31. Navuh
NAVUH
T he procession was the same every day.
Navuh in the wheelchair, Areana behind him with her hands on the grips, Daniel beside them. Three people, one corridor, the same forty meters of reproduction-lined wall between the apartment and the elevator bank, traversed the same hour every day.
Navuh had come to think of it as his daily royal parade. A lord, his goddess, and his guard, marching in state toward a swimming pool.
On his wrists, the cuffs gleamed under the recessed lights, and to anyone who didn't know better, they looked like large silver bracelets, like he was some genie who'd emerged from a bottle.
But the cuffs were not ornamental pieces, and they weren't only tracking devices either.
They contained a neurotoxin, and its release was controlled by Daniel and the other Guardians watching the surveillance feed.
If Navuh tried to leave his little jail apartment outside the approved pool rehabilitation schedule or did anything that was deemed dangerous, the toxin would release and he would suffer excruciating pain.
He had never tested it, but he had no doubt that it was true. It was just the kind of thing Kian would do.
Areana suddenly stopped walking. "I forgot the lotion. We need to go back."
"Forget the lotion. You can massage my legs when we come back."
"It's best when I do that between exercises. You last longer."
There'd been a time when lasting as long as it took had not been a problem. There had been a time when he'd always exhausted Areana, bringing her to a state of bliss that she couldn't take anymore. Now it was just a memory of better times.
"Fine," he said. "Go. We can wait out here for you."
"I'll only be a moment."
She turned the chair so he could watch her go and hurried back down the corridor. Daniel lifted his phone, tapped on it, and the apartment's heavy door released with a hiss and swung open for her.
As the Guardian returned the phone to his pocket, Navuh fantasized about getting his hands on the device. The phone opened the door. The phone programmed the cuffs. The phone was the scepter of his little underground kingdom, and it belonged to a polite Guardian who never let it out of arm's reach.
If only he could bribe Daniel. Everyone had a price, and so did his guard, but Navuh didn't have money, and he hadn't found out what other currency Daniel might accept.
He'd found nothing else to work with either.
Over the weeks, he'd catalogued every clan member who came near him, and everyone without exception wore the filtering devices in their ears. Bridget, Gertrude, the Guardians, and even Kian and Annani when they had visited him.
The clan was thorough, and his compulsion ability, his greatest weapon, was worthless here. He'd accepted that the way a chained dog accepts its shackles, which was to say, by testing it on every new face that entered his shrinking world, waiting for the day someone forgot.
Someone would forget. Eventually. Some new nurse, some careless Guardian, one unfiltered ear, and then he'd have a hand in this fortress that answered to him.
He couldn't compel anyone to free him, though, because the damned cuffs made escape a fantasy. The moment he rolled past his permitted boundary, the neurotoxin would drop him twitching to the floor.
Then again, freedom wasn't the only thing worth commanding.
What if he sent his one unfiltered fool to kill Kian?
The idea brought a smile to his face.
He'd never get another army, but one soldier, one knife, one moment of Kian's arrogant certainty that his prisoner had been rendered harmless, and he would get revenge on Annani and her entire clan.
It would cost Navuh everything, of course. Areana would never forgive him. The clan would execute him or entomb him. But on the bad days, in the dark hours when the ceiling of the windowless apartment pressed down on him like a coffin lid, the fantasy felt good.
The problem was that he hadn't seen another living soul besides Areana and Daniel in two weeks.
Bridget and her staff had decamped to their village, where the clan kept its real treasures, leaving his rehabilitation in Areana's hands, and his world had contracted to an apartment, a corridor, and a rectangle of chlorinated water.
On the other hand, his legs were getting stronger, and that wasn't a fantasy.
The water work was doing what Bridget had promised it would, and sensation had climbed past his knees, and yesterday he'd stood in the shallow end, bearing most of his own weight for a count of thirty without Areana's support.
Soon he'd stand, and after that, walk.
He was collecting these small victories the way he'd once collected nations under his influence, and even though the scale of his ambitions had become pathetic, at least the trajectory pointed upward.
Besides, the pool exercises were no hardship.
An hour in warm water with Areana's hands on him, her wet hair clinging to her shoulders, her laughter echoing off the tiles when he grumbled.
There'd been a time when an hour like that would've ended very differently, and his body's continued refusal to properly respond to his mate was a crueler fate than the weakness of his legs.
Bridget had assured him that the condition wasn't permanent, that the nerve damage was healing on its own schedule, but Navuh was beginning to suspect the nerves weren't the problem.
He'd lost everything he'd spent his life working for, and once he'd realized that he had no bargaining chips left, melancholy had taken root in his psyche.
Perhaps the failure lived in his head rather than his spine.
He wasn't going to ask for a head doctor, though. That was certain. He would learn to walk again, and his erections would return when they returned. He had suffered enough humiliation in the hands of the clan. He wasn't going to add this one to the list.
Areana walked out of the apartment holding the jar like some trophy. "Got it."
Daniel closed the door behind her remotely with his phone, although Navuh didn't understand why he bothered to do so when they weren't there.
No one was going to steal anything from there unless someone was interested in Areana's nightgowns or his pajamas, and according to Daniel, the Guardians were paid well enough that theft wasn't likely.
She slipped the jar into the back pocket of the wheelchair and resumed pushing him toward the elevator bank.
Daniel pressed his palm to the scanner and took a step back.
He touched his ear and his easy posture changed. Probably some orders from those in charge that he was not happy with, given how stiff he'd become.
The elevator chimed, but nothing happened. The doors stayed shut when they were supposed to open.
A malfunction? In the clan's building?
