Captive's War 1: The Mercy of Gods

Six

So help me understand. You were asking around about him,” the security forces man said, “but you’d never met him.”

“That’s right,” Dafyd said, not for the first time. “We heard that Dyan Academy was making a proposal about our workgroup, and I was trying to understand better what that entailed.”

The room was small and spare, but not threatening—natural light, soft chairs, no table. The security forces man made a show of being at ease, a little uncertain, even just on the edge of befuddled by the whole thing. All it meant to Dafyd was that they weren’t trying to scare him into implicating himself in the man’s death so much as lull him into it. Scaring him would have been more effective. He was already scared.

“What that entailed?” the security man repeated, making it a question. Dafyd recognized the technique, and it put him more on his guard, if that was possible.

“If there were any changes, I wanted to be ready for them.”

“Ready for them?”

“Yep,” he said with a smile, and then let the silence stretch.

The security man looked across at him with a blank, generic friendliness until it was clear Dafyd wasn’t planning to elaborate. “So what all did you find out?”

“Well, I just found out he’s dead, so nothing I learned matters much, I guess.” He didn’t feel as light as his words. Between the time the security forces arrived at his rooms and when he’d left with them, he’d managed to send word to his aunt and Tonner. That had been five hours ago, and he hadn’t heard back from either. That almost certainly meant that they weren’t being permitted to contact him. It made all the warmth and calm and ease of the questioning feel like the trap it was.

The security man furrowed his brow. “Does that make you upset?”

“A little nervous, maybe,” Dafyd said. “Is it related to the girl?”

“Girl?”

“I heard that there was a girl who died over break. You were talking to my team lead about it. Tonner Freis?”

The security man’s smile gave away nothing. “We’re looking into things. Why do you think they’d be related?”

“They’re both dead,” Dafyd said. “I don’t know how I can help.”

“Tell me again about these changes that had you worried.”

“I wouldn’t say worried.”

“Curious, then.”

Dafyd spread his hands. “I heard there might be some changes, and I was curious what they might be.”

The other man chuckled, but there was a glint in his eye. “You play your cards pretty close to the vest, don’t you, Mr. Alkhor.”

“I don’t have any cards. I’m just—”

The door opened, and an older man leaned in. He made eye contact with Dafyd’s interrogator, then retreated, leaving the door ajar behind him. The security man heaved himself up from his chair, letting his frustration show a little in his posture. “I’ll be right back. Do you want anything? Coffee? Cigarette?”

“I’m fine.”

The door closed behind him. Dafyd fought the impulse to relax. There were almost certainly still eyes on him, even if the cameras weren’t obvious. He tried to arrange himself into looking placid and complacent, the way he imagined an innocent man would look. Which was a little weird, because he was innocent. The death of Samar Austad had nothing to do with him or the apparently not-quite-as-subtle-as-he’d-hoped inquiries he’d been making. Anything he did would be how an innocent man acted by definition, but the whole situation made him anxious. It left him trying to seem like what he was, which he was pretty sure made him seem inauthentic, which was probably why the security forces thought he was hiding something.

“Overthinking it,” he said to himself. And then, in case someone was listening too, “Just keep telling everyone the truth, and it’ll be fine.”

God, he thought, I wasn’t cut out for this.

The door opened again, and a woman he hadn’t seen before walked in. She gestured for him to stand, and he did. After a moment, she shook her head. “You can go,” she said, and repeated her gesture. “That means you can go.”

“Oh. All right. I didn’t… Thank you.”

She escorted him through the tall, thin corridors of the security services building. The walls rose up three times his height, curving into a Gothic arch at the top with ridges like the ribs of a giant snake that had devoured him. In other contexts, it would have been beautiful.

The waiting area was open and broad, with wooden benches that reminded him of pews. People sat or paced or leaned against the walls, all waiting for whatever the next step was in their personal journey through the security forces bureaucracy. The light was artificial, bluer than sunlight and cold-feeling. The air smelled like old cigarette smoke and cleaning solution. His aunt was perched at the edge of one bench like it was an unwelcome acquaintance. When she saw him, she rose. When she nodded to the security services woman, it was like a dismissal.

“I arranged private transport,” his aunt said. “There are journalists.”

“For me?”

She turned and started walking. He had to trot to catch up. “I mean journalists exist, and our name should stay out of this as much as can be managed. I’ve got enough on my plate as it is. As hard as it may be to believe, this is not my top concern right now.”

