Renegade Page 15

  Appeal? For an instant his pulse leapt, even as he struggled against the pain to process what she had said. He was both out of commission and out of practice on that front, and he was nearly certain he had misheard—or at least misinterpreted—her words.

  But she went on as if her words were merely a given. “It is curious, is it not, what fascinates us?”

  Was this a change of subject? A guess? Or perhaps . . . an accusation.

  “For instance,” she said as she moved, seemed to lean in a little harder. Pain blasted all thought out of his head. He had only the power left to endure. And then she finished her sentence, shocking his brain back into functioning. “I would still give much to know the true reason you keep my portrait in that storeroom.”

  He felt as if his wracked mind was careening wildly, like an air rover with damaged controls. Had this been the goal all along? She wanted that answer and had set this up, this slamming pain, in an effort to get it from him? Was she simply Jakel with a much softer, more alluring approach? Had Davorin known; was this the true reason they had kept him alive?

  “And there we have it,” she said softly, and the pain eased.

  The room’s spinning slowed. The swirling of his brain took a few moments longer. But when it slowed enough, he opened his eyes. She was sitting back, now in his line of sight. He stared at her. What he saw answered two of his biggest questions.

  It had been a ruse, but not to drag information out of him. It had been an effort at distraction, to pull some part of his mind away from the worst pain yet. That he understood, even as it unsettled him to think that she knew enough to know that particular question would work.

  But at this moment, it was that other question, that of whether she could do what she’d said, that rose above all others. And the answer was here, now, in plain sight.

  She could.

  For she sat beside him now, a jagged shard of planium in her hand.

  Chapter 23

  BRANDER LET OUT a long, low whistle as he stared at the piece of the familiar metal, the product of a mine not far from here.

  “He’s been walking around with that in his back?” he asked.

  Iolana, who was sitting, resting, nodded. “It is a testament to his strength that the pain from that alone has not driven him mad.”

  “A strength we would do well to not underestimate,” Drake said, rising from his chair at the table where one of Kye’s exquisitely detailed maps was spread out.

  “He will need it all. The healing of the nerves will be worse even than this, for it will encompass every part of him that those nerves service.”

  Brander winced. “And he must be awake for this, too?”

  “Yes. He must able to speak so that I know that nothing has gotten . . . mis-wired, if you will.”

  “Of course, we must be certain the leader of our conquerors is able to function perfectly,” Kye said dryly. At Drake’s glance, she shook her head. “No, I understand, better him than someone without his . . . restraint.”

  “Have you decided what to do with him?” Eirlys asked, looking at her brother. “When it is done, I mean?”

  Drake turned to Iolana. “Does your original estimate still hold?”

  “It will take time for him to recover from the stress of what we’ve done. And he must be kept still during that time, so I believe keeping him under would be best. I will sense when he is ready. Normally I would say a week, but . . .”

  Her voice trailed off, but she saw she did not need to explain. Drake nodded. “Agreed, if he is that strong it could be sooner. We will mount a guard from the moment you have completed the process.”

  “Speaking of which, who is with him now? Grim?” Eirlys asked.

  Iolana nodded. “I doubt he will stir for some hours, and I think it best to let him recoup as much as he can in that time, in preparation.”

  “I don’t envy the man,” Brander said, looking again at the shard of planium, “if it’s going to be worse than getting that out of him.”

  A scramble of noise came from the doorway, and then two small whirl­winds whipped into the room.

  “Is it—”

  “True? You have—”

  “The major—”

  “Here?”

  “We do,” Drake answered the twins. Iolana never tired of watching this interaction. She’d taken to trying to guess which one would begin the rapid fire bounce of half-sentences, but she was wrong as often as she was right. This time she had guessed Lux and it was Nyx.

  “He is—”

  “Hurt?”

  They sounded concerned, she thought with interest. They hated the Coalition and all it stood for with the passion of any Sentinel, but this one man . . . . She knew they had had more contact with Paledan—even though she’d spoken the name, she still could not think of him as Caze in her mind, or perhaps dared not, she amended ruefully—than just about anyone other than Brander. So was it simply familiarity, that they saw him as just that, a man, while the other Coalition troops were merely the enemy? Or was there more to it? Was it in some remarkable way connected to what she had dis­cerned during her connection with him?

  “Your mother is working to heal him,” Drake was saying.

  The twins flicked a glance at her. She supposed she should be thankful they at least acknowledged she was the person Drake was referring to.

  “And then—”

  “What will—”

  “You do—”

  “With him?” they finished together.

  She watched as Drake studied the pair for a moment. Then, softly and quite seriously, he asked, “What do you think I should do?”

  She saw the flash of brightness in both sets of Ziem-blue eyes, saw the adoration for their big brother gleam as he waited for an answer to what was obviously a genuine wish to know. He had worked miracles with them, Iolana thought, not for the first time.

