“SOPHIOS: Sequencing Organism, Prophage-Human Interface, Optimal Symbiosis. Obvious relationship to ‘sophios’: ‘wisdom’ (an ancient form of proto-Exarchian.) Clearly backronymic, pre-Heavenfall. Clue to the past?”
—Scribbled notation in journal of Magus Comes Masaki Generosus Ortus Takahashi
----
Acerbian Underways
Tumbling Seeding 20, 1885 CE
“Who are you?” the woman asked, and Tvorh’s mind only slowly comprehended the question. “Who sent you?”
Angry. She was angry. Why did his head hurt? Why was she angry? The gun. Of course. Tvorh had taken the gun. Hadn’t he? “I’m sorry,” Tvorh croaked. “I didn’t know it was yours.”
Forgebone pressed against his forehead. “Talk.”
“I’m Tvorh,” he managed. “Nobody sent me.”
“Where am I? Quickly.”
“You’re at my home.” Home? Was it his home? Wasn’t there something he needed to be doing?
Fathers of his fathers, but his head hurt.
“Where?” The gun pressed harder.
“Acerbia. The Chasm.” The blur before him resolved into the woman he’d found in the trash only moments before. That was right! The trash! “Why is my head so leaky?” he groaned aloud to nobody in particular.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know.”
Her voice was grim. “Tell me.”
“I don’t know.” Tvorh realized that he was less worried about the prospect of dying, per se, than about the fact that it would involve leaving his sisters behind to fend for themselves. “I think it was morning when I came up.”
“Came up? From where? When did you get here?”
“Just… just a few minutes ago. I think. I can’t remember.”
“Have you seen anybody? Has anybody come looking for me?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I haven’t seen anybody. Please. Let me up.” The fact that he didn’t know who she was occurred to him only belatedly.
“Tvorh?” a small voice called.
Tvorh craned his neck, slowly, so that the woman could see he wasn’t making any sudden movements— fathers, but his head hurt— toward the hole that led to his hovel. Hrega was standing very solemnly, very still, at the entrance. “It’s okay, love,” he said. “Go ahead and get the rat cooking if you haven’t already.”
“The rat?” The question drew Tvorh’s attention back to the face of the woman. She crinkled a pretty button nose and raised an eyebrow. “Why are you cooking a rat?”
“Because we’re hungry.” Tvorh regretted the bitterness in his voice, both because it might antagonize the woman and because it contravened one of his father’s principles: Never complain. Work tirelessly, and never complain. But honestly, what kind of question was that? What other answer could there be?
The woman eased up on the gun and relaxed slightly. “I can’t think of anything that would make me eat a—”
Tvorh wrenched her to the side, grabbing for his scabbarded knife as he did so. Her free hand managed to grab Tvorh’s shoulder as he rolled, and she brought her knee quickly up between them, striking him in the solar plexus. He spewed his breath even as he tried to gain his feet.
No time to think. Breathing was for the living. He whipped the knife around to an underhand grip as he came to his feet, but she was faster than he was, slamming him down to the ground.
This time, his blade was at his own throat.
She had her hand locked around his, and it was all he could do to keep the point from piercing his neck, never mind bringing the weapon back to bear on her.
“Stupid move, kid.” Her voice was icy calm.
“I won’t let you hurt them, blue-blood,” he growled.
The woman twitched. “Hurt them?” Tvorh stared at her for a silent moment. She returned the look. “Do you think I’m here to hurt them?”
“You hurt me.”
“You had my gun.”
“I didn’t know it was yours.”
“Whose else would it have been?”
Tvorh had no answer for that. He decided to try a different tack. “Blue-bloods like hurting red-bloods. Now get off of me.”
“Last time I got off of you, kid, you tried to gut me.”
That was hard to answer, too.
The woman raised an eyebrow. “Am I right, or am I right? Gently now. I’m a busy woman. Places to go, all that stuff, and I want to be as far away from Nxtlu territory as possible as quickly as possible.”
