Chapter Twenty Sadie
Twenty
Sadie
“Nedd,” I said, “Dayan is following us.”
“Really?” Nedd said. “I’d have thought they would hope never to see us again.”
“Right?” I had no idea what Dayan would want from us, and when the road cleared, they were no longer standing in the shadows. But I was sure they’d been there.
Nedd believed me, scanning the street. “I don’t see them.”
“They were standing by that building over there, but they’re gone now,” I said.
We were obviously staring, so if Dayan was still watching, they’d know they’d been spotted. I’d begun to wonder if they had fled—or if I’d imagined it—when a voice spoke from the side street to my left.
“Hey,” the voice said. “Over here.”
I turned to see Dayan pressed against the wall between two buildings.
Nedd and I looked at each other. We’d come to get information from gladiators, and if Dayan wanted to talk to us privately, we needed to see what they had to say. But I also didn’t love the idea of being ambushed in a dark alley.
I put my hand in my bag, finding my pistol. I kept my grip on it as I approached. In the dim light between the buildings, I could just make out a recessed veranda behind them, though all the windows in the dwelling were dark.
“Hey, Dayan!” I called. “Did you…want to talk some more? We could find a quiet spot at the bar.”
“I need to talk to you in private,” Dayan said. “Come here.”
I glanced back at Nedd, who was right behind me. We’d closed half the distance between us and Dayan, now thoroughly in the shadow of the alley, out of plain view of the street.
“This seems pretty private,” I said, turning around again.
Dayan moved so fast I could hardly react. A light-whip bloomed to life in their hand, and they cracked it toward us, catching us both around the knees and knocking us down. My hand tangled in my bag as I tried to draw my pistol, and I heard Nope squeak as I elbowed her.
“Sorry!” I said, kicking to get my feet clear of the whip, still trying to wrangle my pistol free, wondering if I ought to just shoot through the bottom of the bag, but I might catch Nope in the blast.
Dayan circled us, lashing our bodies together and pulling tight. Soon my arms were pinned to my side, and I couldn’t draw the pistol if I wanted to. Dayan stepped back onto the veranda, hauling Nedd and me to where their light-whip wouldn’t be visible from the street.
“Wait!” I said, stupidly trying to hold up my hands in surrender. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding.”
Dayan stood over us, holding the whip tight. “What did you do to them?” they demanded.
I blinked. I looked over at Nedd, whose prosthetic had come loose, making his arm look broken inside his sleeve, his gloved hand hanging at an unnatural angle. If Dayan thought they’d seriously injured him, they didn’t react.
“What did we do with who?” I asked.
Nedd managed to get his foot free and kicked at Dayan, catching them in the knee and sending them stumbling backward. They stayed on their feet and pulled the whip tighter, staying clear of Nedd’s leg.
“With Zimmel,” Dayan said. “And Laryna and Yamin.”
“We don’t know who any of those people are,” I said.
“Don’t lie to me,” Dayan said. “I know you’re not from the rice farms. Zimmel said there were people snooping around, asking questions, and now he and the others are gone. So drop the act and tell me what you did to them.”
My legs were losing feeling, and one of my arms was bent so hard I thought my shoulder might dislocate. We weren’t going to get out of this by pretending to be rice farmers.
“Okay!” Nedd said. “You got us! We’re not from the rice farms. Can you let us free so we can talk about this?”
“Why, so you can make me disappear too?” Dayan asked. “I know you all are watching us from your precious star. You think you can just come down here and abduct us and no one’s going to do anything about it?”
“You know about the star?” I asked. “About the aliens watching you?”
Dayan yanked on the whip, and I cried out as my arm wrenched farther. Nedd twisted, trying to loosen the pressure on my joint before it popped out of the socket.
“Stop!” he said. “Let’s talk. We aren’t who you think we are.”
“That’s exactly what you’d say,” Dayan said, “if you were aliens who thought I knew too much about your little schemes.”
Oh, stars. Did Dayan know about the Superiority’s schemes? If they did, they’d be an invaluable resource. We had to talk our way out of this without hurting them, and somehow convince them we were all on the same side.
“We’re not with the aliens on the star,” I said. “We’ve been on this world for less than a day. We came from another human colony, and we want to help you.”
