Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

PART FOURTURNABOUT

The moieties have always been a project of exploration and learning. Not of preservation. Preservation is irrational because it glorifies what cannot be. The universe is in constant change from the smallest measures to the greatest. To cling to one state of being over any others is foolish and futile and doomed. That which we encountered, we studied, often to destruction. That which we touched, we changed. Nothing within our reach escaped our influence. Some species accepted the yoke, and some defied it. That which had utility was incorporated, that which had none was culled. Any being who has chosen to pluck weeds out of a garden has done the same. You condemn us even as you follow our example, and with your foot on my throat, I applaud you. Which of us, then, has greater integrity?

—From the final statement of Ekur-Tkalal, keeper-librarian of the human moiety of the Carryx

Twenty

You have to think about the level we were playing at,” Jessyn said. “There were a thousand top-tier researchers just at Irvian’s medrey.”

“You really think Tonner wouldn’t have chosen you?” Campar asked.

He was pressing the question to distract her. He was distracting her because they were almost back at the ruins of the alcove. They were going back to the alcove because the proteomic dictionary was still waiting there, the last thing left to retrieve. She could have stayed at the quarters. No one would have thought less of her. Probably.

She had insisted. Now she and Campar and Rickar were all walking side by side, makeshift crowbars in their white-knuckled fists, ready to pry the last of their equipment free and carry it back to a defensible position. But she still appreciated the effort he was making to pull her out of herself.

“He didn’t know me. It wouldn’t have been me he was turning down. It would have been a name. A tracking number. If he could pick between one perfectly good candidate who had a brain that went sour sometimes and another perfectly good candidate who didn’t, of course I’d lose.”

Campar made a low almost grunt that meant he didn’t want to agree with her.

“Finches,” Campar said. “Lovely to look at, pretty to listen to, but if they get sick they keep it hidden until they drop over dead. Academic researchers are all finches.”

“At least we’re good to look at,” she said, and then they turned the last corner and the cathedral opened up before them. Jessyn’s breath stuttered as she inhaled, but she didn’t panic. Rickar put a hand on her shoulder.

The first time her mind had lost itself, or the first time that it had gotten to a point that required intervention, she had been early in her adolescence. Her father had been working a long-distance field contract in the ice floes south of Aumman, and her mother had taken on double shifts partly to keep the household’s contribution to the village up to par and partly, Jessyn thought, to get away from her children.

Jellit had been the one to see she was spiraling down, to understand that it was a medical problem more than a spiritual one. He’d gotten one of the instructors at their school to pass Jessyn on to the infirmary and her first diagnosis. She’d come home that day to an empty apartment and lain on the couch in the sunlight crying without having anything in particular she was crying for. When Jellit got home an hour later, the sun had moved, but she hadn’t.

He’d sat by her head, looking down with a seriousness too old for his face, and said It didn’t get better. In his youth and innocence, he’d thought the physicians would be able to turn her sane like they were flipping a switch.

Her answer became a shorthand for them later on. Not better, just improved.

Her secret was spilled now. Everyone knew what was wrong with her. And they were going to try to get her more of her meds back. They would probably fail, the darkness assured her, and even if they succeeded, it probably wouldn’t be as effective as something compounded under solid pharmaceutical conditions. It wasn’t going to bring Irinna back. That was her fault, and would be forever. Her brain put Irinna’s face before her like the woman was still alive. Look what you’ve done. Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. If the medication didn’t help, she could always kill herself later.

In the meantime, all she had were the usual sad, not-quite-impotent behavioral interventions: Get enough sleep, shower every day, force herself to eat even if she wasn’t hungry, talk to people, exercise. Clean. Participate in things like salvaging a proteome dictionary.

It didn’t fix anything. But some things, it improved.

The damage to the lab wasn’t as bad as Jessyn’s memory had made it out to be. Lying in her bed, she’d conjured up rubble and blood and not much else. The scene she actually found was almost polite. The most obvious damage was what they’d done themselves, removing the other gear. The dark marks of the bomb and the smears of blood old enough now that it had blackened were there, but not as large in reality as they were in her mind.

