Chapter 35 #2
“You did make an entrance,” she points out. She runs a hand through her hair, and very carefully doesn’t look at him as she asks, “Your arm?”
“Well--tended,” he replies, and it doesn’t matter if she looks at him or not—-she blushes anyway.
She can’t figure out how to ask him what she really wants to know. Not about his arm, but about whether yesterday damaged him in some other, deeper way. Do you feel okay? seems too intimate for them.
Parekh spares her from having to. She groans, and sits up. “Oh my God, is that coffee?”
“Special delivery,” Elegy says.
“It’s real coffee,” Parekh says, marveling. She’s upright now, sticking her entire nose in the paper cup. “Wonder of wonders.”
“I’ll let you wake up.” He pulls away from the wall, glances at Elegy, and leaves the room.
Elegy swallows the last of her coffee, and sets the cup down next to her. She can feel Parekh staring at her, but she’s not going to break the silence first—-not going to give Parekh the satisfaction.
“It’s all right, you know,” Parekh says.
“What?”
Parekh rolls her eyes.
“Come on, I’m not stupid,” she says. “He’s gorgeous, and barely looks at anyone who isn’t you, and you’ve been celibate for four years. It’s biology. Shir would understand.” She tilts her head. “For that matter, Shir would understand if it was more than biology.”
“It’s not,” Elegy says firmly.
Parekh sips her coffee, her expression inscrutable. “I’m just saying, don’t beat yourself up about it.”
Elegy listens to the rain.
“Thanks,” she says, after a while.
Shir always used to say that walking through Naarm Stronghold made him feel like he was inside a bubble.
She understands the comparison—-everything here is made of glass.
In the sun, it’s hot and bright, every surface reflective, too shiny to touch.
In the rain, it’s loud, the drumming echoing throughout the building.
All the walls are sharp and angular, coming to points above them.
From the air, it looks like someone swept up a pile of broken glass and left it there on the coastline.
At the center of the building is the old fort, an old--fashioned structure made of red brick that no one could bear to tear down, but it serves only as a museum, now. They pass it, roped off for repairs, on the way to meet Saetang.
They were invited here for a reason, and it wasn’t to rescue Julia Martin. It was to review the evidence of the Talusar attack—-the one in which the Talusar took nothing, hurt no one, and left a single memory--addled witness.
They meet Saetang on the landing pad, where the general is surveying their ship from a distance.
It’s parked right where Parekh left it, next to the entrance, bits of branches still stuck to its wings.
Saetang stands under an awning, sheets of rain falling to the pavement right in front of them.
Their boots are covered in its splatter.
“Your Grace,” they say. “Interesting detour you took on your way here.”
“Well, you know how it is,” Elegy says. “You train yourself to search and rescue for long enough, and you end up searching and rescuing completely by accident.”
Saetang’s smile is knowing. “And the fact that your sister didn’t approve a mission is, I’m sure, mere happenstance.”
Elegy doesn’t have anything to say to that. She just shrugs.
But Saetang seems content not to linger on the subject.
“However you got here, I’m glad you’re here.
” They look at Theren, their eyes lingering on his bruised jaw.
“All of you. The attack we experienced weeks ago confused me, and I don’t like to be confused by the Talusar.
I hope you can help me make sense of it. ”
A soldier steps out of the building with a stack of umbrellas on his arms. Saetang thanks him, and distributes them to Elegy, Theren, Arias, and Parekh in turn.
Then, shrouded by black fabric, they all walk across the rain--soaked landing pad to the barrier that stretches along the edge of the seawall.
It’s a safety barrier, not intended to keep out intruders.
The seawall itself is sufficient for that, a sheer, smooth surface with waves battering it at the bottom.
They all stand at the barrier in a line, looking out at the storm--tossed sea. Rain sprays Elegy’s cheeks even with the umbrella up.
“This is where they came in. They scaled the wall to get up here, which we didn’t realize was possible,” Saetang says. “You can see the anchor points.”
