“You say we only have to stay alive until your message brings help. Even if that was true, Tau would never let them see the truth. The Humans will attack the Community and destroy it first. The only way any of our people will survive is by making the Humans afraid of us. By striking back!” She waved her hand at my face.
I swore under my breath, because I couldn’t even convince myself that she was wrong and I was right. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t—
“You know almost as much about Riverton as Miya does. You can go there,” Naoh said suddenly, and I couldn’t tell where her thoughts were now.
“How?” I snapped, not even wanting to know why. “I can’t teleport.”
“We can send you. Miya did it.”
“Miya’s the only one who can get deep enough into my mind—”
“It can be arranged,” she said flatly.
I frowned. “I told you, I won’t do anything to hurt innocent—”
“There are no ‘innocent’ Humans! They have no real emotions—even a taku has more real feelings than a Human does. You used to know that. You knew what it meant to have the Gift. Don’t you feel less alive, less whole, without it? Don’t you blame them—?”
“Yes.” I looked down again. “Every second of every day.”
“You are less,” she said softly, “but only because the Humans crippled you.”
“They can never be anything more,” Remu said.
“They’re inferior, not us,” someone else said.
“They’re animals—”
“That’s why they can do the things they have always done to us.”
“Now you have your chance to pay them back,” Naoh said, “and save your real people, the ones who care about you. Your nasheirtah.…”
I kept my expression empty, telling myself they couldn’t reach into my thoughts without my sensing it. But beyond that I was defenseless; without Miya I had no way to escape, no one to turn to. “What … what do you want to do?” I muttered, not quite looking at her. “I was in their jail, but I don’t remember much.…”
Naoh shook her head. “We’re always drugged when they take us in. No one has ever managed to get a clear sense of it. We cannot send you there.”
I began to remember all the places I’d been when I hadn’t been drugged. I imagined the kinds of damage I could do with a wad of explosive the size of a skagweed cud stuck on the underside of a chair. I couldn’t think of a single place I’d been that wouldn’t make a perfect target for a terrorist attack.… I could plant half a dozen patch bombs inside of an hour, easy. I wiped my hands on my pants legs.
“The research team,” Naoh said.
“What?”
“The research team. The ones you came here with. You told us you only came with them so that you could find your mother’s people. Their leader is Janos Perrymeade’s niece. That coward Perrymeade has betrayed us over and over. If we can’t use the child, then we’ll use his niece, and those off-worlders Tau brought here to desecrate our last holy place.”
My mind emptied like a broken cup.
“You can go back to them, Bian. They know you. Perrymeade’s niece wants you back. Miya showed me what she saw in your mind—how that woman tried to seduce you, how she only wants to have sex with you because you’re a half-breed.”
I felt my face turn red. That wasn’t how I remembered it. I didn’t believe that was how Miya saw it, either.
“The memory of her was all pain. She hurt you—”
“It wasn’t her fault,” I said, realizing that Naoh’s mind had twisted the images Miya shared with her the way it twisted everything else she knew about Humans.
“The Humans use you, and still you blame yourself?” she said fiercely. “Miya abandoned you—all of us—because of her sickening obsession with that Human child. If you want to be free, then free yourself!” She raised her fist: a crate spun off a stack behind me and exploded in midair. I covered my head, swearing, as it rained purple-red fragments of rotten fruit like bits of internal organs. “Act, for all of us. We all want to punish the Humans for the oyasin’s death … but only you are strong enough to do it.” She moved toward me slowly, until she was pressed up against me, with her hands on my chest. “Show the Humans your strength. Go back to your teammates and take your revenge on them.…”
I backed away, breaking the physical contact between us, the insidious mental link I’d felt tendriling its way into my mind. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to influence me consciously or only instinctively. But either way, she’d been trying. And it had been working.
“I said no,” almost shouting it this time. My eyes raked the room. “I’m not some walking dead man you can use for your dirty work, because I’m not really Hydran, just a mebtaku.…”
I wondered suddenly if that was how they’d always thought about me … all of them except Miya. Because I’d never be able to tell.
