Chapter 12
Elegy knows two strategies for getting into Valla.
In the military, it’s all about speed. Child soldiers—-still pre--infection, and thus capable of using elixir—-give the Talusar access to the same radar technology as the Cedrae, but they’re slow to deploy. So if a Cedrae ship is fast and precise, it can get into Valla without being intercepted.
Speed won’t work for this mission. She needs to be patient in Valla—-to wait and to watch. So she has to rely on another approach: her father’s. Keen Ahn taught her that sometimes you can’t avoid getting caught, so the trick is to get caught by the right people at the right time.
She sets her flight path to take her southeast of Valla, where there’s a Talusar outpost on the very edge of nothing. No towns, only one settlement, for miles in every direction. It’s a shit assignment for shit soldiers, and they’re bound to be bored and disaffected. Easy to bribe.
Losan and Valla are a thousand miles apart, but it only takes an hour to fly there, even in her little Hummingbird.
She flies overnight while it’s still dark, all her lights off and the night--vision projection over the windshield so she can see.
She has a filtration mask with her as a precaution, but she doesn’t put it on—-only priests of the Fever can spread it by air, and she’s unlikely to encounter any, sequestered from society as they are.
In the back of the Hummingbird is a stack of skin mags and a crate of medical supplies, always useful in Valla, with less of a penalty for smuggling.
She coasts low, weaving between the mountains.
The clouds provide cover from the ground, but nothing can fool the radar. She’ll make it as far as she can.
An arrow bounces off her windshield when she’s twenty miles away from Valla. It doesn’t penetrate the glass, but it leaves a star--shaped dent right in Elegy’s line of vision. She can’t see the archer, but she knows a warning shot when she sees one, so she dips down in a clear sign of surrender.
She touches the Hummingbird down in a clearing beside a river. The sun is coming up now, so everything is awash in blue. She takes a deep, slow breath. Don’t panic, Keen would say. No soldier wants to haul your ass all the way to Valla. They’re looking for a way to get out of it, so give them one.
She gets out of the Hummingbird just as the soldiers break through the tree line. She puts her hands up.
“Hey there,” she says to them, when they’re still a ways off. She speaks her clearest Talusar.
There are three soldiers, one holding a bow, the other two more casual, their weapons not even drawn. None of them are wearing febra armor—-a good sign, because it means they aren’t used to facing any action.
“Identify yourself,” the one on the left says. He’s tall, but rangy. Light brown hair, the color of honey.
“I’m Ella Locke,” she says. “Didn’t mean to get so close to the city, I got turned around.”
They’re close now.
“Hands on the ship,” the soldier on the right says, and Elegy obeys. The soldier does a quick, lazy pat--down as her golden--haired counterpart peeks into the back of Elegy’s Hummingbird. He produces one of the skin mags, and raises his eyebrows at Elegy.
She smiles a little. Shrugs.
“Just giving the people what they want,” she says. “I was headed for Twin Cliffs.”
Twin Cliffs is a small village nearby, just a few miles outside of Valla. Relaxed and quiet.
“Then you have to head out on foot from here,” the soldier says.
The soldier in the middle—-the one with the bow—-eyes Elegy suspiciously. He starts to walk around the ship. She’s made sure her Hummingbird is nothing special: unmarked, with parts only from Losan, and never the best ones. Never military.
“Yeah, that’s the plan. Two trips and I’m gone,” she says. “Listen, I’m happy to compensate you for your trouble. And your discretion.”
She glances at the skin mag, now open in the soldier’s hand as he looks over one of the spreads.
“And you’re welcome to keep that,” she says.
The soldier who searched Elegy snorts. “She’s got you figured out, perv.”
The archer is still moving in his slow circle around the Hummingbird. He pauses, crouches next to the bumper.
“How much are we talking?” the golden--haired one says. “For your compensation?”
“I don’t have a lot of Talusar coin. A hundred, maybe.”
“Make it two. And you gotta be out before dusk.”
“Hey,” the archer says. His voice is rough. “Come look at this.”
Elegy looks behind her as the golden--haired one kneels next to the bumper, shoulder to shoulder with the archer.
