“Commander.”
Sela glanced up from her vigil at Atilio’s side. He had stopped grimacing. Perhaps that meant the pain pharms were working.
Rheg shoved a robed figure into the center of the altar room. The amber lights shone on the shaven head and sun-ravaged skin of his prisoner.
“Found him hiding in a chamber on the spinward side. Says he’s a priest.”
“I’m not a priest.” The newcomer grimaced under Rheg’s heavy grip, actually managing to sound appalled. “I’m a minor sacerdos
. I’ve not been joined in the Order yet.”
“Imagine my embarrassment,” muttered Rheg.
“Sacerdos?” Sela viewed the newcomer skeptically. “You have a designation then, Citizen?”
“Citizen!” he scoffed, plainly insulted. “I am a free man. Not a slave for your Council of First.”
The man’s accent was slight but evident to Sela. The stranger used Commonspeak, the expected standard language for any Citizen of the Known Worlds, but his intonations were those of someone who had grown up speaking Regimental Standard. Much like a soldier. Sela had developed an ear for it. On a nearly daily basis, she listened to crester officers
slaughter Common and Regimental with their sing-song, affected Eugenes accents.
Rheg clamped down more tightly on the priest’s shoulder. “Commander Tyron wants your name!”
“Lineao…Jarryd Lineao,” he grunted.
“Where are the others?” she said. “There must be others here.”
Lineao drew his chin up and drew his shoulders back. “I volunteered to remain and care for the sanctuary. My brothers have fled to safety.”
“Bricky.” She snorted. “I’ll give you cred for that.”
He had to be lying. Only one remaining priest for a compound that seemed to sprawl well past the sanctuary? Whatever his reason to lie, she would deal with it later. For now, there were more pressing matters.
“We have no directive for prisoners.” Valen reached for his sidearm. He spoke now in Regimental to Sela, as was protocol in hostile presence. “He’s a liability.”
She stepped between them. “No. We need him.”
Valen gaped. “Commander?”
But Sela was watching the expression on Lineao’s face. He understood Regimental. Had to. Yet there was no call for a common Citizen to speak Regimental. Her suspicions flared.
“If you’re a priest, you must have healer’s training.” Sela returned to Commonspeak, continuing this newcomer’s ruse.
Lineao’s stare bounced between Valen and Sela. When he noticed Atilio’s body on the altar, his eyes widened. “Yes…some.”
“My meditech took a hit. Lost a lot of blood.” Sela shoved the medistat kit against Lineao’s chest. “Help him.”
Valen snarled in protest. “Boss, you’ve got to be—”
“Sergeant, if you’ve discovered a miraculous means to restore Atilio, produce it now,” Sela snapped.
Valen squared his shoulders and sneered at Lineao.
“I’ve sworn an oath to help those that the Fates guide into my Path,” the priest said quietly as he took the kit from her.
“Well. They’ve dropped this one on your lap.”
The altar room, although it had appeared primitive at first glance, was constructed with a holo-clear ceiling. As the light of the powerful suns sank below the horizon, Sela could now see the purple shimmer of the night sky through its electric scrim. A single bright star hung heavier than the rest. Solid, unblinking, it drew a slow, graceful arc. The Storm King
. Still there. Veradin would not leave us. The knot of her heart loosened the slightest bit.
Lineao closed the case of the medistat kit and made another inspection of the bandages covering Atilio’s torso. Much of the bleeding had stopped. The young man continued to breathe in ragged hitches. But breathe nonetheless.
The priest shuffled over to her and extended the case. When Sela did not move to accept it, he left it at her feet like an offering.
“Well?” she asked. Will he live? Please let him live.
Lineao ran a grimy hand over his face. Without invitation, he collapsed beside her on the bench.
“I’ve done all I can,” he sighed. “His injuries are too great for the supplies you have here. I am only one. Another healer might do better.”