Nedd glanced at me, like he wasn’t sure I should have said any of that, and maybe I shouldn’t have. But lying or hiding who we were would only make Dayan more suspicious, and we needed their help to figure out what was going on with the Superiority and get off this planet.
“You can release us,” I said. “I promise we aren’t going to hurt you.”
“So you weren’t reaching into your bag for a weapon?”
Oh scud. “I was!” I said. “But only because we don’t know you and you were ambushing us in an alley and frankly I wasn’t entirely off base to think this was a dangerous situation.”
Dayan considered this. “Drop your bags,” they said.
Oh no. Now they wanted to take our bags, which contained the taynix.
“Um,” I said.
“No arguments! Drop your bags. I’m going to take your weapons, and then I’ll release you and we can talk.”
Talking while they remained armed with a light-whip, and Nedd and I were both totally unarmed, didn’t seem entirely fair, but it would be an improvement. I looked to Nedd.
“Do as they say,” he said, and I released my bag.
Dayan stepped closer, taking care to avoid Nedd’s loose leg, and hauled my bag away with one hand, still holding the light-whip tight with the other.
The bag appeared deflated, as if it had already been emptied.
Dayan peered inside, not immediately screaming at finding a blue-and-green frilly slug.
They fished out the pistol and dropped the bag against the door of the house, then did the same with Nedd’s, which had also been partially emptied.
Twist must have hyperjumped the slugs to safety. She was allowed to do that without permission, so long as she only moved taynix with her. I hoped they were all okay and not too bumped and bruised.
Dayan turned off their light-whip, releasing Nedd and me into a tangle of limbs. Nedd climbed to his feet and offered me his bio hand. His prosthetic arm was still strapped to his body, the hand covered by his glove, but useless in his sleeve.
“All right,” Dayan said, light-whip ready to lasso us both again if we made the slightest wrong move. “Tell me who the hell you two really are.”
I turned to Nedd. He was the commander of our little side mission and was probably right that I shouldn’t have given Dayan the information I had. I’d have to apologize for that later.
Nedd shrugged. “I guess we’re doing this,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Stars, he still wanted me to do the talking?
“We’re Sadie and Nedd, like we told you,” I said. “But we’re from a planet called Detritus. Our people were imprisoned there by the same aliens who are watching you.”
“So you’re also prisoners?” they asked. They seemed less sure that we’d abducted their friends now, so that was progress.
“We were until recently,” I said. “Our people crashed on Detritus at the end of the last Human War.”
“What do you mean, the end?”
“We don’t know where your gladiators are going,” Nedd said, “but they aren’t fighting in Elysium—because the war is over.”
Dayan’s finger hovered over the light-whip’s trigger. “If the war is over, then why are those aliens still keeping us prisoner?”
Dayan wouldn’t like this part, but I didn’t know how to explain without telling them the full story.
“The humans lost the war almost a century ago,” I said.
“And the Superiority—the aliens we were fighting—decided we were too dangerous, so they kept us isolated on our planet and shot us down whenever we got close to escaping.”
“How could you escape?” they asked. “You have ships? You flew here?”
It was better to admit that than spill everything we knew about cytonic hyperdrives. “Yes,” I said. “We have ships nearby.” I stole a glance at Nedd, who nodded for me to keep going. “The aliens on the star haven’t been shooting at you, have they? Do you have functional starships?”
“No,” Dayan said. “Every time we tried to repair our old ships, something went wrong. Just like when our telescope manufacturing gets too advanced, or our mining too productive.”
Huh. It seemed strange that the Superiority would shoot at us from a distance but sabotage the people of Blightfall up close.
The Superiority had been terrified of humans—they preferred to fire at us with drone ships rather than put their feet on the same ground we walked on.
Why had they treated this group so differently?
“If we’re still detained,” Dayan said, “then the war is not over. They may have declared victory, but we have not conceded.”
This conversation was getting away from me.
“The war is over, though. Yes, we lost for a time, but recently we rallied and made alliances with several alien races. We defeated the Superiority, and now we’re forming a new galactic order.
The people who kept you prisoner have been neutralized, and the humans are free now. ”
“This is what freedom looks like?” they said in a flat voice.
Okay, maybe I overstated my case. Stars, we could use some diplomats about now.
“We’re here to free you,” I tried again. “And invite you to join our alliance and work toward galactic peace.”
