CHAPTER 7
Raena pulled the red lever that blew the door off the escape pod. The wind outside tugged at her, but she kept a good hold on the pod as she looked out. The ground was still a surprisingly long way down. It seemed to be mostly rock, broken by rivers of sand. She wondered if this desert had once been the bed of
an ancient ocean. How long had the Templars lived on Kai? Had they known the planet when this desert had been lush as the jungles on Lautan?
Now that she could see out of the pod, she discovered it was almost sunset on Kai. Perfect. Darkness would give her more shadows in which to hide.
She was still up high enough that there would be plenty of time to put the pod’s homing beacon out of commission before she jumped. Raena hauled herself up onto the roof of the escape pod, but the beacon wasn’t up there. Hm. Maybe she couldn’t smash it until she landed.
The parachute snapped and fluttered above her head, yellow against the crimson sky. She could see where the other pods had landed behind her, their parachutes bright as flowers against the dark brown ground. Turbo skiffs had already stopped to check out two of the other pods. A third skiff still chased the Khangho, barely a glint at the horizon’s edge, heading back into space. Excellent. One less thing to worry about.
Raena crouched at the base of the cables connecting the parachute to the pod. She wished she had some gloves. Then she opened up her survival tool and used the blade to saw at one of the three cables. It nearly took her eye out as it twanged past her head.
Gonna have to be more careful, she told herself, or she’d had that scar back again. Maybe this time it really would cost her an eye.
She pulled the spool of survival cord from inside the rucksack and wove herself a sling between the remaining two cables. Once she had herself tied in, she bent and used another tool to pry the cable anchor loose from the top of the escape pod.
The parachute yanked her suddenly upward as the escape pod plunged away beneath her. Raena concentrated on relaxing, letting the wind bear her away. The pursuers would be after her soon enough. They’d be moving faster than windspeed or gravity.
The escape pod clanged down the rock behind her. Only then did she realize how quiet the desert was. The only other sound she heard was the rush of wind in her ears.
Ahead of her rose a mountainous stone mesa cut by a maze of narrow fissures. Raena steered the parachute by shifting her weight. She aimed herself toward the uplands. There might be wildlife there, but she would have more cover than on the bare rock below.
Twilight drew on faster now. No lights glowed anywhere below her, but off in the distance behind her, she could see Kai City reflected against the clouds. It was a hundred kilometers or more distant, too far to hope for help.
One of the skiffs rose from the escape pod it had been investigating.
Raena stopped lying stiff and flat, facing into the wind. She forced her body downward, spread-eagled to catch as much wind as possible. It slowed her somewhat, so that when the updraft rose from the base of the mesa, she steered herself over the mesa top. Then she clenched her teeth, grabbed the cradle of rope, and sawed the survival tool through it.
The wind tore the parachute away. It grew smaller as it flapped off.
And a helmet, she thought. Wish I had gloves and a helmet.
Raena tucked into the fall, but the pack on her back made landing awkward. She lost a layer of skin on one leg. At least she managed not to break anything.
Before she could uncurl herself, a turbo skiff whizzed beyond her, chasing the parachute.
She hadn’t much time. Growling at herself to move, Raena got to her feet. She limped over to the nearest crevasse and slipped over its edge, feeling for toeholds as she went.
The sky grew darker by the moment. Dark was good. She could work in the darkness.
Raena struggled to keep her mind focused on the climb, wedging her fingers into the rock, keeping her body relaxed, evening out her breathing.
She hadn’t gone far before her mind wandered again. The rock face was still hot from the daytime. It didn’t burn her, but it hinted at how warm the desert would get, come morning.
Not only did she lack shoes, but she’d left her gargoyle goggles on Lautan. She remembered how bright the light had been last time she’d been on Kai. Crossing the desert in daylight was likely to burn her eyes right out of her head.
Focus, she ordered herself. She’d lost track of how far down the canyon face she’d come. It jolted her when she put her foot down on a boulder just above the canyon floor.
Searchlights caressed the top of the mesa overhead. One or more of the skiffs had come to look for her.
Raena hopped down off the boulder to the canyon’s floor. Then she darted into the darkness.
A channel ran straight down the middle of the serpentine canyon, clearly engineered rather than natural. Raena wondered if there used to be irrigation ditches on the surface of Kai. Maybe she could still find water. That would become important in a day or two, when she finished the water in her pack.
