Chapter Three
Coreni
Waking came slowly for Coreni.
Warmth first — which was wrong, because the last thing she remembered was being very cold. Then the stillness. Then the smell, clean and faintly mineral, like stone that had been near water for a very long time.
Slowly opening her eyes, she woke in a bed.
Soft pink light from no source she could identify. The room was small, and had no windows to identify time of day.
A gray shift covered her that she had definitely not put on herself. One question she had, but at this point it was low priority.
More important was where she was and whether she was going to be allowed to leave.
She sat up slowly and took inventory.
Her hands were fine. That was the first surprise — she'd been fairly certain she'd lose at least two fingers to the cold, but they moved when she told them to and the color was normal.
Her head ached in a dull persistent way that suggested she'd been unconscious long enough for her body to start making complaints about it. Everything else seemed to be present and functional.
She looked around.
No windows. No visible door. The walls were smooth gray stone, not construction stone or alloy, but carved, or worn, as if the room had been shaped rather than built.
The ceiling was low enough that she could have touched it standing on her toes.
The floor, when she swung her legs off the bed and set her feet down, was cold in a way that felt deep, like the cold went a long way down.
I'm underground, she thought. Correction. I'm underwater.
She couldn't have said what told her. Something in the quality of the silence, maybe. The faint sense of pressure. The way the room felt held rather than simply enclosed. The smell of the air, tinged with sea salt, even through air purifiers, it was still there.
She was where they wouldn’t find her.
Though she didn’t know if that was good or bad.
On a shelf across the room, a single object sat.
A thin post with a sphere at the top — clear crystal smooth and slightly luminescent in the pink light.
She crossed to it before she'd made a conscious decision to, drawn by the kind of curiosity that had gotten her into most of the significant trouble of her adult life.
But why change now?
She reached out toward it.
Her fingertips touched the surface.
The crystal was warm.
Not ambient warm — not the warmth of a room that had been occupied, or an object near a heat source.
Warm the way something living was warm, from the inside out, and for one disorienting moment she couldn't tell whether the heat was coming from it or from her own hand, whether she was feeling the crystal or the crystal was feeling her.
Something moved through the light inside it. Not a flash — quieter than that. A deepening, like a held breath deciding to release. Like recognition.
She pulled her hand back.
You are in an unknown location, having been brought here unconscious by a Fraluma, with no idea how long you've been here or who else is in the building. This is perhaps not the moment to start touching things.
The rational explanation arrived slightly too late to be the reason she had stopped. She noted that, and set it aside, and stepped back from the shelf.
The crystal went on glowing, undisturbed, as if nothing had happened.
She turned her attention back to the problem of the door.
She was still running her hands along the seam of the wall where the door should logically have been when she heard voices.
Below her.
Two of them — one sharp, one measured, both speaking in tones too low to make out words, though she pressed her foot experimentally against the floor and felt the faint vibration of them. An argument, or close to one. The sharper voice had the rhythm of someone issuing a verdict.
She stepped back to the center of the room and stood there with her hands loose at her sides, because if someone was about to come up through the floor, she wanted to look like she hadn't been caught doing anything.
The floor opened.
A circular section near the far wall rose smoothly and hummed on some mechanism she couldn't see. She watched a woman appear through it, unhurried, adjusting her cloak as she rose.
Old. No implants at all, which on its own was remarkable enough to arrest Coreni's attention — she'd never seen a person of that age without at least some cybernetic reinforcement.
Her eyes were tired and very aware, the combination of someone who had been paying attention for a long time and had not particularly enjoyed everything they'd seen.
She looked at Coreni and nodded, the way people did when something confirmed what they'd already suspected.
"You do not have to stand in the middle of the room pretending you weren't just listening at the walls," she said. "I am Prophet Mother Dremma. Sit down, please."
Coreni sat on the edge of the bed, because there was nowhere else to sit and also because something in the woman's voice made arguing feel like a waste of both their time.
"Where am I?"
"Somewhere safe. For the moment."
"I'd like a more specific answer than that."
"I'm certain you would." Dremma settled on the far end of the bed, her movements slow and deliberate. "How do you feel?"
"Like someone knocked me unconscious on a loading dock. Where are my clothes?"
