Chapter 31 Navuh
NAVUH
The elevator announced its arrival with a chime, the doors slid open, and Areana stepped out.
Had Gertrude known that his mate was on her way, and was that the real reason for parking him in this spot?
If the nurse's goal was to stimulate him, the underwhelming outing to the drab corridor had done very little in that regard, but adding Areana's arrival did the trick. Even though his body wasn't capable of a proper response, his mind still obliged.
His mate looked like the goddess she was, but with a modern twist. She was wearing a cream-colored blouse and dark slacks, the contemporary clothing suiting her beautifully.
Her blond hair was swept back in a stylish updo, and she also carried a small handbag that he hadn't seen before.
Someone had been taking her shopping or bringing her things.
Her eyes widened.
"You're up and about," she said. "That's wonderful." She walked over to him in quick, graceful strides and bent to kiss his forehead. "Why didn't anyone tell me?"
"The wheelchair arrived last night," Gertrude said. "And we are taking it on a test drive. I had a feeling you'd be coming and wanted to surprise you."
So, he'd been right. The nurse had planned this.
Areana crouched beside the chair and took his hand. Her fingers were warm, and the scent of her, the real scent beneath the new perfume she'd started wearing, was the same as it had been for five thousand years. Sweet and clean and uniquely hers.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
"Like a monkey in a zoo."
She smiled, and the smile held both tenderness and the kind of patient amusement that she'd perfected over millennia of managing him. "You're being dramatic."
"I am sitting in a wheelchair in a hospital gown with a blanket spread over my legs to preserve what little is left of my dignity."
"It's progress." She squeezed his hand. "Yesterday you were in bed. Today you're in the corridor. Tomorrow, who knows?"
Tomorrow he would be in bed again, and then he would visit the corridor again, and the day after that, perhaps a different corridor, and the days would accumulate into weeks and the weeks into months and the months into a lifetime of captivity that stretched ahead of him like the featureless ceiling of his room.
Areana straightened and positioned herself beside the wheelchair. The Guardian adjusted his position to accommodate the new formation, and Gertrude resumed pushing.
They moved down the corridor at a pace that Navuh found insulting, past the common area and toward another section. The corridor branched here, one path continuing straight and the other veering to the left. Gertrude took the left branch.
"There's another open area down here," she said. "More space than the corridor."
He didn't respond. He was too busy measuring. The left branch was six meters long before it opened into a wider space. The air was a little different here, less stale, as if the ventilation worked harder in this section. He could hear the hum of larger machinery somewhere above or below.
He filed this away too, even though the exercise was futile.
Deep in his gut, in the place where cold calculation lived alongside the remnants of instincts that had kept him alive for millennia, he knew the truth he'd been avoiding.
He was never getting free.
Not through escape. Not through negotiation.
Not through the leverage of Khiann's body, which they might have already found another way to access.
He had been one of the most powerful beings in the world, and he had been brought down by a fall from a cliff, and now he was a crippled prisoner in a wheelchair, being pushed through a corridor by a nurse while his mate walked beside him wearing clothes bought with Annani's money, or worse, the money of his traitorous sons.
The knowledge was corrosive. It ate at the edges of everything, the way salt air corroded metal on the island, slowly and inexorably.
"I have exciting news," Areana said, as if the silence had become uncomfortable for her. "There's a wedding this Saturday. One of Kalugal's men is getting married. It's such a beautiful love story."
Navuh's jaw tightened.
Kalugal's men.
She'd said it the way someone might reference the employees of a respected businessman. Not traitors. Not deserters. Not the soldiers who had fled the Brotherhood under his son's command.
Kalugal's men.
"The girl's name is Arezoo," Areana continued.
"She and her sisters and cousin were captured by a rogue Doomer who was operating his own breeding program separate from the Brotherhood.
Can you imagine? One of our own, acting on his own ambitions.
The clan rescued them. Arezoo was in terrible shape when she arrived, but she's transformed. She has the most beautiful smile."
Our own, Areana had said, but she'd called him a Doomer, which was the clan's derogatory name for members of the Brotherhood.
The anger rose in his chest like bile.
He clenched his jaw and said nothing because the alternative was to say something that he couldn't take back.
Areana didn't notice his silence, or if she did, she chose to interpret it as interest rather than fury. She kept talking. The words flowed from her with the ease and enthusiasm of a woman who had been starved of social contact for millennia and was now gorging herself on it.
"Ruvon is so patient and kind. The whole family adores him despite his background."
His background. Areana was referring to his service in the Brotherhood as an obstacle the male needed to be ashamed of and had to overcome, a stain on his character that required mitigation through patience and good behavior.
The anger was a living thing now, coiling in his chest, tightening around his ribs.
"I'm told that the cocktail party on Saturday was lovely," Areana said.
