiin, but the prison cell must have been detached at some point. It sat like a low, squat warehouse, alone on a plain of green-brown metal like the flattened summit of a great mesa etched with complex lines of steel and silver. Past the edge, huge ebony ziggurats rose, one after another after another. Any one of them was large as a mountain, with long bars of light that gleamed from their summits down to the clouds that hid their bases. Where the pale clouds grew thin, Dafyd caught glimpses of smaller structures—forests or buildings or both—that glimmered with red and golden light. A world-city.

Above them, vast silver arches rose up toward the white disk of the sun. They were too huge to be buildings, too elegant to be natural structures. They reached up toward space with the casual ease of a stairway rising to a balcony. In the high air, areas of brightness shifted and spun. He couldn’t tell if they were structures or tricks of reflection and diffraction, but they seemed to flow like glowing thread, floating or moving or rising to the hidden stars.

And above them, almost too faint to make out, spots of darkness. A grid of tiny black dots like the ones that had come to humble Anjiin.

On the etched plain, six of the Carryx stood. Three had shells or armor or uniforms the same green and gold as the invading force on Anjiin. The fourth was easily half again as large, and bone white. It was flanked by two more in armor of dull red, and their massive front arms were nearly twice the size of the others’. They stood closest to the white one in the center. All six radiated the same air of magisterial calm and power.

The long-limbed, squat-bodied Soft Lothark loped through the crowd of gawking humanity, tugging here and there at one person and then another, encouraging them forward. The air smelled like distant rain. Like fog. It smelled clean.

One of the Soft Lothark led a group of people Dafyd didn’t know past the massive white Carryx. When they stood staring up at it in confusion, the Soft Lothark kicked one of them behind the knee, and pushed him down to the platform, arms spread. All but one of the others quickly followed suit. The one person still on her feet shouted up at the big white Carryx, though she was too far away for Dafyd to hear what she was saying. She stood shaking her fist in rage for a moment, and then exploded into a spray of tissue and pink mist that splattered across the platform floor. It happened so fast that it took Dafyd a moment to realize that one of the two red-armored monsters had lashed out with its arm. It placed the now bloody end of that limb back on the ground and waited. The remaining people in the group stayed on their bellies until they were prodded back to their feet and led away.

One of the other Soft Lothark tapped at Dafyd’s arm, shifting its attention from him to Else and back, as fast as a twitch. A voice came from the small, dark square at its chest. “Dafyd Alkhor and Else Yannin. You come this way now.”

It plucked at Else’s arm, then his, urging them forward, tugging him out of Campar’s grasp. Still hand in hand, they followed. The bone-pale Carryx shifted to watch them, and they were made to stop before it. Dafyd didn’t wait for the Soft Lothark’s kick. He dropped onto his face, pulling Else down with him, and remained very still. He had the sudden, sharp memory of an image from divination cards he’d played with as a child. A man and woman in chains before a huge and terrible beast.

One of the green-and-gold Carryx trilled and whistled like a pipe organ imitating a bird. It gestured at them with its thin feeding arms. The pale beast made a single, fluting reply, and the Soft Lothark dragged them back to their feet and away while another jailer hauled another group of debased prisoners to stand where they had been.

“I think we were just presented to the king,” Dafyd said. “Spoils of war.”

“Maybe,” Else said, and she was right. Whatever it looked like, it might be something else.

The Soft Lothark seemed to consult with the lines on the ground, reading some meaning in them that Dafyd couldn’t fathom. It opened its mouth, and the black tongue slapped wetly against its cheek.

“Here,” the voice said from its chest. “You will wait here for the transport to come. Do not leave this place.”

Before Dafyd could decide whether he was supposed to tell it that he understood, it slid away. Else was squinting up at the strange towers in the distance. Her hair was greasy, the color of tarnished copper, and sticking to her scalp and neck like it had been pasted there. There were bags under her bloodshot eyes. He followed her gaze. The vast silver arches, the hypnotic shimmering lights, the dark grid against the sky. In the distance, a huge platform rose up the side of one of the ziggurats, moving as smoothly as a key turning in a lock.

It was breathtaking.

“We never had a chance,” he said. “Look at all this. We never stood a chance against this.”

“We did not,” Else agreed. “Too bad we didn’t know.”

“Knowing wouldn’t have mattered.”

She looked over at him. There were lines at the sides of her mouth that hadn’t been there before the invasion. She’d grown thin enough that her cheekbones were sharp and there was a little indentation behind her chin where the cushion of fat had been burned away by hunger and stress. They all looked like that, standing humiliated and half-naked on the alien platform. Thin, wasted, broken. Dafyd gestured to them, the captives of Anjiin.

