A Passage of Stars (37 page)

“We keep our word,” said the officer. “You have until he can walk again.”

Lily took ten steps back, turned, and sprinted. No shots followed her. Her leg ached with each pounding step. Blood trickled down her neck. Each pulse shot through her chest. She ran all the way to the clinic. Not even tattoos bothered her, and she saw no more Immortals.

At the steps leading up into the clinic, she had to stop. Not just because she was gasping for air and fighting the spreading pulse of pain, the cramping in her injured leg. There were others wounded. Her first glance, halted, rising as her wind came back, fixed on a child, chest ripped open as if by a rending knife. She heard weeping. A man moaned, clutching an arm to his body; he shifted, and bone showed, sticking through his flesh. Lily stumbled up the steps, trying to avoid all the bodies cast there like so much debris. A tattooed woman in a medical jacket walked among them, clipping tags about their necks. As Lily reached the clinic door, two clinic workers emerged and designated the next patients to go in.

“Be you have to wait your turn,” said one, laying a restraining hand on her bruised arm.

She winced. “I’m not here for injuries. I’m here to see min Accipiter.”

A look passed between the two workers. One nodded. “He be in ward B.”

She knew where it was. It was the same common room where she had gone—so long ago—when Pero had been shot. Inside the clinic, hush prevailed, a low murmur of talk. Injured Ridanis crowded the seats, sat with the patience she had seen in Paisley—not expecting anything more—in orderly lines in the halls. A worker helped a man limp out of ward B, and Lily slipped inside, the broad door sighing shut behind her.

Seats, benches, floor: all were crowded with bleeding, torn, wounded Ridanis, a sea of patterns that had, like a common thread running between them, the red markings of blood.

Kyosti was bent over a boy, hands probing with insistent gentleness at one leg. The boy cried out, and Kyosti, with a skill she could only marvel at, soothed his crying while ripping off the trouser to see the wound better. His hair stood in wild, pale disarray about his head. Blood stained one cheek, dried there as if from hours ago. His medical jacket had once been white; now red mottled it. Strain pulled at the delicate lines of his face. He looked on the edge of breaking down from exhaustion. She thought she had never seen him as handsome as he was now.

Ridani eyes rose to scrutinize her. Silence unfurled along the room until at last the boy, sensing some emotion outside his pain, shifted his head to look at her. Kyosti looked up at the boy’s face. And, with a slow turn of his head, followed the boy’s gaze.

For an instant as long as a window they stared at each other, his blue eyes fixed on her dark ones.

He rose.

“Lily,” he said “Help me carry this young fellow into the back room. I have to stitch up his leg.”

She complied. She watched in silence as he worked, efficient as the Immortals. The boy cried, but he could limp out of the room, clean and sewn-up, when Kyosti was finished.

“Kyosti,” Lily began. He washed his hands.

“Why are you here?” he said over the rush of water. “That was incredibly stupid of you, Lily.” With a hard wrench he shut off the taps and turned to glare at her.

“We have to leave Arcadia.”

“What? Right now? Do you suggest I simply abandon my patients in all their blood?”

“Kyosti!” She took a step toward him. He backed away. “Kyosti, Heredes is dead.” His expression did not change. He seemed not to have heard her. “Central murdered him. They said he was Pero.”

Kyosti glanced down at his bloody jacket. “I heard Pero was dead. I thought it was Robert.”

“Don’t you care?” she cried. “It was Taliesin!”

He laughed, “I’ll believe he’s dead when I put these hands on his cold corpse. Maybe not even then.”

“How dare you!” she screamed. “How dare you say that!” She flung herself at him, furious with grief, but he dodged her, avoided her blow.

“Why don’t you go away—I have work to do.” His hands gripped the examining table as if he would fall if it was not there.

“I’m leaving, Kyosti.” Her voice fell, lost its brief touch of hysteria. “Don’t you understand that? I may never come back.”

“You’re better off without me, Lily. I’ve only brought you trouble, and I’ll only bring you more.”

