“ ‘Stefan?’ ” she commented, watching the lights.
“Long story.”
“I’ll bet.”
They kept going. The flashes reflected from Nik’s glasses as he looked at her, hiding his expression.
She’d been sure there was a basement.
Just never planned to go there, Em
.
They kept going, floors blinking by so rapidly Mac lost count at seven below ground.
They kept going.
Finally, Nik removed his hand and the lift stopped.
“Reception?” Mac asked dubiously as the doors opened on a white, featureless corridor, flat and long.
“In a sense. Please hurry.”
Hurry?
Mac swallowed and kept up with Nik, giving a little hop every three steps to match his longer ones.
The corridor ended at another, perpendicular to the first. A figure stepped out from the left in front of them. With astonishing quickness, Nik pushed her to that wall and down, using the effort to dodge right and to the floor himself, his hand swinging up to aim before Mac knew he’d drawn his palm-sized weapon.
And before she had time to be more than shocked, Nik was putting his weapon away again. “What happened to patience?” he asked, accent gone.
It was a Trisulian. Mac automatically counted eyestalks—
two upper, no lower
—as the being answered: “Patience, my good Nikolai, is a virtue without value at this time. Dr. Connor. Forgive my partner’s deplorable reflexes. Are you all right?”
Partner?
One hand on the wall, Mac rose to her feet. By the feel, she’d have a bruise on her shoulder, another on her hip. As for her head?
Bah
. “Mac. And yes, I’m fine, thanks.” She couldn’t help herself. “Partner?”
Nik gestured to the alien. “Meet Cinder. Who usually knows better than to surprise me.” This with a glare.
An eyestalk coyly bent in his direction. “You haven’t shot me yet.”
“Day’s young.”
“I thought we were in a hurry,” Mac commented dryly.
Nik gave her the strangest look before he nodded brusquely, motioning her to follow the Trisulian.
Recognizing the look, Mac felt a chill as she obeyed.
Why sympathy, Em? Who or what was waiting for her?
Whatever it was, it was well-protected. They took the left corridor as it gradually bent to the right.
Following the cliff and coastline, not the building,
Mac deduced. Along the way, Nik and Cinder escorted her through three checkpoints, set equidistant along the plain white hall, the last two within sight of each other.
The checkpoints appeared an afterthought. At each, a member of the consular staff waited at a table set to block half the width of the corridor. The remaining gap was guarded by an assortment of aliens, also in the yellow consular uniform, but with armor showing beneath—those who didn’t have their own natural version. After the second of these pauses, during which the staff courteously inquired after their needs and clearances, questions Nik answered for her, Mac decided the choice of guards wasn’t completely random. No two of the same species were present at one checkpoint.
IU policy?
she wondered as they passed the third.
To prevent collusion—or share some risk?
Beyond the third checkpoint, the corridor took a sharper bend, widened into a bulb, and came to an end. They stood in front of a choice of three ordinary-looking doors. Mac was a little disappointed, having geared herself for a more spectacular destination.
“Wait here, Mac,” Nik ordered. He gave her another of those disconcerting looks, seemed to hesitate, then went with Cinder through the first door to the right. Mac peered past them, seeing nothing but more white walls. Another corridor? They closed the door before she could be sure.
Well, Em, this is an anticlimax
. Mac put her shoulders against the nearest wall, tipping her head back to rest it on something solid. It was, to put it mildly, throbbing. Somehow she didn’t think Anchen—
or would it be the physician mind, Noad?
—would consider being violently slammed to the floor as proper care of a concussion.
Spies
.
Mac closed her eyes. Odd. The throbbing had a second component, out of sync with her heartbeat,
elevated,
or breathing,
steady
. She concentrated, turning her head slightly. The bare part of her scalp happened to touch the wall. Through that contact, the throbbing developed a fascinating, singsong pattern. It wasn’t sound, Mac decided, not as she could hear.
But it had meaning.
Mac straightened, her eyes wide. Without hesitation, she went to the middle door, the one closest to her, and shoved it open.