She doesn’t know what they’re looking at.
The soldier grabs something and pulls, hard, detaching it from the underside of the Hummingbird.
He stands, and holds it up to examine it more carefully.
It’s a metal disc, half an inch thick, with a short antenna attached to it. One side is polished metal. But when the soldier turns it over, Elegy sees the seal of the Sword etched into the side.
The archer raises his bow, arrow notched and ready, and points it at her.
“This is a tracking device,” the archer says to her. “From the Sword of Cedre. Want to tell us again who you are?”
Elegy’s mouth goes dry.
“I don’t know how that got there,” she says, and it’s not a lie.
“Sure you don’t.”
“You don’t understand,” she says. “I really don’t. I’ve never seen it before, there’s no reason the Sword of Cedre would be—-”
The archer steps forward. Touches the point of the arrow to her forehead. It digs into her skin. She feels her heartbeat everywhere—-throat, cheeks, fingertips.
Larke Rosyk, current Sword of Cedre, had someone put a tracker on Elegy’s ship.
And now she’s going to die because of it.
“Hands behind your back,” he says. “I’m sure someone in Valla will be very interested to know who you really are.”
“Let’s practice,” Shir said to her, once, after they kissed but long before they got married. She remembers it so clearly: he was sitting across from her in a white T--shirt that was just a little too tight through the shoulders. His hair was damp at the back of his neck from a shower.
“Shir,” she said, rolling her eyes. “We both know if I ever get captured by the Talusar, I’m pretty much toast.”
“Don’t say that.” He folded his hands in front of him on the desk. “Never say that. There’s always a chance of survival, and your job—-your duty is to find it. Understand?”
It was still strange to switch gears the way they were—-that morning he pulled her into a broom closet, pressed her up against the wall, and slid his hands under her shirt; this afternoon he was Primary Alexios again, teaching her how to endure a Talusar interrogation if she was ever captured.
She sat up straight, and folded her hands in front of her, just like he had.
“Only low--level Talusar interrogators resort to torture,” he said.
“The high--level ones are truthsayers—-memory readers. It’s hard to lie to a memory reader.
Even if you keep your mouth shut, they’ll see what they need to see.
The good news is, most memory readers read the very recent past. Which means that if you plan ahead, you can create false memories that feel as vivid to them as the real ones. To create chaos in your memory.”
“I do remember this from basic, you know.”
“Chaos,” he said, as if she hadn’t interrupted. His eyes were bright as sunlight through honey. “Through the introduction of not one, but several false memories that you begin cycling through in your mind from the second you set out for your mission. So what do you do when you get captured?”
“Don’t panic,” she said. “Cycle through your false memories. Pick one or two sensory details every time.”
“Good,” he said. “Now I’m going to give you a scenario, and you’re going to talk me through false memories, one by one.”
“For future reference, you may want to refrain from putting your tongue in my mouth on days when you want me to focus,” she said.
He grinned. “Call it a test of your mental strength.”
She crafted the false memories as she went, as any good Cedrae soldier would.
Most memory readers can’t tell the difference between an event that actually happened or a remembered dream—-or a remembered fantasy, if you concoct one that’s vivid enough.
But as they bind her hands behind her back, she pictures the invented scene again, just in case.
She’s already presented the story that she’s a smuggler, but any smart memory reader will see, even in her recent memories, that she’s actually a Scout.
The trick will be keeping the memory reader’s attention there, instead of letting them dig any deeper—-to Isre, to the conversation they had in the Octopus.
She laid the groundwork for herself, too. Before she left, she went to the Octopus and claimed a—-very real—-job from its bulletin board. The job is to retrieve a message from someone in Twin Cliffs.
In the invented scene, she’s meeting with her contact, who has the face of Robbie Meacham. He shows her an image of the person she’s supposed to meet in Twin Cliffs: a grizzled, graying man with a port--wine stain on his forehead.
Then she loads the skin mags and medical equipment into the Hummingbird.
The false memories she created on her way here just have swapped details in each scene.
The sequence of events stays the same, but the faces revolve—-Robbie Meacham becomes Isre Din, the man with the birthmark becomes Hela—-and in each one there’s the smell of cooked meat, the feeling of a cold glass in her hand, the heat of the sun on her face as she loads up the Hummingbird.
