Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Twenty-Eight

Jellit had changed. It was more than the thinness in his cheeks, more than the threads of gray that had popped into his hair like the time since the fall of Anjiin could be measured in decades. She couldn’t help wondering what changes he saw in her.

Today, he’d taken her to the quarters he shared with his workgroup, made a lunch of the salty paste that the Carryx had left them as food and the plain water from the sink tap. Their conversation felt off, though. Like her brother had become shy. Or he was hiding something.

The conversation circled back to the fall of Anjiin, the event having a gravity that bent all meaning back to it.

“How did it happen?” he said, leaning back on the little chair where he or one of his crew kept watch. When he smiled wide enough, the dark gap of a missing tooth peeked out, but just for a moment. She didn’t know how he’d lost it. “That was… it feels like that was a long time ago. Let’s see. Llaren and Allstin and Dennia were all part of the near-field visualization group. We were letting them use our equipment since they were there for the… ah…”

“End-of-year at the Scholar’s Common,” Jessyn said.

Jellit pointed at her, meaning Yeah, that. It wasn’t the first time since they’d found each other again that he’d had trouble coming up with words.

“So when they came, they just got all of us,” Jellit said. “We were waiting for a security escort to someplace safe, but it never showed up. The Carryx brought us here and gave us a lab. They wanted us to re-create Llaren’s thin-spectrum lensing work. Show them how he’d managed to see them before they wanted to be seen. And…”

And.

There was a lot of room in that and. Loss and trauma. She knew it without having to be told. There was evidence everywhere: bedrooms in their little compound that had been used and weren’t anymore, names that came up in conversation—Barris, Simien—without a living person to go with them, a sense of the space where people had been. And there were habits like the keeping of the guard that implied violence.

Everything she heard from Jellit was like an echo of what she’d been through. The abduction, the passage, the violence, the loss. Not her way through the mess, but a similar one. And the same mess.

Even the rooms were like a funhouse mirror of each other: different and the same. The architecture here was blocky and rectilinear and enameled in low-saturation primary colors, like a child’s playroom with the vibrancy taken out. Color and rhythm in place of her own window on the sky. The kitchen was like the one back at their rooms. They even had the exact same cups and plates. But here, there was only one shower, and each of the bedrooms had a toilet and sink of its own. The bedrooms themselves were up on a second floor, only reachable by ladders. Here, there was a wide door, but it swung out instead of rolling. All the same pieces, arranged in more or less the same way, but with a carelessness. It was like the Carryx had a vague level of accuracy in making space for their pet humans, and close enough was close enough.

They didn’t care enough to keep them safe from violence, though. Or from committing it.

“I was worried, you know,” he said. “Simien had been taking something for his blood. It was hereditary. Easy to manage. It was supposed to be easy to manage, you know. But they didn’t get it for him.”

“Did he die of that?”

“No, not of that,” he said. And then, “I’m really proud of you. Making it even though… you know.”

“Even though my brain kept trying to kill me?”

He barked out a little laugh, and for a flicker, she could see the version of him she remembered. Bright, energetic, curious, alive. “Yes,” he said. “Even though your brain was trying to kill you.”

“It was close, sometimes.”

“Close is okay, as long as you made it. Rickar said you led the battle even before the medication came all the way back up. I guess all those coping-skills sessions with the therapists paid off after all.” He smiled as he said it, both teasing and not.

For a moment, she was in the house they’d lived in when she was thirteen, the summer her head had first betrayed her, sleeping in the main room with her father on a cot beside her because they weren’t going to leave her alone until the medications started working. Her father, or her mother, or Jellit. Barely older than her, he’d still taken a turn making sure his baby sister didn’t hurt herself. She didn’t know how a memory could seem that immediate and that far away at the same time.

She’d been sure she was going to die back then. She’d known it like she’d known that the sun rose in the morning and set at night. Like she’d known that sugar was sweet and not salty. The only thing that had confused her at all was why her family didn’t see it too. When her mind had clicked back into joint, it had been like it made a sound. The soft, wet, low crunch of a dislocated shoulder going back in its socket. She’d been just as sure that the rotten-brain part of her had been wrong, and that this better version of Jessyn was the real one after all. She’d thought her family would see that too. Wasn’t that why they’d been standing watch over her? But the watch hadn’t stopped so much as relaxed a little. There had never been a time after that when someone hadn’t been watching her at least a little.

And that had been good, because her brain was a bastard, and it slipped when she least expected it. Even when she’d grown up and they’d moved away from her parents, Jellit—if no one else, always Jellit—had been there to see when she started to lose her footing and sit with her through the hard nights.

This captivity was the first time in her life she’d actually been able to see whether she could survive a bad stretch on her own. The answer was no, she hadn’t been able to. But she had been able to find other help. The insight was critical and deep and monstrously, monstrously unfair.

“If—” she began, then cleared her throat and started over. “If we were back on Anjiin? If we were back home? I’d let you go. I wouldn’t let you pass up any more postings because of me.”

