Chapter 15
Fifteen
“A child’s a child. Species is the next best thing to irrelevant.”
—Angela Baker
The top level of a giant wasp’s nest, surrounded by prison cells
WE WALKED BACK TOWARD THE office we’d entered through, Alice at the front, Thomas and Arthur behind her, and me and Sam bringing up the rear.
We were about halfway there when someone shouted. We all froze, turning toward the sound, but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and judging by the expressions of the people around me, neither did anyone else.
“Why would they yell?” whispered Sam. “They’re telepaths.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “But we should get out of here.”
We began walking faster, and had just reached the closed office door when there was another shout, this one from in front of us. Again, we froze. This time, however, Alice started swearing softly, putting one hand on the pistol she wore low on her hip.
“Dear?” asked Thomas.
“It’s a hunting tactic,” said Alice, voice low. “Remember I mentioned that prey species on telepathic worlds will tend to develop shields against telepathy? They don’t want to get caught and ripped apart, so they become mentally invisible.”
“Yes,” said Sam, warily.
“Well, if you can’t hunt your prey the way that seems most natural to you, you’ll find other ways of doing it. Flushing them out into the open is usually the opening salvo. They know we’re in here, and they’re just trying to startle us enough that we’ll reveal ourselves, yell or bolt or something.”
“But they can’t see us,” I said.
“They can, if they switch over to looking the right way. We need to consider that they might have started paying attention with other senses. Move very carefully from here, and if you see a Johrlac that isn’t Sarah, don’t let them touch you.”
She turned and opened the office door, which was still thankfully unlocked.
Of course, the room on the other side was considerably more crowded, what with the three Johrlac in blue jumpsuits inside.
They all turned toward the opening door, and she had time to widen her eyes in surprise before she was hitting the ground on her stomach, leaving the rest of us to scatter.
The heavy dart one of them had just thrown at her whistled by over her head, embedding itself deep in the wall on the other side.
Sam reached for the dart, lips drawing back to show his teeth. Before he could grab it, I yelped and pulled his arm away, leaving the dart where it was. He shot me a startled look.
“Just look at it!” I snapped.
He looked, face going slack as he registered the thorn-like needles arrayed around the shaft of the dart. Had he grabbed it, they would definitely have embedded themselves in his hand, leaving him injured at best, potentially poisoned at least.
I kept hold of his arm as I started backing down the hall, pulling him along with me.
Thomas yanked Alice off the floor, and the two of them moved down the hall in the opposite direction.
Arthur watched them go, then looked to Sam and me, and I could see the moment he made his decision.
It was in his eyes, blue and familiar and strange, as they’d been since the day he woke up in St. Giles’s as a stranger.
He reached up and removed his anti-telepathy charm before turning to the office, hands dropping carefully at his side.
“My name is Arthur Harrington-Price,” he said loudly.
“I am not here of my own free will, but I am here, and how often does free will really come into the conversation anyway? My mother was Jane Harrington-Price, and I don’t miss her or mourn her, because I don’t remember her well enough to be sad that she’s dead. ”
Alice made a choked hiccupping sound before clapping her hand over her own mouth.
“Jane was human, with a little bit of Kairos mixed in. My father is Theodore Harrington, and he’s Lilu, which makes me one of the stranger hybrids you’re ever likely to find. And I broke myself out of my cell all on my own. Your operational security sucks.”
He grinned at the occupants of the office, showing his teeth in a way I knew Sam would take as a threat, and I knew was actually intended as one.
I wanted to run over and grab him, pulling him away from his captors, but I respected his right to make this choice too much to take it away from him.
He was making a last stand, using his body to buy us the time to get away.
As long as they had an unknown number of semi-invisible invaders, the Johrlac would keep on coming.
Give them an easy answer and a successful catch, on the other hand …
“Impossible,” snarled one of the Johrlac in blue, stepping into the hall. He didn’t look in either direction, all his attention focused firmly on Arthur. “Our cells are secure. You were helped.”
“But here I am,” said Arthur. “And I’m alone. How do you explain that, if I didn’t break out of my cell?”
