Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) (20 page)

“It’s not just for putting up Nivy. It’s for letting us keep that lunatic in your basement.”

“You think he’s a lunatic?” Hayden asked.

Reece snorted to himself and gestured with his carving knife. “They’re
all
lunatics. It’s a wonder Parliament ever agreed to put them to use.”

“They barely did,” Hayden recalled. “The vote almost didn’t pass. There were worries about the science of the serum…the ethics of it.”

“But it did pass. Because Eldritch has Parliament under his thumb.” Reece shook his head scornfully. He’d told them about Eldritch being an alien, but none of them were sure how that figured into his goings on. “I bet if you checked the transcript from the Guild meeting where The Veritas were voted in, you’d find that it was his proposal to begin with. I wonder if that’s how the rumors started…about the Vees being used by certain members of Parliament to bully Westerners…to torture them…”

“Supposing Eldritch came here thirty-five years ago and created The Veritas. Why would he do that?” Hayden rubbed his temples. “Why would an alien spy do that? The Veritas are terrible, I realize that, but they don’t weaken Parliament…they reinforce it.” Seeing Reece’s look, he added, “I hate their methods too, Reece, but they do what they were made to do. They keep the Honoran people suppressed. Crime is practically nonexistent. Regular Honoran sentries couldn’t guarantee that.”

“So Eldritch is just protecting Honora from itself? He doesn’t really seem the humanitarian type.”

“No, but don’t you see? The crime rate is so low because The Veritas
frighten
people. They’re the most dangerous tool Eldritch could have at his disposal. The Vees have power over the people, and Eldritch has power over them. So I don’t think Eldritch is a spy, not unless this is all some complicated plan to prepare Honora for a quiet invasion. He’s certainly doing more than just gathering intelligence.”

Reece folded his arms over his chest and looked down with a frown. “Honora doesn’t have the kind of enemies who would do that.” He abruptly glanced up at Nivy, who had been staring at a spot on her plate. “Not that we know of.”

Nivy raised her eyes, and they stared at each other with a kind of grim understanding. Slowly, Nivy nodded. Hayden thought he knew what about.

“The Kreft?” he guessed quietly, and they both looked at him. “I have a hard time understanding why a people we’ve never even heard of would single out Honora. Orpheus is wealthier. Oceanus has more advanced automata. What does Honora have that Eldritch’s people could possibly want badly enough to manipulate the political environment for thirty-five years?”

Reece looked again to Nivy, but she just spread her hands helplessly and shook her head, as lost as they were. “They don’t want Aurelia? That’s what brought you here.” She shook her head again, but more uncertainly, and with a thoughtful, even worried frown.

“That doesn’t fit. Eldritch could have taken Aurelia any time. And what about the war?” Hayden went on. His brain was whirring like a datascope, sifting through facts faster than he could compute. “What about Parliament boosting Honora’s armies?”

“You’re right. Eldritch and The Kreft wouldn’t build up Honora’s armies if they were planning to invade. That’s being done for something else. But what?”

For a second, Hayden could have sworn Nivy had been about to say something. But when she saw him staring at her, she lowered her eyes to her lap and clenched her hands tightly together, as if forbidding herself from hand-talk.

Mordecai, who Hayden had completely forgotten was at the table, quietly mused, “Always knew the establishment couldn’t be trusted. Crooked is as crooked does.”

Their conversation dropped out, leaving only the sounds of Reece’s fork ticking against his plate and Mordecai’s resumed jug playing to take the edge off the silence.

For the sake of having something to do, Hayden began clearing the table around Nivy, Reece, and Mordecai. He used the quiet to replay the conversation he’d had with Sophie over Mordecai’s log interface.

“Hayden! How’s school? How’s Reece?”

“Fine…they’re all fine. We’re fine. How…how are you?”

“Good! Guess what? You’ll never guess. I found an owlet with a broken wing behind the house today and I’m fixing it a splint. Um. I borrowed some of your supplies. I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s fine, Soph, but listen. Are you home alone?”

“Yup. Father’s working late again.”

