The Wraith's Story (BRIGAND Book 1) (5 page)

Cutter had her back to me as she pried open a can, and scooped out something brown from a silver colored container. Pushing against pain that made my stomach heave, I slowly stretched out one arm toward the scalpel.

"Don't even think about going for the knives." She said without turning. I'd been counting her breaths by the slight rhythm of her back muscles and she hadn't given a single tell. Not a flicker of awareness. Once again, she was multiple moves ahead of me.

I pulled my arm back into the confines of the sheet and rested my head down. Even with my desire for escape, I most likely lacked the strength.

"Why didn't you just kill me?"

Cutter turned around and glared down at me. Her stare pressed me further to the floor. But her voice relaxed, almost bantering.

"Dumb cunt. I saved your skinny ass." She turned back to her task of opening and scooping piles of indistinguishable food.

I watched her, silently pondering my next course of action. I tried to tally what little information I had, but all I knew for sure was that The Bishop had sent me here.

When she brought me the small plastic tray, it was piled with a small mound of something brown and a bowl filled with a yellowish liquid.

I thought to push myself into a sitting position, but winced as soon as my back muscles tensed with anticipation of movement.

"Stay down. You'll break the healcast," she ordered, as she settled to the floor cross-legged next to my head. With care that seemed out of place with her blunt, unforgiving demeanor, she folded another sheet and placed it under my head so my mouth would be higher than my chest. With gentle, deliberate movements she spooned some of the liquid to my mouth. Some of it leaked out over my lips, stinging the dehydrated, cracked ridges. I winced, but tasted good. Salty. Like tears.

Cutter offered small mouthfuls of water from a plastic bottle. In a few minutes I was done and she told me to wait, to let the broth settle.

With the hot soup gliding down into my stomach, my head cleared enough to process my predicament. I desperately wanted answers.

"Are you going to torture me? What could I know that you would value?"

Cutter stared at me for a moment. I knew if she were on the outside then she had finished her advanced training. Wraiths are masters of silent observation – the flicker of a pulse, dilation of a pupil, the pace of one's breath. To the untrained, her stare would have seemed innocent of any intent. But I knew better. I was being evaluated, measured. I just didn't know for what.

She reached behind her and pulled out a long silver strand.

"This is a tracking unit. Nanomorphic symbiotes were implanted in you at birth. They're programmed to migrate from the injection site in your hip to your spinal column. Each symbiote attaches to a vertebra and continuously transmits biometric information to the Creche. They can also be controlled. If the Mandate orders it, the symbiotes can paralyze you. Or kill you." She paused for a second and her eyes flashed silver. "I took them out."

She laid the gleaming thread back on the floor. I magnified my short range vision and examined it more closely. Sticky threads of blood still clung to the silk of the string and small bulbs protruded like a fingerling branch. At the end of one of the veins a tiny spiderlike form clung, crushed and mangled, with broken legs and severed heads.

"There were more of those?" A shiver slithered down my back at the thought of the bug inside of me, and a new wave of white pain enveloped my back.

"Many."

"What happened to them?"

"Most, I just killed. A few, I stuck inside some alley rats and tossed them into cargo buckets at one of the uplifts. By now they'll know you're not wired anymore. They'll question the lift crews. Probably kill a few to show they're serious."

Expressionless, I stared at her for a minute or more. I knew she was telling me the truth. But the thought of people dying, simply because one of my tracking sensors ended up in a lift pod on their shift, made me sting deep behind my eyes. Why had the Bishop sent me to her? Was it so important to find me that they would go to such lengths? But the obvious question was the one I asked, "If they could have paralyzed me why didn't they do that as soon as I cleared the Cell? Why bother chasing me?"

"Because sometimes the paralysis is permanent. Sometimes you just die."

"And why would they care?"

Cutter sighed as if she was considering calling me stupid again. "Because, my little Proto-wraith, you're obviously far more valuable to them alive." She laughed, a throaty sound, amused for reasons I didn't understand.

"Me?"