"Being cleaned. You'll have them back shortly. Give me your hand."
Coreni looked at the outstretched hand. "Why?"
"Because I'm asking."
That wasn't an answer. Coreni gave her the hand anyway, because she was in a room with no door and no leverage and this woman was the only information source available. She'd work with what she had.
Dremma's grip was gentle. She turned Coreni's hand over in both of hers, running her thumbs slowly across the palm, then the wrist, then the inside of the forearm. Her eyes were slightly unfocused, and Coreni wondered what she saw.
And then Coreni felt a faint buzzing at the edge of her thoughts. Not words. Not quite sensation. Just — a presence, brief and careful, like someone checking a lock without turning it.
She pulled her hand back. "What was that?"
"Nothing to concern yourself with now." Dremma's expression had shifted. Something shifted behind her eyes that she tried to hide.
Coreni still noticed.
The woman stood, and from the folds of her cloak produced Coreni's clothes, folded with precise creases. She laid them on the bed. "Dress. Edi-Veen will take you home."
"Edi-Veen." The name felt weird on her toungue. "Is he the one who —"
"Yes."
"Is he going to tell me what's happening?"
Dremma paused at the edge of the opening in the floor. In the pink light, with no implants and that particular quality of stillness, she looked ancient in a way that had nothing to do with age.
Like she had seen world changing events and had not forgotten them.
"The Fraluma are not the emotionless weapons the government would have you believe," she said. "Remember that, when you find yourself afraid of him. He could not have hurt you. Whatever else you're uncertain about — hold onto that."
"That's not actually an answer to my question."
"No," Dremma agreed. "It isn't." And she descended through the floor, which closed behind her without a sound.
Not long after Dremma left, the voices started again.
The voices continued below for a while. She couldn't make out words but she could map the shape of the argument — the sharp one pressing, the measured one deflecting, a third voice entering briefly and then going quiet.
She sat on the bed and listened and learned nothing specific and catalogued everything anyway.
At some point it stopped.
She got dressed.
Then she sat with her hands in her lap and looked at the crystal across the room and thought about what Dremma had said and hadn't said. He could not have hurt you. Not he chose not to or he was ordered not to. Could not. As if the question of choice didn't enter into it.
She thought about his face on the container above her. That thing that had passed through it.
She filed that too, and waited.
The floor opened again.
He came up the way Dremma had, unhurried, adjusting nothing. His hood was down. In the loading dock she'd had bad light, cold-blurred vision, and the reasonable distraction of expecting to die — now she had pink light and nothing else to look at, and she looked.
He was younger than she'd registered. Not young — there was nothing unfinished about him — but younger than the Fraluma of government reports, the ancient implacable force of official imagery.
His hair was a coppery blond, cut close.
His skin was warm, a honey-brown that the pink light made richer.
His eyes, when they settled on her, were blue-green and steady and giving away nothing she hadn't been given permission to have.
He was also very large, which the dock and the dark had not adequately communicated.
"I will take you home," he said.
"That's what she said." Coreni stood. "You're Edi-Veen?"
"Yes."
"You were going to kill me."
A pause. Not long — just long enough to tell her he was choosing words rather than reaching for them. "That was my order."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"And now you're taking me home."
"Yes."
"And you're not going to tell me why any of this happened."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a wince. "There are things I am not permitted to discuss." He maintained his stoic and impassive expression, even his eyes remained cold.
"Right." She crossed her arms. "How long have I been here?"
He considered the question with more care than it should have needed. "Sixteen hours."
Sixteen hours. A long time. She remembered the dock, the wave, the attacker, and then this Fraluma’s hands at her shoulders and a word she still didn't have a frame for.
And then nothing, until the pink light and the stone smell and the cold floor.
Sixteen hours of nothing.
That had never happened to her before. Even when she'd been concussed — twice, both occupational — she'd had fragments. Impressions. Not a complete blank.
She didn't say that. She filed it, because that was what she did with things she didn't yet have enough information to understand.
"All right," she said. "Take me home."
He held out a folded cloak. "You will need this."
She took it, and her fingers brushed his when she did. She felt the touch more than she should have. Intense, even for something so negligible.
The pink light didn’t illuminate his reaction to the touch.