I turned my back on Naoh and started for the door at the far end of the warehouse. My footsteps echoed like shouts in the cavernous space.
The others stood watching me pass, two dozen sets of eyes tracking me like one. And then, like an extension of Naoh’s own body, they moved in to block my path.
“Where are you going, Bian?” Naoh asked as the wall of bodies forced me to stop moving.
I glanced around the circle of glazed, desperate faces. “I’m going to find Miya.”
“No,” Naoh said. “If Miya brings the boy back, she is still one of us. If she doesn’t, she is a traitor. And if you leave us now, so are you.”
“That’s not the only choice,” I insisted, trying to keep my voice steady. “It’s not the only answer.”
“Mebtaku…” Naoh muttered. No one moved out of my path.
I frowned. “Then I guess I have to do this the hard way,” I said. “The Human way.” I sucker-punched Tiene, who was standing directly in front of me, and shoved him aside into Remu. Two of the others grabbed for my arms; a broken finger and an elbow in the ribs got them off me. They weren’t used to fighting somebody whose every move was completely unreadable; maybe they weren’t used to fighting hand-to-hand at all—
Or maybe they were. The rest came after me as I bolted for the door; just enough of them teleported ahead of me to reach it first. They couldn’t use their psi to attack me; my defenses were too strong. But they didn’t need to, when they still had hands and feet like any Human.
As their blows beat me down to my knees, I wondered whether my own mind’s defenses kept them from feeling my pain. But pain showed in every contorted face: I saw tears runneling filthy cheeks, heard gasps that weren’t mine as they hit and kicked me—doing it the Human way.
Or maybe feeling the pain was the point, the only way they could purge their own guilt about the butchery of innocents they’d caused today, and their own survival: the pain they felt, and the pain they laid on me, crushing me under their rage against everything Human. Pulling my knees in, covering my face, I tried to protect my body, but there was no escape from their pain.…
Until finally something crashed down on me out of nowhere, and blindsided me into blackness.
* * *
(Help me …) I wanted to wake up, kept trying to wake up—somehow sure this had to be a dream. There was no way I could actually be here like this, sprawled back in a seat in Wauno’s transport with Kissindre Perrymeade on top of me, her mouth and hands doing things to my body that I’d only ever dreamed about.…
There was no way my body could be answering her, willingly and completely, when the way she touched me felt more like pain, even though I knew it was impossible for me to feel that kind of pleasure eeling its way out from the inside. Our being lovers had been over before it started, because the same thing would always have kept happening: nothing.
And because now there was Miya.
But Miya was gone … she’d left me behind. I gasped as the echo of a woman’s sudden cascading pleasure sent shockwaves up my spine from between my legs, higher with ever
y heartbeat until I was barely aware of the space around me, seats, floor, hull.… control panel.
In my dream, hungry succubi were feeding on my hunger, sucking my mind dry, looking out through my eyes to identify components and functions; realizing just how intricate, how vulnerable, the system was to someone who could alter circuitry with a thought: just like a Human body. Whispering that just disrupting the fragile processes inside a single microcomponent would start a chain reaction of errors that would build and build, the way my need was building.
Now, while my pleasure was still climbing … it would be simple.… No one would ever suspect that one flicker of a kind of psi energy I’d never even had outside of a dream had set the countdown to disaster ticking. Or when, like the agony of pleasure peaking now inside me, it would explode.…
(No—!)
I woke up, blinking splinters of dream out of my eyes, and saw a woman’s wet, open mouth centimeters from my own. I felt the weight of her body still pressing me down against the seat, the excruciating throb of my erection trapped between us. I tried to get up, get her off me; my hands were tied behind the seatback. Pain everywhere made me swear as I struggled against the bindings.