They point down at the stone beneath them. Elegy squints through the rain to see a small hole in the stone beneath her, no bigger than a walnut. There are others beneath it, in a zigzag line down to the water.
Saetang turns, and points across the landing pad to the hangar, a huge white building with doors so large Elegy can’t fathom them opening.
“Then they ran across the landing pad to the hangar, where our witness was working as a guard. He let them in, probably against his will. They used a candlesnuffer to knock out the hangar’s electricity, so we don’t have any footage of them inside the building.
But we know they spent ten minutes there, then left. ”
“A candlesnuffer?” Theren asks.
“It’s a Cedrae relic, from before the Empty Time,” Elegy says.
She has to raise her voice to be heard over the drumming rain.
The hem of her pants is already soaked. “It emits a suppressive energy field, not unlike the one emitted by a large number of Fevered people, like in a Talusar city. It disables all electricity, all technology. I wonder how they got their hands on it to begin with—-there aren’t many. ”
“That’s where my mind went first,” Saetang says. “But we can only find out so much from our usual sources. I wondered if you could use more unusual ones.”
“Scout sources, you mean,” Elegy says. “So that’s why you asked me here.”
Saetang taps the side of their nose. “Exactly.”
“I’ll look into it.” A piece of salvage as rare as a candlesnuffer would be memorable, but whoever sold it won’t want to admit to making a deal with a Talusar. “And nothing was missing from the building? They didn’t take anything?”
“I’ll give you a copy of the inventories, if you like. Nothing missing, nothing strange.”
“Please do. Did Julia Martin try to restore your witness’s memory yet?”
“She did. I’m afraid it exhausted her; she’s now resting.
” Saetang’s umbrella bumps into Elegy’s.
“As we anticipated, the witness seems to be damaged beyond repair. He can’t remember his own name, let alone what happened during the attack.
Julia said his memory is like a paint--splattered canvas.
No order, just colors. He’s being transferred to a long--term--care facility this afternoon. ”
Elegy looks at Theren, remembering something he said to her about his own memory gap. She asked him if someone erased his memory, and he said, No, that work is indelicate. I would show other signs of brain damage. Now she understands what he meant.
“She didn’t see anything interesting in his memory?” Elegy asks. “Even something that seemed like nothing?”
“She said she saw random images from throughout his life. Heard bits of phrases. ‘Where we come from is where we belong,’ that Restorationist motto. You can probably thank the Sword for that one, that speech she gave was broadcast in every news pavilion for days. A song quote, ‘restless love guides my feet,’ something like that. And a few words in Latin. ‘Equo ne credite.’ I had one of our linguists translate it earlier, it just means ‘don’t trust the horse.’ ”
“Don’t trust the horse?” Arias says. “Oh, right. Equo, equine. Horse.”
Saetang nods. “I told you, no order, just colors. Nonsense.”
They all walk back toward the base. Elegy’s hands are cold. She’s desperate for more coffee, or for a hot shower. But there’s a tugging feeling in her fingers that means there’s a message waiting for her.
“Do you have a quill?” Elegy asks.
Saetang nods, and reaches into their sleeve. The feather is short and flared on one side, and the metal the quill is made of is tinted green. Elegy starts writing, and the quill takes over, turning her tidy handwriting loopy and loose. Hela’s handwriting.
MEETING WITH K IS SET FOR TOMORROW. 1300 HOURS.
In all the chaos of rescuing Julia Martin, Elegy almost forgot about what she asked Hela to do: contact Kesia Forint to set up a meeting so they can ask her about the so--called “alien launch” she saw over twenty years ago.
It doesn’t feel as urgent as Primary Avka Becken waiting in an interrogation room, or even Julia Martin resting in the hospital ward before she can unearth Theren’s hidden memory.
But it’s a reminder: Elegy is needed back at home.
“Unfortunately, I think this has to be a short trip,” Elegy says to Saetang. “Mind if I interrogate your prisoner before I go?”