Chapter 102:
Senior Rajas dorms had kitchenettes. Vek didn’t know how to cook and neither, it seemed, did Lainla, but together they managed to scrape something together from the water, rice and salted meat someone had left in the food storage bins. Lainla appeared to be most impressed by the electric stove burners. More than once she’d held her hand only a finger’s width away from the hot coils, exclaiming each time in her language at how hot they were.
Or so Vek was assuming, anyway. “Hot?” he asked in the pidgin. He copied her gesture and pretended to touch the burner himself, then winced in an exaggerated manner. “Hot?”
“Hot,” Lainla repeated thoughtfully. Then she grinned at him. It made Vek feel warm and welcome to see it. She seemed nice, that was the only way to put it, nice in a way that didn’t have an agenda behind it. Especially now that she was no longer trying to kill him, Vek was actually having fun. He was almost sorry to have to let her go tomorrow and return to his lonely existence.
Then again, maybe he didn’t have to.
Vek studied her from across the folding table they’d pulled out of the kitchenette. She was grimacing a little with each mouthful of rice, although she seemed to enjoy the meat well enough. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “I wanted to ask you – I mean I know you don’t understand anything I’m saying –”
Her eyebrows were raised. But she seemed willing to sit and hear his babble, so he continued. “Maybe I could join you. You know, your people, the Cursed.” Vek paused. By this point he knew he was talking more to himself than to her, but the words kept coming out. “I can’t go back to the Chenta. Not without the Promised Daughter. And you know, I’m not the type to grovel for acceptance. If I had been, I would have never joined the Free Serfs. If the Golden Castle was going to reject me, I was going to reject it. And I did. I was with the Chenta because that’s how I was brought up, and I was one of them, but if they’re going to reject me now, why bother? It’s not in me to try to belong when I know I’m going to fail.”
Lainla was laughing a little now. Vek couldn’t help but grin sheepishly in response. It was funny for him to sit and talk like she could understand anything at all about what he was saying. And yet, for all that, he felt better. Maybe it was possible for him to join the Cursed. Maybe he could leave all this behind.
Then Vek shot to his feet.
Someone was knocking at the door.
At once Vek motioned to Lainla to get back. She grabbed the knife off the table and retreated to the bed. He waited until she was sitting on its edge with a blanket pulled up to cover the knife before he stepped closer to the door. The Rajas delegation he was with had a special knock they were supposed to use, and it wasn’t the soft but quick tapping he was hearing now. So Vek didn’t know who it was. It could be Baripa. It could be anyone.
“Who is it?” he said in the castle serf pidgin. “I’m busy now.”
“Let me in,” a voice responded in a whisper, in Chenmay.
Vek froze. He knew that voice. He grabbed the handle of the door. It cracked open, and light spilled out from inside his dorm room onto Mayah’s face.
***
“I’ve been in LakeCentral Castle for almost five weeks,” Mayah said. “I found out you were here when I saw you the other day with some Rajas in the cafeteria. You looked right at me. But you didn’t see me.”
Vek could barely breathe. He didn’t even know why he was so excited. Hadn’t he accepted the failure of this mission? Hadn’t he been even making plans in light of it? But here she was, and Vek was thrilled, he was elated! Rock-god, maybe he was programmed still by the Golden Castle to adore the Rajas, or maybe he was programmed by the Free Serfs to worship the Promised Daughter. Vek didn’t know, but whatever it was, it was working, because here she was, before his very eyes, here!
He took her hands in his – something he would have never dared to do before – and kissed them. “You’re here,” he whispered. “You’re here, you’re here!”
She pulled her hands out of his grasp. “Did you know I was the Promised Daughter?”
The sharpness of the question, more than anything, jerked Vek back into himself. “I…” he hesitated. “Did Sukren tell you?”
“No. I found the Lost Princess’ journal in the library and figured it out from there.” She paused. “So you did know. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I – it was policy – Lady Nari’s policy –”
“Lady Nari?” Mayah repeated. Her eyes narrowed. “Who exactly is Lady Nari? A patron?”
“She’s… she’s a Free Serf leader. She rules the Chenta quinters right now.”
“And what was her policy?”
Vek wasn’t sure if Mayah’s new-found knowledge meant the policy of secrecy was now lifted. He hesitated. Mayah’s eyes narrowed further.
“Tell me,” she snapped.
Now Vek had lived with Rajas contempt for long enough to recognize its signs. He pulled away. However the Promised Daughter had found her way back to acting like a princess, it didn’t mean he had to take it. The Uprising had happened. After all that had gone wrong, Vek could insist on this privilege, at least.
Stolen novel; please report.
“Watch yourself,” he told her.
The Promised Daughter blinked. Her lips twitched, but she said nothing.
After giving her a cool gaze, Vek continued. “The policy was to not tell you who you were until after you had aligned yourself with the Free Serfs. Until your experiences led you to feel that our good was your good.”
The Promised Daughter didn’t respond right away. When she did, it was to further question Vek, which he couldn’t help but find irritating. “Is that why you came here to LakeCentral? To take me to the Free Serfs?”
It was true enough. “Yes,” he replied.
“What will they do to me when they have me?”
