Masked (2010) (48 page)

“I know,” Namid replied, and finally forced her hand away from the gun.

A boat was waiting for her when she broke through the surface of the ocean. A small craft, little more than a slab of wood laden down with fishing nets and fat cormorants squatting inside bamboo cages; so flimsy, a two-mast junk would have sunk it with merely a swipe. Namid said nothing, though. It was night, and she could see the stars. She had almost forgotten what they looked like.

Captain Shao joined the swimmers who guided her from the submersible. It was against protocol for him to leave his vessel, but none of the boys who saw her off made mention of their commanding officer abandoning them, if only temporarily. They said good-bye in the same way they had said hello—with silence, and respect, and fear. Namid thought she might allow herself to miss them, but only because she could not abide the thought that their deaths would mean losing one of the few people who remembered her in pigtails.

Her belongings were strapped to her body, wrapped again in
sealskin, along with a set of dry clothes. Captain Shao, who had stripped down to a special suit made of shark hide, pushed her out of the water into the boat; helped, from within, by its sole occupant: a young Chinese woman. Her hair was shorn so close to her scalp that even in the darkness Namid could see the cuts and bruises in her skin, and a deep red welt, nearly a scar, that covered her throat. Her movements were slow and pained. Captain Shao frowned, giving her a hard, thoughtful look.

Namid leaned over the edge of the boat, gripping his forearm tight as she could. He tore his gaze from the other woman and did the same, his knuckles white, seawater streaming down his face. Beyond the harsh rasp of their breathing and the lap of waves against the boat, she heard distant booms, one after the other, raining down into her bones.

She tried to release his arm, but he held on, pulling himself so close the boat tipped dangerously sideways.

“No mercy,” he whispered. “Don’t you dare.”

Namid forced herself to smile, though it was faint, grim, and felt like death. “Stay safe, Tom.”

His jaw tightened with displeasure, and something else, too much like desperation for comfort. Namid jammed her hip against the edge of the boat and reached down, ready to pry his fingers off her arm. His grip was beginning to hurt, and his men were staring.

But he let go before she touched him. Let go, as though burned, and pushed away from the boat—and her. He treaded water, holding her gaze, and she did not look away, or blink. Just held on, in the only way she knew how: with memory, and heart, and the certain knowledge that distance was always safer.

The Chinese woman began rowing. Namid raised her hand. Captain Shao did not. He stared a moment longer, and then dove. His men followed him in silence. Swallowed, as though their flesh was made of sea and shadow. She knew better than to watch for them, but found herself doing so anyway.

“Are you ready?” asked the other woman softly. She sounded as though she was from the Mainland south, perhaps even Kowloon,
which spoke a different Chinese dialect entirely; though her tone was educated, even refined. Namid was accustomed to Mandarin, having been born to a Cheyenne mother in the territory of New China, but she had spent most of her adult life out east in the Colonial Americas, speaking English. Sometimes she still had trouble with the various accents of the native Chinese (and the Europeans, as well), though enough gold miners had come around the mountain over the past ten years to give her practice.

The woman’s breathing turned ragged, accompanied by a faint whistling grunt every time she pulled at the oars. Her movements were awkward. Blood seeped from the deep welt in her neck. Namid scooted forward, and without asking, placed her hands on the slender wooden grips. Cormorants clucked, shifting their wings, and in the distance, low crashing booms still rumbled. Familiar, even after ten years.

“You’re injured,” Namid said, as the other woman leaned slowly away from the oars. “The Emperor should not have sent you.”

The woman touched her throat, and then her shaved, nicked scalp; a flick of a delicate wrist, so that her frayed black sleeve fell down a fine-boned arm. Namid would have thought her a Buddhist nun had it not been for the fine weave of her dark clothing, as well as the look in her eyes, wild and hard. “I was uninjured in the beginning. Nor was I meant to meet you here. Everyone. . . everyone else. . . was captured. I was the only one who escaped.” She swallowed heavily, looking at the birds, the ocean, anywhere but at Namid. “You are not what I expected.”

“I am Namid MacNamara,” she replied, because she had never found a better answer to that statement, not even after hearing it for most of her life. No one was ever who he or she was supposed to be; not even Namid could say for certain that she knew herself completely. Truth rested only in action; the rest was mystery.

“I am Xiao Shen Cheng,” said the woman, after a brief hesitation.

Namid was focused on the horizon, where a faint orange glow had appeared. As such, it took longer than it should have
to recognize the name. But when she did, everything stopped—everything—and the boat began to drift. She stared at the woman, letting it sink in; and suffered disbelief, and dread.

“You came too late,” whispered the Empress, rubbing her pale hand against bloodshot eyes. “My husband is dead.”

Namid forced herself to breathe. “How?”

Shen Cheng gave her a disdainful look. “It was a sustained effort. We fought well. But the Emperor had sent our crystal skull away with the children, and the remaining core was not powerful enough to feed the lines. When the Juggarnauts came, we could only slow them.”

