The wall was a darkness, the gate looked as if it could never again move on its hinges.
The shadows of Ilisidi and Cenedi went among the first into an area of weeds and ancient cobblestones, of old buildings, a road like the ceremonial road of the Bu-javid, maybe of the same pre-Ragi origin—the mind came up with the most irrational, fantastical wanderings, Bren thought, desperately tagging the one of Ilisidi’s guards who had his baggage, and his computer.
Banichi and Jago were behind him somewhere. The ones in front were going in as much haste as Ilisidi could manage, using her cane and Cenedi’s assistance, which could be quite brisk when Ilisidi decided to move, and she had.
“I can take it now, nadi,” Bren said, trying to liberate the strap of his baggage from the man’s shoulder much as the man had gotten it away from him. “It’s no great difficulty. I need something from the kit.”
“No time now to look for anything, nand’ paidhi,” the man said. “Just stay up with us. Please.”
It was damned ridiculous. He lost a step, totally off his balance, and then grew angry and desperate, which didn’t at all inform him what was reasonable to do. Stick close to the man, raise no more issue about the bags until they stopped, try to claim there was medication he had to have as soon as they got to the plane and then stow the thing under his seat, out of view… that was the only plan he could come up with, trudging along with aches in every bone he owned and a headache that wasn’t improving with exertion.
They met stairs, open-air, overgrown with weeds, where the walk began to pass between evidently abandoned buildings. That went more slowly—Ilisidi didn’t deal well with steps; and one of the younger guards simply picked her up after a few steps and carried her in his arms.
Which with Banichi wasn’t an option. Bren looked back, lagged behind, and one of the guards near him took his arm and pulled him along, saying,
“Keep with us, nand’ paidhi, do you need help?”
“No,” he said, and started to say, Banichi does.
Something banged. A shot hit the man he was talking to, who staggered against the wall. Shots kept coming, racketing and ricocheting off the walls beside the walk, as the man, holding his side, jerked him into cover in a doorway and shoved his head down as gunfire broke out from every quarter.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Bren gasped, but the guard with him slumped down and the fire kept up. He tried in the dark and by touch to find where the man was hit—he felt a bloody spot, and tried for a pulse, and couldn’t find it. The man had a limpness he’d never felt in a body—dead, he told himself, shaking, while the fire bounced off walls and he couldn’t tell where it was coming from, or even which side of it was his.
Banichi and Jago had been coming up the steps. The man lying inert against his knee had pulled him into a protected nook that seemed to go back among the weeds, and he thought it might be a way around and down the hill that didn’t involve going out onto the walk again.
He let the man slide as he got up, made a foolish attempt to cushion the man’s head as he slid down, and in agitation got up into a crouch and felt his way along the wall, scared, not knowing where Ilisidi and Cenedi had gone or whether it was Tabini’s men or the rebels or what.
He kept going as far as the wall did, and it turned a corner and went downhill a good fifty or so feet before it met another wall, in a pile of old leaves. He retreated, and met still another when he tried in the other direction.
The gunfire stopped, then. Everything stopped. He sank down with his shoulders against the wall of the cul de sac and listened, trying to still his own ragged breaths and stop shaking.
It grew so still he could hear the wind moving the leaves about in the ruins.
What is this place? he asked himself, seeing nothing when he looked back down the alleyway but a lucent slice of night sky, starlight on old brick and weeds, and a section of the walk. He listened and listened, and asked himself what kind of place Ilisidi had directed them into, and why Banichi and Jago didn’t realize the place was an ancient ruin. It felt as if he’d fallen into a hole in time—a personal one, in which he couldn’t hear the movements he thought he should hear, just his own occasional gasps for breath and a leaf skittering down the pavings.
No sound of a plane.
No sound of anyone moving.
They couldn’t all be dead. They had to be hiding, the way he was. If he went on moving in this quiet, somebody might hear him, and he couldn’t reason out who’d laid the ambush—only it seemed likeliest that if they’d just opened fire, they didn’t care if they killed the paidhi, and that sounded like the people out of Maidingi Airport who’d lately been dropping bombs.
So Ilisidi and Cenedi were wrong, and Banichi was right, and their enemies had gotten into the airport here, if there truly was an airport here at all.