  “We think—”

  “You should—”

  “Keep him.”

  Iolana was so startled she almost forgot to breathe. She saw Drake blink, draw back slightly. She was trying to formulate her first question in a way the still-recalcitrant twins might answer when Drake simply asked it.

  “Why?”

  It was Lux this time. “Because he—”

  “Is not—”

  “Like those—”

  “Others. He is—”

  “Not evil—”

  “Or stupid—”

  “Or cruel—”

  “And also because—”

  “We like him—”

  “And he—”

  “Likes us,” they chorused.

  “He does, does he?” Drake said thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” Lux said confidently. “He did not want to, but he does.”

  “You believe us, don’t you?” Nyx asked.

  “I have seen no evidence that disputes what you say,” Drake said.

  Both twins smiled widely.

  “Can we—”

  “See him?”

  Drake glanced at her, then back to the duo. “I will have to consider that. I will tell you when I have decided.”

  They looked disappointed, but didn’t argue.

  “Don’t you have classes with Matta today?” Eirlys asked.

  Nyx grimaced. “Yes.”

  Their sister arched a brow at them. They sighed in unison.

  “All right—”

  “We’re going.”

  When they’d gone, Iolana looked at Eirlys. “Matta is teaching again?”

  “Yes. She was too disheartened at first, after the Coalition destroyed her school. Drake convinced her.”

  Iolana looked at her eldest. He shrugged. “The children with us needed a teacher. She ha
d no desire to remain in Zelos.”

  “Hardly surprising,” Brander said dryly, “given they were hunting her.”

  Iolana frowned. “Hunting her?”

  “They want no one who knows the whole of our true history,” Eirlys said, her tone sour.

  “For they want it replaced with their own version,” Iolana said in understanding.

  “Yes,” Drake said, and his tone was harsh. “They want every succeeding generation to believe the story they tell is real. That they were not our con­querors but our saviors.”

  Iolana muttered an oath she hadn’t spoken in a very long time. Both of her children in the room gave her a startled look. Kye and Brander merely grinned.

  Drake, meanwhile, was looking at the chunk of metal that had resulted in their having the leader of the Coalition on Ziem in their hands. Brander watched him for a moment before looking at Iolana and saying, “Too bad you can’t do . . . what you did with that on a major scale. It would be a lot easier than mining the stuff.”

  “The difficulty of mining it is the only reason we’re still alive,” Drake reminded him. But then he looked at her. “You cannot, can you?”

  “No,” she said. “Nor can I do it when the planium is still in the stone. I believe the ability is connected to the healing only.”

  “We’d best make sure the major knows that before . . . we do whatever we’re going to do with him. Last thing we need is the Coalition thinking it can be pulled out of the mine without equipment,” Kye said.

  “And we’re back to my original question,” Eirlys said.

  “I do not yet know,” Drake said with a grimace.

  “What’s that old saying?” Brander asked. “About having a blazer by the tail?”

  Drake gave him a sour look.

  “And your only job,” Eirlys said to her mate, “is to stay away from him when he’s awake.”

  “Lucky, aren’t I?” Brander teased.

  “Indeed you are,” Iolana said softly.

  Brander’s expression changed in an instant. He looked at Eirlys. “Yes,” he agreed, and even from here Iolana could see the pure, fierce love in his eyes. And when they left Drake’s quarters a moment later, she had more than an inkling of where they were going.

  “I am glad you are happy for them,” Drake said.

  Iolana turned back to him. “I am. Most happy.”

  “Brander was afraid he was not good enough for her,” Kye said.

  “Which, in part, is what makes him so,” Iolana said.

  Drake smiled at that. Then he asked, “When will you start the final phase of the healing?”

  “As soon as he is recovered enough. And from what I have seen, I suspect I’ll be able to move that timetable forward. In fact, I believe I will check on him now.”

  Drake nodded. His mouth tightened slightly.

  “Second thoughts?” she asked.

  “And several beyond that,” he said.

  “You are likely forestalling something worse,” Iolana reminded him.

  “And,” Kye put in, “it cannot hurt to have him in your debt.”

  “I’m not sure a debt of that sort would stop him from doing what he sees as his duty,” Drake said. “Not as long as he does not experience that kind of personal connection, as we do.”

  Iolana considered that. “I am not certain I could isolate that kind of emotion, but I could try.”

  Kye looked at her curiously. “You mean give him the capacity to feel that kind of connection? Or empathy?”

  She nodded. “It will only work if it is innate and has been crippled or smothered. I cannot give what someone does not already have.”

  “Sounds to me like that’s exactly what the Coalition does, crushes it out of them,” Kye said.

  “So you would not be forcing it upon him?” Drake asked.

  “No.” She found it telling that this was what her son asked, and added, “It is a rare warrior who will allow his opponent to live by the rules he himself lives by. That you would not like to see him forced says much.”