The woman’s body pressing up against mine shifted position, shifted again, knowingly, and my/her/my pleasure*pain*pleasure lasered through my nerve lines to my brain. I tried to separate signal from noise; my mind was too clogged with stimuli for me to tell if there was any difference. Dismembered fragments of my past rose from unmarked graves, feeding my darkest needs, my deepest fears.…
(What the hell is happening to me—?)
The body using mine shifted again, sliding back until I could see a face at last. Naoh was straddling the chair, her lips hovering in front of my mouth. She leaned forward and pressed her wet, open mouth over mine again, probing with her tongue. My body kissed her back, straining against the bonds like an animal, desperate to do her the way she was doing me, outside, inside, everywhere, making pain*pleasure strobe through my brain and body until I was crazy with the need to set free the urge trapped inside me, overloading every circuit until I wanted to scream, to beg, to do anything that would make her let me—
“Do it,” she whispered. “Do it and I’ll set you free.”
“Yes,” I groaned. “Please, let me…”
Something let go inside my brain like the latch spring on a trap, and something happened—something far away, something I never meant to happen, allow, do … change. As it let go I fell, not into the core of my burning need, but back into the world.
Naoh was standing over me, still straddling the chair. Still inside my mind, controlling everything I thought and felt. Mind-fucking me. I rolled my eyes, looking away from her. The other Satoh ringed us in, their haunted eyes riveted on me, their minds hand in hand, giving her will the strength of two dozen more.
I twisted my face away. “Why—?” I gasped.
Naoh wiped her hand across her mouth. (Because I wanted to know what it was that could make a half-breed like you my sister’s nasheirtah … what it was she found so irresistible about the enemy … why you would do anything she asked.) She backed away, her eyes never leaving my face, and even though she was no longer touching me, she was— Invisible hands still crawled over my body, sliding down my belly, fondling me, exploring me in ways that made me want to scream, but not with pain.
“I’m not the enemy, damn you!” I mumbled. “Stop it—” But even as I begged her to stop, I could feel her experiencing everything I thought—and felt. She knew as well as I did that some perverse part of me had begged her to finish what she’d started.… And she had … I had … God, what was it I had done…?
Suddenly, she was gone. It was all gone: the invisible violation, the multiple psi link lighting up my mind like a thousand flares. Without warning, I was empty, abandoned, alone in the dark. I whimpered, and she smiled.
“Men,” she spat, her voice thick with disgust. “You let your bodies have their way with you. You betray everything you are, everyone you care for. It all means nothing, compared to your own selfish needs—” She broke off, and I remembered her lover Navu, his mind an empty room, his body wasted by drugs.
You betray everyone you care for.… My mind was suddenly empty of every memory except one: Wauno’s transport. Where I’d dreamed I.… “God, no,” I breathed. Naoh had used my body as the key to break into my mind—to take her revenge. “What … what did I do?” I whispered. “What did you…”
“You want to know?” Naoh asked, her voice dripping poison. “You want to see—?”
No.… I nodded, speechless.
“Then go and see for yourself.”
I felt her tap the potential energy of two dozen other minds to crumple my consciousness, fold up my physical existence like a wad of old paper, and make me disappear.
TWENTY-TWO
I CAME OUT the other end of the teleport with just enough time to realize that wherever I was, I’d materialized five meters up in the air, moving sideways.… I had just enough time, falling, to realize that I didn’t want to hit the ground.
I hit the ground. Pain exploded all my senses.
* * *
I opened my eyes again. My nose was clotted with blood, my mouth was thick with it. I lay drifting for a long time in a blood-red sea so wide it had no shore. After a longer time, I realized that red was the color of pain.…
I remembered falling out of the sky. I remembered being cast out. I remembered that I was a mebtaku.
Every part of my body that wasn’t screaming out a pain signal had gone somewhere beyond pain, not even responding. I wondered whether the fall had paralyzed me or whether I was only numb with cold and slowly freezing to death.