Nobody was moving anywhere right now. Which could mean a lot of casualties, or it could mean that everybody was sitting still and waiting for the other side to move first, so they could hear where they were.
Atevi saw in the dark better than humans. To atevi eyes, there was a lot of light in the alley, if somebody looked down this way.
He rolled onto his hands and a knee, got up and went as quietly as he could back into the dead end of the alley, sat down again and tried to think—because if he could get to Banichi, or Cenedi, or any of the guards, granted these were Ilisidi’s enemies no less than his—there was a chance of somebody knowing where he was going, which he didn’t; and having a gun, which he didn’t; and having the military skills to get them out of this, which he didn’t.
If he tried downhill, to go back into the woods—but they were fools if they weren’t watching the gate.
If he could possibly escape out into the countryside… there was the township they’d mentioned, Fagioni—but there was no way he could pass for atevi, and Cenedi or Ilisidi, one or the other, had said Fagioni wouldn’t be safe if the rebels had Wigairiin.
He could try to live off the land and just go until he got to a politically solid border—but it had been no few years since botany, and he gave himself two to three samples before he mistook something and poisoned himself.
Still, if there wasn’t a better chance, it was a chance—a man could live without food, as long as there was water to drink, a chance he was prepared to take, but—atevi night-vision being that much better, and atevi hearing being quite acute—a move now seemed extremely risky.
More, Banichi must have seen him ahead of him on the steps, and if Banichi and Jago were still alive… there was a remote hope of them locating him. He was, he had to suppose, a priority for everyone, the ones he wanted to find him and the ones he most assuredly didn’t.
His own priority… unfortunately… no one served. He’d lost the computer. He had no idea where the man with his baggage had gone, or whether he was alive or dead; and he couldn’t go searching out there. Damned mess, he said to himself, and hugged his arms about him beneath the heat-retaining rain-cloak, which didn’t help much at all where his body met the rain-chilled bricks and paving.
Damned mess, and at no point had the paidhi been anything but a liability to Ilisidi, and to Tabini.
The paidhi was sitting freezing his rump in a dead-end alley, where he had no way to maneuver if he heard a search coming, no place to hide, and a systematic search was certainly going to find him, if he didn’t do something like work back down the hill where he’d last seen Banichi and Jago, and where the gate was surely guarded by one side or the other.
He couldn’t fight an ateva hand to hand. Maybe he might find a loose brick.
If—He heard someone moving. He sat and breathed quietly, until after several seconds the sound stopped.
He wrapped the cloak about him to prevent the plastic rustling. Then, one hand braced on the wall to avoid a scuff of cold-numbed feet, he gathered himself up and went as quickly and quietly as his stiff legs would carry him, in the only direction the alley afforded him.
He reached the guard’s body, where it lay at the entry to the alley, touched him to be sure beyond a doubt he hadn’t left a wounded man, and the man was already cold.
That was the company he had, there in the entry where old masonry made a nook where a human could squeeze in and hide, and a crack through which he could see the walk outside, through a scraggle of weeds.
Came the least small sound of movement somewhere, up or down the hill, he wasn’t sure. He found himself short of breath, tried to keep absolutely still.
He saw a man then, through the crack, a man with a gun, searching the sides and the length of the walk—a man without a rain-cloak, in a different jacket than anyone in Cenedi’s company.
One of the opposition, for certain. Looking down every alley. And coming to his.
He drew a deep, deep breath, leaned his head back against the masonry and turned his face into the shadow, tucked his pale hands under his arms. He heard the steps come very close, stop, almost within the reach of his arm. He guessed that the searcher was examining the guard’s body.
God, the guard was armed. He hadn’t even thought about it. He heard a soft movement, a click, from where the searcher was examining the body. He daren’t risk turning his head. He stayed utterly still, until finally the searcher went all the way down the alley. A flashlight flared on the walls down at the dead end, where he had recently hidden. He stayed still and tried not to shiver in his narrow concealment while the man walked back again, this time using the flashlight.
The beam stopped short of him. The searcher cut the flashlight off again, perhaps fearing snipers, and, stepping over the guard’s body, went his way down the hill.
Mopping up, he thought, drawing ragged breaths. When he was as sure as he could make himself that the search had passed him, he got down and searched the dead guard for weapons.
