Twelve #2
The voice that answered wasn’t any of theirs. It was harsh, and it buzzed at the edges like a bad speaker. The black man-sized thing leaning against the wall shifted and unfolded.
It was almost a human shape: a head, two arms, two legs.
If its right side had matched its left, it could have passed for a slightly taller-than-average man in black armor.
Instead, its right leg was a dark stick.
Its right arm was less than skeletal—the idea of an arm complete with a simple, schematic hand and elbow, places where muscles might have attached, but made from wire.
It walked forward as if its asymmetry were perfectly natural to it, but there was something in how it held itself that made Jessyn think of weariness.
It gestured toward her with its barely extant arm as it spoke again, but the featureless black head was turned toward the man.
The man replied, his voice deferential. Almost apologetic. He wouldn’t look directly at it. When he shrugged, the black thing shrugged back, mimicking him. Mocking him. The shame on the man’s face was clearer than words.
The black thing turned toward Jessyn. She felt a spike of fear, and then a burning resentment.
Oh , the still part of her thought. And now the fear turns into anger.
The Jessyn who had led the attack on the Night Drinkers in her rage at Irinna’s death flowed out and filled her up, leaving no room for the panic anymore.
She crossed her arms and thrust out her jaw.
If this is going to end in a fight, I’m tired of waiting.
The black thing’s helmet was strange. Featureless and smooth, but not quite opaque.
She felt like, in the right light, she’d have been able to see through the material to whatever was underneath.
A face, a mechanism. It might only have been an illusion.
She looked where its eyes would have been and waited.
It put out one wirelike idea of a finger and tapped her collarbone. It said something like Yez-zin .
“Jessyn,” she said. “Yes, my name is Jessyn.”
The black thing’s thin finger turned to its own chest, tapping there twice. It sounded like someone dropping pebbles on sheet metal.
Gor-fall , it said. Or Cor-wall . Or Tor-vall . Without lips for her to watch, it was harder than usual to parse.
“Gor-fall,” she said.
The black thing reached to its waist with its good hand and came up with a small metal device. The design wasn’t one she’d seen before, but the pressure of function in design wasn’t exclusive to evolution. She saw the barrel, the grip.
“Gun,” she said. “We call that a gun.”
The black thing turned the weapon back toward the cave wall. It gave a sharp, electric snap, and the stone wall puffed dust around a new hole the size of Jessyn’s thumb.
“Threat,” she said, dryly. “We call that a threat.”
The black thing turned and walked back to the wall where it had been, then folded down into place and went perfectly still.
She didn’t try to delude herself that it had turned off.
Now that she knew what it was, she could tell that the head—or helmet or whatever the best term might be—was set to watch the cave and everyone in it.
A sentry or a jailer. That wasn’t new for her.
She made her way to the far wall, out of anybody’s way, and sat down.
Her earlier fear and panic had gone, and now the fighting rage seeped away leaving only a deep exhaustion behind.
That was fine. She’d spent whole years of her life exhausted.
She was used to making herself think through complex problems while her body cried out for rest.
The man and the woman led the children in some kind of call-and-response ritual.
A lesson or a prayer or something else she didn’t have the context yet to understand.
The astounding thing, really, was how much context she did have.
Ever since the fall of Anjiin, she’d been trying to navigate the behaviors of beings that were less like her than she was like a bean sprout.
Even now, she didn’t know what color spectrum the Carryx experienced, how acute their sense of smell—or whatever analogous chemoreception they used—was.
The nature and shapes of their minds were a black box with a sign on it that said IF YOU FUCK UP, YOU DIE.
These new captors were people. When they smiled, she knew what it meant.
They couldn’t speak to each other, but they could negotiate by gesture.
She could watch them and understand what, in general terms, they were doing.
Compared to the Night Drinkers or the Rak-hund or the Carryx, these people were as explicable as a well-written warning.
Yes, they were the survivors of a terrible battle.
Yes, they were very plausibly going to kill her as a collaborator with their enemy.
Yes, she was as trapped by the black thing as she had been by Third Gardener.