The layers of contradictory memories will confuse the memory reader, who won’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s imagined, if Elegy’s done a good job.
They’re not careful with her. When the archer hauls her up on the horse in front of him, he almost wrenches her arm out of its socket.
He’s pressed too close, too warm, but he doesn’t try anything.
The horse, though, terrifies her. It tosses its head and whinnies.
Its body bounces her painfully. It’s cold here, in the mountains; her fingers are stiff and numb.
She can’t help but notice, as they ride the narrow road to Valla, that it’s beautiful.
She’s been to a lot of places on Earth, but she hasn’t lingered in any of them.
Here, she has the time to feel surrounded, swallowed by the mountains on every side.
The sunrise is an eruption of color, and the higher the sun rises, the more color spills into the valley in which Valla finds its home, like a can of paint tipping over.
They bring her through the streets of Valla on horseback, and all the way to the foot of the cliffs that border it on the west, where House Vidar stands waiting.
It’s a strange kind of luck, that the seal of the Sword of Cedre was alarming enough to the archer that he decided to bring her here—-here, where Theren Forint is allegedly still alive somewhere. This is exactly where she intended to go, just not how she intended to get there.
Her head is clear. She’s faced death hundreds of times.
Dodged bullets aimed by child soldiers firing out of an open Sparrow hatch.
Fought Talusar soldiers with only her spear in hand.
Once, she fled soldiers on horseback by hiding in a tree until they passed, confused, beneath her.
She’s a Scout and a former soldier of Cedre; she’s not easily rattled, not anymore.
But she still knows, with an eager kind of detachment, that the odds of survival are not in her favor.
House Vidar is a feat of engineering, a compound built into the side of a cliff.
The archer marches her through a door at the bottom of the mountain and to the foot of an interminable staircase that hugs its face.
Through narrow slits in the walls, she sees the city that fills the valley.
A lively place, full of open--air markets and people strumming old instruments and even, in a park they passed, clusters of people playing a board game in the cold, their hands in gloves and their cheeks bright.
A woman greets them at the foot of the stairs.
She’s Elegy’s height and wears her dark hair in a long braid.
Elegy wonders if she has status in Rava’s house, if that means she was present during the Getty attack.
But she remembers nothing from that night except Shir’s weight against her body, and the metal grate of the shuttle between her hands just before she turned back to see . . .-
Rava Vidar on the rooftop, with her hair braided into a crown.
“I received your message,” the woman says to the archer who captured Elegy. “Where’s the tracking device?”
He reaches into the pack at his side and offers it to the woman. She holds it up to her eye like it’s a diamond and she needs to determine its clarity. She weighs it in her palm.
“The Sword of Cedre,” she says.
Elegy comes back to herself abruptly. She’s supposed to be playing a part.
“There’s been a mistake,” she says, in English.
“Speak again, and I will pull out one of your fingernails,” the woman says to her—-no heat, just fact, her English clear enough despite a thick accent. She turns to the archer again. “Anything else on her ship?”
“Blank. All the parts seem to be Losani.”
“Okay.” She takes a bag of coin from her back pocket and hands it to the archer. “You did well. The commander is pleased.”
“Pleased enough to reassign me?” the archer says. “I shot the ship down, Nyx, did you tell her that?”
Nyx. She tries to remember the name.
“I gave her your message, and you were quite clear about your many achievements,” Nyx says. “As to what she’ll do with you, I don’t presume to know the mind of our commander, so you’ll have to wait and see.”
The archer sighs. He pockets the coin, turns around, and goes back the way he came.
Nyx grabs Elegy by the elbow and pulls her up the stairs.
All the rooms in the house are on the right, since the staircase is built into the side of the mountain.
After so many steps Elegy loses count, Nyx takes her through the only door on the left.
Hanging above the doorframe is a portrait of an older man with a pale, craggy face, a pair of antlers fixed to the wall behind him so it looks like he’s growing them from his shoulders. The emperor, Icar Talus.
Nyx drags her into the stone room and leaves her there, in the cold, for a long time.