They stepped out of the building and into a wide plaza where a transport stood waiting like a giant pill bug. The plates parted, and his aunt stepped in and took a rear-facing seat. Dafyd took one across from her.

“Do we know what happened?” he asked as the transport juddered into motion. “How did he die? You don’t think it had anything to do with the research group, do you?”

His aunt didn’t answer, already involved with spooling through the messages waiting on her system. The transport turned a corner, shifting him to the side then back again. He didn’t like closed transports. They left him a little nauseated. His aunt made a soft grunt like she’d been punched and leaned forward, her whole attention on a message Dafyd couldn’t see.

“This wasn’t us,” he said. “Whatever it is? It wasn’t Tonner’s group.”

“Do you know who killed him?” she asked, not looking up.

“No.”

“Then you can say it wasn’t you. ‘Us’ is a big word. You can fit surprises in it.” She flipped to another message, and muttered an obscenity under her breath. “I have to let you out here. Can you walk the rest of the way?”

“Sure. Yes. What’s the matter?”

“That list is too long right now,” she said, tapping the transport controls. “I’ll tell you what I can, when I can.”

The transport stopped. The plates slid open. Dafyd didn’t get out. “I understand. Just… what will this do to Dyan Academy’s proposal? I know that’s a minor thing for you, but it matters to me. A lot.”

She shook her head, but not as a refusal. “There was pushback before. Without Samar to champion it, it won’t happen. But the damage is done. You understand that.”

Dafyd found himself caught between relief and dread. “I do,” he said. He pulled himself up and out to the walkway. The morning sun was cooler than he expected it to be. Weather moving in, maybe.

“Dafyd?” his aunt said, leaning forward to look out between the still-open plates. “Things are happening. Some news is about to break. I hoped we’d be able to put it off, but that was optimistic. Do what you can to stay out of trouble until I can get my arms around the situation.”

“I will. I promise.”

The plates slid closed, hiding her face.

He never saw her again.

Rickar Daumatin took a last, long drag on his cigarette, pinched it out, and threw the dead butt in a little ceramic public waste can before walking into the café. Littering the streets of Irvian would be a small, petty thing, and while he was feeling small and petty, little self-denials like this helped him feel virtuous. He found that he very much wanted to feel virtuous. More noble than those who had cast him aside.

The interior of the café had been grown in two levels. Half a dozen steps led up and to his right to a set of communal tables crowded with friends and strangers shoulder to shoulder as they watched a display showing what he assumed was the lead-up to some sporting event. They all had that kind of breathless tension. Walking ahead, Rickar found a set of smaller booths, each with a curtain of beads to give the sense of privacy if not the actual thing.

A few tables sat low to the floor with people on cushions around them. He found some faces he’d hoped to see. The delegation from Dyan Academy wasn’t large, and he’d been away from home—in his Irvian exile—for three years now. He shrugged off his jacket and made his way to the little table where a handful of his old compatriots sat. As he took his place, a red-haired man he’d studied with in his first term filled a shot glass from a blue-green bottle and slid it across the table to him. Rickar sipped first, let the feeling of the alcohol and the taste of black licorice wash through his mouth, let the fumes rise up behind his nose, and then finished the rest of the shot in a swallow.

“Rough morning,” one of the others said.

Rickar sighed behind his smile. “I’ve been a guest of our friends in security since daybreak.”

“Austad?” the red-haired man asked. “They don’t think you killed him, do they?”

Rickar pushed his shot glass back. As the red-haired man filled it again, he said, “No, they were aware that my life would be much better with him in it. Losing him like this is a shock for all of us, but—excuse the self-pity—it’s career-ending for me. Not the best profile for a murder suspect.”

A dark-haired woman who was, he thought, part of the transformational chemistry group shook her head. When she spoke, she slurred. “He was the best of us. No one profits, losing a man like Samar.”

“True,” Rickar said. “And some lose more than others.”

The red-haired man pushed back the filled shot glass. Rickar decided to take this one more slowly. Nothing would be made better by being drunk. But then, nothing could be made much worse, either.

