Across a Star-Swept Sea (23 page)

“Come on,” Persis said sweetly. “You know you’re our favorite gengineer, even if you did try to kill me that one time.”

“I didn’t try to,” he corrected, and the teasing was back in his tone. So whatever he was angry about, it wasn’t her fault. “If I’d actually tried, your little revolutionary boyfriend wouldn’t even have had a chance to save you.”

“He’s not really my boyfriend,” Persis said automatically.

“No,” he grumbled, grouchy again. “None of us have
real
boyfriends or girlfriends, do we?”

Andrine looked confused. Persis was sure she was wearing a similar expression.

“For a moment, let’s talk about something other than our love lives,” Isla cut in.

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Persis said. For the last week, she’d been trying to get Isla to realize she had better things to do than go on a public relations campaign with Justen.

“Thank you!” Tero cried to Persis. She stared at him, baffled. There was something she was missing here, and that hardly ever happened.

“Look, we’re sorry for making fun of you,” she said at last. “Obviously, we think you’re a very talented gengineer, and that the unfortunate incident was just a mistake, or we wouldn’t ask you again. But we
are
asking. Can you do it?”

Tero’s lips made a thin, stern line. “Yes. I’ll do it. For you, Persis, and for Andrine. For the League.”

“Thank you,” Andrine said, exasperated.

“But not,” he added, “for you, Your Highness.” And he reached over and tapped the oblet off.

In the split second before the connection ended, Isla’s eyes met Persis’s.

The princess regent of Albion looked guilty.

Seventeen

P
ERSIS STARED DOWN AT
the pricker in her hand. She doubted very highly that Justen Helo would approve of what she was about to do. Not that his opinion should matter. She was only pretending that he was her boyfriend, after all.

She gritted her teeth and rolled up her sleeve, remembering all too well the last time she’d attempted genetemps. Tero promised he’d filtered out all the bugs. He swore he’d gotten it right this time.

But he also seemed to have a lot of stuff on his mind.

“Persis?” said Andrine, huddled close by her side on the narrow cabin bench. She, too, held a pricker, but seemed to be waiting for Persis to go first. The boat they’d borrowed from the fishing village smelled of salt and seaweed. “We’re still going through with this, right?”

“Of course. I trust your brother, don’t you?”

“Sure. As far as I can throw him.”

“Slipstream is great,” Persis argued.

“We’re humans, Persis. Not weasels.”

“Sea minks,” she corrected.

“Whatever.” Andrine stared at the pricker in distaste. “You don’t think—you don’t think anything’s going on with Tero and Isla, do you?”

Persis had vaguely suspected that Tero had a crush on her best friend. His palmport apps, his adoption of “your highness” when all her other friends were still calling her Isla, his ability to use any excuse at all to run errands from the Royal College of Gengineers’ lab to the court … and that was fine. But his anger and Isla’s guilty expressions yesterday—had things moved beyond unrequited crush? With the ruler of the realm? Was this what came of Tero growing up in Scintillans and seeing Persis’s parents live happily ever after? There was a huge difference between a reg marrying a random aristo and one falling for the princess regent. Maybe Persis should have been paying more attention to what was going on with her friends.

And maybe if Justen Helo knew what she was thinking, he’d get all revolutionary again.

She took a deep breath and jabbed the pricker in her arm. “Tero is always making her those palmport apps.” The burn began deep in her muscles and she winced and reached out for the pallet shoved in the corner of the cabin.

Andrine followed suit. “That might prove he
doesn’t
like her. I mean have you
seen
the supplement she has to take to run that jumping threads application? It’s like drinking rock slurry.”

Tero had warned them there might be dizziness in the half hour it took the genes to reach maximum expression in her system. She stumbled over to the rough linen cushion and collapsed, and the boat pitched beneath her feet as Andrine joined her.

“Too bad your father geolocked the
Daydream
,” she slurred to Persis. “At least there we could be sick in comfort.”

“Sick,” Persis agreed through chattering teeth, “but also far more suspicious. I think this particular genetemps will be harder to explain away as a party drug gone foul, and they’ve stepped up their monitoring of all boats from Albion.”