“We’d have fought anyway,” he said, thinking of Ostencour and his improvised knife. Synnia wrestling down the guard. “It’s what we do.”

“I don’t know if that idea is stupid or noble,” Else said.

“Human,” Dafyd said. “It’s just human. We don’t stop just because there’s no hope.”

Else nodded, stopped with her brow furrowed. A tear dropped from her eye unnoticed, and she shrugged. “There’s always hope for something. Just not always… not always what we want.”

Jessyn lay on the bed and tried to decide whether she felt nauseated.

The rooms they’d been taken to were the architectural equivalent of an unmastered second language. The parts were mostly there—bedrooms, a common area, a kitchen—but it was all a little wrong. The doors were functional but too wide, and the panels that opened them were placed high and off-center. The clothing—shirts, pants, underwear—that waited for them was all rolled into cylinders and held in place with something like wax that shattered when they were unrolled. The cloth felt like soft canvas and smelled like mint. She didn’t have any idea what the fibers actually were. She had laid them out, but she hadn’t taken off the rags and remnants she’d worn since the day she was captured, much less put on something clean.

There were ten bedrooms along a single corridor from a common area. The one she’d taken for herself was in the middle along the left side. It had a bed, a bedside table too low to be useful, shelves with more waxy rolls of clothing, a chair and a desk with nothing to write with or on, and a shower in the corner: dull, metallic tiles and a step down into a drainage pan. There was no curtain or door to keep water from splashing across the rough metal floor. It was like someone had seen that people liked privacy to sleep and to shower and decided the two must go together. The toilet—and thank all that was holy there was a functional toilet and not more of those repulsive mats—was communal, but with its own little closet.

She knew that she should bathe. She wanted to. She would, soon. Just not yet. The mattress was soft. The blanket was some kind of artificial fleece. Scratchy, but warm. When she closed her eyes, she felt the press of strangers and misery, but now when she opened them, she was alone. The air smelled like fennel instead of shit and formaldehyde. She had a little window that looked out into the white sky and the sun above it, even if the sun was behind a hundred little dots. If she stood next to the window, she could see a half dozen of the dark ziggurats and part of the curve of the arches that rose up past the sky. The ceiling was too high for her to reach, and the light was white. There were colors. After her duration in orange purgatory, she was grateful for colors, and she was angry that she was grateful. She was overwhelmed by the quiet. The privacy ached like a reperfusion injury.

Voices came from the common area. Else’s low tones, the way she always ended her sentences with a downturn like she was making a statement even when she was asking a question. Campar’s habitual sly deadpan, the same when he was joking and being serious. Jessyn curled over, grabbed the pillow, and pulled it over her ears to block them out. Little waves of illness kept washing through her, and fits of trembling so subtle she wasn’t sure if it was her body or a low vibration shaking the whole room. She tried to imagine Jellit on a bed like this, somewhere maybe even nearby. The combination of hope and despair ached more than either feeling alone would have.

When she’d been younger, one of her physicians had warned her against comparing her distress to other people’s. No matter what conclusion you drew, he said, you’d made a mistake. Either you saw someone else suffering, like Synnia staggering under the grief of Nöl’s execution, and decided that your own pain didn’t matter. Or you saw someone laboring under what seemed like a minor problem—Dafyd mooning after Else and Else letting him—and discounted their troubles as trivial. The first case was an excuse for self-negation, the second invited contempt. Jessyn felt herself doing both now while the small, sane part of her watched, powerless.

Campar’s laugh pushed through the pillow. Jessyn wished both that he would shut up and that she was out there with the others. She rolled onto her back again, letting the pillow fall away.

“You are a fucking mess,” she said aloud to herself.

You’re always a fucking mess. It never stopped you before, some part of her mind replied. She clenched her jaw, stood up, and started stripping off the filthy clothes she’d worn since the night she’d been captured. The shower controls seemed to consist of a single button. When she pressed it the nozzle hit her with a blast of red liquid that smelled like industrial cleanser. Jessyn screamed, and was just about to leap out of the shower when the nozzle switched and began spraying clean warm water. There was no soap, but whatever the red goo was, it loosened up the layer of filth caked on her. The top layers of her skin peeled off as she rubbed, like she’d been sunburned and was only now healing. She washed her hair, scrubbed her flesh, dug a black gel of filth out from under her too-long fingernails. There was a little box set into the wall with a razor, toothbrush, and a comb. And, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, a small steel spoon. Finding them was like discovering buried treasure. When she felt clean, she turned off the water, stepped out into her room.

Now that she was clean, it was hard to even touch her old clothes, but she had to. She rooted around in the pockets until she found the little bottle of pills. There were still enough to rattle.

