23 November 2263
Perie, Caldin – Borderworlds
“They are holding on,” Sotheby announced when I emerged from the bathroom fifteen minutes later, toweling my hair dry. He was standing by the kitchen counter, a communications headset pressed to his ear, a pot of coffee ready on the stove. “Sounds like most of the security forces have spontaneously joined the Resistance.”
“That’s comforting. Has the Imperium landed more forces?”
“That situation hasn’t changed,” Ren said from where she sat on the floor, leaning against the couch where Wil lay unconscious. She’d changed her clothes, too—I knew better than to ask where Sotheby had found some for her—and she looked up at me with a slightly pained expression. “They’ve only dropped the seven landers, but we don’t know if there are reinforcements showing up in orbit or not. There’s a lot of confusion on the spaceport channels.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me.” I crossed to the couch, tossing my towel across the back of an easy chair before I crouched down in front of her. The bloody sheets were gone, though I didn’t ask what Sotheby—or Vasily—had done with them. I didn’t really want to know.
“Me neither,” she said, watching me. “Is he really going to be okay?”
“I hope so,” I said, then took her hand and squeezed. “Regardless, this is the safest place for him on the planet right now. It’s the safest place for any of us.”
“But we’re going to leave,” she said, meeting my gaze. Her voice was heavy with certainty. She was planning on coming with me when I went out there again, to try to turn the tide or die trying.
I closed my eyes for a second, exhaling. “I can’t hide.”
“I know,” she said. “No one’s going to force you to.”
I glanced at Wil’s pale face, then at Sotheby. Ren choked on a laugh.
“No one conscious is going to stop you,” she amended, squeezing my hand. Silence stretched for a few moments before she said in a small voice, “You said you figured out how to take the blocks down. I’m guessing you meant safely.”
I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I figured out the key.”
“Right.” She drew her knees up to her chest. “So how do we do this?”
“You let me in,” I said. “You’ll hear my voice in your head. I’ll try to be gentle but—well. I’ve only done this once.”
“I understand.”
She didn’t, but she also had no way of knowing how much, exactly, she didn’t understand. “Are you ready?”
She nodded. I shifted, turning to face her, then reached over, settling fingers against her cheek and temple. She kept a grip on my other hand, squeezing again. “Will it hurt?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It might.”
Ren nodded again. “Okay.”
“Hey,” I said softly. Her eyes met mine. There was uncertainty there, but her jaw was set in grim determination that was also reflected in her gaze. “I want you to remember that everything he’s done, he did for you.”
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t—”
I was already inside, charging toward the wall that represented the blocks on her memory. Being in someone else’s head like that can be strange, jarring, with the world outside overlaying what the mind’s eye sees in strange ways. This visualization, though—this was familiar. I’d been inside of Ren’s mind enough in the past that the landscape was far from unknown. There were cracks in the wall, and beyond its dark surface I could see color and light.
It was about to get a whole lot brighter.
In her mind, I yelled the name at the top of my proverbial lungs. It gained form, substance, transforming into something that smacked right into that wall in a burst of blue-white light bright enough to blind me.
Ren went tense, her hand spasming around mine as she sucked in a short, sharp breath.
The walls around her memories blew apart in front of me, the pieces vanishing even as I plunged into the sudden tidal wave of remembering.
She made a sound that was half a whimper, half a sob, falling forward into my arms. I held her tightly, still inside her mind, trying to help reorganize everything without looking too hard. These were her memories. I didn’t need to bear witness to all of them. All I wanted to do was to make sure they weren’t too tangled for her to sort out on her own.
I’d probably pay for what I’d done—I had the last time I’d done this for someone—but I never would have been able to forgive myself if I’d waited a minute longer to help her.
She’d been through enough already.
My head pounded as I reeled myself back in and Ren clung to me like someone drowning, her face buried against my neck as she sobbed. Her thoughts were a maelstrom, loud enough for me to hear even without trying. My shields had never been that great in some ways, not like the ones psychics growing up in Alliance space developed. Things were different in Imperium territory.
