Revolution's Shore (37 page)

Lily stood, feeling dwarfed and alone in the vast silence of this strange, almost alien, bridge.

Kyosti's voice, soft, brushed against the quiet that hung so heavily over him. “‘Hell hath no limits nor is circumscribed In one self place, but where we are is Hell, And where Hell is there must we ever be.'”

She took fifteen deliberate steps forward and halted three steps from him. Where the blood had streaked his face most thinly, it was already dried and beginning to flake off.

“I don't know what to say to you.” She extended a hand toward him, tentative, and withdrew it without touching him.

He did not look up at her, but his voice was low, compelled by an inner pain she could not even imagine. “Say you forgive me for murdering the man on Unruli Station.”

She felt dizzy, having forgotten to breathe, and she knelt beside him. “I forgive you.” She put her hands on his shoulders.

The urgency and force with which he embraced her caught her by surprise, and the strength of his grip scared her—until she realized that he was holding on to her as if she were his anchor. Not even so much for his life, but for his sanity.

K
YOSTI DID NOT SPEAK
at all on the return trip back to the
Boukephalos
. He sat next to Lily, eyes shut. The slight rise and fall of his chest, and the barest, shifting presence of his fingers brushing her leg, were the only signs that he was alive.

When Doctor Prachenduriyang met them at the shuttle bay with Jehane's orders that they were to be returned immediately to quarantine, Hawk acquiesced without protest. Duri had taken careful precautions from the shuttle bay all the way to Medical, and installed them swiftly and efficiently in a two-room suite somewhat larger than Lily's original quarantine room.

As soon as they were sealed into the suite, Kyosti lay down on a couch in the second room and turned his back to them, effectively leaving Lily alone with Duri.

“He isn't feeling well,” Lily said, feeling obliged to explain. “I don't understand, after my quarantine was broken so thoroughly by Kuan-yin, that you're bothering with this.”

Duri shrugged, watching Hawk's back with the measuring eye of a healer. “Jehane's orders. What are his symptoms? Lethargy? He seems pale. I'd better take his readings. I don't mean to alarm you, but I've finally gotten in the medical records from the
Forlorn Hope
, and he is the only member of the entire crew who has not yet come down with this mysterious plague. And evidently we have a new rash of cases on
Zima Station
and
Savedra
, the two ships which accompanied the
Forlorn Hope
the past month.”

“Maybe he's immune,” suggested Lily.

Duri shook her head. “Unlikely. So far we have one hundred percent contagion. Why should comrade Hawk be immune?”

“Why, indeed?” asked a new voice.

Lily whirled to see Jehane, sheathed for quarantine, enter from the other room—she had not heard him coming in through the quarantine lock. He waited, examining her, expectant.

“I wouldn't know,” she said smoothly. “I'm not a doctor.”

“No, you aren't,” he agreed. His gaze moved to investigate Kyosti's still form. “Doctor Prachenduriyang, do you think comrade Hawk might be coming down with this illness?”

“I can't say yet.” She took a step toward the couch, hesitated. “Of course I'll have to take a blood sample. I haven't had time to study in depth the analysis of the illness's course on the
Forlorn Hope
, although”—she pressed her lips together with a brief tightening of disapproval—“I must say there are a few irregularities in the report.”

“Which was, I believe, compiled by comrade Hawk himself,” interposed Jehane neatly.

“Yes. For instance, he took no blood samples at the onset of the disease, only midway through and during recovery.”

“Which suggests?”

Duri glanced at Lily, then at the unreadable line of Kyosti's back. “I couldn't say. Poor procedural methods could account for it. Although all the other medical records from the
Forlorn Hope
show a meticulous thoroughness in keeping records. Lack of time due to the sudden and virulent outbreak of cases. But again, battle casualties show no such lack of precise record keeping. He might have thought he knew what he was dealing with, and then realized midway through that he did not.”

“In which case,” Jehane said softly, “would he not have changed his procedures with the later cases?”

“Well, yes. …” Duri cast another glance, this one worried, at Lily.