“Why don’t you go to the Adams’ for the night? Take the trolley. Use the money hidden in the hollow leg of my bed. I’ll send Father a log and tell him.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I really need to watch Ben. That’s the owlet. I named him Benjamin.”

“So take him with you. Charity keeps an owl, doesn’t she?”

“Yes, but—”

“I’d really like you to, Soph. It would make me feel better.”

“Why? What’s wrong? You sound…are you sick?”

“No. Everything’s fine. But promise me you’ll go, alright? Promise me you’ll stay there.”

“Hayden—”

“Promise?”

“…I promise.”

He’d warned his father about The Veritas, though he wasn’t specific as to how he knew what to warn. Hugh had been less than pleased and more than a little anxious, but he had promised to lie low with Sophie at the Adams’s. Mother’s parents. They would probably be glad of the extra company.

The night grew heavier as it stretched on. Hayden and Reece had brought their schoolwork, and plunged themselves into catching up on it while Nivy, faithful to her promise to Reece, worked her way through vocabulary graphs that Hayden had brought from The Owl. Mordecai swapped duties with Gideon, disappearing into the tunnel as his grandson emerged, convulsively rolling his revolver around his finger. His forearms were still shiny with the fresh coat of medical glue Hayden had reapplied to the scrapes from his bim accident.

“If you’re gonna question the Vee,” he said to Reece, “I think now’s the time. He’s actin’ kinda funny. Might be sick.”

“Sick?” Hayden raised his eyes from the screen of his neurosciences lapbook. “How so?”

“Shakin’. Sweatin’. Actin’ like he’s run a race or somethin’.”

“It sounds like he’s going through withdrawal.”

“From the serum,” Reece guessed, scratching the dark stubble that had dusted his cheeks these last few days. “I hadn’t thought of that. How often do you suppose he’s used to getting it?”

Not sure, Hayden shrugged. The exact formula behind the Veritas’s serum was protected by Parliament, but it was easy enough to speculate on its properties. “As much as three times a day, maybe? To replace the standard meal? It’s hard to say. A compound like the serum’s is
extremely
unforgiving on the body. I mean, from what we know if it, its effects are instantaneous, and no drug should be able to work with that kind of speed. So it must create a sort of fake internal system—” He stopped when he saw Reece’s vacant look, and went back to his lapbook, trying to immerse himself in its simple, familiar words. Adrenergic, amygdala...

“So how are we going to do this?” Reece wondered quietly, standing.

“Figure it should be just you and me. You ask your questions, and I’ll make sure it answers.” Gideon gave the revolver an extra energetic spin.

It had never bothered Hayden to be excluded from talks like this…before today. Today, in every way, all his studies and good marks had failed him. He’d let Gideon hide him, Nivy push him to safety, Reece save him again. He felt like a shelved book that never got read: full of good information, but in the end, useless.

Nivy tapped his arm, and he tore his eyes away from a diagram to look at her. Her face impassive, she handed him a scrap of parchment. In her lopsided, messy hand, she’d written, “ask”, and then, puzzlingly, “pun”.

“I…don’t understand,” Hayden admitted, embarrassed. “What pun?”

“Someone’s making
puns
right now?” Reece asked incredulously from above where they were sitting. “Seems kind of inappropriate.”

Nivy was at work again, scribbling out her mistake and replacing the word “pun” with a drawing that Gideon recognized before anyone else.

“
Gun
, not pun,” he grunted. “She wants us to ask about her gun.”

“Oh. Nivy, G faces the other way, see? And it has a fishhook on its bottom, like this…”

Reece and Gideon left the room, one behind the other. Hayden followed the sound of their footsteps down the dimly lit hall, Gideon’s a heavy march, Reece’s a brooding stamp. A door opened with a rusty groan, then closed with an ominous squeal and a click.

“I wish you could speak,” Hayden told Nivy earnestly. “I hate the quiet.”

Quirking her head to the side, Nivy studied him in her not-quite-smiling way.

“Sorry. I suppose you’re use to it. It must have been very quiet, coming across space in that pod. How long did the journey take?”