Cutter picked up the small plastic tray again, slowly scooped a spoonful of the brown stuff, and then offered it to me. I lifted my head, a few centimeters, as much as my strength would allow, and opened my mouth.

"That is the real question isn't it? Why do they need
you
alive?"

I took the bite, started to chew, then gagged and tried to spit it out. The texture was tough, somehow stringy and grainy at the same time. Horrible.

"What the hell are you doing?" She shouted at me for the first time and pushed the stuff back in my mouth with her fingers.

"What did you give me? It's disgusting," I said. My voice had taken on a whining note that I had never heard before. It almost struck me as funny.

"It's meat! I spent most of my creds on this! You need the protein."

Her anger conveyed the importance of this meat so much more than her words. I still didn't understand most of what she said. But I deliberately and forcefully chewed the fleshy grains and swallowed with the aid of another sip of water.

After a few bites, as a reward for my hard work, she helped me up to a sitting position, balanced against the wall.

"If you knew they would kill people for my trackers, why put them on the lifts? Why not just destroy all of them?"

"If I'd done that they would've known right away what happened, that they'd been removed. That's why I had to cut them out of you so they would still be alive. Putting a few out into the world easily bought us a day or two here," and she motioned around the room, "In our palatial abode. I knew you would need time to recover."

"You could have told me what you were doing. Instead of just assaulting me." I allowed an inflection of accusation to seep through.

"There wasn't time. And besides, if you had known, they would have killed you." She tossed the tray and the spoon on to the concrete floor. "I'd been tracking you just like they were. When you're in the pockets, the lauds –"

I raised my eyebrow at her in question.

"The nanosymbiotes. They can't transmit while you're in the pockets. You were out of range for so long I thought you might be dead." She stopped and looked hard at me. "You really can jump, can't you?"

I nodded. I could tell she was impressed. Perhaps that made me valuable to the Mandate, and perhaps Cutter wanted me for the same reason.

She continued, "As soon as you flashed back on the map I knew I had to act quickly or risk having them decide to stop you. There wasn't time to explain all of this." She motioned around the room and then pulled out a small portable tracking unit from one of the satchels and handed it to me.

I thought I knew where it had come from, but I still had to ask. "Who gave this to you?"

Contempt weighted her voice. "He did."

I looked up at her, my eyes wide, hoping to see the truth amongst the gray and dankness around me. "The Bishop?"

She slapped me across the face so hard that I dropped the tracking unit and collapsed onto the bag that supported me. Tears stung at my eyes, but I would not give them to her. I wouldn't show her my weakness.

"Never say his name," she said quietly.

Anger welled inside me, which only amplified my physical pain.

"Why are you doing… this? You didn't need to put those things on a lift with so many people. You didn't need to get them killed. What's wrong with you that you would do all of this? This isn't a war!"

I let the pain wash through me in hot ripples with each raging word. I welcomed the next slap, the next assault from this cruel girl who was both my salvation and my torment. This Wraith who was my savior.

She stood slowly, towered over me for a moment, picked up the remains of my meal, putting the spoon on the tray, walked over to the reclamation bin and dropped them in. The clank of metal falling into metal pierced the room and I winced as if she struck me again. Then she walked back to me, her left hand curled over the bandage on her left wrist. I could see a faint bloom of blood under the gauze. I dropped my eyes to the floor and waited for the blow.

She stopped directly in front of me, legs apart, hands fisted on her hips, and I looked up at her. She was magnificent, a black and silver goddess, terrible and beautiful, looming over me. I hated her.

I needed her.

Cutter dropped to one knee, her face dangerously close to mine. She moved her hand suddenly toward my face and I flinched. But the blow never came. She gently smoothed back the strands of black hair that stuck to the sides of my sweaty face.

She kissed my forehead.

"Here's your first lesson, little Wraith." She paused long enough to capture my gaze in hers. Our eyes locked and my heart pounded.

"This
is
a war."