“I guess that’s a no,” she muttered, kicking the useless kit away. Her anger was indiscriminate: At Lineao, at the stupid, inadequate kit, at the nameless, faceless bastard who had taken out Atilio.
It was moments like this when she could understand why she existed. Sela suspected that she was made this way on purpose: easy to provoke to physical shows of anger. Her first
impulse was often to rend and tear. There was nothing here that had earned it.
And so she breathed deeply, slowly. She counted to a hundred. She did all the things Veradin had taught her to do. Sometimes it worked. Not now, though.
Guess it’s just not my night.
Sela stretched her neck, flexed and released her shoulders. The heat of Tasemar was damning. Hours ago, she had shed the upper portion of her field armor. It was a move that was not protocol. She had earned yet another disapproving frown from Valen. He could be too protective at times. He had kept his argument to himself and sauntered off to check on the fortifications.
“The Fates may protect your boy yet,” Lineao offered, turning his gaze to the pictograph of the three women spanning the entire wall.
Sela sloshed the hydration matrix in her canteen thoughtfully. “Good thing he can’t hear you call him a boy.”
Atilio could be prideful, bordering on arrogant. In many ways, he was still a booter with much to prove. He had put up a lot of swag at first, but she’d let the others in his team take care of that. The young meditech was good at what he did. He just needed to learn his place. It was an initiation of sorts; any soldier on her team had faced similar treatment.
“You regard him as such, like your child,” Lineao replied.
Sela did not care for how he watched her as he said it.
“My strength is the soldier beside me. I shall not abandon him,” Sela recited Decca. Eyes narrowing, she turned to focus on Lineao. “Your brothers don’t seem to feel the same, priest. Abandoning you here.”
“And your Kindred masters do not hold the same sentiment,” he shot back. “They have yet to reclaim you.”
“He will.” Sela jerked her chin in the direction of the Storm King
. “They will.”
She knew it as surely as the breath that filled her lungs. Somewhere aboard that ship, her home for a large portion of her adult life, was an agitated Captain Jonvenlish Veradin. She pictured him storming the corridors, bellowing at anyone foolish enough to get in his way. That same familiar warmth filled her. For a moment, the worry about Atilio dulled.
“How long ago did you forsake us?” she asked the cleric in Regimental.
In the half-light, Lineao stiffened.
“I know you understand me. No need to keep pretending,” Sela pressed. “I doubt they teach clerics Regimental.”
“The years do not matter,” he answered after a thoughtful silence.
She tipped her canteen in his direction in a casual salute. “I never get tired of being right.”
“I imagine you have not told your men.” He cast a wary glance around. True enough, Rheg would have made a special point of rendering pain on a deserter.
“Relax. You’re no good to me or Atilio dead.”
“I have done little to help him. I fail to see what intelligence I can offer you, Commander. I am but a novice, a student of the Fates now.”
“I’m not an Intelligence Officer, Lineao. And I’m not the torturing type. My job is to keep my people alive and get them back home.”
“Then we wish the same things, Commander. I serve the Fates and seek to end what hostilities I can toward my people.”
“Your…people
,” Sela said with a dry chuckle. He had deserted an enemy to the populace of this back-birth world. Now they were his people
. “Then tell me…satisfy my curiosity about your people
. All the intel I’ve seen indicates they lack the resources or training to organize an insurrection. Did they have assistance, then? Someone with a soldier’s training?”
Lineao shook his head. “That is no longer my way, Commander. I live the simple life of a priest now.”
“Uh-huh,” she muttered, unconvinced. “Then at least tell me why no one has advanced on our position yet. They must’ve figured we’re here by now. Why not?”
Lineao raised his eyebrows. “You know what this place is, Tyron. It is sacred to them, to us. They hesitate to perform a warring act on this soil, for it would be a desecration.”
“Desecration.” She arched an eyebrow at the room. Fragments of pottery peppered the floor. Broken furniture lay in heaps. Atilio’s blood soaked the altar cloth. “I’m glad we’ve preserved the site thus far.”