The holster was empty. There was no gun in either hand, nor under the body.
Damn, he thought. He didn’t naturally think in terms of weapons, they weren’t his ordinary resort, and he’d made a foolish and perhaps a fatal mistake—he was up against professionals, and he was probably still making mistakes, like in being in this dead end alley and not thinking about the gun before the searcher picked it up; they were doing everything right and he was doing everything wrong, so far, except they hadn’t caught him.
He didn’t know where to go, had no concept of the place, just of where he’d been, but he’d be wise, he decided, at least to get out of the cul de sac; and following the search seemed better than being in front of it.
He got up, wrapped the cloak about him to be as dark as he could, and started out.
But the same instant he heard voices down the street and ducked back into his nook, heart pounding.
He didn’t know where the solitary searcher had gone. He grew uncertain what was going on out there now—whether the search might have turned back, or changed objectives. He didn’t know what a professional like Banichi might know or expect: having no skill at stealth, he decided the only possible advantage he could make for himself was patience, simply outlasting them in staying still in a concealment one close search hadn’t penetrated. They hadn’t night-scopes, none of the technology humans had known without question atevi would immediately apply to weaponry. They didn’t use any tracking animals, except mecheiti, and he hoped there were no mecheiti on the other side. He’d seen one man ripped up.
He stood in shadow while the searchers passed, also bound downhill, and while they, too, checked over the dead man almost at his feet, and likewise sent a man down to look through the alley to the end. They talked together in low voices, some of it too faint to hear, but they talked about a count on their enemies, and agreed that this was the third sure kill.
They went away, then, down the hill, toward the gate.
A long while later he heard a commotion from that quarter, a calling out of instructions, by the tone of it. The voices stopped; the movements went on for some time, and eventually he saw other men, not their own, walking down toward the gate.
That way of escape was shut, then. There wasn’t a way out the gate. If any of their party was alive, they weren’t going to linger down there, he could reason that. The force was concentrating behind him for a sweep forward, and he visualized what he in his untrained and native intelligence would do—hold that gate shut until morning and scour the area inside the gate by daylight.
He took a breath, looked through the screen of weeds growing in the chinks in the wall near his head, and ducked out again onto the walk, wrapped in his plastic cloak and aiming immediately for the next best cover, a nook further on.
He found another alley. He took it, trying to find somewhere in it a small dark hole that a searcher might not automatically think to look into even in a daylight search. He could fit where adult atevi wouldn’t fit. He could squeeze into places searchers couldn’t follow and might not realize a human could fit.
He followed the alley around two turns, feared it might dead-end like the other one, then saw open space ahead—saw flat ground, blue lights, and a hill, and a great house sprawling up and up that hill, with its own wall, and white lights showing.
Wigairiin, he said to himself, and saw the jet down at the end of the runway, sitting in shadow, its windows dark, its engines silent.
Ilisidi hadn’t lied, then. Cenedi hadn’t. There was a plane and it had waited for them. But something had gone terribly wrong, the enemy had moved in, taken Wigairiin the way Banichi had warned them they might. Banichi had been right and no one had listened, and he was here, in the mess he was in.
Banichi had said Tabini would move against the rebels—but there was that ship up in the heavens, and Tabini couldn’t talk to Mospheira unless they’d sent Hanks, and, damn the woman. Hanks wasn’t going to be helpful to an aiji fighting to solidify his support, to a population dissolving uneasy associations and lesser aijiin trying to position themselves to survive the fall of the aiji in Shejidan. Hanks had outright said to him that the country assocations didn’t matter, he’d argued otherwise, and Hanks had refused to understand why he adamantly took the position that they did.
All around him was the evidence that they did.
And Ilisidi and Cenedi hadn’t lied to him. The plane existed—no one had lied, after all, not their fault the rebels had figured their plan. It got to his gut that, at least that far, the atevi he was with hadn’t betrayed him. Ilisidi had possibly meant all along to go to Shejidan—until something had gone mortally wrong. He leaned against the wall with a knot in his throat, light-headed, and trying to reason, all the same, it didn’t mean they didn’t mean to go somewhere else, but after hours convinced they were being dragged into a trap, knowing at least that the trap closing around him was not the doing of people he’d felt friendly…
Felt friendly, felt, friendly… Two words the paidhi didn’t use, but the paidhi was clearly over the edge of personal and professional judgment. He wiped at his eyes with a shaking hand, ventured as carefully as he knew along the frontage of abandoned buildings, among weeds and past old machinery, still looking for that place to hide, with no idea how long he might have to hold out, not knowing how long he could hold out, against the hope of Tabini taking Maidingi and moving forces in to Wigairiin along the same route they’d come.