She dressed in the alien clothes, then counted out the pills, putting them in a line on her bed. Sixteen. So either they had been in the hold of the alien ship for about six weeks, and she’d been taking her medication as she should, or less than that if she’d had too much, or more if she’d been too sparing. But six weeks seemed about right. Six weeks and a lifetime.

One by one, she put the pills back in their bottle, then hid the bottle under her mattress. She didn’t think anyone was really going to steal them, but they were precious, and the instinct to protect them was both powerful and harmless.

“Focus,” she said. “Just focus. Let go of all the things you can’t control, and find the things you can.”

It almost sounded like a joke. A punchline. What could she control? How could she control anything? Usually, that was the voice of her depression. Here, it was just being realistic.

Time to be unrealistic, then, Jellit said in her imagination, and she actually managed a grim little smile.

In the common room, Campar said Oh my God, and—adrenaline rushed into Jessyn’s blood—Irinna answered. Jessyn was out the door of her room before the other woman’s words had faded. The common area was a main room with a scattering of institutional chairs and couches in front of a massive window like the lobby at a decent transport hub, an open kitchen, and dining area. Irinna stood by the too-wide doorway from the corridor that their alien captors had ushered them through.

Her skin had gone so pale that she was nearly the same white as her hair, as though she’d been dipped in bleach. Her body was thinned to the edge of emaciation. She wore a ragged skirt that had begun its life as a man’s sweatshirt and a dark jacket that was slick and shining with filth. Jessyn crossed the common room and threw her arms around the thin woman. Irinna hugged her back fiercely, and then they were both crying.

“You made it,” Jessyn said. “You’re all right. You made it.”

“You did too,” the younger woman said.

They broke off the embrace, Jessyn grinning through tears, and Campar swooped in, picking Irinna up in a bear hug of his own.

“Please,” Irinna said, her words bubbling through a half-sane laughter of release and relief. “I’m disgusting.”

“You are made of gold and sunshine, and you smell like fresh roses,” Campar said. “And the same for you, old man.”

“It’s good to see you too,” Tonner Freis said. He was in the kitchen area. He’d lost so much weight that the face hiding behind his thick, dark beard looked like someone else. There was a bruise that covered half his neck, old enough that it was turning green and yellow as it healed. But his hair was the same rising, unruly gray, and his voice was familiar. He had his arm around Else’s waist. Her smile was wide, showing more of her teeth than Jessyn remembered ever seeing at once before. And beside them, Dafyd Alkhor stood with a blank, stunned smile like someone had hit him with a brick and he was trying to be happy about it.

Jessyn remembered all the days when Else and Dafyd lay beside each other in the darkness. All the time the second lead of the research team had tended to the sickness of the research assistant. The gentleness between them and the need. And now here Tonner was, like waking up out of a dream. How strange that anything from before could still matter.

You poor fuckers, all of you, Jessyn thought, but she didn’t say it.

“They have some use for us,” Tonner said, pulling on a clean shirt for the first time in weeks and running his hand over his freshly shaved chin. It felt wonderful. He hated having a beard. “They must.”

“Yes.”

Else sat on the bed, her back against the headboard and her arms wrapped around her knees. Her face was too thin, and her hair had grown out. The way it framed her cheeks seemed wrong, as if the mental image he’d held of her through the long, terrible weeks had suddenly jumped. She was quiet and still, thinking through what he’d said, and then lifted an eyebrow the way she always had, and she seemed more like herself again.

“Well, I don’t think it’s physical labor. If it is, their target selection’s terrible.”

Tonner felt a little sting. He liked to think of himself as a man who could build a wall or dig a ditch if the occasion called for it, and the implication that he wasn’t annoyed him. But then, he also knew himself well enough to hold back any quarrels until he’d rested and slept. He was never able to tell directly when he was stressed. He had to watch himself like he was the subject of an experiment and judge from outside. He thought he felt perfectly normal, but irritability was a frequent sign of being in distress.

Judging from Else’s report, her own journey from Anjiin had been much like his and Irinna’s. The dark, cold, low room, packed with bodies. The alien keepers—though his group hadn’t assaulted one. The misery. The death. Tonner and Irinna had watched seven people die before they had reached whatever the “moieties of the Carryx” were. Mostly, they’d been older men and women whose health had been imperfect before the invasion. Daiir Ferria, conductor of the Abbasat symphony and popular educator on all things musical, had died at Tonner’s feet. He’d grown up watching her documentaries for children. When he thought about her, he could still see the gape of her mouth as she struggled to breathe.

That was interesting. Intrusive memories were another sign. Clearly, he was overstressed.

“They’d been monitoring us,” Else said. “I think they must have been. They knew who we were by name. They chose people who were the top of their fields, including us. They have to want expertise, don’t they.”