“Kyosti.” The barest whisper. “Don’t make me leave without you.”

He laughed, short and hard, and let go of the table. “What difference would it make whether I go with you or not?” But his eyes asked something else.

She bowed her head. She could not meet his gaze. The floor, not very clean, lay in all its neutral glory beneath her. “I left Ransome House,” she said to it. “I left Wingtuck’s Academy. Robbie’s in hiding. And Heredes—” She stopped, voice catching on his name.

He turned his back to her, picked up his examining kit, fastened his stethoscope about his neck. “And I’m all that’s left.” He made it sound like an insult.

“Kyosti. That’s not how I meant it.” She moved around the table. “Come with me.” Came up to him, put out her hands.

“Don’t touch me,” he said.

While she was still staring, he walked carefully around her and left the private room.

She could not move. The examining table, thin paper sheet covering its cold surface, metal-smoothed corners, transfixed her vision. There he had gripped with such force. With one hand, tentative fingers, she touched that place. It was cool. He had left nothing of himself there. She swallowed. There was moisture on her cheek, but when she raised a hand to touch it, it was just blood. Here and there her body ached, but it was like an old sorrow, dulling into oblivion.

After all, she had to get back to the shuttle. Her feet moved as if someone else were willing them to. The door swung back. It took an eternity to get from the private room to the door of ward B. All the Ridanis stared at her deliberate progress. She arrived at the door at last. Best just to leave. But she had to look a last time.

She turned. Kyosti had knelt before an elderly woman. She had deep gashes all along one side of her body. He examined them, graceful in his competence, painstaking, absorbed.

Paisley’s story came unbidden to her mind—perhaps some people never could find their true home, like the Ridanis, lost far down the way. Or never recognized it for what it was until they had lost it. To lose Heredes was a thousand times harder than leaving, and losing, Ransome House. But although she had lost Heredes to irrevocable death, she had at least known what he was to her. This time the recognition had indeed come too late.

In front of all those eyes, tears welled up as she looked at him, and she began to cry. Noiseless at first, until a sob caught in her bruised chest.

His head turned. He stared at her, as if at revelation. Unfastening his stethoscope, he laid it on the lap of the elderly woman and stood up.

“Forgive me,” he said to the room at large as he unbuttoned his medical jacket. “But I love her.” The jacket slipped to a crumpled heap on the floor.

The elderly woman stood up. The rest, those that could, one by one, stood, and when they were all standing they bowed to him, a brief, respectful salute, and averted their eyes.

He came up beside her and put his hands on either side of her face. “Lily,” he breathed, lifting her so that she looked up at him.

“I love you,” she said, wondering, because she had just this instant realized it was true.

He smiled, that brilliant, languorous, suggestive smile she had seen the first time he had smiled at her. “Of course you do,” he murmured, and his lips touched hers, the briefest brush. “Mother’s Breasts, Lily,” he said in an undertone of suppressed hysteria, “let’s get out of here before I have to haul you into the back room.” He let go of her as if she were scorching him.

He led her out a back way, pausing long enough in an empty storeroom to take two clean medical jackets from a shelf. He handed one to her, put the other on himself, and they left the clinic.

Roanoak was deserted—silent, empty, seemingly uninhabited. No one walked the streets. Once, in the distance, they heard a shouted command, but that was all: the Immortals, with terrible efficiency, had obliterated the riot.

Side streets led them to the plaza that fronted E Depot. It was so utterly changed a scene from the one she had just fought through that she could not help but feel that she had somehow been dislocated in time, as if she had just gone through, or was still in, a window.

Thin streams of plastine fiber fluttered over the ground. The litter of violence lay strewn across the plaza: clothing, signs, abandoned weapons. There were no bodies. The quiet that lay over them was ominous in its intensity.

“Have they killed everyone?” Lily whispered. “Hoy, they worked fast.”