Give or take a few days, a few weeks, it might happen, if he could stay free. Rainy season. He wouldn’t die of thirst, hiding out in the ruins. A man could go unfed for a week or so, just not move much. He just needed a place—any place, but best one where he might have some view of what came and went.
He saw old tanks of some kind ahead, facing the field, oil or jet fuel or something, he wasn’t sure, but the ground was grown up with weeds and they didn’t look used. They offered a place, maybe, to hide in the shadows where they met the wall—his enemies might expect him down closer to the gate, not on the edge of the field, watching them, right up in an area where they probably worked…
Another, irrational flash on the cellar. He didn’t see where he was, saw that dusty basement instead and knew he was doing it. He reached out and put his hand on the wall to steady himself—retained presence of mind enough at least to know he should watch his feet, there’d been other kinds of debris around, in a disorder not ordinary for atevi. Old machine parts, old scrap lumber, old building stone, in an area Wigairiin clearly didn’t keep up.
Knocked down an ancient wall to build the airstrip, Ilisidi had said that. Didn’t care much for the old times.
Ilisidi did. Didn’t agree with the aijiin of Wigairiin on that point.
They’d talked about dragonettes, and preserving a national treasure. And the treasure was being blasted with explosives and atevi were killing each other—for fear of humans, in the name of Tabini-aiji, sitting where Ilisidi had worked all her life to be—
Dragonettes soaring down the cliffs.
Atevi antiquities, leveled to build a runway, so a progressive local aiji didn’t have to take a train to Maidingi.
He reached the tanks, felt the rusted metal flake on his hands—blind in the dark, he slid down and squirmed his way into the nook they made with the wall—lay down, then, in the wet weeds underneath the braces.
Wasn’t sure where he was for a moment. He didn’t hurt as much. Couldn’t see that conveniently out of the hole he’d found, just weeds in front of his face. His heart beat so heavily it jarred the bones of his chest. He’d never felt it do that. Didn’t hurt, exactly, nothing did, more than the rest of him. Cold on one side, not on the other, thanks to the rain-cloak.
He’d found cover. He didn’t have to move from here. He could shut his eyes.
He didn’t have to think, either, just rest, let the aches go numb.
He wished he’d done better than he’d done.
Didn’t know how he could have. He was alive and they hadn’t found him. Better than some of the professionals had scored. Better luck than poor Giri, who’d been a decent man.
Better luck than the man who’d dragged him to cover before he died—the man hadn’t thought about it, he supposed; he’d just done, just moved. He supposed it made most difference what a man was primed to do. Call it love. Call it duty. Call it—whatever mecheiti did, when the bombs fell around them and they still followed the mecheit’-aiji.
Man’chi. Didn’t mean duty. That was the translation on the books. But what had made the man grab him with the last thought he had—that was man’chi, too. The compulsion. The drive that held the company together.
They said Ilisidi hadn’t any. That aijiin didn’t. Cosmic loneliness. Absolute freedom. Babs. Ilisidi. Tabini.
I send you a man, ’Sidi-ji…
Wasn’t anything Tabini wouldn’t do, wasn’t anything or anyone Tabini wouldn’t spend. Human-wise, he still liked the bastard.
He still liked Banichi.
If anybody was alive, Banichi was. And Banichi would have done what that man had done with the last breath in him—but Banichi wouldn’t make dying his first choice: the bastards would pay for Banichi’s life, and Jago’s.
Damn well bet they were free. They were Tabini’s, and Tabini wasn’t here to worry about.
Just him.
They’d have found him if they could.
Tears gathered in the corners of his eyes. One ran down and puddled on the side of his nose. One ran down his cheek to drip off into the weeds. Atevi didn’t cry. One more cosmic indignity nature spared the atevi.