Without warning, the crevasse spat her out into a courtyard barely visible in the twilight. The ornate facades of a handful of buildings faced the courtyard. Bihn told her there were Templar ghost towns on Kai. It seemed that she had discovered one.
Raena ducked into the middle doorway. The building was pitch black inside. She forced herself farther in, wondering if Kai had critters who would seek shelter inside the abandoned houses. She had an emergency lantern in her survival pack, but if her pursuers saw it flashing around in the darkness, they’d know exactly where to look for her.
She stopped to listen. The old house held its breath. Raena couldn’t hear anything beyond the rush of blood in her ears, just like being in her tomb. Remembered terror shivered over her.
Raena forced herself to sit on the stone floor, to breathe in the darkness. She was safe for now. She had a little water and some food. They didn’t know where she’d gone.
She pulled one of the nutritional bars from her pack and unwrapped it, careful to put the wrapping back in the pack so it couldn’t betray her later. She nibbled the bar, trying to eat it slowly rather than gobble it down as her body wanted to do. It tasted of sweetness, but felt like some kind of small nuts or seeds. Not a bad flavor, if unfamiliar. She hoped eating it would still the tremor in her hands.
If her pursuers had infrared, they would find her. If there were enough of them and they searched long enough, they would find her. While she was curious what they wanted from her, she wasn’t interested in dying to find out.
If what Bihn told her was true and Kai City held the only civilization on the planet, then it offered her only hope of getting back into space.
Raena knew where the tourist spaceport was, but at the moment, barely armed and still barefoot, she had little to trade for passage off-world. Not enough for anyone to risk anything, if they knew Planetary Security wanted her.
She could lurk around the spaceport until she found a human ship to commandeer. One thing she’d learned as Ariel’s bodyguard, though, was that you didn’t steal from rich people. Working people might let a slight go, because they couldn’t afford to fight you and what else were they going to do, but the rich wouldn’t let it drop. They would hunt you down—or pay someone else to do it.
That meant she would have to find the secondary spaceport, the one for deliveries and workers. Kai had more human employees than Lautan did, but she would still be individual enough to be noticeable. She’d have to be extra cautious until she hijacked a ship. She would also have to wait until she found one capable of being flown by a woman whose knowledge of piloting was twenty years out-of-date.
As much as she loathed the idea, planetary custody offered advantages. It meant she would be fed, kept out of the sun, and sheltered from the gray militia. Maybe the only thing that made sense was to turn herself in to Planetary Security and wait for the cavalry to come get her.
Once the night settled in for real, Raena could not have moved if she’d wanted to. No telling if the floor of the old house was solid or how far back it went. The stone where she sat felt so smooth that she wondered if it had been swept. Had someone else set up housekeeping here?
She would have been happier with her back against something, anything, but without turning on her light, she wasn’t about to crawl off in search of a good solid wall.
To pass the time, she thought over what she knew about the Templars. She wasn’t certain of very much. They were an old species, maybe the first to travel the stars. No one knew where they originated. By the time other people crept off their homeworlds, the Templars had already colonized planets strewn across the galaxy. They were ready to trade, but to trade with the Templars, new worlds had to give up their interplanetary weaponry. Those who could not abide by the Templars’ rules were annihilated.
Mostly the Templars traded their technology for food. The translation devices Vezali and Haoun wore were Templar tech. Even the comm system the Veracity used to connect to the galaxy in real time was based on Templar tech, stolen and adapted by the Empire. The machines that made most colonized planets’ air breathable and water drinkable had come from the Templars. The galaxy relied on Templar-made fabrics and construction materials and miscellaneous electronics.
The galactic peace might have endured forever, if humanity had not run up against Templar space. The Empire wanted to expand—and they didn’t want to give up their weapons to trade by the Templars’ rules.
Between the Empire and the Templars stood the border worlds. These managed to form a Coalition between their nonhuman governments and the human refugees fleeing the Empire. If any of them had had weapons of war, the border worlds might have joined the conflict on the Templars’ side. Unfortunately, the masters of the galaxy had destroyed all the weapons they’d confiscated before the War. The only way the Coalition governments could arm themselves was by hijacking Imperial convoys or by scavenging Imperial ships. They were late to the party.
The galaxy at large merely looked on in horror, unable to offer aid or even defend themselves.
The War had been going on for years by the time Raena ran from it. She’d never seen a living Templar, nor had most humans. If an Imperial craft came across a Templar ship, they destroyed it. The same happened if the Templars saw an Imperial ship first. The initial aggressor always won the exchange, at the price of total obliteration of the enemy.
