Ashes and Rain: Sequel to Khe (The Ahsenthe Cycle Book 2) (18 page)

Doumanas were returning to the streets in large numbers now that the rain had stopped. I pulled up my hood again and drew it tight around my face. I leaned close to Larta and lowered my voice. “Jonton and the orindles and helphands who have sided with her need to be dealt with as you would any babbler in Chimbalay.”

Larta stared at me. “These are our sisters. One babbler, yes, for the good and harmony of the community, would be turned out to the wilderness. But you can’t send them all. We need orindles and helphands.”

“Then what instead?”

A group of doumanas was coming our way. I ducked my head as they approached.

When they had passed, Larta said, “The guardians will come for Jonton. We’ll remove anyone who springs to her defense and hold her at Justice House. I won’t do more than that against my own kler-sister.”

Larta fiddled with the bracelets on her wrists, the ones with the symbols of her work and rank embossed on them. “I don’t like this. We guardians exist more to help than anything else. We only have stunners in case beasts from the wilderness threaten our sisters while they go to and from visiting corentas. I’ve never used one to threaten a doumana.”

“Not even a babbler?”

Larta shook her head. “The babblers all went quietly. Even Marnka, for all the trouble she’d caused. In the end she went out the gates without a fuss.”

When I’d stayed with Marnka in the wilderness she’d told me she’d pushed an orindle out a second floor window, breaking her leg. Marnka was proud of what she’d done and felt no sorrow for having harmed a sister. The same way that Jonton felt no sorrow at the harm she did her sisters in Chimbalay and to soumyo all over the planet. Maybe it was loss of compassion that made doumanas insane. Maybe that was the definition of insanity — the inability to care about others.

“I hope we won’t need a stunner with Jonton, but best to be prepared.”

Larta sighed again, and picked up a weapon from those lying on a table. She slipped it into a leather pocket shaped like the instrument in the special cloak she’d put on. She nodded to the nine other guardians. The brownish-pink of uncertainty showed on a few necks, but softly. Each guardian chose a stunner and slipped it into the pocket of her cloak. Duty was the stronger emotion, bred into us over the generations that the lumani had ruled our world.

I felt my neck warm. Here was another consequence of having destroyed the lumani: sister turning against sister. It had to be put right.

I’d worried that Jonton would use the machine against us, opening the skies and pouring driving rain on our heads. I didn’t doubt she knew we were coming. However her information network operated, it was efficient. The late afternoon sky stayed clear, but when I looked up the sun was shady and weak, as pale as old yolks.

Could Jonton control that too? Not the sun, but the air somehow, how we perceived the world around us? I shivered in the warming air.

“What?” Larta asked, as we walked side by side.

“Nothing,” I said. “A thought. Nothing real to worry about.”

One of the guardians stepped up on Larta’s other side. “Some of our sisters are nervous about bringing the stunners. They’re wondering what we’ll be up against.”

Larta kept her steps as steady as her damaged leg allowed, but I saw swirling within her the brownish-pink of uncertainty and the dark-gray-purple of the frustration uncertainty brought.

“I don’t know any more than what I told them at Justice House,” she said. “Jonton and any orindles — or anyone else — who tries to stop us from taking control of the machine will be detained and removed. That’s our job, and we’ll do it. We’re not — ”

The sudden sob seemed to come from beneath our feet. A sob like I’d heard back in Research Center Three, though no one else seemed to hear it then. I stopped and listened.

“What — ” Larta said, but was cut off by a loud rumble through the air.

The ground beneath us buckled and rolled. Yips of surprise came from the guardians behind us. Larta grabbed my arm and the shoulder of the guardian on her other side, trying to keep herself from falling. I set my feet wide and bent my knees to keep balanced. I held onto Larta to keep her and the other guardian from tumbling down, amazed that I was strong enough to do it.

The shiver passed in a moment. The sky was still bright, but rain fell as hard and sudden as an avalanche. The guardians who had been behind us squeezed up and we grouped together, each of us tugging our hoods over our heads. I glanced around the street and saw groups of other doumanas doing the same, most walking fast now, in a hurry to reach their destinations.

Larta stepped in front of our group and held up a hand dripping with rain. “Jonton seems to be sending us a greeting. Or perhaps she felt the gardens were dry and in need of a soak. Either way, we do what we have come to do. We do it like guardians — peaceably, orderly, with the best wishes for our sisters in our hearts, but prepared.”

She reached into her pocket. I saw her fingers moving inside. The other guardians reached into their pockets and their fingers moved in the same practiced motions.

Many of the public structures in Chimbalay had stone steps leading to wide porches, but Research Center Three had more steps than most, more than twice as many. We climbed the twenty-three steps and I realized the reason this first floor was so high was to make space for the machine below, which didn’t make sense if this structure had been built for the lumani when they had Chimbalay constructed, long before the mistakes of the weather-prophets and the building of the machine. Had Jonton lied about when and why the machine was built, or had the lumani put the machine here because there was existing room? What else might be hidden in this place? I wished the structures of Chimbalay would communicate. Things would be much easier if I could ask and they would answer.