She was so afraid. I held her tight, threading my fingers through her hair as she cried, shaking. Her voice came muffled, but clear enough to understand amidst the wrenching sobs.
“I did it for him. I did it all for him, so he’d be safe, so he’d make it. I—I left him in that field so he’d live. It was our extract point and I thought I’d make it back in time, I really did. I thought it’d be okay. Oh, god. Oh, god.” She let out a shaky, rasping breath and pulled away just enough to look me in the eyes, her face tear-stained, eyes red and puffy. “Both of me love him,” she whispered, covering her mouth with one hand as she choked on another sob. “Caren loved him more than anything and Ren fell for him in a bar a thousand light years from where it started. I love him. I can’t lose him, Luc, not now.”
I drew her back in, hugging her tight. “You won’t,” I murmured into her hair. “I promise. Stay with him, okay? You’ll be safe here.”
“No,” she said, pushing me back, mopping quickly at her eyes. “No, no, I have to go out there with you. Someone has to watch your back.”
“I’ll go with him,” Sotheby said gently. Ren jerked, startled, as if she’d forgotten he was there.
My brow furrowed. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I still remember how to shoot a gun, Lucas. I was a soldier, once. This is my home, and I was called here for a reason. Maybe this was a part of it.”
“Okay,” I said. Ren’s fingers tightened around my arm.
“Are you sure?” she asked faintly.
“Ren,” I said gently. “I wouldn’t tell you to stay here if I wasn’t sure. Stay with him. Take something for the headache that you’re starting to get. If we need more backup, I’ll send out a mayday, okay?”
“Okay. Okay. As long as you’re sure.”
“Positive.” I pressed a kiss to her forehead and stood up. “Get Constance if he takes a turn, okay? She’ll be able to tell you if you need to get me back here.”
Ren nodded, hugging her knees against her chest again, pressing her back against the couch’s baseboard.
“Vasily will stay with you,” Sotheby said. “If you need anything, just tell him.”
“Thanks, Father Alex,” Ren said, smiling weakly. The smile shrank a moment later, worry in her gaze as she looked up at me. “Be careful.”
“Of course.”
Sotheby handed me a jacket, one I recognized as mine—I must have left it at some point—then headed back toward his bedroom. “Give me a moment, then we’ll head out.”
I just nodded and went to the kitchen counter, picking up the headset he’d been using to listen in to comm chatter on the bands we usually used. Many of the voices I heard as I lifted the headset to my ear were familiar—I could make out Kalsyn Gamgee’s voice, Conrad King, Conrad’s father, Thomas. That last surprised me a little, considering the last time Thomas and I had spoken, he’d flatly stated that he wanted out of the Resistance—and I’d let him go.
I guess when the chips are down, no one can really walk away.
Not for the first time since the Imperium started their landings, I was glad that Sam wasn’t here. She was my second, but she was also like my little sister—would have been, if her older sister Korea hadn’t vanished on a sector circle four years ago, back when she led the Resistance in our part of the Borderworlds. With Sam off-world, even if something went seriously wrong here, at least the Resistance in this sector would hang on.
“Are you ready?”
I lowered the headset, looking at Sotheby, who was dressed in a dark jacket over his slacks and dark shirt. There was a sidearm holstered at his hip, military-grade, one I was willing to lay odds was his service piece from back when he was still a member of the Alliance’s armed forces. “Ready if you are,” I said quietly.
“Once more unto the breach,” he said, then clapped a hand to my shoulder. “Come on. I think I know how we can get outside the walls without the Imperium forces realizing we were ever here.”
“As long as it doesn’t involve climbing over them again,” I muttered with a slight shudder.
Sotheby laughed. “No,” he said. “I think I have a better idea than that. Come on.”
We ducked out of the residence the same way I’d entered with Ren and Wil—through the storage area with its hidden door. Outside, a frigid, misting rain drifted on the wind and I shivered, tugging my jacket closer around my body.