“I’ll be lookout,” Rickar said.

“We’ll be quick,” Campar replied.

She wasn’t sure where Dafyd had scrounged up the crowbars. They were about as long as her forearm, elbow to the tips of her fingers, and made from the same fibrous crystal as the understructure of the countertops. Maybe they were part of the shower pan salvaged from Irinna’s room. Not like Irinna would mind the loss. They’re her bones. You’re using her bones.

“All right,” Jessyn said. “Let’s get this done.”

Tonner and Else were back at the quarters trying to work a glitch out of the resonance scanner. Synnia was there too, still dedicated to her strike. On the one hand, it was a little shitty of her to just refuse to help and rely on the rest of them like that. On the other, what was the point in fighting her over it? They were in hell. She could burn whatever way suited her. Dafyd had taken off at first light, telling Else something about the librarian and looking for other groups from Anjiin. If she thought about that, she’d leap forward, imagining Jellit waiting for them when they got back, and the disappointment when that didn’t happen would hurt. So she didn’t think about it, just drove the point of the crowbar into the crease around the dictionary’s housing and put her weight behind it.

“Almost,” Campar said. “There, good! That’s a start.”

“You want to take a turn?”

“Happy to,” the big man said.

At the mouth of the alcove, Rickar’s back went stiff. “Hey. Hey! We have an issue here.”

The fear was a taste in her mouth. The murmur of the aliens moving past in the cathedral-tall space they all shared seemed to grow louder, sharper, more threatening. Jessyn clenched her jaw and walked toward him.

The truth was, she hated the open room of the cathedral. Under different circumstances, she might have loved it. She could imagine a child looking out at the same space, seeing the same alien bodies in their wild forest of variety, and being charmed. Delighted.

Diaphanous bulbs floated in the vaulted heights, flickering to each other like malefic fireflies. Black crab-shaped animals scuttled together past a tall, lumbering thing that she didn’t remember having seen before with plates of greenish chitin all along its body. She hated it all.

Rickar’s gaze was as set and steady as a hunting dog. Fifteen strides into the shift and press of bodies, each on its own path, there was a stillness. Ten wide simian eyes turned toward the alcove. Five small, murderous bodies covered in something halfway between hair and feathers. Jessyn’s throat went tight. Night Drinkers, Dafyd had called them. As a name a species called itself, it didn’t make a lot of sense to Jessyn. But who knew what those little black boxes that took chirps and clicks and rumbles and turned them into human speech were doing with idiom and metaphor.

“I take it that’s them?” Rickar said, his voice steady in a way that spoke of threat.

She tried to speak, but it was too much. She nodded and he saw her. Campar shifted ahead of her, putting his body between her and the threat. This was what it must have been like, evolving up to human. Being part of a group. Closing ranks together in the face of an enemy. She felt tears start to prick at her eyes, and hated that her anger was making her cry. She wanted to scream her rage. Leap and attack the vicious little monkeys. Not weep like she was still a little girl with a skinned knee.

“All right, then,” Campar said. “We knew they’d show back up. This is that. Not a surprise.”

Rickar moved next to Jessyn, putting himself halfway behind Campar’s formidable bulk. He held his makeshift crowbar in a white-knuckle grip. They were all afraid, she said to herself. No reason for the self-loathing and shame she felt. She felt it anyway.

Across the gap, one of the five feather monkeys ran wide, delicate fingers across its face and chittered to the others. She couldn’t hear it, not really, and if she had, she wouldn’t have known what it meant. Still, she was certain there were words in it. Then it looked at them and bared its teeth in something that Jessyn anthropomorphized into a grin.

Something shifted inside her fear. It was as fundamental and deep as a breaking bone. All the hatred she carried for herself seemed to slide away. Irinna’s presence in her memory still whipped her, but now it was whipping her toward something. Not just a punishment, but an instruction. The spiritual knives she’d carved herself with for as long as she could remember became a weapon looking for someone else’s blood.