Dayan squinted at me. “If you’ve come to liberate us, why are you sneaking around pretending to be rice farmers? And why would you ally with the creatures who kept you captive?”
“Our allies weren’t our captors,” Nedd said. “This may be hard to believe, but there are a lot of other sapient species in the galaxy, and many aliens were also prisoners of the Superiority. Our allies want to coexist, to learn to live in peace.”
“The aliens holding you captive are a remnant of the Superiority’s larger forces,” I said.
“Your planet is in some kind of dimensional pocket that made it incredibly difficult for us to reach you, which helps the Superiority troops keep you prisoner even though the rest of us are free. We flew through to make contact, but now we’re trapped here, and we can’t get back or call for reinforcements. ”
“So you’re here to rescue us,” Dayan said, “but you have no more power than we do.”
We still had ships. And hyperdrives, even if we couldn’t use them to get off world. “We have some resources,” I said. “What we lack is information. Can you tell us more about the people holding you here?”
“I don’t know much,” they said. “A few months ago some older gladiators told me about the star. They said they had reasons to believe we were being watched, and they were suspicious of Elysium—the way no one ever comes back to visit or tell us what it’s like.
Some of us think we’re being trained and taken for some other purpose, but we don’t know what it is.
We talk about trying to get a message back after we cross over, but no one has managed it. ”
“You were already a gladiator when you learned about the star?” I asked. “So when you joined the games, you didn’t suspect anything?”
Dayan shook their head. “Not at first. I wanted to fight in the games like everyone else, you know? For the money, the prestige, even to defend our people. But when I learned about the star, about the people watching us, I stopped believing the stories about how important we are, how vital to the survival of humanity. I think maybe we’re being played, and I want to know why. ”
“The other gladiators who told you about this,” Nedd said, “could we meet them?”
“Not anymore,” they said. “They’re gone. Zimmel was hearing voices in his head. Usually anyone manifesting cytonic abilities bypasses the games and goes straight to Elysium, since they’re so important to the war effort.”
Oh stars. These people knew about cytonics, but Ivy had convinced them to send them all away.
“But Zimmel heard voices talking about watching us, instructions about which facilities to hit next. And his information was accurate; he warned us that the mine was going to shut down again, and then it did. But today during first shift, when I went to see him, to talk about the End Times, his home had been ransacked, and he and the others were gone.”
Scud. I wondered if that, too, was related to our arrival, or if there was something else at play here we were missing.
“All the gladiators who were suspicious of the games disappeared?” Nedd asked. “Except you?”
“No,” Dayan said. “There are still others. Timon wanted to communicate with his family, to tell us all where he’d gone.
Maybe he’ll figure it out and we’ll hear from him.
If not, Kalia had the idea to capture one of the robed priests, see what they would tell us.
But they only come out at the end of a match, to take the winners through the gate.
Attacking them in front of an audience would be suicide. ”
“I don’t know where the gate leads,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure they’re not taking you to fight for honor and glory—not on behalf of humanity at least.”
I still couldn’t imagine these people fighting on the Superiority’s behalf. We’d never encountered human militias in our battles with them.
Another thought occurred to me. “It’s possible they aren’t amassing an army, but siphoning off your best warriors, keeping you weak.”
Dayan stared at me, rage stretching across their face. I couldn’t blame them. If that theory was correct, it meant that instead of going off to fight for a noble cause, Dayan’s friends had been imprisoned or killed.
“How long have your people been sending gladiators to Elysium?” I asked.
“Over a century,” they said. “Since around the time you say the war ended. But if there is no war, why are these the End Times? Why stop the games?”
“It might have something to do with us. Their leader tried to kill us, but she knows some of us are still alive and hiding.”
There were a lot of unanswered questions—enough that I wasn’t sure what the next step was. Except…“Our team is here to gather information,” I said. “And right now you’re our best source of it. Would you be willing to come talk to our flightleader?”
Stars. We probably should have done that a lot earlier in this conversation.
“Your leader is here? In the city?” Dayan twisted the light-whip in their fist, as if considering whether it was safe to come with us, to leave this position where they clearly had the upper hand.
“Yes,” I said. “We’re supposed to meet up with him and the rest of our team.”
Dayan thought for another moment. “All right,” they said.
Nedd nodded at me like I’d done good work.
I only hoped Arturo would agree.