The smell caught her first. She covered her nose, staring at the shape huddled at the far end of the cage. For that was the only feature of the rectangular, white room: a floor-to-ceiling enclosure of vertical white bars each the width of her hand, set her shoulder-width apart. The cage filled half of the floor space, away from any wall by several meters. Within was nothing but the shape, motionless, naked, and blue.
It was as if her blood congealed within her veins, leaving nothing but a lump of flesh incapable of movement, of feeling.
Oh, not incapable of feeling,
Mac realized. Emotions surged through her, battering at her senses. Blinding rage. Betrayal, deep and sour. Fear like a chorus that sang along every nerve.
How had she dared lecture Lyle?
Suddenly. Unexpectedly. A whisper of hope.
Shaking, Mac clung to it, desperate to clear her mind, to think.
No time for gut reactions,
she pleaded with herself.
She began to hear her own breathing again, deep and ragged, feel her hands, clenched into aching fists. There was sweat running down her sides.
Hope. Opportunity
. She focused on those.
Mac reached down and took off her shoes. Barefoot, she could feel the vibrations through the floor. The hairs on her arm and neck rose.
Distress.
She walked around the cage until she was as close as possible to the shape, then sank to the floor herself, balancing on the balls of her feet, and nodded.
Dhryn.
Even huddled in its misery, she couldn’t mistake that rubbery blue skin, dotted with weeping pits of darker blue. No mistaking the three pairs of shoulders either, or the massive, podlike feet. There were wounds, marked by more dark blue liquid. It was smeared over much of the cage floor, as were other stains.
Mac hugged herself.
The
oomling
tongue, the Dhryn language spoken by those too young—or unable—to produce and hear the deeper infrasound—came to her with sickening ease, as if more natural than her own. “Who are you?”
A once-powerful arm pushed against the floor, then another. One after the other, each slipped and lay flaccid.
Conscious, then.
Mac stood and walked around to the other side of the cage.
She hadn’t expected to be relieved his eyes were closed behind their marblelike lids, that she’d unconsciously stiffened in anticipation.
Fool,
she told herself.
“I am Mackenzie Wini—” her voice failed and Mac coughed to free it, starting again. “Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor—” after a hesitation, she finished, “—Sol is all my name.”
His hands scrabbled at the floor, as if the Dhryn tried to rise and couldn’t.
She understood. Manners dictated he rise and accept her name with a clap of all six hands.
Three hands,
Mac realized, as the last arm, middle left, moved into view. Its wrist ended in a fresh scar.
Grathnu
. Dhryn sought all their lives to sacrifice their hands to their Progenitor. It was a mark of Her greatest favor. Mac suspected it was also a contribution to the gene pool, allowed only the most worthy.
But three?
This was no ordinary Dhryn.
Emily had warned her—the Ro claimed a wounded Dhryn was dangerous. Brymn had transformed only after being injured in the sandstorm, but not after giving up his hand.
Does it matter how severe the damage, Em, or did the Ro lie to you?
It wasn’t the first time she’d asked herself that troubling question. An answer this living Dhryn could provide.
It would be the last one
.
Mac shuddered. “Don’t try to move,” she said. “Who are you?” The face shifted on the floor, shadows changing beneath the thick ridges that overhung the closed eyes, where they played over the curved rises of skin-covered bone sculpting nose and ears. The small mouth was tight and fixed.
Pain
. Mac felt the vibration of complaint through her feet.
The eyes snapped open, their huge pupils black and lustrous, like figure eights on their sides. The oval iris of yellow filled the rest. She’d seen it warm. Now it was a cold, accusing gold.
With the eyes and changing light, despite the scars and sunken appearance, Mac suddenly knew who this was. “Parymn Ne Sa,” she whispered.
“—Las.”
So it had been
grathnu
and not more violence from his keepers. Numb, Mac repeated his full name. “Parymn Ne Sa Las. Honored. I take the name Parymn Ne Sa Las into my keeping.” She clapped her hands together. His eye coverings winked blue.
Acknowledgment
.
This was not a Dhryn who traveled, before his entire species had taken flight. This had been the Progenitor’s officer and gatekeeper, the same Progenitor with whom Brymn—and Mac herself, though with hair not hand—had committed
grathnu
. More, Brymn had called Parymn Ne Sa an
erumisah,
one who is able to make decisions.
