I SMELL THE RIVER BEFORE I see it, moving water that reeks of life and death. When I open my eyes, it rushes below me at the bottom of the hill, gray like the sky above it. Glass explodes nearby. Soon the scent of the river gives way to char. My nose stings from the fumes, and I see smoke rising from a city in the distance. I don’t recognize it. Too much wood, too much stone. The architecture is all wrong. Uneasiness and disorientation steel my spine, and I try to stand, but a dainty gloved hand holding a pair of delicate binoculars presses down on my thigh to stop me.
It’s Tamar. Her biosuit is gone, and she’s in a purple dress with a high collar and small buttons trickling down from her neck to her chest. She’s holding a white lace umbrella over her head in the other hand.
“Where are we?” I ask.
The corners of her mouth turn down in a frown as she adjusts the binoculars and considers something in the distance.
“Paris, 1789,” she mutters. “Earth.”
“Earth!”
“Oui, monsieur. There is about to be a revolution. See?”
Her dainty hand points to a couple across the river. They’re arguing.
“The boy in the plum-colored waistcoat and stockings is you, and the girl in the periwinkle frock is me. He’s trying to convince her to come with him to New Orleans.”
“She doesn’t look too interested in the deal,” I say, beating back my confusion to follow the thread of conversation. I look behind me, under the bench, lift up my feet to test the gravity, anything to help me determine whether this is a dream or a simulation. Nothing gives me anything to go on.
“The Civil War is nearly seventy years in their future. Louisiana is notorious for its treatment of slaves, the gens de coleur as well if you consider the Knights of the White Camelia. A Paris in flames might be better than all that. There is also the opportunity for her to train under the famed composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.”
“Long title.”
“Oui. He was one of the queen’s favorites, as close to the nobility as a Black man can get, back when that meant something. He’s in London at the moment, so chasing that dream is a bit reckless.”
“But—”
She places a gloved finger to my lips, and my mouth vibrates from the contact, like it’s a button that she knew just how to push.
“Wait. This is the good part.”
The guy, or the other me, gets down on one knee. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I can assume by the way the other Tamar wraps her arms around his neck that he’s gotten her to agree to whatever request he’s made.
“Ah! Young love,” Tamar says.
“Great. Happy ending. Can you tell me why we’re here? What all this is?”
She looks at me, eyes full of laughter, like I’ve just told her a funny joke. “Happy ending? Silly boy.”
I pull her hand from my cheek and hold it in my lap. She’s acting very strange in what is disconcertingly an even stranger situation.
“Why are we here?” I ask, my voice soft, my gaze searching for an answer hidden in her expression. I’ve heard of mind worms that can extract information from your subconscious. Make you see things that aren’t there. This isn’t like any dream I’ve ever had. I’ve never watched myself from the outside.
“I don’t know,” she replies with sincerity.
“Is this real? A vision? A dream?”
“A memory, maybe,” she says, her eyes looking past me to something I cannot see. Then she shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
“What do you know?” I growl, suddenly angry but trying hard not to scare her.
She leans close as if she’s going to tell me something, her expression shining with a secret. “You need to wake up.”
“What?”
“WAKE UP!”
My body jerks as I sit up straight, eyes wide open. Restraints bite into my wrists, and my stomach roils with the aftereffects of what I can only imagine is poison.
They got us.
I knew the moment she looked at me that something was wrong. Maybe if I’d heard it, I could have known they were flanking us, I would have known where to run. But as my commander would say, if wishes were fishes, we’d never starve. They hit us both with tranquilizer darts. If they were bullets we’d be dead; synth lasers and there’d be nothing left of us but bones.
They’ve dragged us to some hidden rebel outpost. Who knows how long we’ve been out or how far they’ve dragged us from our original location. A Sueronese woman, tall and lean with skin the color of bellflowers, pushes a communication device in front of me.
“It won’t work,” I tell her, trusting that the old tech is translating correctly. It’s not a Republican design, but I’ve seen some similar to it, if a little bit newer. “My ears are injured.”
She shakes her head and says something in return, but I can’t make out the shape of the words; her lips are hidden behind her beaded headdress. The communicator lights up, but the translation is jumbled and the grammar is off as it scrolls across the screen. I’m getting frustrated, and by the way she kicks the dust in front of me, she’s downright angry.
I switch to the little Sueronese I know, rolling my r’s and hitting my consonants extra hard. I lower my pitch at the ends of my sentences to show deference, and grant her the honorific of “grandmother,” though I am sure she’s still a maiden by her people’s standards.
“Grandmother, I beg your forgiveness for my existence. My sister and I are only travelers.”
She stops in front of me, but I don’t look up. I keep my eyes planted on her toes, stained an even darker shade of blue from walking barefoot on the mowed grass. Her large hand grips my chin and thrusts it upward.