But, over all, decent folk, like the old couple with the grandkids, impulses that didn’t add up to love, but they felt something profound that humans couldn’t feel, either. Something maybe he’d come closer to than any paidhi before him had come—
Don’t wait for the atevi to feel love. The paidhi trained himself to bridge the gap. Give up on words. Try feeling man’chi.
Try feeling why Cenedi’d knocked hell out of him for going after Banichi on that shell-riddled road, try feeling what Cenedi had thought, plain as shouting it: identical man’chi, options pre-chosen. The old question, the burning house, what a man would save…
Tabini’s people, with their own man’chi, together, in Ilisidi’s company.
Jago, violate man’chi?
Not Banichi’s partner.
I won’t betray you, Bren-ji…
Shut up, nadi Bren.
Believe in Jago, even when you didn’t understand her. Feel the warm feeling, call it whatever you wanted; she was on your side, same as Banichi.
Warm feeling. That was all.
There was early daylight bouncing off the pavings. And someone running. Someone shouting. Bren tried to move—his neck was stiff. He couldn’t move his left arm from under him, and his right arm and his legs and his back were their own kind of misery. He’d slept, didn’t remember picking the position, and he couldn’t damned move.
“Hold it!” came from somewhere outside.
He reached out and cautiously flattened the weeds in front of his nose, with the vast shadow of the tank over his head and the wall cramping his ankle and his knee at an angle.
Couldn’t see anything but a succession of buildings along the runway. Modern buildings. He didn’t know how he’d gotten from ruins to here last night. But it was cheap modern, concrete prefab—two buildings, a windsock. Electric power for the landing lights, he guessed; maybe a waiting area or a machine shop. The wall next to the tank above him was modern, he discovered, sinking down again to ease the strain on his back.
Left arm hurt, dammit. Good and stiff. The legs weren’t much better. Couldn’t quite straighten the one and couldn’t, with the one shoulder stiff, conveniently turn over and get more room.
Gunshots. Several.
Someone of their company, still alive out there. He listened to the silence after, trying to tell himself it wasn’t his affair, and wondering who’d be the last caught, the last killed—he couldn’t but think it could well be Banichi or Jago, while he hid, shivering, and knowing there wasn’t a damned thing he could do.
He felt—he didn’t know what. Guilty for hiding. Angry for atevi having to die for him. For other atevi being willing to kill, for mistaken, stupid reasons, and humans doing things that had nothing to do with atevi—in human minds.
Someone shouted—he couldn’t hear what. He wriggled up on the elbow again, used the back of his hand to flatten the weeds on the view he had of the space between his building and the other frontages.
He saw Cenedi, and Ilisidi, the dowager leaning on Cenedi’s arm, limping badly, the two of them under guard of four rough-looking men in leather jackets, a braid with a blue and red ribbon on the one of them with his back to him—
Blue and red. Blue and red. Brominandi’s province.
Damn him, he thought, and saw them shove Cenedi against the wall of the building as they jerked Ilisidi by the arm and made her drop her cane. Cenedi came away from the wall bent on stopping them, and they stopped him with a rifle butt.
A second blow, when Cenedi tried to stand up. Cenedi wasn’t a young man.
“Where’s the paidhi?” they asked. “Where is he?”
“Shejidan, by now,” he heard Ilisidi say.
They didn’t swallow it. They hit Ilisidi, and Cenedi swung at the bastards, kicked one in the head before he took a blow from a rifle butt full in the back and another one on the other side, which knocked him to one knee.
They had a gun to Ilisidi’s head, then, and told him stop,
Cenedi did stop, and they hit him again and once more.
“Where’s the paidhi?” they kept asking, and hauled Cenedi up by the collar. “We’ll shoot her,” they said.
But Cenedi didn’t know. Couldn’t betray him, even to save Ilisidi, because Cenedi didn’t know.
“Hear us?” they asked, and slapped Cenedi in the face, slamming his head back into the wall.
They’d do it. They were going to do it. Bren moved, bashed his head on the tank over him, hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, and, finding a rock among the weeds, he flung it.
That upset the opposition. They shoved Cenedi and Ilisidi back and went casting about for who’d done it, talking on their radio to their associates.