Cold. The wind probed the rips in my flapping clothes with icicle fingers; the ground crushed against my face and body felt cold as ice; the frost-clouded air burned my lungs.… Cold like Old-city. But not cold like Cinder. Cold.…
Refuge. It’s cold here, I thought, the first memory I recognized. I struggled to integrate body systems that had splattered like globs of mercury when I’d fallen from a height. A height— I remembered everything, then: Naoh. HARM. But there was no one in my head now. My mind was an empty room.
Ice coated my jacket, plastered my hair against my face—or maybe that was blood. I wondered how long I’d been lying there. I wondered where the hell I was, if I wasn’t in hell.
Find out for yourself. Naoh’s last words: Kissindre. Wauno’s transport.…
I pushed myself up on my elbows, spitting clotted mud; fell back again as pain wrenched my shoulder like the rack. I tried again, managing to raise my head. There was no sign of the reefs or the river; no sign of a city, Human or Hydran. No sign of anything I recognized. Only a gray rubble-strewn plain, broken by the muted ochres and rusts of lichen, a scattering of stunted purple shrubs filmed with ice. In the distance I saw what could have been a line of hills, or just a bank of clouds. The image changed and changed back again, like a mirage inside my mind’s eye.
I tried to get up, breathing curses as my cold-numbed senses came back on-line. I kept trying until I was on my knees, and then finally got my feet under me, feeling things grate and slide that shouldn’t have. One leg didn’t want to hold me up. My foot had swollen inside my boot until the only way I’d ever get it off would be to cut it open. I went down onto my knees again, too dizzy to go on standing, with every nerve ending a nexus of pain.
I wasn’t just hurt; I was hurt bad.… I forced myself to get up again, because my body wanted so much just to lie there, in the middle of nowhere—just lie down and die. But the pitiless survivor who had always spit in the face of my own weakness wouldn’t let me give the universe that satisfaction; at least, not the part of it that had abandoned me here.
I took everything slower this time, using my Gift in ways that I still could to block the electrode shocks of pain every move sent through me, shutting down the systems meant to warn me against moving my broken body.
I s
tood there breathing, each breath a conscious decision, in and out. I couldn’t stop shivering. I sealed my coat and jerked the hood up over my hair, searched the deep pockets for anything that might help me survive. They were empty, except for the mouth harp and the field glasses Wauno had given me. My left arm was useless; I pushed the hand into my coat pocket, gritting my teeth. My good hand was gummy with blood; I breathed on it to warm it, making handfuls of fog. At least I had my coat. I wished I had gloves. I wished I knew what the hell to do.
Kissindre. If what Naoh claimed was true, then she was out here somewhere. If I’d done what my memory said I had to the transport’s onboard systems, she was probably with Wauno, and they needed help, maybe even more than I did. And maybe the transport still had some way to call for it. I turned in a slow circle, fighting dizziness. I didn’t see wreckage or smoke. I scanned the dreamlike line of the horizon again, using Wauno’s field glasses this time. As they came into sharp focus, I realized that it wasn’t clouds or mountains I was seeing. It was reefs. Cloud-reefs.
I dropped the glasses, let them hang from their cord around my neck, fingerprinted with blood. I took a step, and then another, swearing under my breath as I forced my bad leg to hold my weight. I started toward the distant smudge on the sky, sure that the reefs would be where they were headed, even though I wasn’t sure logic had anything to do with how I knew. All I knew now was that I had to find them. I had to know how unforgivable the truth was.
Pain had no hold on me now that could compare to my grief or my rage. I’d slipped off the edge of the world, and my mind was free-falling. I kept on across the plain, stumbling, falling, getting up again. Hearing some crazy burnout mumbling curses, singing half-remembered lyrics of half-remembered songs … crying out when I fell, sobbing when I got up again and went on, step-by-step across the broken land. Sometimes the voice sounded like my own. But it couldn’t be my voice, because I wasn’t there.… My consciousness drifted like a cloud, free of my body’s suffering, only bound to it by a fraying thread of will. There were two of me when I knew there should only be one: like I’d never really been whole, not Human enough, not Hydran enough.…