“What—Jessyn?” Rickar said, trying to grab her arm and failing. “What are you doing?”

“I have to tell them something,” she said as she strode out among the alien bodies. She heard Campar murmur an obscenity behind her. A large deerlike thing with a green sparking carapace moved in front of her in a cloud of musk, and when it had passed, she was closer to the little fuckers. Their too-wide eyes went wider, and they jumped back, bouncing from spot to spot like they were on the edge of flight. One of them lifted a hand toward her and bared its little teeth again. Jessyn grinned back at it. Mine are bigger.

Rickar materialized at her shoulder. He had the crowbar gripped in his right hand, and a jagged length of something transparent in the other. A shard from the berries sample case. He held it like a knife. The feather-haired monkeys chittered, bounding away.

“Move pretty fast, don’t they?” Rickar said.

Jessyn shrugged. “Humans are endurance hunters.”

Behind her, Campar was still talking to himself in a steady mutter. The constant chatter of the big room took the edges off the words, but it sounded like prayer. When she glanced over her shoulder, he was following along just behind. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved that they’d stayed together or worried that they’d left the lab unguarded. But the lab had been unguarded the whole time she’d been convalescing. The worst they could do was break it. The worst she could do to them was going to be much more dramatic than property damage.

Ahead of them, the Night Drinkers scattered, bouncing between the legs and bodies of the other aliens like they were children playing find-me games. Jessyn swung the crowbar back and forth. It had a fair amount of heft. Enough mass to get some power behind it.

“This is reckless,” Rickar said.

“It is,” Jessyn agreed.

“That’s a symptom, isn’t it? Of the depression? Attempts at self-harm?”

“Might be. But it’s not me I’m thinking about harming right now.”

Campar’s voice broke in. “On the right.”

Jessyn’s gaze cut to the right. One of the Soft Lothark, the same as the guards and jailers from the ship, was in the process of ignoring the Night Drinker dancing in distress at its knees. The Soft Lothark had one of the voice boxes, and it was chanting back the same squeaks and screeches as her prey.

The Night Drinker looked at them, plucked at its own hands, and bounded away. Jessyn didn’t hurry, just changed the angle at which they were walking. She’d never been this far into the cathedral. There were alcoves all along the walls like the one they had crewed. And others too. High in the wall, a grid of machined holes let tiny bodies in and out of the tall air. Things with wings and balloon-wide bodies floated above those, shifting like living clouds that cast shadows on the throng below. Great arches of the same bronze-and-green metal that the holding cell had been constructed from rose up into the haze and light, foursquare and brutal and not actually without their own rough kind of beauty.

As huge as the place felt, it wasn’t bigger than the campus square at Irvian. Or if it was, this part wasn’t. Jessyn had walked farther than this every day in her old life, going from her rooms to a breakfast café and then to the research labs. They felt like things she’d done in a particularly vivid dream. Something shrieked in the distance: a long, fluting howl that Jessyn could have heard as distress or exultation. One of the Rak-hund undulated into their path and then turned away. The little monkey scurried ahead, looking back at them every few steps with a growing sense of desperation.

Jessyn waved to it with her weapon, and Rickar chuckled.

“What are we thinking we’ll do if we catch them?” Campar asked. “Just to make sure we’re all thinking the same thing?”

“Play it by ear,” Rickar said. “We think we’re going to play it by ear.”

Hearing Rickar respond as though this expedition were his idea, that he got to set the agenda, rankled a bit. You play it by ear, I’m getting some payback.

The Night Drinker fled, running on all fours, arms reaching out over legs, legs swinging down under arms. The three hunters kept pace, never rushing to catch up to it and never losing sight of it for long. When it turned and bolted toward the wall, Jessyn thought at first that it was trying to find some tunnel or passage too small for wide, angry human shoulders. The opening it jumped into was hardly bigger than a rabbit hole. If that had been its strategy, it would have worked.

