Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Something cool moved across his brow, and Brannik came up out of the dark the way he’d learned to as a boy—silently and all at once, taking stock before he let anyone know he was awake.
Soft hands. Amy’s scent lingering in the air and a rag that smelled of clean water. The hum of an engine through the deck at his back. No chains at his wrists. That last fact took him a moment to believe, and when he believed it his whole body relaxed a little.
He opened his eyes. She leaned over him with a strip of wet cloth in her hand and her hair down.
He’d thought, dimly, before the dark took him, that he’d dreamed that part.
He hadn’t. Loose brown waves fell around her uncovered face, and her skin was her own now, pale and warm-toned instead of the mottled grey disguise she’d worn.
The thin shirt she wore revealed the shape she’d hidden beneath layers of cloth and binding, and she was looking down at him with her whole self showing for the first time.
He lay still and let himself look at her from beneath his lashes while she thought he was still asleep.
“I can see your eyes moving,” she said, not lifting hers from the cloth. “You’re terrible at pretending to be unconscious for a male who was out cold for six hours.”
“Six hours?”
“Give or take. I don’t know how to read the ship’s clock.
” She pressed the rag to a raw line at his temple, and he let her, even though it stung.
“You’ve got a cut here that’s going to scar.
You’ve got about forty others that already have.
Whoever they had working on you did a—” Her breath caught, and her voice went flat and careful. “They weren’t gentle.”
“No.”
She sat back on her heels and looked at him properly, and the fear was there, banked but not gone, and under it something harder. She’d flown a ship she’d never touched through a portal she’d never seen. She’d earned the hardness.
“I want to know what’s going on,” she said. “All of it. I’ve been sitting here for six hours watching you bleed on a ship we stole, headed for a destination we don’t know, and I don’t even know who you are. Not really. So.” She set the cloth down in the basin. “Talk. And this time I know you can.”
He pushed himself up to a sitting position.
It cost him. Every muscle in his back had knotted around the bruises while he lay unconscious on the hard metal floor.
His head swam and his wrists throbbed where the restraints had eaten into them, but he got himself upright against the bulkhead and sat there breathing until the cockpit stopped tilting.
She watched him do it without offering to help, which he was grateful for, but her hands were half-raised in case he fell, and the concern in that gesture made his chest ache.
He was not a male who explained himself. He’d made silence into armor at eleven and he’d worn it so long it had grown into his skin. But she’d fed him by hand in a cell. She’d cleaned his wounds with strips torn from her own clothing. She’d flown him out of that place when she could barely stand.
She had bought the right to his words, and more than that—he found he wanted to give them to her.
“My mother was Aurelian,” he said, and she nodded.
“The silver eyes.”
“Yes. My father was Tuori. That’s where the rest of this comes from.” He extended a huge clawed hand with deep bronze skin. He looked at her, and he knew what she was seeing, the thing everyone saw first. “But my eyes come from her.”
“Aurelian eyes.”
“Yes.” He let his head rest back against the metal.
“My mother was small and quiet. But sometimes she would touch something nobody living built, precursor things, and wake them. She never made much of it so I didn’t either.
To me she was just my mother.” The words came slowly, rusty from long disuse, each one dragged up over ground he preferred not to walk.
“She left when I was eleven. She went somewhere and didn’t come back.
My father waited for six months. Then he went after her, and left me with his brother’s family, and neither of them ever came back. ”
“Oh, Brannik,” she whispered.
“My uncle raised me. Not cruelly. Just—” He searched for the word.
“Without interest. I was small then, Aurelian small. They put me through Tuori warrior training anyway, because that’s what you did with a boy, and I learned to fight males twice my weight because I had to.
” The dry sound that emerged wasn’t quite a laugh.
“But then I grew into this and everything about me that had been Aurelian disappeared except for my eyes. And once I had the size and strength I needed, I took the first ship off-world that would have me.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.” Her eyes widened, but he kept going. “I’ve been on ships ever since, or working ports. Whatever it took to follow the rumors.”
“Rumors of what?”
“Of her.” He met her eyes. “Of Aurelians. Of anyone who had ever heard the word. Most people swore that Aurelians didn’t exist anymore, but I kept searching.