Things seemed fairly evenly balanced when Raena was imprisoned on the Templar cemetery world. Wiping the Templars out must have struck the Emperor as the only gambit to level the playing field.
He hadn’t counted on humanity’s aversion to genocide. Everyone who had an opportunity to do so switched sides, choosing to live in the galaxy rather than assist the Empire’s plans to take it over.
Raena didn’t know what the Templars would have done if they’d succeeded in overpowering the Empire. Would they have wiped humanity out or seen its people enslaved? She was fairly certain the rest of the galaxy wouldn’t have censured them over it. Everyone was too reliant on Templar-derived tech—the tesseract drive as case in point—to be thrilled when they had to reinvent or reverse-engineer the things they relied upon every day.
Raena suspected that the failure of the tesseract drive was just a harbinger of things to come. Other tech would start winding down before much longer. If nothing else, without the understanding to manufacture translators that could add new languages, there would be no way to easily communicate with new peoples. Misunderstanding would escalate.
Without the Templars to enforce galactic peace, Raena expected that many governments were already experimenting with interplanetary weaponry. At first the weapons would be justified as self-defense, but eventually someone would claim offense. Then there would be war again.
There was nothing she could do about it here. The silence of the dead village worked on her. Normally sleep was difficult for Raena to find, but now, in the blackness, it stole over her and she couldn’t resist.
* * *
When Raena opened her eyes, a faint green light glowed in the back of the house. She watched it, but it came no closer. The silence stopped up her ears.
Her body had stiffened up. Climbing painfully to her feet, she crept cautiously toward the light. It burned with an even emerald glow that was easy on her eyes. When she reached the room where it shone, she marveled at the size of the place. There was nothing cozy or inviting about the empty stone room. It had clearly been fashioned out of the rock for the huge Templars.
A faint mist floated ankle-high above the floor. Raena told herself it was a trap. She should be planning how to cross the desert and get herself back to Kai City. How could she overpower her pursuers? How could she be certain she’d be able to fly a skiff, if she stole one? How was she going to muffle its engine so the sound of it didn’t alert the others to follow her?
Instead, she stepped into the room. As she crossed the threshold, the ankle-high mist gathered itself into a sleeping couch.
Twenty years after its masters were erased from the galaxy, the faithful house still remembered the Templars, still worked to offer them comfort.
Desperately lonely, Raena sat on the couch. The mist moved around her gently, conforming to her body, supporting her aching and abraded limbs. Ariel had told her that human chemistry shared startling similarities to the Templars. Apparently, they were alike enough to trigger the furniture’s nurturing response.
It was so pleasant just to rest. Raena leaned back into the misty couch and closed her eyes.
* * *
When Raena woke again, she heard a pattering sound, like water. She stood up. The wonderful couch that had supported her dissolved back into mist and evaporated.
Following the sound of rain, she discovered another room lit by a pale green glow. Gentle droplets filled the air inside. She tested the spray with her left hand, but it was only water. She stepped into the shower and let it wash the sweat and worry from her face and hair. Later, perhaps, she would regret getting her clothing wet, but now she took the dress from the breast pocket of Bihn’s shirt and rinsed it out, too.
The couch had healed her while she slept. All her aches had been eased. The scabs washed from her abraded leg to reveal new skin beneath. She felt better than she had in days.
Rather than drain into plumbing and vanish, the shower water collected into a stream that ran down into the mountain.
Raena pulled the emergency lantern from her knapsack and followed the stream. It led down a winding stairway into the mountain. Eventually, the water trickled into an underground river that flowed farther than her light could reach.
She settled down on the shore of the river. The stone had been worked into a series of rises, smooth and flat, that would provide safe footing and a place to draw out boats. Mooring posts still protruded from the rock. She shined her lantern overhead, examining the ceiling of the cavern. Normally, Templar stone was rough-surfaced, covered in jagged nubbins, but this stone had been polished until it was softly reflective. She hoped that meant the river had been used as a highway.
She set the light aside so she could see as she pulled everything out of her pack. When she’d checked the pack in the escape pod, she’d noticed the inflatable raft. At the time, she had been tempted to leave the raft behind to spare herself the weight, but decided it might provide shelter in the desert, if she could find nothing else.
The pack didn’t contain anything she could use as a paddle, but it didn’t matter. The river seemed to have a good current. She hoped it was flowing to the ocean and not a waterfall, but she would soon find out.