Kyosti’s head lifted, as if he had caught a scent and was trying to trace it to its source. He moved forward abruptly, and Lily half-tripped over a ruined motoped in her haste to follow him. He halted beside a pile of debris, knelt, and uncovered the body of a Ridani woman. Shutting his eyes, he laid a hand on the side of her face. Lily stopped behind him. The woman had been shot at least four times, once in the neck, the rest in the chest. A slow bubble of blood rose out of her partly open mouth.

At last Kyosti removed his hand and, rising, stepped over the body and began to walk on.

“She’s still alive,” said Lily quietly.

He paused. “She’ll be dead within the hour, Lily.” She still hesitated. “And she can’t feel anything.”

Lily lifted her gaze from the body to look first at Kyosti and then at the deserted square. “We’re going to be seeing a lot of this, aren’t we?”

“Ah, Lily,” he murmured. “You’re no longer what you were when I first met you.”

“No, I don’t suppose I am. Let’s go.”

At the gate into Kippers the mob had vanished and the troops stood vigilant but relaxed. To get them inside, Kyosti used the simple expedient of presenting his technologist’s identification and informing the guard on the other side of the gate that there were wounded troopers he and his assistant had been called to attend. Once inside, Lily guided them to berth 5778.

“Damn my eyes.” Jenny swung out of the cab where she had efficiently trussed and tied the troopers. “You found him. What happened to your hair, Hawk?”

“A minor cosmetic change,” said Kyosti. “I’ll let the color grow back.”

In the shuttle, the engines were already going. Pinto strapped in front counting down the check of his instruments. Aliasing had a hand on his shoulder; when she saw Lily, she stepped back and strapped herself in beside Pinto, at comm. Bach sang a relieved greeting, but the chair restraints prevented him from going to Lily. Behind, Jenny closed the hatch. The comm, tuned in to some underground frequency, sounded suddenly in the quiet left by the dampening of engine noise.

“Pero is not one man, not one woman.” It was Robbie’s voice. Lily strapped herself in next to Kyosti. The shuttle shuddered and coasted forward, taxiing to the strip. “Pero is the voice of the people. Pero cannot be murdered by the oppressors.” Jenny strapped in across from Lily. Out of the window, buildings and berths cleared into the length of runway. “Pero will never die. Pero will always be resurrected. Such is
our
power.”

Pinto reached out across Aliasing and flipped off the comm channel.

Into its absence, Lia said, “What are you going to do?”

Silence first, but for the muffled rumble of engine through the hull.

“I don’t see we have any choice,” said Lily finally. “We’ll join Jehane.”

“Oh,” said Lia. “After all,” she finished as Pinto responded to the go-ahead over comm and the engines arced in volume, “if Central is hunting you, he’s one person who will welcome you, and protect you.” She glanced briefly at Jenny as she said it, but Jenny was busy glaring at the screen on her lap and did not notice the comment.

Beside Lily, Kyosti had fallen asleep, head tucked against her shoulder, one long-fingered hand resting on her thigh. Lily kissed his hair softly. “His heir will take his place,” she murmured. “It was inevitable.”

The engines screamed and shoved and she was pressed back into her seat by the thrust of takeoff. The shuttle banked sharply to the left, lifted, leveled, and began the long ascent toward space. Lily, gazing out the window, watched Arcadia dissolve from detail into the indistinct clarity of distance. All that blue, all water—the kind of beauty that never leaves you.

“Good-bye, Master Heredes,” she said. Bach sang,

Ruht wohl, ihr heiligen Gebeine,

die ich nun weiter nicht beweine;

Ruht wohl, und bringt auch mich zur Ruh’.

Das Grab, so euch bestimmet ist

und ferner keine Not umschliesst,

Macht mir den Himmel auf

und schliesst die Hölle zu.

“Rest well, you holy remains,

which I shall no longer mourn;

Rest well, and bring me also to rest.

The grave, that is destined for you,

and holds no further suffering,

opens Heaven to me

and closes the gates of Hell.”

The shuttle continued to climb, a steady curve lengthening into the infinite expanse of sky.

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