“You had help,” insisted the Johrlac, but he was starting to sound unsure, like he wasn’t as convinced as he wanted to be. The other two emerged from the office behind him, moving to flank Arthur.
Oh, screw last stands. There are always other options, always plans that don’t involve leaving anybody behind. I pulled back my hand, calling silently on the fire that always burned in my bones, as much a part of me as my blood or marrow, innate and inseparable.
The pneuma here was sturdier and faster to respond than the still-healing pneuma of Earth. The air above my palm burst into flame, hot and lambent and very nearly searing my skin. I pulled back farther, then let fly, flinging the fireball directly at the nearest Johrlac.
They didn’t register us as important because they couldn’t appreciate the existence of thinking creatures without readable minds.
But they knew what fire was. One of them yelled, less words than pure surprise, and then the fireball impacted the nearest guard, catching his hair and jumpsuit.
They went up like oiled parchment, and it was his turn to yell, howling pain and distress.
He lurched away from Arthur, careening into the nearest wall.
The nearest paper wall.
To say the wall burned was to understate the sheer spectacle of what happened as soon as he brushed against it. The paper went up so fast it virtually exploded, consumed by roaring flames that were immediately on their way to becoming a conflagration.
“Get Arthur,” I snapped, pulling back to do it again.
Sam nodded and leapt, a streak of motion that crossed the distance between himself and my cousin so quickly that all I could do was hold my second fireball to be sure I wouldn’t hit him by mistake. He returned with Arthur and I threw again, only to be answered by one of those massive metal darts.
“We’ll meet up outside!” yelled Alice, and then she and Thomas were running down the hall, the guards who weren’t actively on fire following after them. Sam, Arthur, and I turned to run in the opposite direction, trying to move away from the flames as quickly as we could.
We ran, and behind us, the fire consumed all.
The Johrlac had abducted two members of my family, and the family creed said if they hadn’t wanted collateral damage to follow on this terrible, terrible choice, they shouldn’t have done it.
I didn’t feel bad about the fire, or the inevitable property destruction.
That didn’t mean the people in the cells deserved to die.
I ran until the fire was far enough behind us that it felt safe to stop, even if only for a moment, then slammed my hand into the nearest cell door, fingers spread to frame the lock.
The papery substance that made the body of the door crisped and blackened, then gave way as the lock fell inward. I wrenched the door open.
The prisoner huddled in the corner looked up, eyes wide and glazed with white.
“I know you can’t see me very well, but the building is on fire and you need to get the hell out of here,” I snapped and moved on, running toward the next cell.
Realizing what I intended to do, Sam went bounding down the hall, beginning to punch holes in the doors and pull the lock mechanisms out that way.
“This is a lot faster than lockpicks!” he yelled back at me.
“Property destruction generally is,” said Arthur, diving into the cell I’d just opened to grab the prisoner by the sleeve and steer him out into the hall. He was careful not to touch the man’s skin, proving that even if he was making strange choices, he still remembered his training.
Arthur making strange choices was nothing new.
He was a person built almost entirely from other people’s memories, essentially “born” with someone else’s experiences and emotions pre-loaded.
Grandpa Martin was a Revenant, made of the bodies of dead men; Arthur was a new kind of Revenant, made from the memories of a dead man.
And sometimes that made him glitch, in a way, reacting to stimuli and situations in unpredictable ways.
He’d been depressed after his mother died, not because he was sad that she was gone, but because he wasn’t sad.
He hadn’t known her well enough to mourn for her.
In the time since then, he’d seemed to get more stable, but had continued to have strange mood swings and what he described as patches of absence, places where the memories used to build him had been improperly anchored, leaving them to fall off and drop into the void.
We’d thought that was a terrible thing in the beginning, a sign that he was going to fall apart entirely, but more and more I’d come to suspect that it was like a scab coming off of a scraped knee: he was settling into himself, becoming his own person and sloughing off the remains of what had been Artie.
It broke my heart a little, because I loved Artie, but it wasn’t Arthur’s fault.