We stayed in that room for slow, endless, days while the healcast worked its magic. Cutter practically force fed me meat, insisting it would give me what I needed to regrow tissue. Sometimes we talked.

Mostly I slept.

She told me about two raids – the Merchant Princes were sending out soldiers — no word about operatives from the Mandate. They were looking for a girl, a kidnapped highborn. They even trotted out weeping parents to plead for her safe return.

Cutter and I lay in the dim light of the room and waited. To pass the time, or maybe to clear her conscience, she told me about the Wraiths — and the Mandate.

Marajo Lift is governed by a family descended from the line that ruled South America for most of the 23
rd
Century. At least in public, they're devout adherents of the Catholic Revival that emerged in the wake of the American Caliphate's collapse after the Water Wars.

The Mandate of St. Nicolo was their creation. It's a Revived Catholic order devoted to the teachings of the greatest of the New Canon and the patron saint of the Merchant Princes. The Mandate is devoted to statecraft, and controlling the masses, all seven billion of them, and keeping those in power where they belong — in power. The Mandate is a careful organization. Secrecy is ruthlessly maintained and the Consiglio Camerlengo, the council of cardinals who run the order are even more powerful than the princes they advise. The Wraiths are their instruments of policy — ambassadors, soldier and of course spies.

On the second day, Cutter decided I needed a name. I guess she was tired of calling me 'Stupid Girl'. I asked her where she got hers. She gave me that look again and then unwrapped the bandage on her wrist. There was a small cross, the double-barred style the Mandate favored, carved into the soft skin just below the heel of her hand.

"To remind me of my roots," she quipped. "There are others. Do you want to see?"

I did.

She unzipped her black jumpsuit, emerging in an unconsciously delicate pirouette of pale flesh like some fabulous creature shedding its cocoon. She wore nothing underneath and her body was as beautiful as her face. My eyes moved over her with a will of their own. They grazed the landscape of her smooth white skin, every prominence, every hollow, every crease.

She was taller than me and much of the difference was in her long, athletic legs. I traced her thighs, noting automatically the development of her quadriceps. Dancer's legs. Her belly showed the faint pattern of rigorously developed abdominals. Like all Wraiths, she had tiny breasts, little mounds peaked by pale nipples which stood erect despite the warmth of the room.

There were scars. Everywhere. A few might have been the marks of combat. There was a pink seam running along the fifth rib of her left side that must have come from a blade — a big one. A little divot, no more than a few millimeters across punctuated her right shoulder, just below her collarbone. I could see the X shape clearly. Flechette.

But the others, and there were dozens of them, were something else entirely. Cutter's body was a gallery of images gouged and sliced into her perfect skin. Many were simple glyphs, like the cross on her wrist. But some of them were far more elaborate — masterful illustrations drawn in blood and pain.

My eyes flitted from one vignette to another, reading Cutter's soul in the scars on her skin.

All I could think to say was, "Why?"

"They took my soul and my life and left me with this." She motioned up and down the length of her glorious body. "A shell. A house for the me they couldn't quite eradicate. And I decorate my house as I please, for me — not them."

I knew 'them' meant more than the Mandate. Beauty like hers, outside the fold of a highborn home, would surely be as much a hazard as an asset. Maybe the Wraiths needed the protection of the families as much as they wanted us to protect them.

I thought of 82 and my throat tightened. Then I thought of Cutter, of everything she must have endured, and the tears welled, sketching their own narrow lines on my cheeks.

"Trig," I whispered. "I want you to call me Trig."

For the briefest instant, fury flashed in her eyes. But then something else displaced it. Something I'd never seen before. Something I didn't know how to read. When she spoke, her voice was husky. "Is that really what you want? You know what they take from you?"

"Yes."

Cutter's lips curled up gently. It was a madonna's smile, heartbreaking in its beauty. She ran her hand down her belly and it rested over her pubic mound. Her fingertips brushed a thin red seam just above her sex and I remembered the mandatory hysterectomy. "They never quite take it
all
do they?"

After a moment she shook her head and said, "Fine, Trig it is."