“Far away— you’re not Nxtlu?”
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
As soon as he’d asked the question, Tvorh realized that he’d been improperly addressing a Generosus. Though she was probably angrier about the near gutting than about his insufficient deference.
She clamped her hand over his mouth. She was trying to suffocate him! Tvorh flailed with his free hand before she got a grip on it and slammed it down. “Quiet,” she whispered. “Listen. Do you hear that?”
A sound of pulsing air, like the pumping of mighty forgebone bellows, assailed his ears.
“Lungboat,” she whispered, releasing her grip. “Quick. Hide me.”
“But—”
“Now,” she hissed.
“I won’t let you hurt them —”
“It’s not me you should be worried about.” She motioned wildly toward the Chasm above them. “Blood, bile, and bones, kid. If you want them safe, then hide me.”
Tvorh scrambled to his feet and raced for the hovel. The woman followed on his heels. There was barely enough space within for them all to fit. Tvorh and the woman huddled near the entrance, peeking out as an open-topped lungboat descended from the Table. Dozens of tracheas on the bottom of the vaguely rectangular four yard long biomobile gasped endlessly as it wavered its way down.
“Do you know about lungboats, Tvorh?” the blue-blood whispered.
Tvorh watched a couple of the men in the open-topped cabin sweep a search lumin over the black debris-strewn rock. Other than the pilot, who stood at a console at the front of the lungboat, they were the only ones of the eight-man crew who weren’t armed with wicked-looking rifles. “Short-ranged air-propelled aerial vehicles. Uses gengineered lungs to maneuver. Highly manuverable, moderate speed. I don’t know why they say they’re stealthy. They sound really loud to me.”
“Not bad, kid.”
Tvorh shrugged. “I read about it them in a book once.”
“See how it wobbles from side to side? That happens when the valves close off one set of lungs and open up flow from the others. It’s always breathing in with at least one set and out with at least one other.”
“Are they always open-topped?”
“No. But open tops are great for shooting out of.” The woman gave Tvorh a meaningful glance.
“They’re looking for you?”
“For me, the one and only.”
The lungship swept its lumins over the pile of garbage. Finding nothing, several of the men on its back turned to one another and conversed. One of them said something to the pilot, and then the lungboat ascended out of sight.
“Maga Senrii Generosus Ortus Nethress,” the woman said at last, “and if they find me, they will not be happy.”
“Nice to meet you, Senrii.” To hell with propriety. She’d almost killed him, what, two, three times? “Isn’t it dangerous for a Nethress blue-blood to be in Acerbia?”
Senrii didn’t seem to notice anything he’d said. “Who are the girls?”
Tvorh turned to his sisters. Hrega was crouching protectively at the side of the bed next to her twin sister, who had the rat pressed hard against the coarse blanket and was stroking it. There was no fire, no water evident anywhere. “My sisters Hrega and Bilr. Hey, what happened to cooking the rat, loves?”
Hrega looked guiltily at Tvorh, while Bilr gazed down at the rodent. “I don’t want to cook her,” Bilr said at last.
“You need your strength, Bilr.”
“She’s scared, Tvorh.”
“Of course she’s scared. She knows we’re going to eat her. Come on. No time to waste. Delver’s foot isn’t going to wait around for you to find something you want to eat.”
“Not her,” Bilr whispered.
“Your sister has Delver’s Foot?” Senrii asked.
Tvorh drew back the covers so that Senrii could see the horrible malformation and the angry red veins on Bilr’s right foot. The Maga’s eyes went wide. “How do you live like this?”
“Same way anybody lives.” It was a bold, even stupid, thing to say, but Tvorh was too tired and in too much pain to hold back.
Senrii merely peered at the gray-skinned rodent for a while. It was obvious the wheels were turning in her head. Suddenly, she asked, “Where’d you find the thing, anyway?”
“Why?”
“It’s got no hair. That’s new to me. Must be a native Acerbian species.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Where, then?”