He really had hoped Cenedi could have taken advantage of that break, but they’d had their guns on Ilisidi, and Cenedi wasn’t leaving her or taking any chances with her life—while the search went up and down the frontage and back into the alley.
Boots came near. Bren flattened himself, heart pounding, breaths not giving him air enough.
Boots went away, and a second pair came near.
“Here!” someone shouted.
Oh, damn, he thought.
“You!” the voice bellowed, and he looked up into the barrel of a rifle poking through the weeds, and a man lying flat, the other side of that curtain, staring at him down that rifle barrel, with a certain shock on his face.
Hadn’t seen a human close up, Bren thought—it always jarred his nerves, to see that moment of shock. More so to know there was a finger on the trigger.
“Come out of there,” the man ordered him.
He began to wiggle out of his hole, not noble, nothing gallant about the gesture or the situation. Damned stupid, he said to himself. Probably there was something a lot smarter to have done, but his gut couldn’t take watching a man beaten to death or a brave old woman shot through the head: he wasn’t built that way.
He reached the daylight, crawling on his belly. The rifle barrel pressed against his neck while they gathered around him and searched him all over for weapons.
Besides, he said to himself, the paidhi wasn’t a fighter. The paidhi was a translator, a mediator—words were his skill, and if he was with Ilisidi, he might even have a chance to negotiate. Ilisidi had some kind of previous tie to the rebels. There might be a way out of this…
They jerked the rain-cloak off him. The snap resisted, the collar ripped across his neck. He tried to get a knee under him, and two men caught him by the arms and jerked him to his feet.
“He’s no more than a kid,” one said in dismay.
“They come that way,” red-and-blue said. “I saw the last one. Bring him!”
He tried to walk. Wasn’t doing well at it. The left arm shot blinding pain, and he didn’t think they’d listen to argument, he only wanted to get wherever they were going—and hoped they’d bring Cenedi and Ilisidi with him. He needed Ilisidi, needed someone to negotiate for, himself and his loyalties being the bargaining chip…
Claim man’chi to Ilisidi: they’d read his actions that way—they could, at least, if he lied convincingly.
They hauled him into the next building, and Cenedi and Ilisidi were behind him, held at gunpoint, shoved up against the wall, while they said someone’s neck was broken—the man Cenedi had kicked, Bren thought dazedly, and tried to make eye contact with Ilisidi, staring at her in a way atevi thought rude.
She looked straight at him. Gave a tightening of her mouth he didn’t immediately read, but maybe she caught his offer—
Someone grabbed him by the shirt and spun him around and back against the furniture—red-and-blue, it was. A blow exploded across his face, his sight went out, he wasn’t standing under his own power, and he heard Cenedi calmly advising the man humans were fragile and if he hit him like that again he’d kill him.
Nice, he thought. Thanks, Cenedi. You talk to him. Son of a bitch. Tears gathered in his eyes. Dripped. His nose ran, he wasn’t sure with what. The room was a blur when they jerked him upright and somebody held his head up by a fist in his hair.
“Is this yours?” red-and-blue asked, and he made out a tan something on the table where red-and-blue was pointing.
His heart gave a double beat. The computer. The bag beside it on the table.
They had it on recharge, the wire strung across the table.
“Mine,” he said.
“We want the access.”
He tasted blood, felt something running down his chin that swallowing didn’t stop. Lip was cut.
“Tell us the access code,” red-and-blue said, and gave a jerk on his shirt.
His brain started functioning, then. He knew he wasn’t going to get his hands on the computer. Had to make them axe the system themselves. Had to remember the axe codes. Make them want the answer, make them believe it was all-important to them.
“Access code!” red-and-blue yelled into his face.
Oh, God, he didn’t like this part of the plan.
“Fuck off,” he said.
They didn’t know him. Set himself right on their level with that answer, he did—he had barely time to think that before red-and-blue hit him across the face.
Blind and deaf for a moment. Not feeling much. Except they still had hold of him, and voices were shouting, and red-and-blue was giving orders about hanging him up. He didn’t entirely follow it, until somebody grabbed his coat by the collar and ripped it and the shirt off him. Somebody else grabbed his hands in front of him and tied them with a stiff leather belt.
He figured it wasn’t good, then. It might be time he should start talking, only they might not believe him. He stood there while they got a piece of electrical cable and flung it over the pipes that ran across the ceiling, using it for a rope. They ran the end through his joined arms and jerked them abruptly over his head.