“Indoors is the best place for him right now,” Sotheby said as he started walking quickly through the grass toward the northern corner of the grounds.
“What?”
“For Wil,” he said, glancing at me. “Can you imagine how miserable he’d be out here right now?”
I choked on a laugh. “Oh.” For as long as I’d known him, Wil had been overly sensitive to cold—something had happened to him before we met, something he’d always avoided talking about despite my making noises that it was a part of his medical history that I might need to know about. In truth, I was really more curious about it than I was concerned. “Yeah, he’d probably be complaining already.”
“Likely,” Sotheby said, pausing as we reached a hedge just shy of the wall. “Just as well.”
“I thought we weren’t going over the wall.”
“We’re not,” Sotheby said, nudging some branches aside. Through it, I could see a door.
“Where does that lead?”
“I’ll show you.” Sotheby grinned. The door opened inward, revealing a flight of stone steps leading down into shadows—shadows that were only deepened by the night and the storm, though the misting rain leant a strange, diffuse light to the world. It made me nervous to think about what it might look like beyond the walls, where there was certain to still be fighting in the streets—fighting we couldn’t hear because the rain and wind and the stone walls had all but dampened all but the nearest sounds.
Sotheby led the way down, leaving me to close the door behind us. Once it had clicked shut, Sotheby snapped a glowstick to life and led me down the stairs to a passageway wide enough for three people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder.
“What is this?” I asked in a hushed voice, somehow worried it would echo. It didn’t, despite the stone of the tunnel’s walls.
“Foresight in action,” Sotheby said. “This was built when they built the cathedral all those years ago. The memory of the Preytax Wars runs deep, especially inside the church.” He smiled weakly over his shoulder at me. “Not all of us have forgotten that threat.”
I shuddered slightly. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
“No one really does,” Sotheby said. “Never have we come so close to destruction as a people, as a species.”
“Have you shown Wil this?”
“The passageway?” Sotheby shook his head. “I don’t tell him all of my secrets, Dr. Ross. Just enough of them.”
I choked on a laugh. I had no doubt the priest was telling the truth in that regard. “So how far does it go?”
“Not too much farther,” Sotheby said. “It lets out near the river, near the park.”
The park was on the western edge of city center and the river wound its way the northern outskirts to a spot on the southwestern side. I wasn’t sure where the Imperium had landed troops, but I was fairly certain they would be focusing on the city’s administrative center and probably the city’s central power plant on the far northern edge of the city. The Imperium would want to secure city center first, which explained why the cathedral’s front gates were being watched—it was close to the city center. The only major targets of interest that were beyond city center were the now-destroyed Alliance post and the spaceport. One was destroyed, and there were strong odds that the Imperium was less worried about the spaceport than the city’s administrative heart.
They were more interested in securing the planet than stopping anyone from getting off it.
At least, that’s what I hoped.
They must know you’re here. They won’t hesitate to either take you into custody or kill you—depending on who’s in command and what their standing orders are. You know too many of their secrets to allow you to keep running free. You’ve hurt them too deeply.
We came to the exit door more abruptly than I expected—it was down another short flight of steps from the main passage, and Sotheby pushed it open easily on well-oiled hinges. We stepped out into the night, standing near the riverbank. The mist glowed all around us, but still there was no real sound.
Sotheby started walking along the river, heading north, but turned back when he realized I hadn’t followed.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“It’s so quiet,” I said. “You can’t even hear the sirens.”
“There might not be any,” he said. “Come on. We have work to do.”
In that, he was undoubtedly correct.
“There are rally points all over the city,” I told him, checking my footing to make sure that the ground wasn’t starting to get slick. It was still all right; the frigid rain wasn’t coating anything in ice yet. “We had a few plans in place. Come on. We’ll check the one in the park first.”
“What if none of your people are there?”
“Then we get some comms and supplies from the cache in the park and we find them.”
I set off at a jog and Sotheby fell in half a step later, trailing in my wake.