Papa’s restrictions might be a blessing in disguise. Someone in Galatea would eventually correlate the appearance of the
Daydream
with a visit from the Wild Poppy. There were enough commonplace fishing boats in the Scintillans village that Andrine and Persis could commandeer without anyone getting wise. A new round of tremors overtook her and Persis hugged herself and clenched her jaw to ease the pain.

“This … had … better … be … worth it, Persis,” said Andrine, who sounded similarly pained.

Persis reached over to give her friend a comforting pat, but every move sent arrows of agony through her flesh. “Don’t worry,” she ground out. “If it goes wrong, I’ll treat you to a full body wax.”

Andrine forced a laugh, and everything went dark.

W
HEN SHE WOKE, PERSIS
could tell by the angle of the sun that at least an hour had passed. She stood up, her muscles stiff and slightly sore from the spasming. Andrine was still asleep, but the evidence of the drug’s effectiveness was there on her face. Persis crossed to the mirror they’d hung above the cabin door.

“Well, Tero,” she whispered, and her voice came out deep and gruff. “Good job.”

A fine, downy black hair covered Persis’s face from the bottom of her nose down past the collar of her shirt. Her hands, when she reached up to touch her face, seemed swollen—the palms were wide, the fingers broad, and the knuckles far more evident. Her feet felt tight inside her slippers, and she was sure she’d find the same changes wrought there. Her amber eyes seemed darkened to a muddy brown and even her complexion appeared darker, though it was difficult to tell beneath her new beard.

What would everyone think of her now? Stylish, feminine aristo Persis Blake had been wiped off the map, and in her place was a rough-looking man. She couldn’t picture the image before her as the toast of Albion society, couldn’t picture him luring Justen into the water and kissing him against a rock wall. A giggle escaped her lips; but in her new rough voice, it came out sounding more like a grunt. Here she was, rough and furry, and freer than she’d been in days.

She ran her fingertips over her mouth. It remained much the same. These were the lips Justen had kissed. Would he even recognize them now, surrounded by so much hair? Maybe, if she looked like this, she’d never be put in the position of having to kiss people she didn’t want to in the first place. If she looked like this, she could be a Council member. If Isla looked like her father, she could be a king.

But she still couldn’t date Tero Finch.

Last night, as Persis swam in the star cove and trumpeted the great opportunity to be found for regs in Albion, Justen had reminded her that they weren’t spread out equally. Noemi would never run her own sanitarium. Tero had grown up to be a gengineer, but his sister, Andrine, despite her service to the princess, would never be a Council member. And a princess regent could never rule the country or marry a reg.

Just because things were better in Albion didn’t make them perfect.

But that was neither here nor there at the moment. She needed to rescue Lady Ford and the others, who were in far more immediate danger than any women or regs in Albion.

Quickly, she gathered up supplies to complete the transformation. When she was finished, her hair had been painted with dark temporary dye and arranged in a flat, unobtrusive tail down her back. The fuzz on her face had been transformed into a trailing mustache and a neatly kept beard. Dressed in a squarish coat, cropped trousers, and cylindrical cap, she looked every inch the part of a salt miner from Galatea’s southern shores.

A moan at her back gave her pause, but when Persis looked around, Andrine was still deeply asleep. The sedative Persis had substituted for Andrine’s dose of genetemps should last for several hours. She double-checked, but the moan appeared to be a false alarm. Persis took a breath, then let it out. Andrine would no doubt be furious when she awoke, but until Justen figured out how to fix the problems with detoxing the regs who got Reduced, Persis refused to let her friend be put in more danger than strictly necessary.

Andrine’s family was Helo-cured. If she was caught and Reduced, she might never recover, and Persis would definitely never forgive herself. Andrine, so young and so brilliant—doing all this because of her loyalty to Persis? No, it wasn’t worth it.

Then again, Persis had never been tested. She might have an aristo mind and never even have to worry about Darkening, or she might be a reg through and through. If she were caught and Reduced, she might never escape, either.

