Thirty-Two #2
The pale alien considered the question, gnawed for a moment on the end of a long finger, then shifted the symbols quickly, efficiently to a new set that took Dafyd almost a minute to decipher. To do so would invite scrutiny, and so the Deep Lothark both can and cannot.
He wiped the glowing slate and added in his usual I understand reply. The Soft Lothark looked around uneasily, as if it was confused by the conversation it was having.
Maybe it was. The exact dynamic between the murderous enforcers of the Carryx and the other self they traded back and forth on their lips and skin followed a logic that Dafyd hadn’t seen before.
He wasn’t at all certain the Soft Lothark understood what the Deep Lothark was or what it was saying.
To them, the conversations might be nothing more than flailing at the glowing shapes, unconscious of any reason for the actions they took.
Some of them might not know how to read.
He reached for the letters again, then waved them away.
He had been speaking with the Deep Lothark for most of the afternoon, and the effort left him spent and exhausted.
The Soft Lothark rose from its place, scratched its arm, and ambled back toward the doorways leading into the body of the vast, arcing Carryx tower.
The Rak-hund by the doorway gave its body a little shake as the Lothark passed, like a sleepy dog greeting an old friend, then went still again.
Dafyd sat under his little tree, looking out at the glowing pastel expanse of a sky so familiar that he barely noticed it anymore. His eyes were tired.
He was due to have dinner with Korham and Andermus.
The first wave of the human moiety that had been taken out into the universe alongside the Carryx were starting to roll back.
A little over two hundred and fifty people had gone out to see whether they could serve Carryx interests at spots throughout the empire.
Seventy had died, including Rickar. One hundred and sixteen were coming back, including Jessyn and Campar.
The rest remained out among the stars. The dead and the lost weren’t Dafyd’s problem.
Housing and feeding the ones who returned was.
Andermus wanted something she called a decontamination period before the returning humans were permitted in with the population at large.
Korham argued for assigning them new quarters and duties at once, as encouraged by his faith.
Dafyd didn’t care one way or the other, except for the growing sense of anticipation and dread.
Campar. Jessyn. They had been his friends once. He hoped they still were. Besides Uuya Tomos and the spy, they were the only ones he felt safe talking to about the plans he was forming. The only people left that he came close to trusting.
When the woman arrived, he mistook her at first for Andermus.
She had the same slight frame and a confidence to the way she walked around the Rak-hund curled in the shadow of the archway.
The hair was wrong, though, and the skin closer in tone to the Kaul family light bronze than Llian’s nearly translucent white.
As she got closer the air filled with a peppery incense odor, and Dafyd found himself struggling to place her.
She was familiar. He should have known her, but he couldn’t put a name to the face.
She sat down where the Soft Lothark had been. She frowned in concern, and said, “Have you been sleeping? You look tired.”
Dafyd jerked back like she’d lunged at him with a knife. “No. This? No. Absolutely not. This is insane.”
“Dafyd—”
“I can’t have people popping in and out of existence. There are a little over three thousand people, all of whom came over together. All of whom have been in a tight-knit community since we arrived. Now here’s some new person. Where did she come from?”
The spy made a gentling motion with her hands. The air smelled vaguely of spice. “I’ve thought this all through. It’ll be all right.”
“You need to go and turn back”—he glanced at the archway, the sleepy Rak-hund guard, and lowered his voice—“back into Jellit. You know that was what I meant. Not this brand-new person no one has ever met before that we have to explain.”
“It’s already happened,” she said. “My name is Clae Audin. I worked for Else Yannin back at Dyan before she was with Tonner’s team.
I already have one person pretty sure she remembers me from back then, and I can get others.
I’ve talked with Brun. I’m on the protein translation team, and you— Wait! ”
Dafyd closed his mouth.
“And you need me there,” she continued. “With Tonner gone, I bring everything that Else knew. I am literally the best-qualified person alive. Better than Brun. I can get it back on track. No one else can do that, and it has to happen.”
“No,” Dafyd said. “This can’t be the way.”
The spy lowered her head. For a moment, he thought she was crying, but he was wrong. There was no grief in her eyes. Just regret.
“You’re in charge of so many things,” she said, “that I understand how you might feel like you were in charge of this too. But you are not. It’s my decision, and I’ve decided. You should accept that and let it go so that I don’t have to decide something else.”
“Decide something else,” Dafyd echoed. And then, “Are you… threatening me?”
“If we didn’t have a common enemy, you told me you’d spend the rest of your life finding a way to burn me down,” she said. Her face was very calm. Very still. “But we do.”
Dafyd didn’t have a name for the emotion, but it started like a hand pressing gently against his throat and bloomed down into his chest. It reminded him of being at a zoological park as a child and locking eyes with a full-grown lion for the first time.
He would have called it fear, except there was something more with it.
Something wide and wild and as awe-inducing as the stars.
He looked away. He took a breath.
“Is that what she looked like? The other one?”
“Ameer?” the spy said. “No. She didn’t look like this.”
“And the name you’re using?”
“Clae.”
“All right,” Dafyd said. “Fine. We’ll make this work. We haven’t really compared notes since Tonner died.”
“I’ve been busy,” the spy—Clae—said. “I can apologize if you want.”
“No no. That would be pointless. But I’ve let a lot of things slip. I’ve been spending a lot of time focused on the Deep Lothark.”
“The what?”
Dafyd laughed without humor. “There’s a lot to catch up on. The way that I’m using Uuya Tomos to build a secret culture of resistance out of songs and stories, the Lothark built one out of skin oil.”
When the spy both frowned and smiled, there were two perfectly symmetrical dimples at the sides of her mouth. She pushed her hair behind her ear in a gesture Dafyd remembered, but the hair was black, not the rich auburn of old copper. He felt a moment of sorrow, then pushed it away.
“Before we get to that, do you have a way to get in touch with the enemy? The ones who sent you?”
Clae shook her head. “I sent out one packet to them with all my early observations and data. I have reason to think it was received, but there’s no protocol for them to acknowledge it.
That was before we found the archive, though.
I don’t think I could get the information we have now out to them if I had a constant connection and a thousand years. ”
“How did you send this ‘packet’ to them?”
“I’m not going to talk about that, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not a method I can use again.”
Dafyd leaned forward and chewed at the tip of one finger.
He didn’t realize at first that he was mimicking the Soft Lothark.
“All right. That’s a problem we’ll need to solve.
Hopefully when the others start coming back we can find some strategies.
I need a way to send them messages and also to get messages back. ”
“Tall order,” she said. “Tell me about what you want to use it for. How much traffic do you want to pass back and forth?”
“Enough to coordinate an attack.”
“On what?”
Dafyd lifted his hands to the gridwork sky, the vast and curving towers, the dark procession of ziggurats that marched to the horizon.
“The Sovran’s here, on this planet. This is the empire’s core, so this is where we break it.
Assassinate the Sovran and sow chaos for long enough for the enemy to come in and do to these bastards what they did to Anjiin. ”