The rain beat down, as hard as pebbles. No orindles or helphands were out on the porch. Larta didn’t knock or call out; she aimed her stunner at a small depression beside the door, fired a light-bolt, and the door irised open. She held up, rather than bursting in, stepping carefully into the barely lit foyer.

“Empty.” She motioned us in with a wave of her hand.

The door to the large receiving room flew open. An orindle I didn’t recognize stood between the jambs, her fists on her hips, her elbows jutting to the sides. The brown-yellow of annoyance showed on her throat. I wondered why she’d chosen to show us her feelings.

“Kith,” Larta said, naming the orindle, “step aside and let us in.”

Larta’s neck showed nothing. This was her work and she did it well. It didn’t cause strong emotion in her. Or wouldn’t, if Kith stepped aside quickly. If not…

It didn’t take lumani hearing to know there were more doumanas inside the room. They scraped chairs and moved around, and some gave little gasps. I worried about how many might be behind the door, if they would try to stop us.

“Kith,” Larta said, using the doumana’s name again to bring the orindle’s focus to her, “
The
Rules
of
a
Good
Life
say, ‘Trust in those who keep you safe and obey their every request.’ You know what has to happen. You and the others must go with the guardians back to Justice House.”

Kith stood a moment longer, colors blooming and fading out on her throat as she thought through her options. Finally the pale-yellow-blue of acceptance replaced the other colors and she sighed, pleased, I thought, not to have to make a stand. It was the way we were — trained to
The
Rules
and content to follow them. I thought again of what Thedra had said — that we were like flocking birds. Give us a leader — any leader, even a guardian — and we would happily follow.

Larta cocked her head slightly to the left, waiting. Kith stepped out of the doorway.

I quickly counted seven orindles in their green hipwraps, and four helphands in yellow. None of them looked inclined to quarrel. Several bore the soft-green-yellow of relief on their throats.

Larta glanced toward a knot of guardians. “Take them to Justice House, where they’ll be safe.”

The orindles and helphands started moving through the door. The room had emptied, leaving only Larta, five remaining guardians, Kith, and me. Kith moved slowly toward the door, perhaps regretting now her acceptance of Larta’s orders.

Larta grabbed her elbow. “Where is Jonton?”

Kith gave her a sour look and kept silent.

“Larta,” I said, “it’s raining.”

The guardian glanced at me, her look now as sour as Kith’s.

“It’s raining hard,” I said. “There’s only one place Jonton could be — with the machine.”

Larta forced open the door to the machine room with a shot from her stunner, holding her free arm back, her palm facing down, to tell us to halt. The only other time I’d seen Larta at her work was when she’d found me scavenging something to eat from one of Chimbalay’s refuse area. She’d been kind then, and still she’d scared me. Now she was tight, her muscles taut. She took a quick look around, straightened, and walked into the room. Her hand moved to her pocket.

“Jonton,” she said as the rest of us followed her in.

The orindle turned away from the machine and bared her teeth at us. Her neck was awash with the brown-black of anger, but also the red-purple of amusement. How could she be amused? She was a babbler, her rational mind gone. I’d seen what power could do — saw it turn Simanca cold-necked and unfaithful to her sisters. Power had driven Jonton insane.

Had I unleashed this, too, on my community? Jonton’s ambition. I didn’t want to believe it. Didn’t believe it. The destruction of the lumani had given us freedom. What we did with that freedom was up to each of us.

Jonton’s back was to a wall. Several gray cylinders the width of my two hands around jutted from the barrier. The cylinders hadn’t been there before, or had been, but were hidden. I couldn’t guess what they were for. The guardians stood in a semicircle around her, their hands in their pockets, ready to reach for their weapons.

Larta stepped forward. “Jonton, we’ve come to protect you.”

The orindle turned and reached inside the cylinder closest to her. Every guardian tensed. Their fingers twitched in their pockets.

Jonton pulled a slim black hose from within the cylinder and pointed it to the left side of Larta. She pressed on the hose, a certain spot, a button perhaps. A shimmering jet of sharp blue light shot across the room. The guardian to Larta’s left cried out, threw her arms across her chest, and fell to the floor.

Larta dropped to her knees by her sister, her fingers on the doumana’s throat, touching each emotion spot one by one. The room was unnaturally quiet, as though the air and all the life had been sucked from it. Larta looked up, her eyes stricken. But I’d already known the fallen doumana no longer lived. We all knew.

No one moved — every doumana as still as stone. Every neck burning with the gray-red of shock. We had no word for what Jonton had done, the deliberate Returning of a doumana — no word for a thing that went against every
Rule
and rightness of our lives. Even Jonton seemed stunned, her throat the same mass of gray-red as the guardians’ necks. Maybe she hadn’t known what the hose would do. Maybe she’d thought it would merely knock someone back, or daze them at the worst.