Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
SARAH
“Time may come where someone comes along and says they’ve got a claim on you from something they did without asking you first. You can be polite to them if you like, but you’ve got no obligation. They have no power over you.”
—Frances Brown
The Ka’krin Hall of Justice and Law
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I sat there before they came for me, eight guards in blue jumpsuits who grabbed me roughly and pulled me out of my cell, dragging me down the hallway to a small room where they thrust a bundle of fabric into my arms and snapped aloud, “Get dressed.”
Interesting. They didn’t even want to risk making mental contact with me.
As soon as they’d pulled me out of the cell, the world had returned to its usual depth and focus: I could feel their minds around me, self-contained and bright, like little candle flames I could have reached out and dragged my fingers through.
I kept my thoughts to myself—literally—and didn’t try to communicate telepathically with any of them.
Better not to feed their fears when they’d already decided I was a monster.
As for me, I was still trying to decide how monstrous I was going to become.
Their collective had brought me here against my will, and now that same collective was afraid of what I could do to them.
But was I willing to do it? So much hinged on Arthur’s condition.
If they had him and he was unharmed, I might just stand down.
Let them have their trial, let them promise to send my family home, and then …
After that, I didn’t know. I’d meant what I said before.
I still had things to do. I wanted to see Isaac grow up, whether having Charlotte and Mom and me around would mean he was a better example of our species than Mom or I had been able to become.
I wanted to meet Cici. I wanted to take care of Greg.
But even more than all of that, I didn’t want to hurt anyone else, and hurting people seemed inevitable if I continued on as I had been.
I didn’t belong on Earth. I was an invasive species there, and I always, always would be.
Maybe we’d all be better off if I just stopped fighting and let the collective do whatever they wanted with me.
At least if they erased the Sarah-I-was and replaced me with a Sarah-they-made, they’d know they had someone who could be useful and wouldn’t go around accidentally deleting people’s memories or wiping their minds.
But that would be rewarding them for their terrible behavior, and I didn’t want to do that either.
The bundle of fabric they had handed me was another jumpsuit, this one arctic white with bands of pale gray that I guessed would be pink if I had a pair of mammalian eyes to orient myself with.
Interesting. I wondered which of their castes this aligned with; it seemed odd for them to have a whole color scheme for prisoners.
One of the guards made an impatient gesture, clearly signaling me to get on with it.
I removed the loose shirt and pants they had dressed me in, leaving them discarded on the floor.
I shook the jumpsuit out to remove the wrinkles, stepping into it and easing it over my hips before doing up the seam at the front, which wasn’t a zipper but might as well have been.
It adhered to itself when I pinched it, sealing the fabric around me.
I couldn’t figure out how that worked. I wasn’t sure it mattered.
Turning, I walked the short distance back to the guard who’d handed me the jumpsuit in the first place. “Do I get shoes?” I asked. The jumpsuit covered the soles of my feet, but it was so thin that anything rougher than the interior floors would probably tear the fabric.
“No,” the guard replied tersely. “Come with us.”
They turned then, starting down the hall, while the others fanned out to surround me, leaving me with no choice but to accompany them.
I didn’t particularly want to run away again.
This whole thing had been like one big game of cat and mouse, and I was tired of it.
I wanted to see my family. I wanted to know they were okay.
I wanted this to be over with.
So I didn’t resist and I didn’t run, and I didn’t reach out and mentally squeeze the guards around me until they collapsed and I could get away. I just walked.
The building smelled like the inside of a cheap barbeque joint, all smoke and char and the sharp, almost fruity tang of acetone.
Someone had managed to light a fire here recently.
I blinked, looking around as we left the hall for a large atrium—the main atrium, if the pattern of the dome above us was anything to go by.
Some of the walls were blackened, and janitorial crews were already hard at work cutting away sheets of damaged material and replacing it with fresh panels, using a muddy substance to glue them in place.