"Amanda, that's Kian's sister, organized the whole thing.
She has a gift for celebrations. The village green was transformed for the occasion, and Arezoo wore the most stunning red dress.
" She sighed. "I wish I could have been there, but I didn't want to leave for the entire day. "
Meaning to leave him, the invalid, so she could enjoy herself.
"The Odus prepared everything, and the meal was served buffet style."
The Odus. Annani's bio-mechanical servants. They were precious relics, technology so advanced that not even the clan had been able to replicate or acquire anything similar.
At least he hoped they hadn't.
If the clan ever managed to manufacture more of those bio-mechanical creatures and turn them into soldiers, they might have a chance against the Brotherhood.
Not that he should care.
The Brotherhood was his past, not his future, and he didn't want any of his so-called sons to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Not his traitorous sons by blood, nor his inadequate adopted ones.
Gertrude kept pushing the wheelchair at the same maddening pace, occasionally checking over her shoulder to look at the Guardian as if to confirm that everything was in order.
Navuh kept cataloging. A fire exit sign. A junction box mounted high on the wall. The number and spacing of the recessed lights.
It was futile, but he did it anyway because the habit of gathering intelligence was too deeply ingrained to abandon even when the intelligence served no purpose.
Areana kept talking about their sons, their grandchild. Darius, his blood, was growing up in Annani's village, surrounded by the clan that had imprisoned his grandfather, and he would learn to walk and talk and eventually learn who Navuh was, and the story he would be told would not be kind.
Navuh's rage intensified, and his fingers curled around the wheelchair's armrests hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
"You're quiet," Areana said, and her voice carried a note that was either concern or calculated innocence.
"I have nothing to add to your report."
She studied his face. "Would you prefer that I didn't tell you about these things?"
"I would prefer many things that are not available to me."
"That's not an answer."
He looked at her, this woman he had loved for five thousand years, who had conspired behind his back and whose fall from the cliff had sent him plummeting after her without a moment's hesitation.
"Tell me whatever you want," he said.
She held his gaze, and for a moment, the bright social mask slipped, revealing something older and more complicated underneath. She understood his anger. She had always understood him better than anyone, which was what made her so effective and so dangerous.
"I tell you these things because I want you to know the world I'm living in now," she said. "I want you to understand what it's like outside this building."
"What it's like," he repeated. "You mean what it's like among the people who captured me and hold me prisoner?"
"I mean what it's like to be free."
The word landed between them hard.
Free.
She meant it in every sense. Free from the harem. Free from the island. Free from him, though she would never say it in those words because she still loved him, and her love was the only thing he trusted completely in this wretched situation.
But love and loyalty were not the same thing, and Areana had always been better at the former than the latter.
"I'm tired," Navuh said. "I'd like to return to bed."
The nurse glanced at Areana, which irritated him. She should have responded to his request, not sought confirmation from his mate.
"Of course," Gertrude said, and began the process of turning the wheelchair around in the corridor, which required a three-point maneuver that was as undignified as everything else about this excursion.
Areana walked beside the chair in silence as they returned down the corridor. The Guardian followed. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The wheels turned, and the rhythm of the distance was the same going back as it had been going out.
"The wedding ceremony will be presided over by Annani," Areana said, as if the silence had again become intolerable and she needed to fill it. "My sister does that for all the clan weddings. She loves it."
Annani. The adversary around whom the Brotherhood's entire ideology had been constructed.
Annani was presiding over weddings. Welcoming defectors from the Brotherhood into her community. Babysitting grandchildren.
"Did Annani preside over Kalugal's wedding as well?" he asked, and the question emerged calmer than he felt.
"No."
Well, at least there was that. He waited for her to continue telling him about Kalugal's wedding, but she didn't.
"What about Lokan?"
"Lokan and Carol are not married. They are fated mates, though. As are Jacki and Kalugal."
Navuh's chest suddenly felt tight.
Fated mates were rare, and for both of his sons to find their mates among the clan meant one thing.
It had been fated.
It hadn't been his failing that had led to his sons betraying him. It had been the Fates steering things so they would meet their fated mates.
It eased some of the resentment he'd been carrying.
Made the tightness in his chest loosen.
Areana reached for his hand, lacing her fingers through his, and the contact was real, and it was love, and it was also the hand of a woman who had chosen a side that was not his.
Every story she brought back to his room, every name she dropped, every celebration she described with shining eyes, was a declaration. She was telling him, in the only way she could without saying it outright, that she had found her place, and her place was not with him.
She had switched sides.
They reached his room. Gertrude locked the wheels and pulled back the blanket. She lifted him from the chair and placed him back on the bed with the same efficient strength that had transferred him in the other direction, and the mattress received him like a familiar and hated embrace.
Areana kissed his forehead. "I'll stay for a while."
"As you wish."