Rickar slowed, his gaze shifting along the wall like he was reading it. The slow smile on his lips looked almost like wonder. “Well now. Would you look at that?”

She did. She’d been so focused on her little quarry that she hadn’t taken in the whole picture. The wall here was stippled with holes like the one it had gone into, but it wasn’t the harsh metal that the rest of the architecture was forged from. It was grayish and soft-looking. Here and there, fungal rills ran along the mouths of the openings. And in the dark recesses, wide eyes looked out.

“Little bunny went home to Mama,” Campar said.

“That was a mistake,” Jessyn said, then stepped forward and banged the crowbar against the ground. The impact made her fingers tingle. “I know where you live,” she shouted. “You have one of those little boxes? Make it tell you what I’m saying. I know where you fuckers live.”

A gold-pelted Night Drinker appeared in one of the higher burrow holes, looking from Jessyn to the others. Its weird V-shaped mouth made it seem somber and disapproving as a judge. Jessyn shouted at it once, a harsh wordless yawp, and then turned away.

The elation and rage lasted almost two-thirds of the way back to their alcove. The darkness and fear that came in their place were as recognizable as her pillow. The rot. The joy and the sense of power had been an illusion. Pretty paper wrapping around the same black center.

“Well, that was bracing,” Rickar said. He sounded slightly drunk. “Been a while since I walked that far. I’m surprised we did that.”

“We had our war leader,” Campar said. His tone was light, but not joking. It was meant as a compliment, and she even felt it a little.

“Those things are a ten-minute walk from our lab,” she said. “That close, and we never saw them. We made our world too small.”

“I think Tonner has been keeping our eyes more at our feet than the horizon,” Campar said. “All of us except maybe young Alkhor.”

“The circumstances are unusual,” Rickar said. It was so strange to see him defending Tonner. Like watching a cat walk backward.

The alcove was as they’d left it. The mess, the shards, the crack they’d managed to open beside the dictionary’s screen. Jessyn looked at it all—everything they still had to do, everything that was arrayed against them—and it was like she was gearing herself up to swim across an ocean. Which was the same as preparing to drown.

Campar lifted the crowbar from her fist. “Take a turn as lookout, maybe? Catch your breath. Unless we should retire to our quarters and come back later?”

“No, I’m fine,” Jessyn said, but not with enough strength to convince him.

Rickar chuckled, “I think we need to get Jessyn here back on her meds before she starts a war.” He was smiling when he said it. He even sounded happy. It still felt like an accusation.

“Fuck you, back on my meds,” she said. Rickar looked chagrined and she felt a mean little thrill at his discomfort. To Campar she said, “I’m all right.”

Campar put a hand on her shoulder. “You were magnificent. I’ll follow you into battle any time, little sister.”

“Fuck,” Jessyn said, wiping at the sudden, embarrassing tears. “Fuck you both.”

“We love you too,” Campar said. Tentatively, he put his arm around her shoulder. When she leaned her head against his side, he relaxed into her too. He was a big man, tall and broad as a boat. He seemed as massive and unbreakable as an ancient oak. And she remembered him weeping and gasping for air on their kitchen floor. She put her own arm around his waist and squeezed him tight.

“It’ll be all right,” he said.

“It won’t.”

“No. But we’ll find a way to be all right with that.”

They stood together for a long moment. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine they were on Anjiin, at the end of a long day’s work or some late-night event that had left her drained to the point of illness. Except it would have been Jellit instead of Campar, and she’d have felt guilty about keeping her brother from going out with his friends. Instead she felt guilty about trying to drag her friends into a fight with murderous aliens just because giving in to the rage washed away the soul-crushing sadness for a few moments.

And this was a good day. This was what a good day felt like now. She surprised herself by laughing.

“Yes?” Campar asked.

“I was just thinking,” she said. “That’s the first time since I don’t know when that something was afraid of a human.”