“Speak, child,” she says, or possibly, “Confess, insect,” or some other combination. The words light up and scroll very quickly. The vines are digging into my wrists, and Tamar is still unconscious beside me. At least they’ve turned her onto her side so she won’t choke on her own vomit.
“I am of low standing, Grandmother, a missionary. I cannot hear well, and my sister has only accompanied me in order to avoid the war on our home planet.”
She spits in Tamar’s direction. She’s aware I’m lying. I lean forward and dip even lower so that my medallion peeks out from my undershirt. It glints in the firelight so I know she can see it.
“Priest?” she asks.
I can hear the question even if I’m not sure what she’s asking. My ears have stopped ringing so loudly and words, low as they are, are finally getting through. I force myself not to jerk in Tamar’s direction as she comes to. She groans and begins to cough and spit. Her brain is a jumble of sounds and half-formed questions.
You were hit with a seeker. We are in a cave compound, I say into her mind.
Escape routes? she asks.
She’s still coughing and spitting, but her telelink is strong, maybe too strong. I’m not just getting sounds; I’m getting images. It’s the chemicals in her blood.
None that I’ve seen so far. The compound is surrounded by an invisi- shield. It blends into the landscape. It’s so good the rodents smash into it every so often. When they pile up, they send someone out to clean up the mess. They’ll have to let us out if we want to get out, I say quickly.
She retches hard and gasps for breath. I move closer, but Grandmother presses a finger into my forehead, scratching a nail across the skin until it breaks. I suck in air and clench my teeth. I hear her through my connection with Tamar.
“Your people live on lies. This will tear the truth from your tongue,” Grandmother says, like a curse.
The paste she rubs into my forehead wound is cold, reminiscent of the numbing agent they poured on my leg before it was severed and replaced with a prosthetic three years ago.
I nod in Tamar’s direction, more than a little concerned that she can now hear my inner thoughts and not just the ones I push toward her. I’m not sure what chemicals they’ve already flooded into our systems.
Are you okay? I ask.
I’ll be fine. What is she doing to you? she says, scared.
Bush magic. A hallucinogen. She thinks it will force me to tell her the truth.
Will it work? she asks before she coughs again. Yellow bile spews out this time.
Grandmother mutters something to the guards I can’t make out—not that I’ve been able to understand her anyway. They’re posted on the other side of the veiled partition that makes up the “room” we’re being kept in. A guard comes in with rags and a bowl of water to clean up Tamar’s mess. Without my helmet my senses are heightened from the previous suppression. The stink is ten times worse than it should be. My face doesn’t show my disgust. My training and my respect for Tamar keep my reactions in check.
They lace the food of all the intelligence recruits with poisons to build up our immunity, I offer. Tamar’s smart. She’ll be looking for signs of whether I’ve been affected like she has. Most people don’t know what counterintelligence training is like. It may not be combat forward, but it isn’t a walk in the park.
She’s shocked. She doesn’t say it, but I can… feel it. And I can see it: a yellow-orange ribbon like smoke erupts from Tamar’s skin. Her emotions look like colors. Synesthesia. The poison is having an effect. This is not good, not good at all.
Whatever I say. Whatever they do. Do not negotiate. Do not make deals. A translator won’t help you with the language. Words have triple meanings here, based on who says them and how they say it. You are the meek and chaste sister to a young priest. Repeat it, I say, my voice calm but serious.
I’m trained in seven martial arts forms. We’re getting out of here. Where are the bags? she retorts.
Don’t, I repeat.
If they wanted to kill us, we’d be dead already, she argues.
I’m starting to see… things I shouldn’t, I confess. The agent she gave me is topical. It shouldn’t last as long as—
She shakes her head slowly. You can’t see what I see. That gash is deep. You’re bleeding into your eyes. It’s fear talking, Tamar says.
“Do not insult me,” I mutter through clenched teeth to emphasize the point, the pain taking over the shred of control I held in my voice.
“Stop insulting me. We will not die here. I’ll make sure of it,” she whispers out loud.
Our eyes are locked in a battle of wills; maybe that’s why we don’t notice the child until it is too late. She must be Grandmother’s novice, an adolescent just barely six feet tall with a shaved head and animal-hide boots that soften her walk. Recognition catches me off guard.
It’s the girl from the cave.
When she breaks the clay jar in front of Tamar and me, I instinctively hold my breath. A second later my eyes clench shut, but Tamar is too sick to do the same. Grandmother chuckles, a deep throaty vibration that rattles the ground. I try to apologize again, to make one last plea, but my brain won’t cooperate. I have no choice; I need air. The oil smells like dead leaves and chrysanthemum tea. It smells like the old and the unknown. I’m losing my grip.
“Grandmother, please…”
“Save your strength, spy. You will tell me your truth in time.”