Namid sat back, struck with a chill. Juggarnauts. She had heard that name from the envoys—heard it for the first time in a decade—and then again in the imperial court on the Pacifica coast; from the mouths of the silver bullet aircrew, and on the submersible, whispered when the boys would see her coming. No one ever thought she could hear them, but that was the curse and the gift of being who she was. Only Captain Shao had refrained from speaking of those skull-enhanced men and women—but that was because he was also Tom, and shared the pain.

Behind them, below, in her bones, Namid heard a low oppressive groan, a rumble that rose from the sea through the bottom of the boat. A despairing sound; and the answering swell that lifted them was unnatural and stomach-roiling. Something brewing in the water. More than one submersible. A battle.

Namid tightened her grip on the oars, prepared to row again—and found herself staring down the barrel of a ruby-studded revolver. British design, new and gleaming.

Shen Cheng closed her eyes and pulled the trigger. Namid had already begun to move, reaching out to knock aside the weapon, but the deafening blast skimmed her left arm and sent the Empress recoiling backward over the edge of the boat. She bobbed to the surface immediately, gasping for air, arms thrashing the water. Not much of a swimmer, either.

Namid did not jump in after the drowning Empress. She took
a deep breath, rolling through the pain and rush of blood to her head. Ten years on the mountain. Quiet, peaceful. She would have died an old woman, with no one the wiser. A good meal for the scavengers.

She picked up the British revolver, testing its weight in her hand. “Where are the Juggarnauts?”

Namid was not entirely certain the woman would hear—or care—but that bruised, battered face turned toward her, and a skinny hand managed to latch on to the edge of the boat. Below them, the waters swelled again, as though from the passage of a large body. Namid thought of Shao, and Maude, and the rest of her old crew, and balanced the revolver across her forearm, aiming it at the woman’s head.

“Tell me where they are,” she said again.

Shen Cheng shook her head, though the corner of her gaze lingered on the glittering gold star pinned to Namid’s chest. Despair flickered through her face.

“I know the stories,” she whispered. “You are savage. You will kill me if I tell you.”

“I’ve killed for less,” Namid agreed, and slammed the revolver butt on the woman’s fingers. She howled, flailing. Namid placed the weapon on the floor of the boat and picked up the oars. She started rowing. The Empress, sobbing, tried to follow; but it was like watching a log thrash.

“They tortured me!” she screamed at Namid, her voice choking on seawater. “I had no choice!”

Namid did not stop.

It was an accident, or so her father had always said. A Scottish engineer, an adventurer, who had studied with the skull masters in China before traveling across the Pacific to the imperial colonies—a vast network of villages and cities that had been thriving for almost a century before England sent its first ships of men to hack a new civilization on the frontier of the far eastern continental tip.

By the time her father had arrived in New China, the Pacifica court and its alliance with the western native tribes was well known, but only by accident; the Chinese Empire had done its best to keep its colonies secret. Too many precious resources at stake: not just gold, but rich and verdant farmland, the likes of which did not exist in Asia.

Her father, who had become a favorite of the old Emperor, was allowed frequent access to the crystal skull that powered the Pacifica court, and formed the root strain of its crystalline harvests. Only fifteen skulls had been found throughout the world—four of them were in Chinese possession—though rumor had it that many were yet to be discovered in the jungles of the far south. Expeditions were regularly sent—usually ending in bloody conflicts—but only one had thus far been found, and that by the new Americans themselves, raising their current possession to two—the other having been given to the new colonies when they were still under British rule.

No one knew quite for certain how the skulls worked, only that some Mohammedan king of the Holy Lands had discovered three in the sands of an oasis: blocks of perfect crystal carved in the shape of human skulls, the likes of which no artisan had ever yet been able to duplicate.

Rather than declare the skulls a simple curiosity, the king had devoted himself to hours spent staring into those translucent eyes—one after the other, in patient succession. This, according to legend, went on for several years until, quite abruptly, the king suffered a massive stroke that left him blind and speech-impaired, but functional enough to declare that he had discovered the secrets to the skulls.

An overly ambitious statement. Two hundred years later, engineers were still learning what powers the skulls possessed—though it was widely known that an electrical current flowing through a skull into a special mineral bed was enough to instigate the growth of crystals that could be used to power the armadas, towns, even entire cities. Beyond that particular commonality, however, each skull
was different. Some provided visions. Some made others go insane.

And some, as her father had discovered, changed the very essence of a human being.

Namid found the shore far sooner than expected. She dragged the boat onto the beach, but did not bother hiding it. Just stood in rock and sand, staring at the ocean as she stripped off her wet clothes and dressed in dry trousers and a shirt. The rest of her belongings were unwrapped quickly: revolver, two knives, her special bullets, and last, the vials of chemicals her father had prepared during the colonial war, and left to her upon his murder.