Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
In Amy’s dream there were no chains. There was no cell, no cold wall—just heat, and the deep bronze span of her warrior’s chest under her palms. His silver eyes were half-lidded and fixed on her face as though she were the only thing in the universe worth the looking.
In the dream he had a voice, as low and deep as an engine humming, and he said her name against her throat.
She felt the shape of it against her skin as one enormous hand slid up the length of her bare spine and gathered her against him, and she arched into him and—
She woke.
She lay in the dark of her small locked room with her heart slamming and her whole body tight and aching.
A hot, unbearable ache pulsed low in her belly, her thighs pressed together and her breath coming fast and shallow into the thin blanket she’d fisted against her mouth.
The narrow cot creaked under her. The recycler hummed in the wall.
Somewhere below, the restaurant’s overnight cooling unit ticked as it cycled. Ordinary sounds. Real ones.
She squeezed her eyes shut and the dream was still there, so vivid it hurt—the heat of his body and the sound of her name in a voice she’d never heard and the desperate grateful way he’d held her.
She made a broken noise into the blanket and rolled onto her side, drawing her knees up as if she could push the want down into something small enough to ignore by making herself smaller.
It was a mistake.
That was what she needed to think. That was the safe thought, the survival thought, the kind that had kept her breathing for four years.
She’d kissed a prisoner. A chained, half-starved, dangerous prisoner in a slaver’s compound, a male who could snap the guards’ bones like dry reeds and probably hers along with them.
She’d knelt right down in front of him and put her mouth on his because she was lonely and stupid and starved for one gentle thing in a life that had run dry of them.
That was all it was. A mistake. She’d let it happen once and she’d feel the shame in the morning and she’d stop, because stopping was what she did. Because stopping and shrinking and disappearing were the only reasons she was still alive.
She lay there in the dark and carefully told herself that, the way she’d once recited safe things to herself in the hold of the ship that took her from Earth. It was a mistake. It meant nothing. It won’t happen again.
And underneath all of it, quiet and stubborn and impossible to kill, the truth sat up and looked her in the eye. The kiss was the best thing that had happened to her since they’d taken her.
She thought of the way he’d turned his face into her palm.
The way that enormous, terrifying, battered warrior had closed his eyes and leaned into the warmth of her hand like it was water and he’d been years in the desert.
Nobody had ever looked at her like that.
Not on Earth, in the small ordinary life she barely let herself remember. Certainly not here, not ever.
He’d looked at her like he’d seen all of her, the woman under the boy’s slouch and the stain and the bindings, the person she’d flattened down to nearly nothing to stay alive.
Being seen like that was terrifying but it was also the first time in four years she’d felt, for the length of one kiss, entirely and completely real.
She pressed the heel of her hand against her aching eyes.
“Stupid,” she whispered into the dark, her voice cracked and shaking. “You stupid, stupid—”
But she didn’t finish it, because she didn’t believe it, and lying to yourself only worked if you could make yourself believe it. She’d lost the ability to do that somewhere between his mouth and the coming dawn.
She got up before the ache could turn into something she’d have to do something about. She splashed cold water onto her face from the small sink and stood there gripping the edge of it, until the woman in the small mottled mirror looked something like the boy she needed to be.
The compound felt wrong before she’d even cleared the outer gate.
She’d always noticed things—it was half of why she was still alive—and four years of making herself into furniture had honed it to something close to a sense. She read rooms the way other people read weather. And Krebb’s compound this morning read like a storm coming in.
The first thing she noticed was more guards on the gate.
Two where there was usually one, and both of them straight-backed and alert rather than the usual bored slouch of males counting the hours till their relief.
They waved her handcart through with barely a glance because she was still invisible, still nobody, but they were watching the road behind her.
They were watching the road and the sky and even each other with the particular watchfulness of males who’d been told someone important was coming and hadn’t been told when.
Inside the receiving yard the wrongness thickened.
The kitchen where she normally handed off the dull grey stew to a surly under-cook and turned straight around was in an uproar.
Real crates were stacked along the wall, insulated ones with the seals still bright and unbroken.
The under-cook, Resh, was arguing with another servant over a manifest, his voice high and harried.