“Perhaps you ought to ask comrade Hawk directly,” Jehane suggested in a tone of utmost reason.

“He's asleep,” Lily said sharply.

Jehane smiled, making her feel suddenly as if she had given something away. “I meant, of course, when he is feeling better. Meanwhile, Doctor,” and he transferred his attention with effortless smoothness back to Duri. “I wonder if you have dealt with all the inquiries on wounded that have come in from our fleet? Has a complete compilation of casualties been made?”

“No, comrade, but it should be finished within six hours. I have two technicians at work on it now. There were twenty-eight casualties that I did not have sufficient expertise to advise treatment for beyond what the medical teams on board their respective ships had already done, so I'm afraid that they may not recover—”

Kyosti sat up. So smoothly and abruptly that both Lily and Duri started. Only Jehane did not register any obvious change of expression.

“Let me see those files,” Kyosti said harshly. The extreme pallor of his skin gave him a look of desperation, or desperate illness. “My specialty is triage, and specifically combat injuries.”

Duri was too startled to do more than look helplessly at Jehane for guidance.

For an instant Kyosti looked right at Lily. He was so pale that she had a sudden blinding flash of
déja vu
, seeing, not him, but one of his ghostlike cousins, hand immersed in blood. A tiny smudge of red decorated his cheek: a bit of blood he had missed when he had scrubbed his face with the white towel that Adam had offered him as they had boarded the shuttle for the trip back. She looked away, feeling sick with the memory.

“By all means,” Jehane said. The plastine quarantine sheath muted his expression and his tone. “Doctor Prachenduriyang, if you can set up an interface in here?”

Duri frowned. “I don't like it. You look and act ill to me, comrade.”

“I won't leave this couch,” he promised. Even just sitting, he had an edge of fine-honed exhaustion about him, as if the couch lent him a force of will that alone, at this instant, sustained him. “It will give me something to do.”

“Well.” Duri hesitated, then walked forward decisively. “Let me examine you, and take some blood, and then I'll set you up.”

Under any other circumstance, Lily would have been amazed at the meekness with which Kyosti submitted to Duri's orders, or even to her plastine-sheathed—and thus scentless—touch. But now she was amazed he had the strength of mind to insist on what little he did demand: a task to immerse himself in, one that would keep him free of having to think.

“Very good, Doctor,” said Jehane. “Now, comrade Heredes, I would like to speak with you in the other room. If I might.”

She allowed herself a brief, exhausted smile as she reflected, following him into the other room, that his habit of asking permission for things he well knew he could demand tended to disarm his followers into believing that they controlled their own actions far more than they actually did.

She seated herself on the other bed, allowed herself a sigh, wishing she could sleep. Jehane did not sit, but turned to face her, standing light and relaxed, his golden hair and brown tunic—given an unearthly sheen by the plastine sheath—set off in rich contrast against the stark white expanse of wall behind him.

“We have routed Central's fleet,” he began in as matter-of-fact a voice as if he were announcing dinner, “and I have given orders that we advance on Arcadia. I expect to meet very little resistance there, except in the walled precincts of Central itself.”

“Because of Pero,” she said. “Robbie will have Arcadia entirely committed to you. He was halfway to that goal when I left there.”

“Indeed,” agreed Jehane. “Pero has been a tireless worker for our cause.”

For some reason the comment irritated her. “He's the most honest man I know,” she said abruptly. “I hope you appreciate that.”

“Rest assured,” he murmured, without a smile. “Meanwhile, comrade, both of the unidentified vessels which caused us—some alarm, have left Blessings system.” He paused.

She simply watched him, without speaking.

“You must understand that I need to know what transpired on that ship.” Again he paused.

This time she shut her eyes, not wanting to remember, but the vision bloomed unbidden in her mind's eye. She opened her eyes quickly to the soothing monotony of white walls and Jehane's impassive and implacable face.

“And why both ships left so abruptly.”