* * *
Once she got the raft into the water, Raena scrambled to climb aboard. The river rushed with gathering speed away from the lonely house. Its course seemed to have been cleared of obstacles, so that Raena never encountered rapids or whirlpools. She stretched out in the bottom of the raft so that her head would not strike the ceiling, if ever it dipped toward her. In her cozy nest, she ate another bar and drank more water from her pack. After what seemed like hours, she slept again.
She woke when light caressed her face. The cave grew brighter as she neared its mouth. It did not seem to be daylight quite yet, but dawn was coming.
The scent of the air changed, as the water grew brackish.
The river spat her out into the ocean. Raena could see Kai City up on the cliffs a couple of kilometers down the coast, but the current was bearing her away, out to sea. She quickly collected her trash from the bottom of the raft, stuffed it into her pack, and then dove over the raft’s edge. She swam parallel to the beach for a while, long enough to get out of the current.
When she broke free of the outflow, she set out toward shore. The pack made swimming slightly awkward, but she wasn’t ready to abandon it yet.
* * *
Although the hour was not long past dawn, Raena watched for signs of pursuit, whether her friends in the gray uniforms or more bounty hunters. Instead, she seemed to have the beach to herself for as far as the eye could see.
She sat in the sand to eat the last of the nutrition bars. She had become fond of their flavor, whatever it was. She considered saving a wrapper for Mykah, so he could stock some on the Veracity, but that future seemed so far away that she didn’t give in to the temptation. Now that she knew they existed, maybe she would encounter them again.
She changed back into the dress she’d been wearing on Lautan. It was still slightly damp from being rinsed out in the Templar shower, but she figured wearing it made her look more like a tourist than Bihn’s oversized shirt.
She pulled the survival tool out of the pack. Even though she knew weapons were outlawed on Kai, she wasn’t prepared to give it up yet. She left the pack on the beach for someone else to find and started walking.
The isolation made it difficult for her to appreciate the morning’s beauty. Rosy light stole across the empty beach. The total solitude was eerie enough that Raena began to hope that Kai City had not been evacuated. It would be miserable to find herself altogether alone on the planet. The way her luck had been going, that was a possibility.
Eventually she walked past a familiar trio of stone arches offshore. Not far beyond that, she found the boardwalk where she and Ariel had jogged on their first morning together on Kai. She wondered if Ariel ever felt nostalgic for that beautiful dawn.
That, she remembered now, was the morning she’d met Mykah. Funny how she’d felt so fond of Kai after that trip.
As Raena crossed the outskirts into Kai City, things seemed to be coming alive. She stopped to ask directions, but eventually she found a resident who could direct her to the Planetary Security station. She threw the survival tool in the incinerator outside.
Raena ran her fingers through her hair to comb the tangles out. After that, there really wasn’t anything more she could do to fix herself up. She climbed the steps into the Central Security Station, took a seat in the anteroom, and waited her turn most politely.
They gave her a lot of time to rethink her decision. Stealing a ship, running away, would be so much more satisfying than simply sitting here. Once she ran, though, she would always be running. Kai already had hunters after her. No doubt Lautan could find something to blame her for, too. She could hide in Ariel’s villa, never to go out again. She could alter her face and body so she wouldn’t recognize herself. Or she could grow up and try to live according to the galaxy’s rules.
Finally, the clerk called her number. The black-feathered bird creature at the window tipped its head to regard her with a shiny button eye.
“My name is Raena Zacari,” she said. “The Business Council of Kai put a bounty on me. I’m here to turn myself in.”
The Shtrell seemed bored by the whole process until it looked Raena up in its computer. “Oh, good heavens,” it squeaked. “Really? You are turning yourself in?”
“Yes,” Raena said, not showing the amusement she felt. “I escaped the hunters who’d captured me. Do I get to claim my own bounty?”
The bird must have triggered a silent alarm. An entire squad of Planetary Security agents poured into the waiting room. Raena turned slowly to face them, hands held straight out from her shoulders. As she knelt, she checked where the cameras were in the room. She gave them her best smile, hoping they were recording how docilely she gave herself up. Maybe her defender could show the recording to the jury on the first day of her trial.
She’d forgotten that Security on Kai didn’t carry weapons, other than stun staves. No one seemed particularly like he wanted to stun her now. They just surrounded her, confused by the little barefoot human girl waiting calmly for their orders like she’d done this all before. Eventually, the commander ordered her up onto her feet and they marched her into custody.