  “It says,” Kye said, with a smile at her mate’s obvious disconcertment, “that he is the best kind of warrior. The kind who was a good, noble man before he became a hero.”

  “I’m not—”

  Kye stopped his refutation. “Do not even try to sell that here, in front of two who know your heart.”

  The look Drake gave his mate then had Iolana quickly rising. “I will go make preparations while you . . . make good use of this respite.” Drake flushed slightly, but Kye laughed. Iolana gave her a sideways look and made sure she was smiling as she added, “I do wish for that grandchild, you know.”

  She left them staring after her, and with the warmth of their love filling even her solitary heart.

  Chapter 24

  HE SENSED HER presence the moment she came in, although his eyes were closed. It seemed his hearing, always good, had sharpened even more, as if his brain had sensed what still worked was more critical now.

  “I will not ask how you feel,” she said, apparently knowing somehow that he was awake. “That you are conscious is amazing enough.”

  He didn’t deny it. “I was contemplating what it might feel like to move again.”

  “I would imagine a man of your fitness expected the cooperation of your body in most cases.”

  The thought that stabbed through his mind at her words made him glad he had kept his eyes closed. That he’d thought himself long past needing the kind of physical connection a male and female could have made it even more ironic that he was thinking of it now, when his body was totally and utterly incapable of that cooperation.

  He supposed it was inevitable, given the hours he’d spent staring at the portrait of this woman, that it was she who gave rise to those thoughts now. That she was everything that portrait had implied, and more, was more unsettling. He had wondered, as he’d lain here helplessly, if perhaps his brain had been damaged as much as his body, to even consider that the things that had happened were real. His mind had ever been grounded in reality, and what had happened since he had awakened here had been anything but.

  They were impossible.

  What she had done was impossible.

  She was impossible.

  And yet . . .

  He opened his eyes at last. She was seated beside him, on a chair that looked like the one in his office. The office that was also impossible. But then she, alive, had seemed impossible. And if he had to believe this luminous, compelling woman long thought dead was real, why not the rest?

  “You look . . . perplexed,” she said, and there was an understanding in her tone that he wanted to reject.

  “I do not understand. Any of this. It makes no sense.”

  “And you do not like things you do not understand,” she said, as if she were reciting a known. “And if you do not understand something, what do you do?”

  His brow furrowed. “Analyze, experiment, learn until I do.”

  Her expression changed slightly, as if she had just understood something. “Is that how you came to design the air rover?”

  His mouth tightened. But he could see no harm in answering, although he was certain she had a motive for asking that he could not yet see, because it seemed she always did.

  “Yes. I am not a pilot, but often flew. I needed to understand the principles of flight.”

  “And so you learned them, well enough to design the rover. Which, my son says, is a most remarkable craft.”

  He was startled at the feeling her words caused in him. He could only describe it as pride. He was equally startled at the need to acknowledge how his design had been advanced. “He has taken what was intended as a basic transport with some minimal defense capabilities and turned it into an attack weapon. A bomber, and a fighter m
ore agile than I ever would have thought possible.”

  “He had help to carry out those ideas. We have a clever mind or two among us,” she said. “Which I’m certain your masters find hard to believe.”

  She put the very slightest emphasis on the word “masters,” and he guessed he was supposed to react to it. Even knowing that, he could not resist. “You say that as if they are not your masters.”

  “Your Coalition? I cannot deny that most Ziemites must do as they order. But obedience by force does not make them their masters. A true master is one you choose to serve. Who earns your obedience. And I can promise you . . . Caze, there are very few Ziemites who would not die rather than accept the Coalition. It is true that we grew soft, in our ways and our thinking, but our hearts beat true. We will stand. And die, if so it must be.”

  He stared at her. “And yet I am told individual life is valued above all else on this world.”

  “Then I suppose the conflict is in the interpretation of what life consists of. Enslavement, to us, is a direct contradiction.”

  “I find your world . . . contradictory in many things.”

  “Do you?” she said with a laugh. He suddenly remembered a place he had seen, on Zenox, a small waterfall over hollowed rocks, where the scat­tered streams made the rocks ring with an impossible sound that was almost like singing. Her laugh sounded like that.

  He caught himself, wondered if there was any one word he had used more since he’d awakened here than “impossible.”

  He did not like impossible.

  “The passage of time is still a factor here,” she said. “Do you feel strong enough to begin this?”

  “If it is to be, as you said, worse than the last, I am not certain I will ever be,” he said frankly.

  “I can ease the pain to some extent, but this is a long, difficult process, and any haste is ill-advised.”

  “Because?”

  “You might end up with misconnections, and I imagine it would not do if you involuntarily replaced a Coalition salute with some other, less respectful gesture.”

  He laughed. He was unprepared for his own response, and suspected he looked startled as well.