The shoulder shot fire. He screamed. Couldn’t get his breath.
A belt caught him in the ribs. Once, twice, three times, with all the force of an atevi arm. He couldn’t get his feet under him, couldn’t get a breath, couldn’t organize a thought.
“Access code,” red-and-blue said.
He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t get the wind. There was pain, and his mind went white-out.
“You’ll kill him!” someone screamed. Lungs wouldn’t work. He was going out.
An arm caught him around the ribs. Hauled him up, took his weight off the arms.
“Access,” the voice said. He fought to get a breath.
“Give it to him again,” someone said, and his mind whited out with panic. He was still gasping for air when they let him swing, and somebody was shouting, screaming that he couldn’t breathe.
Arm caught him again. Wood scraped, chair hit the floor. Something else did. Squeezed him hard around the chest and eased up. He got a breath.
Who gave you the gun, nand’ paidhi?
Say it was Tabini.
“Access,” the relentless voice said.
He fought for air against the arm crushing his chest. The shoulder was a dull, bone-deep pain. He didn’t remember what they wanted. “No,” he said, universal answer. No to everything.
They shoved him off and hit him while he swung free, two and three times. He convulsed, tore the shoulder, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t breathe.
“Access,” someone said, and someone held him so air could get to his lungs, while the shoulder grated and sent pain through his ribs and through his gut.
The gun, he thought. Shouldn’t have had it.
“Access,” the man said. And hit him in the face. A hand came under his chin, then, and an atevi face wavered in his swimming vision. “Give me the access code.”
“Access,” he repeated stupidly. Couldn’t think where he was. Couldn’t think if this was the one he was going to answer or the one he wasn’t.
Second blow across the face.
“The code, paidhi!”
“Code…” Please, God, the code. He was going to be sick with the pain. He couldn’t think how to explain to a fool. “At the prompt…”
“The prompt’s up,” the voice said. “Now what?”
“Type…” He remembered the real access. Kept seeing white when he shut his eyes, and if he drifted off into that blizzard they’d go on hitting him. “Code…” The code for meddlers. For thieves. “Input date.”
“Which?”
“Today’s.” Fool. He heard the rattle of the keyboard. Red-and-blue was still with him, someone else holding his head up, by a fist in his hair.
“It says ‘Time,’” someone said.
“Don’t. Don’t give it. Type numeric keys… 1024.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s the code, dammit!”
Red-and-blue looked away. “Do it.”
Keys rattled.
“What have you got?” red-and-blue asked.
‘The prompt’s back again.“
“Is that it?” red-and-blue asked.
“You’re in,” he said, and just breathed, listening to the keys, the operator, skillful typist, at least, querying the computer.
Which was going to lie, now. The overlay was engaged. It would lie about its memory, its file names, its configuration… it’d tell anyone who asked that things existed, tell you their file sizes and then bring up various machine code and gibberish, that said, to a computer expert, that the files did exist, protected under separate passcodes.
The level of their questions said it would get him out of Wigairiin. Red-and-blue was out of his depth.
“What’s this garbage?” red-and-blue demanded, and Bren caught a breath, eyes shut, and asked, in crazed delight:
“Strange symbols?”
“Yes.”
“You’re into addressing. What did you do to it?”
They hit him again.
“I asked the damned file names!”
“Human language.”
Long silence, then. He didn’t like the silence. Red-and-blue was a fool. A fool might do something else foolish, like beat him to death trying to learn computer programming. He hung there, fighting for his breaths, trying to get his feet under him, while red-and-blue thought about his options.
“We’ve got what we need,” red-and-blue said. “Let’s pack them up. Take them down to Negiran.”
Rebel city. Provincial capital. Rebel territory. It was the answer he wanted. He was going somewhere, out of the cold and the mud and the rain, where he could deal with someone of more intelligence, somebody of ambition, somebody with strings the paidhi might figure how to pull, on the paidhi’s own agenda…
“Bring them, too?”
He wasn’t sure who they meant. He turned his head while they were getting him loose from the pipes, and saw Cenedi’s bloodied face. Cenedi didn’t have any expression. Ilisidi didn’t.