Raena kept her face composed. She could have taken the whole gang of them down several times over. Security on Kai was even softer than she remembered—and the last time she’d been here, she’d stolen a staff from one of them in order to subdue Jain Thallian. She was pretty sure that stun staff was still riding around on the Veracity, wherever Mykah had squirreled it away.
None of these agents held their staves right. As she watched, one juggled and nearly dropped his. They left too big a margin around her and bunched up so close to each other that they would have been stunning each other if she’d made any threatening moves. Clearly they’d never captured an actual criminal.
Planetary Security turned her over to the city jail, whose guards didn’t even have the benefit of helmets or armor. They ran the identity tests and got her booked. This crew also didn’t carry weapons other than sleep grenades and more stun staves. Maybe they were hand-to-hand artistes, but Raena doubted it.
From what she’d seen so far, Kai was not going to provide her any protection if a couple of hardcore bounty hunters showed up to take her out of here. The gray militia could probably level the place with a dozen soldiers.
Oh, well. She’d already bought the ticket. Hopefully, she’d be allowed to talk to Ariel before long.
First, though, they delivered her to a cell somewhere in one of the jail’s towers. Raena walked around the cell with one hand on the wall and her eyes closed, trying to get a sense of its size. It was smaller than her tomb had been, of course, but larger than her cabin on the Veracity. She supposed that counted as a blessing.
The cell even had a window. It was higher than her head, so she couldn’t see out, but it opened to the air. Raena stood on the dry stone bench beneath the window and studied the wall behind it.
The cell’s wall was rough black Templar-extruded stone. She thought she could see enough protrusions to form a climbable face. Anyone larger or heavier than Raena probably couldn’t find enough to dig its toes into, but she felt disappointed. She had expected escape to seem challenging enough that planning for it would entertain her a while. Knowing that she could just waltz out of here any time she took a mind to made the prospect much less enticing.
Besides, where would she go? She’d already done the math about leaving Kai. For now, she would have to relax and just see what luck came her way.
* * *
Raena spent most of the day cursing the solitude of her cell before another creature was shoved inside with her. It was some form of living rock. It took one look at Raena and started pounding on the door.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” it shouted. “You’re not locking me up with a human. This is cruel! Let me out.”
Raena remained seated on the sleeping bench, watching the show.
The creature kept glancing over its shoulder at her, making sure she didn’t sneak up on it. It kept up its racket for a remarkably long time, considering it got no response at all from the guards outside.
Eventually, after what seemed like hours, it gave up. Whimpering to itself, it crept over to the far wall, where it squatted down and stared at Raena.
“Don’t like humans?” Raena asked mildly.
“Don’t talk to me!” it shouted. “Don’t even look at me. I’ll squash you like a bug.”
“Okay,” Raena said. She kept gazing at the creature without moving from her bench.
“I mean it. Don’t look at me. I know what your kind is like.”
“Really?” Raena asked. “I’m not even sure what kind you are.”
“That’s good. It means you can’t manufacture some disease to wipe us out.”
Not in here, Raena thought. She had the sense not to say that aloud.
* * *
Raena found herself dreaming of her imprisonment in the Templar tomb, shifting images of darkness and hunger and despair. She remembered the days when she sang every advertising jingle she had ever heard, the hours when she remembered the face of every person she had killed. She would work through the crewmembers of the Arbiter, recalling everything she knew about each one. She would remember every meal she’d ever eaten and every drug she’d ever sampled and every sip of anything she’d ever tasted. And still her imprisonment dragged on.
The darkness became more oppressive, almost solid, weighing down on her, crushing the breath from her.
Raena wrenched herself awake. Her roommate lay atop her in the cell on Kai, crushing Raena to the sleeping bench with the weight of its stone body.
Raena thrashed around, trying to dislodge the lumbering creature from atop her. Pain flared suddenly sharp and bright in her chest.
“Why don’t you die, human?” the creature screeched at her. “I’m going to kill you. Hold still!”
Raena succeeded in wriggling out from beneath the creature. She bumped the creature off balance and knocked it to the dirt floor. It flailed on its back, screaming abuse.
It would have been funny, if she hadn’t hurt so much. Pain shot through her with every breath. At least one rib was broken. Raena didn’t even want to touch her torso to probe how many fractures she had.
She scuttled away from her cellmate, but nothing in the cell could qualify as a weapon, certainly nothing she could use against something clad in rock.