“Humor. Interesting in a breeder like you,” Lineao said, canting his head. It was the way he said the word, “breeder,” like a term for diagnosing an illness. He made it sound forgiving and damning in the same breath.
The accepted term for the soldiers like Sela, who were specifically bred in the kennels, was Volunteer
. She suspected the term made their existence more palatable to the cresters. Oddly, she had no recollection of anyone offering her a choice. Not that she or anyone of her team would have chosen differently.
“Call me breeder
again, and I’ll tell the others our little secret, Lineao.” She held his gaze. It was the stare she reserved for the intimidation of quaking villagers. “They won’t be nice like me.”
But he wasn’t buying.
Lineao nodded. “Why are
you here, Commander?”
Sela gave a derisive snort. He seemed to oscillate between amusing and annoying. “I have my orders. You remember what those are, don’t you?”
“Ah. Yes. Orders
,” he mocked. “How would you know what to do without your orders
?”
“First knows what’s best.”
“I doubt that, Tyron. I think you do too.”
“Be quiet,” she hissed, gesturing at Atilio. “He needs rest.”
Sela rose quickly, rocking the bench, and went to Atilio’s side. She watched the agonizing rise and fall of his chest in the uncertain light.
“Will your boy’s death be worth their orders?”
“Shut it!” She whirled, jabbing a finger at him. “You don’t want to piss me off.”
Lineao uttered an observant grunt and folded his hands inside his cloak. Another long stretch of silence rolled past, yet she still felt him watching her.
“The others have no idea, do they? Why you care for the boy as you do?” he asked.
Sela glared at him, feeling the blood build in her face. Who did he think he was?
“The boy…he’s yours, isn’t he? You may treat them all as your charges, but you know for certain that this one, Atilio, he is your flesh and blood. Your son.”
She cleared the space between them in two great strides. Leaning down into his face, she planted her hands on the wall to either side of his head.
“You don’t know a damned thing, priest,” she said, teeth clenched.
But he did. He had ripped the secret Sela carried out into the hot, listless air for anyone to see. None of her team knew, not Veradin, not even Atilio.
Lineao made a placating gesture. “The bonds of a mother and child are great. It is unnatural to sever them the way First does.”
Sela straightened but continued to loom over him. Still, he did not recoil. He was on a mission now. Perhaps he thought he would manipulate her into freeing him, or, save her eternal spark, what they called a soul.
“Imagine, Tyron. In an army so vast, and the Council of First
with powers so great, they cannot keep the Fates from reuniting you with your son.”
The Council of First was not genuinely loved out here on the frayed edges. Anyone knew that. Sela was not a wide-eyed innocent. But First, and the power of the Regime and Fleet, were the thin lines that kept the Citizens of the Known Worlds safe. The Regime kept the monsters away. The Council of First kept the lights from going out. Yet the farther from Origin, the less gratitude was shown for this.
“Valen!” she shouted, still staring down at Lineao. This time the priest did flinch. Good.
Her sergeant was instantly in the room. She realized that, in all likelihood, he had probably been in the corridor just outside.
“Watch him. I need air.” Sela stormed from the chamber without waiting for a reply.
When Sela threw open the heavy doors that led to the courtyard, the cool night air greeted her burning face. She nodded to the sentry.
Simirya rose. “All quiet here, sir. No movement.”
“Spell you,” Sela said. “Go eat. Rest.”
As the gunner turned to leave, she paused. “Sir, how is Atilio?”
Of course, she would ask after him. Sela had suspected the two had shared down time more than once. Not that it was any business of hers. They were the same rank. It didn’t violate Decca.
Sela gave her a brittle smile. The word held all the trappings of a lie. “Fighting.”
“I’ll check him,” Simirya offered before fading into the dark. Her moves were quiet with trained stealth.
With a weary sigh, Sela sank against the wall. Eyes blurring with tears, she studied the darkness of the street below for movement.
Lineao had spoken the truth. But how could this stranger have known?
Was I not careful enough?