But that was a risk she’d have to take.

F
EW PLACES IN THE
islands were as dismal as the Halahou city prison. The golden sunlight that bathed the rest of New Pacifica didn’t penetrate its interior courtyards, and the gray basalt walls were devoid of color or decoration. The moans and wails of the Reduced ricocheted down corridors and bounced off the ceilings of the cells. The sound was relentless. Those who visited the prison often wondered if even Reduction was worse than the punishment of waiting for sentencing in your cell and listening to the unintelligible chorus that you, too, would make once your brain was scuttled by the drug. Was this the sound that their ancestors had made for generations? Was this the noise that permeated the islands before the cure? Such a notable aspect of Reduction would surely be something they’d learned about in school, right?

But it was silly to question whether or not the Reduction drug was different from actual Reduction. Dangerous, too. Those who questioned the revolution would soon get caught in its crosshairs.

Today, the prison was more chaotic than usual, with all the excitement surrounding the triumph over the evil Lady Ford and her army of loyalists. The Fords had waged a month-long battle of resistance against the revolution, barricading their estate against the military police and enlisting the help of loyalist regs against their best interest. As the siege had drawn out over days and weeks, the fiasco had become a thorn in Citizen Aldred’s side. The regs loyal to the Fords had spoken out against the revolution, disseminating loyalist propaganda and undermining the populace’s support of the new republic. It was not to be borne. The Fords would have to pay, and so would anyone who’d dared side with them.

But, at last, the barricades had fallen and the Ford estate belonged to the people of Galatea, thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of Citizen Aldred’s own daughter, Captain Vania Aldred. The Fords and their supporters had been transferred to Halahou prison to receive a public Reduction, which would be broadcast at sunset all over the island. Along with the Fords had come a host of new guards, mostly transfers from the siege. They wouldn’t need nearly so many forces at the estate once it was a work camp, even with the new guidelines that General Gawnt had put in place to root out the Wild Poppy.

All this was perfectly understood by the bearded figure who was slowly driving a service skimmer filled with barrels of salt up to the gate of the Halahou city prison.

“What took you so long?” the head gate guard asked as the salter handed over an oblet with the inventory and order list. “You were supposed to make this delivery several hours ago.”

“Lava flow cut off the road,” the salter grunted. “Don’t have heat shields on the lifters.”

The guard whistled through his teeth. “What is going on down in the southern lowlands? It’s a good thing Citizen Aldred’s in charge now. We regs will get the public works we deserve.”

“Long live the revolution,” the salter said, lifting a gloved fist.

Once inside the prison, the salter made a big show of unloading the prison’s barrels, then trying and failing to restart his skimmer.

“Looks like it needs a fresh battery,” the salter said, in case anyone was listening.

He wandered down one corridor and then another, the dead battery in his arms, as if searching for a geocharging station.

After the third turn, he found what he was looking for. A young girl in a military uniform sat in the shadow of a wall, far away from security imagers.

“Private Delmar,” he said, his smile hidden behind his beard. “You’re looking well.”

Remy Helo stood and smoothed down her chin-length hair. “Not too loud. I’ve been recognized once already and said I was looking for my uncle. But most people just see the uniform and ignore my face. There are so many new guards today from the Ford estate, no one knows anyone.”

“That’s what we’re counting on.”

Remy peered through the shadows at the salter. “Are you …
her
? Or someone else?”

“What does it matter?” said Persis. “You know what I’m here for.”

Remy regarded the beard and the other changes. “This is a much better disguise than the last one you used.”

“I’m glad you approve. Now let’s get going.”

Persis quickly dispatched the two guards monitoring the cells holding the Fords.

“Is that the drug you used on me?” Remy whispered as she watched the knockout drugs spinning from Persis’s palmport and smacking the guards in the face.

Persis didn’t answer. She inserted the nanotech key into the panel and it quickly scrambled the locking mechanism. With the cell unlocked, she pressed a lever on the cart battery. It began to droop and sag, looking less every moment like a piece of machinery and more like a sack of some sort. Inside were the items Remy would need to complete the mission.