Tvorh paused. His father had performed janitorial duties at the Nethress Archives, and the Gens had always welcomed him when he’d come riding into the building on Ysur’s shoulders. They had always set out a place for him to read in peace while his father did his job. But then, that was the Gens proper, not the blue-bloods — the Magi, or even the Generosi: the Nethress nobles, Magi or not. If Senrii Generosus Ortus Nethress was anything like the Nxtlu brutes that now controlled Acerbia, his life would be forfeit as soon as he told her.
Honesty is the best policy, Tvorh, echoed the voice of father in his head. Time to put it to the test. “I don’t know if I can trust you,” he said.
“What? Why not? I just didn’t kill you twice out there, and I stopped you from getting found by a Nxtlu lungship.”
“I’m just a street rat. They wouldn’t have bothered me. Besides, they’re only down here looking near my home because of you.”
“Look, Tvorh, what’s to trust about?”
Tvorh gazed at his sisters. On the one hand, Senrii might be as bad as any Nxtlu blue-blood. On the other hand, Bilr was going to die; if not today, then in weeks or months. If something — anything — could protect his family, Tvorh would take it.
If Bilr died, he’d want to die anyway.
Tvorh took a deep breath. “I found a Last Era Libraratory today. Nobody’s disturbed it in years. That’s where I found the rat. And I know that people like you — blue-bloods, I mean — would want it. So I’m keeping it secret until someone pays me for it. So you can threaten to kill me, but I’ll never reveal it.”
“A Last Era libraratory?” Senrii’s voice was that same icy, dangerous quiet that it had been when she’d held the knife to his throat outside.
Tvorh stood and nodded. “And it’s secret until I hear an offer worth my time.”
Senrii licked her lips, glanced at the girls, glanced back at Tvorh. “Huh,” she said at last. “That’s a pretty unbelievable story.”
Tvorh shrugged.
“If you were lying about something like that, you probably wouldn’t get the deal you’d been hoping for.”
“Of course not. A man’s word is his bond.”
“And you’re a man?”
“Yes. And I’m binding myself by my word: on my father’s blood, I found a Last Era libraratory.” Senrii raised an eyebrow. Tvorh continued, “I could have sworn on my sisters’ father’s blood, and then you’d know I’d be lying, because they don’t have a father.”
“Tvorh!” Hrega somehow managed to make his name an indignant hiss.
He ignored her. “I know, we have the same curly black hair. But notice how much darker my skin is than theirs. And I have prehensile toes. They don’t. They’re the splitting image of my mother.”
“Parthenogenesis?”
“Like I said, splitting image. So you can know that I had an easy out there, swearing on my sisters’ father, and I refused to take it. My word on my dead father’s blood.”
“That’s pretty compelling, but lots of people could say stuff like that without really meaning it, couldn’t they? And it seems to me that if you lied to a girl about something like that, you could lead her into a trap, hoping for some kind of reward from Nxtlu.”
The blood rose against Tvorh’s gullet, and he clenched his fists. “Nxtlu? Everything in my life they’ve ever touched has fallen to pieces. I wouldn’t trust them to boil water. They’d mess it up, freeze it, then blame all us red-bloods and gas us to death for it.”
Senrii grinned. “Smart kid. All right. Let’s say I believe you. Now I’m supposed to make you an offer, right? So here’s one.” She stroked the rough cover above Bilr’s leg. “You want your sisters to live?”
Tvorh’s hand flew to his knife. “I swear, if you lay a finger—”
Senrii just smiled sadly at the girl. “Delver’s Foot is pretty bad stuff, Tvorh. I studied it in Academy. Life expectancy is six months to a year, tops. And your other sister isn’t looking too healthy, either. They need food and medicine.” She turned to him. “So here’s the deal. I’m already late for my extraction, so I’m gonna have to fall back to the failsafe anyway, and that’s not time sensitive. So I want you to show me. If you’re on the up and up about this place, I’ll take you and your sisters away from here. Gens Nethress will take you in. Care for you and yours, for the rest of your life.
“So. Do we have a deal?”