Raena huddled as far away in the cell as she could get. Maybe she could still climb up to the window, but it would mean dodging her cellmate’s grasping arms, then scaling the wall. She wasn’t sure she could put any weight on her right arm, to say nothing of crawling through the little window. And she didn’t know where she was in the building or how far she might have to climb down on the outside.
So this was how it was going to end: dying in a jail cell on Kai, killed by a cellmate who attacked her in her sleep.
Raena laughed at herself, but that led to a wet cough that felt like she was being stabbed in the chest.
“Die!” her cellmate screamed. “Just die already!”
The other creatures in the cellblock started shouting for her cellmate to shut it, people were trying to sleep. The cacophony grew worse until Raena felt herself blacking out. She wedged herself against the wall, afraid that if she fell down, she would puncture a lung.
Anger made her shake. She didn’t want to die. She wanted to see Ariel again, and Haoun, and Vezali, and Coni, and Mykah. She wanted to walk on the outside of the Veracity’s hull and look at the stars. She wanted to eat more of Mykah’s inventive cooking. She wanted to swim in every ocean and buy every pair of black boots she saw and she wanted to fly on makeshift wings among the skyscrapers again. Dying was stupid. And this was a stupid way to die.
The guards finally burst into the cell, stun staves at the ready.
“Raise your hands,” one of the guards ordered.
“Can’t,” Raena wheezed.
Her cellmate gloated, “Did I hurt you, little human? Did I break you? So fragile!”
One of the guards held out a hand to Raena. That was the last thing she saw as her knees buckled.
* * *
Raena woke in an infirmary ward. Cuffs pinned her limbs to a table. The pain in her chest had been replaced by a warmth that lingered on the edge of burning. That was better.
An orange-furred nurse noticed she was awake and came over to offer Raena a drink through a straw. The water was icy cold. Raena drank gratefully.
“How do you feel?”
“Better.” Her voice sounded familiar again. “Did you reinflate my lung?”
“Yes. We’re mending your bones now. You need to lie still to let the machine work. If you don’t think you can do that, I will sedate you.”
“I can do it,” Raena promised.
“Would you like some entertainment? I can put the remote in your free hand.”
“Actually, I’d like to call my sister.”
“I’ll connect it for you.”
The nurse typed in the comm code Raena gave her. Raena was certain that everything would be recorded for use against her, but she was tired of fighting alone.
Eilif answered the call. The nurse looked from the image on the screen to Raena and smiled gently at the similarities. “I’ll leave you two to chat.”
Raena didn’t correct her.
“Have you been injured?” Eilif asked.
“Attacked by my cellmate. They’re mending me now.”
“Shall I wake Ariel for you?”
“Please.”
When Eilif went off on her errand, she left the channel open. Raena tried to puzzle out where Eilif and Ariel were. It wasn’t Ariel’s office on Callixtos, or onboard Ariel’s racer. Definitely a ship, though. It looked old-fashioned, human-made, but not as antique as the Veracity.
Before she puzzled it out, Ariel appeared on screen. Her cheeks were flushed and her hair was coming loose from her braid.
Raena recognized what that meant. “Didn’t mean to tear you away from anything important,” she said by way of apology.
“Kavanaugh says hi,” Ariel answered.
Raena laughed cautiously, so she wouldn’t wiggle.
“Where are you?” Ariel asked.
“An infirmary on Kai.”
“I heard you got arrested,” Ariel said sympathetically.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Small galaxy.” Ariel’s eyes probed Raena’s face. “You all right?”
“Better. My cellmate attacked me in my sleep. Luckily, the guards stopped it from killing me.”
Ariel made a note on a handheld. “Have you talked to a defender yet?”
“They haven’t even arraigned me yet. Do you know what the charges are?”
“I know what was on your wanted poster. I’ll look into seeing how long they can hold you without charges. And I’ll get you transferred to a solitary cell, if that’s okay.”
“Might be safer. I get the feeling that someone somewhere doesn’t want me to survive to be tried.” Raena realized how paranoid that sounded, but didn’t retract it.
“All right. Since you’re one of the Foundation’s wards, I should be able to negotiate better treatment for you.”
Their eyes met and Raena got the feeling that Ariel understood everything Raena didn’t say.
“Thanks, Ari. Tell Kavanaugh I say hi, too.”
Ariel smiled and signed off.
Raena tried to call the Veracity next, but the comm code had been disabled. She hoped the kids were all right.