Mad, he said to himself. He hoped Cenedi didn’t try any heroics at this point. He hoped they’d just tie Cenedi up and keep him alive until he could do something—had to think of a way to keep Cenedi alive, like ask for Ilisidi.
Make them want Ilisidi’s cooperation. She’d been one of theirs. Betrayed them. But atevi didn’t take that so personally, from aijiin.
He couldn’t walk at first. He yelled when they grabbed the bad arm, and somebody hit him in the head, but a more reasonable voice grabbed him, said his arm was broken, he could just walk if he wanted to.
“I’ll walk,” he said, and tried to, not steadily, held by the good arm. He tried to keep his feet under him. He heard red-and-blue talking to his pocket-com as they went out the door into the cold wind and the sunlight.
He heard the jet engines start up. He looked at the plane sitting on the runway, kicking up dust from its exhaust, and tried to look back to be sure Cenedi and Ilisidi were still with them, but the man holding his arm jerked him back into step and bid fair to break that arm, too.
Long walk, in the wind and the cold. Forever, until the ramp was in front of them, the jet engines at the tail screaming into their ears and kicking up an icy wind against his bare skin. The man holding him let go his arm and he climbed, holding the thin metal handrail with his good hand, a man in front of him, others behind.
He almost fainted on the steps. He entered the sheltered, shadowed interior, and somebody caught his right arm, pulled him aside to clear the doorway. There were seats, empty, men standing back to let them board—Cenedi helped Ilisidi up the steps, and the other men came up after Cenedi.
A jerk on his arm spun him away. He hit a seat and missed sitting in it, trying to recover himself from the moveable seat-arm as a fight broke out in the doorway, flesh meeting bone, and blood spattering all around him. He turned all the way over on the seat arm, saw Banichi standing by the door with a metal pipe in his hand.
The fight was over, that fast. Men were dead or half-dead. Ilisidi and Cenedi were on their feet, Jago and three men of their own company were in the exit aisle, and another was standing up at the cockpit, with a gun.
“Nand’ paidhi,” Banichi gasped, and sketched a bow, “Nand’ dowager. Have a seat. Cenedi, up front.”
Bren caught a breath and slumped, bloody as he was, into the airplane seat, with Banichi and Cenedi in eye-to-eye confrontation and everyone on the plane but him and Jago in Ilisidi’s man’chi.
Ilisidi laid a hand on Cenedi’s arm. “We’ll go with them,” the dowager said.
Cenedi sketched a bow, then, and helped the aiji-dowager to a seat, picking his way and hers over bodies the younger men were dragging out of the way.
“Don’t anybody step on my computer,” Bren said, holding his side. “There’s a bag somewhere… don’t step on it.”
“Find the paidhi’s bag,” Banichi told the men, and one of the men said, in perfect solemnity, “Nadi Banichi, there’s fourteen aboard. We’re supposed to be ten and two crew—”
“Up to ten and crew,” somebody else called out, and a third man, “Dead ones don’t count!”
On Mospheira, they’d be crazy.
“So how many are dead?” the argument went, and Cenedi shouted from up front, “The pilot’s leaving! He’s from Wigairiin, he wants to see to the household.”
“That’s one,” a man said.
“Let that one go,” Bren said hoarsely, with the back of his hand toward the one who’d said his arm was broken, the only grace they’d done him. They were tying up the living, stacking up the dead in the aisle. But Banichi said throw out a dead one instead.
So they dragged red-and-blue to the door and tossed him, and the live one, the one who’d resigned as their pilot, scrambled after him.
Banichi hit the door switch. The door started up. The engines whined louder, the brake still on.
Bren shut his eyes, remembering that height Ilisidi had said rose beside the runway. That snipers could stop a landing.
They could stop a takeoff, then, too.
The door had shut. Engine-sound built and built. Cenedi let off the brakes and gunned it down the runway.
Banichi dropped into the seat next the window, splinted leg stiff. Bren gripped his seat arm, fit to rip the fabric, as rock whipped past the windows on one side, buildings on the other. Then blue-white sky on the left, still rock on the right.
Sky on both sides, then, and the wheels coming up.
“Refuel, probably at Mogaru, then fly on to Shejidan,” Banichi said.
Then, then, he believed it.