“And the language. There wasn’t a pause to learn how best to translate. They knew how to speak to us and how to understand what we said back.”

“And now this,” Else said, gesturing with her chin toward the bed, the window, the shower, and all the rooms beyond it. “Their best approximation of how humans live.”

“That red glop in the shower instead of soap, though,” Tonner said with disapproval. “That was a miss.”

Else gave him a wan smile. “Our own little dormitory. So likely they aren’t just looking to harvest our brains.”

He chuckled before he realized that she hadn’t been joking. Fair enough. Extracting whatever knowledge the Carryx wanted through surgical means was as plausible as anything else they’d suffered.

He sat on the edge of the bed and ran his hands through his still-damp hair. “Well, it’s not as wide as the bed back at home, but I suppose it’ll do.”

Else started like a mouse and looked down at the mattress and blankets. Then, after a moment, “I don’t think it will. I have my own room already. And anyway, I don’t know that we should be demonstrative given the present… situation. There are more than enough bedrooms for all of us.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he snapped. “If Nöl had lived, everyone would expect that he and Synnia would share one.”

“He didn’t, though. It doesn’t apply.”

Tonner sighed, harsh and percussive. “You can’t still be angry that I told you to take Alkhor to get that stupid telescope. That was a lifetime ago.”

“It was. And no, I’m not angry.”

“What, then? Because this is a strange time to be renegotiating how we sleep together. I would have thought you’d be happy to see me again.”

Else released her knees and stretched out her legs. She had a way of relaxing like a hunting cat. Like a preparation for violence. “I’ve been through an unpleasant and traumatizing set of experiences,” she said, each word clear and careful. “And I find the idea of having a space that’s just my own very appealing. Are you telling me I’m not permitted to do that?”

Yes floated at the back of his tongue like the idea of jumping that came with looking down a cliff: a suicidal tingle. He shook his head. “I’m not at my best either.”

She rubbed an open palm on his shoulder like she was comforting a sick child. It was a little condescending, but part of him appreciated it anyway.

“I am sorry Nöl died,” he said.

“Synnia is going to be a problem,” Else replied with a nod, as if that was what he actually meant. He was still considering his reply to that when a sound came from outside the room. The clack and hiss of the main door rolling open. Someone barked out a cry of alarm. Tonner felt the fear in his chest and neck, raw and immediate as if it had been waiting for the chance to attack. They exchanged a look and headed for the door. He walked down the little corridor toward the common area with his hands clasped behind his back to keep them from shaking.

The two newcomers couldn’t have been more different. The human one was the thin remnant of Rickar Daumatin. The ragged scraps of cloth that hung from his shoulders were recognizable as one of his jackets. His feet were bare and the patchy beard that he’d grown in the weeks aboard the alien ship looked moth-eaten and sickly. A long black scab marked the side of his face, and his eyes were locked on the middle distance.

Beside him, the alien seemed huge, though it was smaller than the others of its species that Tonner had seen. The green-and-gold shells were gone. They’d been armor or clothing or the mark of a different gender or clade. This Carryx had the same form, though: a back section with four legs and a broad, flat abdomen like an insect, an upright thorax and head supported by two much larger legs, and then two mantis-like forearms at the front. This one had flesh that was somewhere between purple and beige and two pairs of black eyes large enough to almost look childlike. Below the eyes was a small, thick beak in the center of a mass of muscular folds that Tonner assumed was its face. It shifted on its back four legs like a dog dancing with excitement. The two heavy forearms were planted on the floor, immovable as granite pillars. It gave Tonner the eerie sense that the Carryx was two different animals at once.

Campar, Dafyd, and Jessyn were on their feet, all of them looking at the newcomers. Synnia sat by the window, looking out at the alien landscape as if she could ignore the Carryx to death. The alien chittered, whistled, and a voice came from the black square that hung around its neck. Not the voice they’d heard on Anjiin or the ships. This was low, vaguely masculine, and pleasantly reedy, like the alien was a particularly friendly clarinet.

“I understand that one of your working group was lost. You have a tradition of offering sympathy on these occasions. I offer this sympathy. You are to feel comfortable.”

Synnia made a quiet strangling noise. The alien paused like it was waiting for a translation that didn’t come. Jessyn stepped forward, and Campar reached out unconsciously to pull her back to safety. “Where are we?” Jessyn said. “What do you want with us?”

The alien’s back half capered a little faster for a moment, then calmed. Its massive forelegs bent a degree. “I am Tkson of the cohort Malkal, and I have been made keeper-librarian of your moiety,” it said-sang. “For the moieties, usefulness is survival. I am here to help you succeed and survive.”