Because they aren't interested in you—or us—at all, she thought, but she refrained from saying it aloud. “Because,” she said instead, “they had finished what they came here for. Business”—she had to suppress the image of Kyosti dipping his hand in blood—“that was purely between themselves.”

His lack of reaction was so pronounced as to be a strong reaction in itself—a man like Jehane could not like being dismissed so easily. “The ship you were on, where did she hail from?” he asked, cool now.

“You know where she's from,” said Lily flatly. “She's not from the Reft. She's from the League. As was the other ship.”

“As are you. As is your robot, and comrade Hawk.”

“Where
is
my robot?” she demanded.

“In time.” He pitched his voice to be soothing, but continued his questions nevertheless. “You were saying, comrade?”

“I'm not from the League. I grew up—” She hesitated. Could she be sure that Ransome House would never be blamed for her actions, in some form or other? And changed what she was going to say. “I grew up in Reft space just as you did, comrade Jehane. I just happen, like you, to have seen stranger things than most people have, and been influenced by them.”

He smiled, a surprisingly sweet expression. “Well spoken, comrade Heredes. Nevertheless. Say it is true, about
your
birth and upbringing. That still leaves us with—the League. How does one get in touch with them?”

“I don't know. La Belle Dame might, but she's gone now, and you'll never catch her.” She saw the flash of annoyance flicker across his face before he controlled it, and she knew it had been the wrong thing to say.

“Then that leaves comrade Hawk, does it not?” he replied calmly. “Convenient that he who was so well before visiting this La Belle Dame is now obviously suffering some illness. How did you escape from my people at Nevermore, Lily Ransome?”

She had forgotten how much he knew of her—again, she had let distance and time allow her to underestimate him. It seemed to her now that she was walking down a long, but finite, corridor in which all the doors were being shut one by one before her.

“I happened to be traveling,” she said slowly, “with a man who is now dead.”

“And the three representatives from the League? One of whom was, though I shouldn't have to remind you, our comrade Hawk.”

“Hawk came with us. The other two—I don't know. Perhaps they went back to League space.”

“Presupposing that the route that the ghost ship called the
Forlorn Hope
once haunted has now been rediscovered.”

Lily cupped one hand over her eyes, rubbing the ridges of her eyebrows. “I don't know. I suppose it must have been—”

“If La Belle Dame and this other ship are now running the roads in Reft space, I suppose it must have been, too,” he answered for her, perhaps a little sarcastic, now.

Lily lowered her hand and regarded Jehane with the cool carelessness of utter fatigue. “What are you afraid of?” she asked. “I'm not a navigator, but I think—I suspect—that a road that long lost, or so difficult to run that it was left and forgotten, is not so easily opened again. Does that satisfy you?”

“Comrade, you do me an injustice,” he replied in his most persuasive voice. “This is not an interrogation. But the safety of the Reft—if the safety of the Reft is at risk, then there is no investigation I will not pursue to ensure peace and the restoration of a true and responsive government.”

“Blessings worked well for you. Did you know it would?”

He cocked his head to one side, a gesture both endearing and modest. “I had faith. Now I had better leave you to your well-deserved rest. Events press on, comrade. I will not talk to you again until Arcadia is ours.” As he finished speaking, he stood up and walked to the door.

“Comrade.” She, too, stood up. “Why are we being held in quarantine?”

He smiled gently. “As long as the risk remains.” And left the room.

She reached the door just as it sighed closed behind him. It was locked, of course; a means to ensure quarantine from the inside. She laid a hand on it, felt the unyielding metal cool her palms as she leaned against it as the hope that the pressure of her hand might open it cooled as well with each passing second. He had trapped her as neatly here as he had manipulated her into risking herself and her friends in the liberation of the Harsh 30s mine. That he no longer trusted her seemed obvious; the question now that she had to consider was whether he had ever trusted her, and whether her belief in Robbie Malcolm had caused her to be blinded to his suspicions. But she could not reconcile Pero's belief in Alexander Jehane with her own misgivings about him, and knowing Robbie as she did, could still only conclude that Robbie knew of him something she did not, and had still to learn.