Nivy shrugged one shoulder and laid the side of her face down on folded hands. She shut her eyes.

“Oh. They put you in a sleep stasis.” Hayden considered for a moment. “It was probably months, then, especially if you didn’t travel by Stream. The Streams intrigue scientists, you know. We couldn’t dream of getting to even Cronus Twelve without them, at least not in any reasonable amount of time, and yet we haven’t a clue where they came from or how they were formed. They—what?”

Nivy was staring at him with an amused if slightly mystified smirk. She put her pen to her parchment and thoughtfully tapped its nib a few times, spotting the page, before shaking her head and giving up.

“What?
What is it, Nivy? Is it about the Streams?”

“Aitch,” Gideon’s voice boomed down the hall, interrupting. He followed it into the room a second later. “We need you.”

“What did you do?” popped out before Hayden could stop it, and he flushed deeply.

Unfazed, Gideon said, “Nothin’. It’s havin’ some sort of fit. You better have a look at it.”

It
being the Vee. Hayden made himself stand on legs that kept trying to lock in place. A person needed his help. He was a doctor; it was his duty to treat any patient entrusted to him to the best of his abilities. Even a Vee.

“You too,” Gideon said to Nivy, jerking his chin at her. “You’re still our prisoner. Can’t leave you alone.”

As calm as ever, Nivy set her things to the side and followed him and Hayden down the poorly lit hall with its dingy, flickering photon globes hanging by chains from the ceiling. Ocher lamplight framed a door at the end of the hall, and as someone started choking and coughing beyond it, Hayden walked faster. He rubbed his sweating palms down the sides of his pants.

He hadn’t given Reece and Gideon much credit. Here he’d been expecting a dark and empty cell when they had set the old storage room up with some civilized albeit small comforts. A canvas cot and a tub of clean water, an ancient oil lamp, a plate of food. It wasn’t so different from the detention rooms at The Owl (which he’d only ever seen from the outside looking in).

With a scream and a kick, the Vee sent his plate of food flying into the wood-slated wall, narrowly missing Mordecai, who straightened up from dodging with a low, impressed whistle. The Vee was crouched in the far corner like some kind of wounded rodent, hiding in the shadows that the guttering orange light couldn’t reach. Hayden inspected him from a safe distance. Pallid and yellow, shaking, sweating, his eyes ticking back and forth wildly. There was vomit on the floor by the bed.

He hesitated only a second, and then something in him took over his body and directed it forward. It was hard to be frightened of someone who needed your help. “Can you tell me exactly what you’re feeling?” he asked as he knelt.

The Vee’s eyes rolled to him, bloodshot. He did not answer.

“Do you have a name?” Hayden asked instead, tentatively reaching for the Vee’s arm.

Behind Hayden, someone shifted uncomfortably.

“Careful, Hayden,” Reece warned. “Don’t get too cozy.”

“I’m going to have to, if you want him to live out the night,” Hayden said evenly as he closed his hand about the Vee’s wrist. The skin’s sticky coldness made him shiver.

“I don’t necessarily need him to. I just need him to answer my questions.”

Hayden looked over his shoulder, alarmed. “I’m not going to help him live just long enough for you to—”

The arm in his hands snapped to life and roped him about the shoulders in a flailing sort of hug, trying to drag him, thrashing and shouting, to the floor. Quick as a blink, Gideon and Reece and Mordecai were there, Mordecai and Gideon towering with their revolvers trained on the Vee, Reece untangling Hayden from his trembling captor.

“The serum, we beg you,” the Vee rasped, lathering like a rabid animal. “If you will just give us the serum—”

“Keep dreamin’,” Gideon growled. “And quit talkin’ like that. It’s creepy.”

As Reece helped Hayden up by his elbows, he said loudly enough for the Vee to hear, “Come on, Hayden. He had his chance.”

“But—” Hayden started before Reece gave him a look that cut the appeal short.

“Burn you all!” the Vee despaired loudly, ripping at his clothes. “We will make you
bleed
for this! Bleed until your life…slowly…seeps….out…” His words gave way to horrible, hacking laughter.