“If we get home, we’ll talk about it,” he said.

Their wide door swung open, creaking on a hinge that seemed to be made from some metallic fabric. Jellit sat back in his chair, putting a little space between them like he didn’t want his older friends to see him sitting too close to his kid sister. Some things didn’t change.

Allstin was the first one in, wagging his eyebrows like he was following up some punchline, making whatever he’d said funnier by insisting that it was. Two women followed him. Dennia, walking with the habitual deference of a research assistant. Merrol, tall and broad-shouldered with a curly mane of black hair and weary confidence. Whatever conversation they’d been having stopped as they entered. Their smiles were warm and welcoming. Even after days of talking and eating together and sharing space, it still gave Jessyn a little rush of joy to see the less familiar faces. The fact that people existed who weren’t Tonner’s workgroup was an ongoing source of relief and evidence that sometimes the unexpected could be good instead of tragic.

They exchanged pleasantries, and Merrol pulled up one of the blocky, pastel-colored stools, but they didn’t close the door. It drifted slowly back toward closed but without latching. It would have been the work of a push to do it, and it seemed odd that none of them did until the door swung open again and Llaren Morse came in with Synnia.

It wasn’t odd that one of her group should accompany Llaren and the near-field group. That wasn’t what raised the alarm. After all, Jessyn was there herself. Campar and Rickar had come for meals and the diversion of sleeping in a different set of rooms. Tonner stayed there whenever the discomfort of being around Else and Dafyd was worse than the discomfort of being away from his lab. And Dafyd and Else, busy as they were interviewing whatever aliens passed by, still made the occasional appearance.

No, something else raised the small hairs on Jessyn’s neck. Something about the brightness of Synnia’s eyes and the tautness of her smile. This wasn’t the quiet presence by the window, the woman who was slowly working through her grief. This was the Synnia planning violence in the dark. The thought was deeply unsettling even before the door swung open again and the other man came in.

She didn’t recognize him at first. In addition to shaving off his hair and growing a sharp, pale beard, Urrys Ostencour had put on a lot of muscle and lost what little fat he’d had by the end of their passage in the cold, orange-lit cell. His arms and neck were ropy, the musculature so defined it was like the skin had been painted onto a medical model. She thought he was deliberately dehydrating to make himself look like that.

Ostencour, who had organized the failed revolt in the transit cell, smiled almost shyly and put out his hand. Jessyn hesitated. She had seen this man at his most vulnerable, near naked, sick, vomiting and shitting himself and weeping on the alien mat. He’d seen her in intimate moments because everyone had. She’d had lovers when she was younger she’d shared less of herself with than she had with this man she barely knew. She felt exposed just seeing him, reminded of her humiliation, and of his. There was no etiquette for meetings like this.

She stood and shook his hand. His grip was just firm enough to say that it could have hurt if he’d wanted it to.

“Ostencour,” she said.

“Jessyn. I’m glad you made it.”

“Likewise.”

He let her go. Llaren Morse hauled over a stool for Ostencour and then sloped over to lean against the kitchen counter. The others arranged themselves in a rough semicircle, like they were wings and Ostencour was the angel. Jessyn glanced at her brother. His shrug was a confession. This meeting wasn’t coincidence. It had been planned.

“I told you we’d found other groups.”

“You did,” Jessyn said. “You said that.”

Ostencour lifted his hands, palms out. It looked more placating than surrender. Jessyn sat back down, not realizing that she’d shifted to put a solid wall at her back until she’d already done it.

“You probably feel a little ambushed,” Ostencour said.

“Why would I feel like that?”

“Because I kind of ambushed you.” His smile was quicker and easier than she remembered it from the cell. He also had more color in his skin than dull orange and black. She had a powerful memory of the man sitting by Synnia in the near dark, promising her that it wasn’t over. “Not ambushed in a bad way, I hope. But I heard about your workgroup and everything you’ve been through. I think we should talk, and I don’t know how much the big guys are listening in on us, but I try to give them as little to go on as I can. It’s just good security hygiene.”

Behind him and to his left, Synnia nodded like one of the pious hearing a preacher.

“You’re in contact with a lot of other human groups?” Jessyn asked.

“It’s been my project since I got here. Tracking down as many of us as I could find.” He sighed. “I think we know where about three hundred of us are, all told. This complex seems to be a lot of the research and administrative captives. There were artists and writers in the cells too. Either they’re in a different complex or a different part of this complex or…”

“Or?”

“There were rumors that the artists got classed as extraneous. That they were executed. I don’t know if that’s true. There are a lot of rumors that don’t seem to come from anywhere. We have Llaren’s visualizations group, your biochemistry folks, a couple labs’ worth of energetic physics, some logistics and administration departments. That’s less than half of the people we know were taken, but it’s what I have to work with.”

“It’s not my group,” Jessyn said. “It’s Tonner Freis’s group. I just work there.”