This really was a giant wasp’s nest, with little adjustments made where necessary to adapt it to bipedal uses.
I faced front again as we crossed the atrium, feeling fleeting touches from all the minds around us.
The people were intensely curious. From a few of them I caught glints of recognition, and the meaning of my jumpsuit: it was their signal for “cuckoo.” As long as I wore this, I was branded as an exile, someone outside their system.
I immediately liked it better for knowing that it was accurate, it actually described me, and liked it less at the same time, because it would make running away harder, if things came to that.
Now anyone who looked at me would know what I was.
As if they wouldn’t have known already. I tried to reconstruct the partition I’d been using with Fetch and Carry, then paused as I realized that I was out of my cell. Experimentally, I reached for the numbers that would let me take myself away.
They were back, all of them, a beautiful Fibonacci spiral of possibilities that could take me anywhere I wanted to go if I could just define my destination to the eighth decimal place.
That was easy. That part had always been easy.
I could pull on the underlying threads of reality to put myself someplace else, someplace I could be, however momentarily, safe.
But if I did that, I’d be running again, and I’d just be delaying the inevitable. It was enough to know, however briefly, that the option was open to me. I could go. That meant I didn’t need to.
We had reached a large set of sliding doors, with more guards outside, these ones standing at full attention. The eyes of the guard leading my group flashed white, and the other guards nodded before stepping to the side to let us approach.
The doors slid open. We stepped through, into a short, dark tunnel with light at the far end.
“Move, cuckoo,” snapped one of the guards, and something prodded me in the center of my back, urging me to move forward, toward the light. I did so, and was almost there when someone stepped out of the shadows and snapped something around my wrist.
“Hey!” I yelped.
Too late: they were already gone. I lifted my arm, trying to see what was on my wrist. Whatever it was, it was heavy, and when I shook my arm, it slid up and down by a few inches, too tight to remove, loose enough not to cut off the circulation.
I was prodded again, and I stepped forward into the light of an arena like something out of a gladiator movie.
I was standing on the ground level, and all around me were tiers and tiers of seats, almost all of them occupied.
The Johrlac around me were wearing all manner of jumpsuit—everything but the cuckoo white-and-gray.
At one end of the space was a high box, cut off from the rest of the seats by privacy walls, occupied by Johrlac in iridescent black jumpsuits, their hair all styled in the exact same manner, all sitting on the same level as they stared toward me. I looked at them and swallowed, hard.
The collective. The five queens who controlled this whole territory, in front of me and in the flesh.
There were other boxes scattered around the edges of the arena, all of them closed off by heavy curtains. I looked at the object on my wrist again, and managed, barely, not to groan.
It was a heavy bracelet, some sort of polished wood wrapped around what looked like uncut opal.
Opal is one of the best gems for incorporating in anti-telepathy charms; the water trapped inside the gem acts as a conductor for the magic.
I couldn’t feel the power embedded in the gem, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought that was what it was.
An opal of this size could be tailored to contain a queen. I glanced up again, at the box containing the collective. They were looking at me, eyes glowing white, and I didn’t hear anything. They might as well not have been there. I was completely blocked off.
The one at the center of their formation stood, moving the short distance to the front of the box.
“Bring the cuckoo,” she said, her voice echoing through every corner of the arena.
The acoustics were incredible, and the fact that my designation was “cuckoo,” not “prisoner” or “accused,” explained why: if this was where they did their show trials for exiles, they would have to conduct them at least partially aloud. They couldn’t trust us in their minds.
The guards pushed me forward, and I didn’t resist, allowing myself to be pushed onto the bamboo disk set at the center of the open space.
As soon as we got there they stepped away, leaving me alone.
The ground rumbled below my feet, the bamboo platform beginning to slide upward.
I couldn’t hear any sort of mechanism. I looked back to the central box.
All five queens were standing now, their eyes lit up like searchlights, so bright that I couldn’t look at them directly.