“—said fresh khema, not this dried rubbish. Do you know what he’ll do to me if I serve him dried?”
“It’s what was on the order—”
“The order changed! Everything changed this morning! Fresh khema, marrow-fowl, the blue Tarrenwine from the good cellar—” Resh spotted her and flung out an arm. “You. Boy. Put Pelloq’s slop down and get out from underfoot. Can’t you see we’ve no room today—”
She obediently ducked her head and set the containers of stew on the end of the counter where they always went, but she took her time about it, and she listened.
Fresh khema. Marrow-fowl. The good cellar.
She knew what that meant. In a year of hauling food into this place she’d learned exactly what Krebb ate and what he fed the males beneath him, and the gulf between the two was as wide as a canyon.
The warriors got ration-bricks and thin stew.
Krebb and a few of his trusted lieutenants ate considerably better.
But fresh meat and the blue Tarrenwine that Resh guarded like his own blood had only come out twice before, when Krebb wanted to impress someone. Someone he was afraid of.
“—and the east room. Is it done? Tell me it’s done—” Resh snapped, wringing a cloth in both hands.
“The servants have been at it since first light,” the other male said. “Fresh linens, flowers, the lot. Never seen the like.”
“He’s not to be kept waiting. That’s what Krebb ordered. Everything has to be perfect before he arrives.”
She stepped away from the counter. She should go.
She’d delivered, she was done, and every instinct she owned was telling her to make herself scarce and leave this place of storms and males on edge before somebody’s fear turned into somebody’s temper and landed on the nearest small target.
Leaving was the smart move, the safe move…
She thought of Brannik leaning towards her yesterday, closing the distance as much as the chains would let him. She thought of the way he watched everything with those brilliant silver eyes, as patient as a predator waiting for his prey.
Because he’s waiting for something. Or someone.
“Resh,” she said, pitching her voice low and rough. “Prisoner’s still to be fed?”
Resh flapped a hand at her without looking up. “Yes, yes, the beast, take it down, one less thing for me to worry about. Use the east passage. The yard’s full of the wine crates, don’t you dare knock one over or it’s both our hides—”
The east passage.
She’d never once taken the east passage.
It ran past Krebb’s rooms and the offices where his warriors gathered.
In a year of careful invisibility she’d never had cause to go that way and never once wanted one.
But the yard was jammed with crates and males, and Resh had said take the east passage.
To argue was to be noticed, so she picked up the prisoner’s bowl and she put her head down and went east.
The passage was cool and dim, with cut stone walls, older than the rest of the compound.
Her soft-soled boots made no sound on the floor.
She kept to the wall. She made herself small in the way she knew, her shoulders in and her chin down.
A boy who was nobody carrying a bowl of slop that nobody cared about.
Voices came from an open doorway ahead. She slowed without meaning to.
“—doesn’t matter if he believes it. The priest believes it, and the priest pays.” Krebb’s voice. She knew it from a year of overhearing it barked across the yard, always threatening. “That’s all that concerns us.”
“What about those coordinates you found?” A second voice, a cool, careful one she didn’t know.
Krebb made a dismissive sound. “Thressk hasn’t bothered with them yet.”
“Where?”
“Valkesh. Some abandoned settlement outside the northern trade routes.”
“And he thinks it’s worth looking at?”
“He paid for the coordinates, didn’t he? But this specimen is worth more to him, Ontar.”
“And if the specimen’s wrong? We thought we’d found Aurelian blood before and it came to nothing. The eyes might prove his heritage, but they don’t prove he’s a Key.”
She went still against the wall. Aurelian blood. Silver eyes, the first thing she’d ever noticed about him. The eyes that had told her he was watching and thinking and nothing like the animal they called him.
“The eyes are enough to hold him on,” Krebb said. “The priest wants any with the old blood. Bloodlines that can wake the machines. He’ll test the beast himself. If he’s one of these Keys he keeps talking about—” A smug, satisfied grunt. “Then we’ve delivered exactly what was promised.”
“We don’t even know what a Key is.”
“I know what Thressk pays for one. That’s all I need to know.”
“And if he isn’t one?”