But these were also her cousins, and the enemies of her enemies.
Her anxiety was familiar. She’d been living with anxiety for as long as she could remember.
The sense of possibility under it was new.
If the deathless enemy of the Carryx were humans, if the army standing against the empire were people like her, then maybe there was someplace to escape to. A place of safety where she didn’t wake up ready to die and work until bedtime on behalf of the things she expected to kill her.
Or maybe they’d be found, maybe Third Gardener would come looking for its lost sheep after all.
The half-formed black thing didn’t look like it could handle even a single Carryx warrior, much less all the guards from the ships.
And one Rak-hund would be enough to slaughter all the children and the round-faced woman and the man with the knife.
Or maybe the black thing would decide she wasn’t useful and kill her before she could think how to keep the war from washing all of them away. She had to get away if she was going to keep them hidden. She had to get away before they killed her. She wanted more than anything to stay.
A girl with short blond hair in tight curls broke off from the group and came toward her.
She had a wide leaf in her hands, and a lump of what looked like boiled grain in the middle of it.
Jessyn smiled and didn’t change the way she was sitting.
Approachable and safe, that’s me. The black thing didn’t move, but she was very aware of it.
She had a fair guess what would happen if she seemed to threaten one of the children.
The girl stopped about two steps away from Jessyn and put the leaf down, then skipped back away from it and her.
Jessyn bowed to the girl and waited for her to back safely away before she moved—slowly, carefully—to the leaf.
The grain wasn’t quite rice, but it was close.
Jessyn sat back down, working to keep the leaf balanced on one thigh.
The others were eating their own, scooping it into their mouths with two fingers. She imitated them.
When she shifted her weight, something in her pocket clicked against the stone.
The notebook. They hadn’t thought to search her, and her notebook was still in her pocket.
Jessyn kept her eyes down, focusing on the food.
If Gor-fall the Black Thing was watching her heartbeat or the temperature of her cheeks, it would see that she was reacting to something, and she didn’t want to give it any hint what.
She tried to keep from wolfing down her almost-rice, but it was hard.
She was suddenly very hungry, but she couldn’t seem like she was moving toward some event. Because now, she was.
When she was done, she took the leaf, pushed it back away from her so that, if they reused them, one of the kids could come collect it without coming too near her.
Hopefully, that would just make her seem like a compliant prisoner.
The lines of the notebook in the cloth of her pocket seemed as obvious and obtrusive as a lit sign, but none of them noticed.
She went back to sitting. And then, after she counted a thousand breaths, shifted to lying on her side.
And then, a thousand breaths after that, rolled her back to the group.
She slid the notebook out of her pocket as casually as she could, stretching one leg out while she did it in hopes of distracting anyone whose eyes were on her in the moment.
She hid the little square with her body.
She looked at what it said. The map had updated.
It showed her camp in the pear grove. There were half a dozen new entries from other researchers.
The geologist had found a series of wells north of the ships and was testing water from them.
A small essay about structural engineering using a dictionary’s worth of jargon that Jessyn would have fed through a half-mind to make sense of, even though it was her native tongue.
Garral P?r had an entry marked half an hour before about something that he thought might be an unopened storage facility with only a little fire damage.
And there, on the map, a short walk away from the evacuation zone, was the notebook she was using.
The man with the knife, dumbfuck that he was, had brought a tracking device into the heart of his camp.
All she would have to do was update her report. Something like Taken captive by the enemy with the coordinates that her notebook already knew. It would go to Third Gardener and the Carryx, and they’d either come save her or else blast the whole area and write her off as an acceptable loss.
Someone—the woman, she thought—coughed and said something. Jessyn couldn’t afford to take long with this. With one finger, she navigated to Garral P?r’s most recent report and added a note.
F OUND SOMETHING INTERESTING TO FOLLOW UP OUR CONVERSATION. C OMPARE NOTES? She included the coordinates that the notebook gave her and saved the report before she lost her nerve.
She turned the notebook’s face against the stone, rested her head on her folded arm, and waited to see whether the choice she’d just made came with a price.