Navuh derived a small measure of satisfaction from the proof that not everything in their domain ran like a well-oiled machine.
But then there was a metallic groan of protest, and the doors jerked apart instead of sliding.
The elevator wasn't empty.
Eight familiar men stepped out of it, and Navuh's world was turned upside down once more in so many weeks. The broken doors didn't even register until later, one more oddity in a morning that had run out of room for them.
He knew every one of those faces. He'd studied them for months through reinforced glass, had read reports on their vitals and their brain chemistry and their disturbing, deepening synchrony, had stood in the laboratory and weighed whether the prudent thing would be to exterminate them and cut his losses, or to continue with the experiment.
They were his creations. The last surviving product of the program that had cost him half the island and one of the finest scientific minds.
He owned them.
They were wearing exercise clothes, not uniforms, and there were no cuffs on their wrists. They were in his enemy's fortress, but they were not prisoners, and they were looking at him with the blank expressions they had always worn when he'd visited the lab.
"What are you doing here?" he asked in the island tongue out of habit.
They were still looking at him with those blank expressions, but he knew them well enough to notice that something passed between them. They were communicating inside their collective consciousness.
And then he saw something that made his breath catch.
They had no earpieces.
They all wore their hair closely cropped, their ears exposed, and there was not one filtering device among them. The clan that had plugged every ear that interacted with him had left these eight open, leaving the most powerful weapon he had ever created at his disposal.
Navuh's mind shifted gears, making rapid calculations.
Daniel controlled the cuffs, and if Navuh gave the Eight a command to do something they weren't supposed to, like order them to disarm the Guardian or kill Kian, Daniel would have the neurotoxin flooding Navuh's wrists before the sentence ended.
Unless Daniel didn't speak the island tongue and didn't understand the command. He probably didn't. Almost certainly didn't.
Probably. Almost certainly. Navuh wasn't going to risk everything on a probability.
He could do it subtly. He didn't need to command anything alarming.
He needed only to plant the first hook, something innocent, something even the Guardians in the security office wouldn't flag.
He could compel the Eight to visit him. To come to the pool during his hours.
To seek him out, again and again, until he'd had time to layer command upon command, laying obedience down in coats like lacquer, until the eight of them were his again without one alarming word ever being spoken aloud.
They could disarm Daniel in half a heartbeat. They could take the phone, the weapon, and given how strong they were, they might even be able to tear the damned cuffs from his wrists. The neurotoxin would drop him, but he'd endure it to get free.
Not yet, though. Not while he sat in this chair. Patience. First, he needed to make them his, then heal, and then he would choose the right time.
The tall one in the front shrugged. "We wanted to see the world, so we crossed over to the clan."
Crossed over. As if switching sides to the enemy were a matter of strolling across a street.
"How?" Navuh demanded. "And why would the clan accept you?"
Another insolent shrug. "That's none of your business. We don't answer to you anymore."
Anymore.
The word landed like a slap, and behind the sting of it, Navuh saw his opening, gleaming and perfect.
They'd refused to answer. Which meant that if they answered anyway, he would know if he still had what it took to compel.
He almost laughed at the elegant simplicity of it.
One command, disguised as the kind of angry demand that was his style, which no one would question.
If it failed, he'd look like nothing more than what they already believed him to be, a broken, angry male.
And if it worked, he'd know that the most powerful weapon in his arsenal was still firing, and these eight unfiltered minds were his to harvest.
The question was whether he still had it at all.
He couldn't even get an erection, so perhaps his compulsion ability wasn't working either. What if it had died on those rocks along with everything else?
There was only one way to find out.
"Tell me how you left the island!" Navuh commanded, and he laced every word with every shred of compulsion power he could summon, opening channels he hadn't used in months, pouring through them everything he had, everything he was, the power that had bent thousands of knees and built a false god's throne on an island of slaves.
"What did the clan promise you to betray the Brotherhood? "
It worked. He could see it in their postures, their expressions, their eyes.
All eight of them went still at once. Their faces slackened, their eyes turned glossy, distant, and fixed on him, and the old power sang up Navuh's spine.
Oh, it sang.
He was Lord Navuh again. Not a patient, not a prisoner, not a broken male being wheeled to water therapy by his mate.
For one glorious, expanding moment, the corridor was his throne room, eight powerful weapons stood before him awaiting his command, and the future unrolled itself at his feet in all its old glory.
The spokesman's mouth opened.
Closed.
Opened again. "We can compel now," he said, his voice sounding monotone and distant like a male controlled by a powerful compulsion.
"We compel through thralling, not sound waves.
We just walked onto a departing ship in front of a hundred men, and not one of them noticed us because we compelled them to look the other way. "
Navuh's triumph curdled.
They could compel through thralling? He was the most powerful compeller in the world and he couldn't do that.
"That's impossible. No one can compel through thralling. Besides, compulsion is inherited, not manufactured in a laboratory."
"Oh, but it is possible." The spokesman smiled, and the glossy distance vanished from his eyes between one heartbeat and the next.
It had not faded. It had been switched off, cleanly, deliberately, and the light came back on in all eight faces at the same instant, eight pairs of clear, sharp, amused eyes trained on him in perfect unison.
He had a sinking feeling that they had toyed with him, and that his compulsion didn't work on them, or didn't work at all.
In the roaring silence of that realization, another one arrived, quieter and almost as bad.
Areana was standing behind his chair, and she hadn't said a single word since the elevator doors opened.
Not a gasp, not a question, not one syllable of surprise at eight enhanced soldiers stepping out of an elevator into the sealed world she shared with him.
He turned his head and looked up at his mate, at her beautiful, composed face.
She had known, and she had chosen not to tell him.