He leaned forward, legs crossed under the table, and went back over it all while the others chattered around him. There should have been someplace he could have made a different choice. Some decision that, in retrospect at least, he ought to have made differently. Maybe he would have been better off staying at Dyan and not joining Tonner Freis’s project in the first place. Except that the team was good, the project had borne fruit, and without it, he’d have been another minor scholar chipping at some less successful work. If only we hadn’t done well made no sense.

He noticed that the drunk woman was talking. Had been talking for a while. She was going on now about the existential unfairness of death, but just before that, she’d said something else. He didn’t get to see them.

“Didn’t get to see who?” She blinked slowly. Rickar tried again. “You said he didn’t get to see them. See who?”

“The things,” she said, as if that meant something. Rickar gestured his question. The others were looking at him now, all of them surprised.

“You really have missed everything today, haven’t you?” the red-haired man said.

Rickar checked his system. It was still set to refuse interruptions the way the security forces interrogator had insisted that it be. He went back to his base settings, and floodgates opened. More than a hundred alerts—some from friends, some from journalists and newsletters he’d set his system to watch, half a dozen from his father with referents out to the same reports he had in his own listings.

UNKNOWN OBJECTS MAY BE VEHICLES

INTERSTELLAR VISITORS?

DEFENSE COUNCILS FROM EIGHT NATIONS IN EMERGENCY SESSION, URGE CALM

It felt like a joke. A prank. Then like a kick in the chest. Rickar was breathless. He caught a glimpse of a familiar face in one report as he passed, and spooled back to let it run. Llaren Morse, his face shining with exhaustion and perhaps mania. As he spoke, he made sharp, staccato gestures like he was fighting with ghosts. We’ve been following the lensing effect for some time now. Since shortly after it entered the solar system. We detected the presence of matter inside the effect only within the last day and a half. When we tried a targeted scan… the lensing effect collapsed. Maybe they saw we were watching them. I don’t know. It’s too early to say what exactly we’re looking at here, but it’s certainly—Morse’s grin stretched taut—it’s certainly interesting, isn’t it?

Rickar shifted to a related image. A starfield with a scattering of dim spots highlighted. If he hadn’t known to look, he wouldn’t have seen them. Seventeen city-sized objects, broad on one end, and tapering to an almost crystalline point. The surfaces of the things were faceted and polished, more like machines than living systems. Despite that, Rickar’s mind kept trying to interpret them as some kind of animal skull.

He lifted the shot glass halfway to his mouth, and then put it down again. “Is this…?” He couldn’t find the words.

“It’s real,” the red-haired man said. “They showed up three hours ago like someone flipped a switch.”

“It’s some kind of secret defense project,” someone else at the table said, but Rickar wasn’t paying enough attention to care who. And anyway, he recognized the sound of panicked denial when he heard it. He looked at the images again. Seventeen not-quite-identical mysteries floating in the void. The anger and self-pity he’d been swamped by just minutes ago were gone, and something else was pressing against the inside of his mind like he was being inflated. He had a brief but vivid memory of being seven years old at his grandmother’s vineyard in Nortcoor, looking into the night sky and seeing it for the first time as infinity towering above him like God, only worse because it was real.

Maybe this was what religious awe felt like. Maybe it was only fear. Either way, he was done drinking for the day. He looked around the café, and saw the tension he’d felt coming in. He’d misunderstood it then. He was part of it now.

“Have they said anything?” he asked.

“No. They haven’t done anything,” the red-haired man said. “But I think your workgroup’s moment in the spotlight is over. This is going to be the only thing anyone’s talking about now.”

“Tonner will be disappointed,” Rickar joked, and then laughed again when he realized it was true.

Synnia found a live image from an observatory in Glenncoal, and set her system to display it without analytic overlays. The seventeen probes or ships or artifacts floated on the face of the abyss with only a little false-color enhancement to show the details of their surprisingly complex surfaces. Probes or ships or asteroids or anomalies or miracles. It seemed to Nöl that any term failed in some nuance. His own system was set to scour the available inputs for analysis and commentary that was more than speculation and echoes. So far, he’d found very little that had any intellectual rigor, and what there was devolved into the need for further study. He found that more comforting than she did. He kept waiting for it to turn out to be something innocuous. Something that didn’t merit alarm. That kept not quite happening.

“Let me make you some tea,” he said.

Synnia shook her head, refusing, and then a moment later said, “That would be good. Yes. Thank you.”

