42. FORTY-TWO #2
“Calver!” Her back was to his as bits continued to fly from the tanka latched to her arm. She stopped to load another bit strip into the launch. “Calver!” Her voice was so shrill, it was hard to distinguish from the clanging of steel.
The Survivor blossomed.
Calver saw what was to come: the phantom of a bit striking true.
His weapon moved before he put thought to it—good, considering his thoughts had the consistency of mud.
The dowaga came to a stop inches from Fankalo’s face, the bit ricocheting off it.
He’d been wrong. She couldn’t help herself. There were too many.
A soldier clad in the tan ensemble of Pazir’s royal guard assaulted them from the left.
{Let me.}
He couldn’t trust it near his sister.
{Your mind has been altered. You will not be fast enough. You will not be strong enough. And she will die for your obstinacy. Inhibitors have no effect on me. Submit.}
Around him, Fankalo’s crew dropped like heavy rain. They would lose. Calver looked at his sister, whose teeth were bared, eyes alight with determination and fury. She could not see it: they would not make it out alive. He would not witness her taken from him twice.
Calver submitted.
The void became victory.
“Calver!”
So different, the sound of her voice now.
“Stop!”
He knew the sound of hatred well. The Survivor fell. Calver rose.
Excruciating heat ripped through his arm.
A bit. He whipped around to face the threat and stumbled.
Fankalo stood before him, calf-deep in a river of runoff rushing into the sea.
It was like a bone bent at the wrong angle, like an insect’s lost appendage still moving, to see water that color.
His mother had dyed a shawl once—festive for the Red Wing recruitment.
The water was crimson, like their once-cooking-pot.
“Calver!”
There were tears in her eyes. Her tanka was leveled on him. He clapped a hand to his arm. Warm liquid gushed between his fingers from the wound she had put there.
“Don’t make me test my aim.”
The whole shore held still, the eye of a hurricane. No wave dared to crash. No voice dared to call. No salt dared to sting.
They used to scour the coastline after a rain like this, his sister and him, looking for flotsam and debris, yearning for treasure. Like mounds of kelp brought in by the storm, the bodies lay face down around him, taken in the back. None bore the uniform of Pazir’s royal guard.
Ice struck his veins as his vision tunneled. He dropped the dowaga. It sploshed into the rusty waters pooling around his feet. His knees hit the sand.
Kill him. She should kill him, right now. What was she waiting for?
Fankalo trained her weapon on him for long seconds. The smoke smell heightened, the bird calls amplified, as he waited for her to flex her wrist.
She disengaged, eyes narrowed, lip curled. She turned and dashed past him. He would have rather his forehead had made a soft landing for her bit.
Somewhere behind him, Fankalo barked out, “Stand ready!”
Dozens on the beach, all far from his reach, moved at her command. Behind him, a chorus of screams of “At ready” came in reply, one after the next in a spine-chilling roar. Calver fell from knees to backside, pain, vertigo, and nausea in fierce competition.
The silhouettes of at least fifty figures still stood on the mainland rise. Fankalo leapt forward, her body like a switch: long, lean, and corded with muscle. She projected to them, “Your dissenting ‘prince’ is dead.” Was he? “Stand down and permit our assembly before the king.”
She suddenly had the posturing of a fox catching a scent on the wind.
Her eyes closed. Her chin lifted. Like she was listening for something.
Moments later, she pulled the canteen from her waist and dipped it low beneath the still-red-running stream.
She brought it to her lips, made a show of wiping her mouth on her sleeve, and cast it to the side.
“Should any other dissent occur, they should know that this is only the tip of my wrath!” The words tore from her throat like the voice of Chaos: fury, power, and majesty in one vibration.
One by one, the silhouettes on the rise raised their arms toward the smoke-screened sky.
Calver’s stomach roiled as his mind showed him what came next: an enemy from behind. He possessed no will to stop it. An arm locked around his head. A needle plunged into his neck. A dark hue quickly saturated his vision. His body spasmed, kicking up sand.
Mitek’s voice in his ear, cut with ice. “Easy, Reaper,” and then aloud for others, “Ay! Get ’im under the arms. Brig ’im quick. We’ve got places to be.”
Fankalo paced the narrow passageway between the hull of the Rogue’s Rapture and the brig where Calver sat.
He couldn’t know how long had passed since he had been put to sleep on the beach in Pazir.
The waves had been under him for what seemed like days, but he hadn’t eaten, and hunger had yet to hit.
His eyes traced his sister’s movement. He offered nothing in the way of signaling.
What could he say? It was a miracle he was still breathing, after what he’d done.
He pulled the Survivor’s memories into focus: he’d killed the Pazirian prince.
His explosives had taken out half of the dissenting envoy.
And then he’d killed… with the dowaga, five Ghosts?
With the Aetech lamps… It was hard to say.
“Cal.” Fankalo’s fingers caught in her hair. “I don’t even know how to say this.” She stomped a foot, face screwed up, and he was briefly reminded of a petulant child he once knew, not wearing the skin of the queen of the raiders. “You’ve put me in a difficult position.”
A difficult position. Definitely not the words of the girl he knew. He’d rarely had a moment in his own mind in years. In that time, she had learned to speak diplomatically. It must have been the Chori man’s—Drogus’s—influence.
He lifted his eyes to the bars.
“You and I both know nothing can keep you here. You could have broken free at any point. You are choosing to stay.” She swallowed, face sallow, with no hint of its usual spark. “I appreciate your gesture of good faith, but it is too late.”
“Fuck!” she screamed. There she was, his sister. “You’re sorry?” Her words picked up force like a rogue wave. “You’re sorry?!”
He flinched.