Not an ordinary Dhryn at all, Em.
Mac knelt, not daring to touch the bars. “What are you doing here?”
“I was sent to talk to you.”
“Me?” She rocked back on her haunches and began shaking her head. “No. No. There are people in authority—important people. I—”
study salmon.
Parymn managed to raise his head and first shoulders to better look at her. She could see his flexible seventh limb now, curled out of the way, its scissorlike fingers tucked under an elbow. “They are not-Dhryn,” he gasped out, then sank to the floor again. “You are Dhryn,” more quietly but with as much effort. “Unlikely . . . as that appears . . . to me.”
“Oh, dear,” Mac said in Instella.
A touch on her shoulder. She startled from under it, rising and turning to put her back to the bars.
Nik let his arm fall to his side. Mac searched his face, but it was like a mask, fixed and expressionless.
And he wasn’t alone. Others walked around the cage to array themselves on either side of him, all confronting her: the Trisulian, Cinder, hands combing the mane over her face; another Human, older, male, and in a brown suit almost twin to Nik’s; a scaled humanoid Mac couldn’t identify, with a dainty beaked mouth and feathered crest; and a stout Imrya, carapace dark with age spots, her hands clutching what looked like an unusually ornate recording device. Two of the consular staff remained by the door.
Last, but not least by any measure, the Sinzi-ra herself, regal in her white gown and long silvered fingers. “You were right, Nikolai,” Anchen said. “I see you can communicate with our visitor, Mac. Most gratifying.”
“Visitor,” she echoed incredulously. Mac felt vibration through the soles of her feet as the Dhryn subvocalized. She couldn’t understand it.
Perhaps it wasn’t words at all, Em, but a moan.
“Well, you haven’t taken very good care of him.”
Anchen lifted two fingers. One of the staff members stepped forward. “What have I done wrong, Dr. Connor? I cared satisfactorily for the Honorable Delegate from Haven during his stay with us. This individual has proved more, forgive any impertinence, challenging a guest, but I have followed every established protocol for his species.”
She’d forgotten Brymn had been here.
Mac blinked. Finally, she managed to ask: “Do you want him to live or not?”
Nik shifted involuntarily, but said in a noncommittal voice. “It’s preferable.”
“To start with, they—” Mac pointed at the yellow-clad staff, “—shouldn’t wear that color near him. Why doesn’t he have furniture and clothes? He looks to be starving.”
His wounds?
That was territory she didn’t dare tread, Em.
“Your concern is admirable but misplaced, Mac,” responded Anchen, making a calming gesture with her long fingers. “Our guest was originally provided with civilized accommodations. He tore them to shreds, along with his clothing. He refuses food.” Again, as if able to read Mac’s thoughts,
or,
Mac judged,
with the awareness of a superb negotiator,
the Sinzi went on: “The wounds you see? Self-inflicted. We’ve done our utmost to keep him healthy and comfortable. It is our in own interest as well as his. But he has rejected all of our efforts. We feared he was attempting to die.”
The floor vibrated more intensely. “
Oomling
language,” Mac hissed in Dhryn.
Sure enough
. “Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor Sol,” Parymn almost bellowed. “These are not-Dhryn! You must not interact with them!”
“What did he say?” Nik, quietly.
“He’s not happy,” Mac summarized, then frowned. “You said the teach-sets weren’t working, but surely you’ve servo translators.”
“They function without adequate success, thus your cooperation is most essential,” said the beaked alien, in precise, feather-edged Instella. He/she/it lifted his/her/its elbows, the other Human moving to avoid those sharp ends. “We predict our current technology capable of reliable translation of no better than twenty percent—”
The other Human broke in: “He hasn’t said a word to translate until now—”
“Mackenzie Winifred Elizabeth Wright Connor Sol! You must desist!” Parymn’s bellow faded into a desperate whisper.
Mac shot Nik a look and he nodded reassuringly. She turned to the Dhryn. “It’s all right, Parymn Ne Sa Las. It is—” she tried to think how to calm him, “—it is my task among Dhryn, to speak with those who come to you like this.”