Nöl rose from the table and, pausing to kiss the top of her head, went to the kitchen. The house was silent. Even the voices from his system faded to a dim murmur by the time he reached the kitchen and started the kettle. The remnants of their breakfast still sat on the counter. His plate was clean. The yolks of her eggs had congealed into an intense yellow gel. He thought it would be time for food again soon, but he doubted she would eat.

They had meant to spend the day in the garden, pulling weeds and sampling the soil for signs of split worms and agthaparasites. Outside the kitchen window, the sunlight was bright. Ravens hopped along the branches of the pecan tree just beyond Nöl’s yard, conferring with each other on the mysterious business of corvids. He wished they’d kept to the gardening plan. Whatever was happening out beyond the envelope of Anjiin’s skies, there was nothing he could do about it. And Synnia would be less frightened if she could put her hands in soil.

He let the tea steep, poured it into a rough earthenware cup, and took it back to the main room. The seventeen things glimmered in the darkness, their clarity and resolution growing sharper with each new scan that was applied to the image. He put the cup at his lover’s elbow and sat beside her.

“Anything new?” he asked.

“One of them’s moved,” she said. “Changed their formation. And then it stopped. The feed said that they seemed to be using some kind of accelerated gas to maneuver. They’re still moving toward the planet. They won’t impact us, though. Not unless they change course.”

Nöl grunted his interest in the new data as he took his seat. Synnia picked up her tea, leaned closer to the screen, then after a moment sat back and put the cup down as if she’d forgotten to drink from it. He felt her unease as a tightness in his own belly, and wished she would stop watching. He didn’t want to think about this, and as long as she did, he had to.

Nöl reached out, rubbing his palm along her arm. He meant it as comfort, but also as a request for comfort for himself. She glanced at him, distractedly ran her hand across his head, and then turned back to the screen.

He wished whatever the things were that had hidden in Llaren Morse’s lensing effects, they’d gone about their business without him. If he were younger, he might feel the wonder and mystery as a promise, but he was what he was, and more than anything, he wanted to be left alone with his love and their garden. If the probes or ships or miracles were important for him, someone would tell him.

Synnia caught her breath. “Look. They’re doing something.”

At first, he didn’t see it, and when he did, he thought it was only data errors in the image feed. It was hardly more than a dark bronze shimmering. Then new scan data came in, the images refreshed, and the softly curving trails coming from the objects—ships, probes, whatever they were—flashed into clarity. She took control of the image, expanding and expanding until the trails atomized into oblong spheroids. The greenish halo around them was almost certainly an artifact of the image compiler, but it did make them striking to look at.

“Like spores,” Synnia said. “I’ve seen mushrooms releasing spores, and it was just like this.”

“Or pollen,” Nöl said. “Maybe they’ve come to pollinate us.”

If she noticed the little joke, she didn’t react to it. “Look at the foreshortening. They’re coming toward us. It’s all coming toward us.”

A weight of dread settled in his gut, and he pushed it aside the way he did any unpleasant emotion. The anxiety was temporary. It would go away when he understood the situation better. That was how it had always been with him.

“Perhaps they are,” Nöl said. “Let me see if I can find any good analysis.”

He turned to his own system, but there probably wouldn’t be anything yet. If experience had taught him anything, it was that first guesses were almost always disappointing. Data collection and analysis took time.

Synnia kneaded her hands into each other like she could squeeze her distress out of her knuckles. “Oh, I hope the security forces don’t panic and do something aggressive.”

Dafyd leaned forward and pressed his fingertips against his upper lip until the pressure ached. The laboratory felt like it was buzzing, like the walls themselves were on the edge of panic. Tonner was pacing the length of the room, his hands clenching and unclenching, his jaw slid forward. For Dafyd, talking now would have been a mistake.

“This is a windfall. We can’t waste it,” Tonner said, as much to himself as the rest of them. It took Dafyd a moment to realize he meant Samar Austad’s death, not the ships descending toward Anjiin. When Tonner scowled, he looked like an angry child. “Where is everybody?”

Campar, sitting cross-legged on one of the lab benches, said it for him. “The most important thing in the history of the world is happening. People might be a bit distracted.”

The research complex should have been filled with the sound of maintenance crews finishing up their work before the scholars all came back. It was silent. Tonner had sent his summons out to the whole workgroup, except Rickar. Only Campar and Else were there. Irinna had sent a message saying she was coming, but hadn’t arrived. Nöl and Synnia hadn’t responded at all. Dafyd guessed that they’d turned their notifications off or else just stopped looking at them.