That’s why I was in Krebb’s warehouse. I traced a network that was interested in acquiring precursor artifacts.
Then I heard they were also paying for information about people with unusual blood.
The trail led me to Krebb, and I went in to find his records.
” His jaw tightened around the old anger.
“I made a mistake. They had more security than I planned for, including a paralytic drug strong enough to knock me out. I woke up chained to a wall.”
She sat very quiet, turning the wet cloth over and over in her fingers.
“You could have gotten out before,” she said eventually. “Couldn’t you? Whenever you wanted. I saw what you did to those chains when they—” She stopped. Swallowed. “You broke them like they were string. You could have done that any day.”
“Not any day, but long before I did, yes.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because a male who fights his way out learns nothing. A male who waits, and lets them think he’s beaten, learns things.
” He watched the understanding cross her face.
“They talked in front of me because they thought I was an animal. I was waiting for the one who ran the whole thing. Krebb’s patron.
I wanted to learn where he thought the Aurelians were.
I didn’t know he was a Grorn priest.” His hands curled slowly against his knees.
“And then he came. And he looked at you.”
The name for what he’d felt in that moment didn’t exist in any language he knew.
He’d sat chained to a wall and watched a Grorn priest see through her disguise, and something in him had gone perfectly cold and perfectly murderous.
He’d known then, if he hadn’t already, that whatever happened next, she came first.
Before the answers. Before his mother. Before the thing he’d spent his whole life searching for.
“You gave up the answers,” she said softly, and he realized she’d followed the thought all the way to the end.
Her eyes searched his face. “What you were waiting all that time to find out. You had a choice back there, in the yard. I saw you look at the priest. He was walking away and you looked at him and then you looked at me.” Her voice wavered.
“You picked me. Over the thing you’ve spent your whole life chasing. ”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He didn’t answer that. Some things he still could not put into words.
She looked at him for a long moment, reading the silence the way she’d learned to read all his silences, and whatever she found there put color in her cheeks and made her drop her gaze to the cloth in her hands.
“I might know something that could help,” she said, and he frowned at her.
“What?”
“I don’t know if it does. I didn’t understand most of what I heard.” She tilted her head, dredging up the memory, and he saw how hard she was working to get it right for him. “When I overheard Krebb talking to that other male, they mentioned some coordinates he’d found. A place called Valkesh.”
“Valkesh.”
“I’m sure that’s what Krebb called it. He said there was an abandoned settlement there, somewhere outside the northern trade routes. Thressk had paid for the coordinates, but he hadn’t investigated them yet.”
His attention sharpened, as a tiny spark of hope surfaced.
“What else did he say?”
“Nothing about Valkesh. The other male asked if Thressk thought it was worth looking at, and Krebb said he’d paid for the coordinates, hadn’t he?” Her mouth twisted. “Then he said you were even more valuable.”
“Exactly what did he say?”
She closed her eyes for a moment.
“Something like, But this specimen is even more valuable. You were the specimen.” Her eyes opened. “After that they started talking about you. They said they’d thought they’d found Aurelian blood before and been wrong. That your eyes proved your heritage, but didn’t prove you were a Key.”
“Key.”
“That’s what Krebb said. Then he said that Thressk wanted anyone with the old blood. Bloodlines that could wake the machines.”
He forgot the pain for a moment. He remembered his mother kneeling in the dirt beside a black metal object some farmer had dug out of a field. Her small pale hand settled against a surface that had been dead and cold for longer than anyone could remember.
Light bloomed beneath her fingers.
He’d been six, perhaps seven. He’d thought she could do anything.
“I think my mother could do that,” he said. “Wake old things.”
“Because she was Aurelian?”
“I don’t know.” He’d never asked. He’d been a child. Children didn’t ask why their mothers could do the things they’d always done. “I thought so.”
“And can you?”
“No.”
The answer came automatically, but her head tilted as she regarded him thoughtfully.
“Have you ever tried?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again and shook his head.
“No.”
Her eyebrows went up.
“I worked cargo ships,” he said. “I didn’t come into contact with precursor artifacts.”