Ostencour’s gaze flickered toward Synnia and away again. “The way I heard it, Tonner’s not entirely in control these days.”

“I guess you can make the argument that Dafyd Alkhor is setting some of the agenda that—”

“Not him,” Ostencour said. “You.”

Jessyn laughed. No one else did. “Me? How do you figure that?”

“You’re the one who fought off the Night Drinkers,” Synnia said. “And you were the one who took the fight back to them. Tonner didn’t. Dafyd didn’t. Campar still calls you the war leader.”

“He’s teasing me,” Jessyn said.

“He’s not.”

“I’m not asking you to fight,” Ostencour said. “I have other people for that. But I do need a favor that only your group can do for me. Support.”

“Support for what?” Jessyn asked. But she already knew. Stress, power, love. They didn’t change people, but they revealed people as who they were. Ostencour, on the journey from Anjiin, had been ready to fight and kill. Now that he was here, his defaults were still the same.

“The big guys give us a lot of freedom when it suits them to,” Ostencour said. “You’ve noticed that. Your Night Drinkers were able to make bombs. I’ve seen other species gutting each other with mechanized drones and knives. We’ve been able to make these.”

The object he took out from under his tunic was black and heavy. The metal shone in the light. If he’d been holding a venomous snake, Jessyn would have felt the same urge to recoil away.

“They’re just little slug throwers,” Ostencour said. “About half of them are chemical propellant. The other half are magnetic pulse, but those burn out fast. There’s no rifling. The accuracy’s a joke. But they can still pop a hole in something.”

“You made guns.”

“And they let us. They don’t care. Why do you think that is?”

When Jessyn didn’t answer, Merrol did. She had a pleasantly deep, smoky voice. In another context, it would have put Jessyn at ease. “Because they aren’t scared of us. The things we can make aren’t a threat to them.”

“Maybe,” Jessyn said. Or maybe the Carryx that are here are low enough status that the real powers don’t care if a few of them die. She didn’t say it aloud. The alarm in the back of her head was still sounding.

Ostencour put the gun on the table in front of her. She thought he was presenting it for her to inspect—like she’d be able to tell from looking that it was the real thing, that he was telling the truth. When he sat back and folded his hands in his lap, she realized she’d just been given it as a gift. She had a gun now, all she had to do was pick it up. She didn’t.

“If you’re planning to start some kind of prison riot, I’m going to remind you how well the last one went,” Jessyn said. “You can’t win. Look at everything we’ve seen. Do you remember stepping out of the transit cell and seeing this place? You could put every human in Irvian in just this one wing of this one building. And the planet is covered with them. An insurrection can’t win.”

“Depends on what the goal is,” Allstin said. “If you’re looking to get your old apartments on Anjiin back, yeah. Chances are grim. If winning means something else, though. See?”

“I do not,” Jessyn said, but she did. Ostencour meant dying gloriously, striking a blow at their oppressors. Like an ant biting the toe of an elephant that had just crushed its nest. It wouldn’t even rise to the level of moral victory.

“You know how this is going to go,” Ostencour said, and the warmth was gone from his voice. The coldness in its place wasn’t angry or aggressive. He wasn’t talking to her anymore, not really. Everything he said, he was saying to himself. “If we’re good pets and do all the things we’re told, we get the chance to live for another few days. Or months. Or years. If we’re young enough, maybe we can have children to hand over to the Carryx for whatever they want to do with them. Is that the future you want?”

“It’s that or die.”

“It is,” Ostencour said. “It’s live as long as they let us live, and die how we’re told to die. Or…” He shrugged.

Something in the way he looked at her now made Jessyn pick up the gun. She examined the ugly knot of steel in her hands. It was slipshod and awkward, but she believed it would function. She wondered how many nights—just the absolute number of them—she’d have opted to use something like this instead of seeing the dawn. They thought they were suicidal. Allstin and Merrol and Llaren Morse. Even Jellit, who should have known better. They thought their fear and claustrophobia were the same as what she carried.

They were mistaken. Jessyn was a citizen of that darkness. What Ostencour was peddling was a meaningful death. A die-on-your-feet-or-live-on-your-knees ending. He had to paint death as noble to get people to go along with it.

He was an amateur.

Jessyn found the gun’s chamber. There was a chemical cartridge in it, and a little lump of what might have been steel as the slug. She could imagine how it would feel if she held it out to Ostencour and plucked back the trigger. The surprise in his eyes. She could imagine holding it under her chin and doing the same, except that would upset Jellit.

And, a little to her surprise, because she really didn’t want to.

“What are you asking me for?”

“We can make a few tools, but we don’t have ways to mass-produce chemicals,” Ostencour said. “You do. You’ve already made biological weapons and used them successfully. Design some for us. Something that can break down these Carryx sons of bitches. Bloody their noses for real, and make them think twice before they mess with human beings again.”

His smile was soft and wide. “You make them, and we’ll use them.”