Else leaned against one of the worktables, her system displaying the most recent images of the objects. Dafyd would have liked to do the same, but Tonner would have yelled at him for it. Tonner might be irritated with Else—clearly was, actually—but he wouldn’t yell at her.

Looking back, he had to think his aunt had known something when she dropped him off on the street. By the time he’d gotten back to his rooms, the news was breaking to the public all across the world. First contact with an alien species or humanity’s lost origin or something stranger. Everyone guessed because no one knew. Dafyd spent hours sitting on the edge of his bed, flipping from one source to another to another, always finding the same images, and being astounded by them every time. When Tonner’s message came through, he’d responded to it out of reflex. If he’d thought about it, he’d have stayed home the way the others had and watched history unfold.

“Fine,” Tonner said, biting at the word. “If we’re the only ones that care, we’ll do it ourselves.”

“Do what, exactly?” Campar asked. He wasn’t usually so acid.

“This thing. Everyone’s watching it,” Tonner said. “They’re distracted. There won’t be anyone paying enough attention to stop us. This is our chance to cement the workgroup. Get control of it.”

“How?”

Tonner threw his hands out in exasperation. “That’s what we’re here to discuss. There has to be a way.”

“They’re censoring it,” Else said.

Campar jumped down from the bench and went to her side. Tonner froze. A cascade of emotion—shock, humiliation, anger—flickered over his face. Even as Dafyd’s excitement and anxiety and confusion and awe threatened to overwhelm him, there was also a part of his mind that saw how the power in the group had changed. Tonner had been their high priest. The focus had shifted, and he wasn’t able to command it back. Dafyd noticed the little vulnerability, tucked it away for later, and went back to being distracted and scared.

“What do you mean ‘censoring’?” Campar asked as he leaned over Else’s shoulder. “Who’s censoring what?”

She gestured to the screen. “They say this is a live image, but it’s the same one they were showing forty minutes ago. Look.” She paused the image, pulled up a second display, and then shifted them together. From where he was, Dafyd couldn’t see them, but Campar whistled.

“It could be that our new friends have some periodicity?” he said.

“Or that something’s happened that the governing council wants to keep to themselves,” Else said.

Campar made a small, soft sound. Almost a cough. “I’m a little surprised they let it go this long without stepping in. I suppose Jellit knows what’s going on, but I can’t think they’d let him tell us.”

“We could ask Jessyn,” Dafyd said. “If he’s able to get anything out, he’ll get it to her.”

“It would be worth trying,” Else said, but she didn’t seem enthusiastic. “We should go to my rooms. All of us. Now.”

“Why?” Tonner snapped. “What good would that possibly do?”

“I have a good optical telescope there,” Else said. “It won’t do much now, but once the sun’s down, we could take a look for ourselves. And if something happens and we need to shelter, it’s solid and mostly underground.” Else glanced over to Tonner. As soon as she saw him, her shoulders shifted inward and the excitement left her voice. “I’m sorry. I can’t focus. I just… I need to do this.”

“That’s fine,” Tonner said.

“It’s an extraordinary—”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me. Do what you need to do.”

Campar looked down and took a gentle step away like a man who’d walked into the wrong room. Tonner had gone still, his lips a little pursed, his arms rigid at his sides like a child making a show of how much his feelings weren’t hurt. Dafyd had seen him like this before, especially after a particularly disappointing data run, but it was always Else who brought him back out.

“At least come with me,” she said. “Help me get the telescope.”

“Take Dafyd.”

Now Else stiffened. Whatever subtext passed between the two of them, Dafyd could tell it was unpleasant. He wished his name hadn’t been part of it.

Else seemed to struggle internally for a moment, then closed her system displays. “All right. We’ll be back.” She turned a polite, empty smile to Campar, then walked to the lab doors. Dafyd hesitated for a few fast heartbeats, then followed after her.

They passed through the research complex in silence, Else walking with long, confident strides, her head held high. Dafyd fell into step beside her, his hands in his pockets and a confusion of half-recognized emotions churning in his head. Everyone they passed had the same tension: wonder and fear.

It was only about fifteen minutes before they reached the old ecosphere. Facets of the dome caught the sunlight, shining white for a few steps and then fading to a rusty brown. It was one of the few buildings that hadn’t been grown, but constructed, and it aged like a mechanism, not a living thing. The steps down into the wide central courtyard were dark metal at the sides, bright in the middle where footsteps had polished them. The air was humid and cool. Else’s gait had slowed, trading an almost military stiffness for something looser and less certain. In the lift down to the basement level, she leaned against the wall.

The basement level had been utilitarian and severe when it was built, and redecorated when it was converted to living space. Pipes ran along the walls, but painted bright, primary colors. Cut-paper shades arced over the sockets where work lights would have been, softening the space until it was shadowless.

Else’s rooms seemed oddly spare, until Dafyd realized Else probably didn’t live in them anymore. He imagined they’d been storage before they’d been converted, or maybe part of the water reclamation. Now the space was a little kitchen that opened onto a dining area that had crates and boxes piled neatly against the walls and under the table. A sliding door led to what he assumed was a bedroom. Glass vases were set in the walls, but there were no flowers in them. The space smelled like dust. She paused, looking around with an almost puzzled air, like she’d forgotten what brought her there in the first place. There was a focus in her eyes that reminded him of physicians in the middle of an emergency. Or the beginning of one.

Dafyd cleared his throat. “Are you… are you all right?”

She turned toward him, seeming startled to find him there.

“I was thinking that at least we kept the workgroup together.”

“Yeah,” he said, but it didn’t sound convincing.

“Do you know something I should hear?”

“We’re not keeping the workgroup together.”

A flash of panic lit her eyes. “What happened? Did Rickar—”

“No, Dyan Academy lost their shot. That was just luck. But we stood a chance against it because we knew it was coming, and where it was coming from. Samar Austad put the idea out there, and he almost made it work. Next session, there’s going to be a dozen different factions looking for ways to do what he was trying, only this time, we won’t know who they are. We got a year, maybe. But that’s all.”

Else leaned against the wall and crossed her arms. He couldn’t tell what her sigh meant. “Interesting.”

“It’s status competition. Almost everything is status competition.”

“Why are you in research? You’re the wrong kind of smart. You should have been administration.”

Dafyd shrugged. “My dad. He always wanted to be research, but never got the placement. I’m kind of living his dream.”

“Your father’s last wish?”

“Not his last one. He lives in Astincol with my stepmother. I was supposed to go out over break, but the timing didn’t work out.”

“I’m sorry.”

“There’s next time,” Dafyd said. “I mean, assuming.”

“Assuming,” she agreed. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about Tonner. When he’s stressed, he can be petty. It’s not his best feature.”

“It’s his pathological move. I get it.”

“I don’t know the term.”

“It’s the thing people do when they’re working on instinct. When they’re stressed and overwhelmed, there’s something they go to by reflex. Tonner focuses down on something small enough to control. Campar makes jokes. Jessyn withdraws. Everyone has something.”

Her smile. Its uneven dimples. Dafyd was suddenly very aware of being alone with this particular woman.

“What do I do?” she asked, and she seemed genuinely curious.

“I don’t know. Do you ever get stressed and overwhelmed?”

“I do,” she said. “I am right now.”

“Because of the…” He pointed up at the ceiling. At the sky.

Her smile faded. “Yes. Because of that.”

“Maybe it’ll all be okay. We don’t know. Maybe this will be something wonderful.”

“Maybe it won’t.”

Look, he thought, I know it’s stupid. I know there’s nothing in it, but I’ve been dreaming about you for months. You’re a million levels above me, but if you weren’t you and I wasn’t me? If we were just two people who met in a bar one night and started talking, I’d want to keep talking to you. He tried to think of something less potentially humiliating instead.

“Hey, this is probably inappropriate, but if this does go bad, I’d feel stupid not having said anything…”

She shifted her head. Her hair draped down to her collarbone. Her gaze on him felt like a pin through a butterfly. After a few breaths, the corner of her mouth twitched into a half smile.

“You’re not saying anything,” she said.

“Yeah. I know. And I was off to such a good start too. Forget about it. Let’s just grab that telescope.”

Else used her shoulder to push off the wall. Dafyd didn’t step back. She pressed her mouth to his and it tasted like salt and smoke. Something rumbled, deep as thunder or an earthquake. The lights flickered.

In the distance, alarms began to shriek.