Frustration flared up inside Vek. Gone was the Mayah who had tearfully embraced him inside the vegetable greenhouse. Gone was the Mayah whose face had shone with hope at the thought that she might become a true serf. In her place was a princess – cold, aloof, superior.
The Free Serfs had failed.
He responded honestly. “They’ll imprison you.”
Lainla said something in Cursed. “She wants to know what we’re talking about,” the Promised Daughter said to Vek, before turning and answering Lainla in the same tongue.
Vek watched them talk. The thought of bringing the Promised Daughter back to the Chenta ethnonationalists like this… what was the point? Even if they were happy to have the Promised Daughter back under their control, wouldn’t they blame him for having failed to finalize her identification with the serfs? And wouldn’t they say his failure was due to his heritage? He could hear their voices now. A true Chenta could have persuaded her. A true Chenta wouldn’t have been hindered by his own complicit background.
No matter what Vek did, it wouldn’t erase his Eenta half. And like he’d told Lainla, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life trying to make up for it.
Besides, he wasn’t even sure how he would get the Promised Daughter out of LakeCentral back to Lost Technology. Maybe if he left tonight, without any warning… they could swim across the lake… yes, that might work.
But that would mean leaving Sukren behind.
Vek closed his eyes. His own snarl came back to him. If I had my way the Eenta would torture you to death.
If Vek left with the Promised Daughter, Sukren would most certainly be tortured to death, and not right away.
Would Sukren’s fate with the Chenta be any better though? Lady Nari normally did not take things personally, but Vek knew Sukren’s betrayal had hit her hard. She had trusted Sukren. She had relied on him. Would she not punish him once he was back under her authority?
Vek was distracted from his thoughts by the Promised Daughter. She was shaking her head, saying something that sounded like, “No, no, no.”
“What is it?” Vek asked.
At first she wouldn’t tell him what Lainla had said. But when Lainla jabbed her finger in Vek’s direction, the Promised Daughter capitulated. “She’s saying I should trade places with her. That I should take her clothes, and go join the Cursed, and that she’ll take my clothes, and stay here. In exchange, she wants you to take the Cursed with you when you go back to Lost Technology.”
Vek stared at Lainla. All at once he saw the pieces of his problem coming together. He would go to the Rajas negotiators and instruct them to make the trade, Sukren for a queen, with the Cursed thrown in to seal the deal. Lady Nari is willing to trade a queen just for Sukren, Vek would say, but she has to justify her decision to some powerful constituents. One of them has been looking for individuals to run experiments on. If the Cursed – seventy bodies – were added to the trade, she would agree to it at once.
That the Eenta badly wanted a queen was obvious. Vek probably didn’t even need to push them that much. An offer tomorrow, an acceptance the next day, then he, Sukren, the Cursed, and the Promised Daughter with them, could be marching out of LakeCentral Quinter next week.
“She’s saying she’ll only do it if you’ll ensure the Cursed are protected and provided for. She says they can’t be starved or mistreated.”
“But what about her?” Vek asked. He felt a twinge in his heart. Of course he didn’t know Lainla that well, he’d just met her, but still, she’d been the first person to show him compassion on this side of his trial.
The Promised Daughter and Lainla exchanged a few words. “She says she’ll hide here in this room until she can escape and join us.”
“That won’t work,” Vek objected immediately. “They’ll find her as soon as they open up this dorm to clean it. Which they will within a few hours after I leave it to lead the Cursed back to Lost Technology. We’ll have only those few hours, at most, before they discover her and realize that someone else went back to the Cursed in her stead. And once they find her, they won’t exactly be gentle to her.”
“She says she’ll find a way to give you and the Cursed as much time as possible to get out of LakeCentral Quinter. That she can hide under the bed, or climb out the window, or anything to forestall their discovery of her.”
“But what about her?” Vek insisted again.
He met Lainla’s eyes. He knew he was being stupid to resist. It was a good idea. It was probably the best one they were going to come up with. And it would solve all his problems, wouldn’t it? It would get Mayah out, and Sukren, and give him just barely enough status to temporarily risk asking Lady Nari if he could join the Cursed.
“She says it’s worth the sacrifice.”
Vek took a deep breath. Again he thought of the mixture of Eenta, Chenta and Xhota inside Coffee Post #1. Lady Nari would probably put them to work somewhere, in a greenhouse maybe. Wouldn’t that be best for him? He was young and strong. He could work in a greenhouse and be done with endless political games. He could be half Eenta, with no one to care that he was. In fact, it might even be better, holier for him, to return to life as a greenhouse serf.
But what about Lainla?
Vek hesitated for only a second longer. Then he sighed and surrendered to the mission. “Tell her,” he said out loud, “that I’ll join the Cursed and advocate for them conditions that only I myself would be willing to live under.”
He waited as the Promised Daughter passed on his words. Then he said to her, “The guards will be back tomorrow morning to return her to the Cursed. Will you be missed if you go with them instead?”
“I don’t know. I’m unclassified right now, so I’m not very important. But my review is coming up. I don’t know when. All I know is that it could happen any time.”
Vek nodded. He would ask Baripa tonight to start covering up the Promised Daughter’s absence. “I think this will work. You’ll go to the greenhouse tomorrow morning, dressed as Lainla. I’ll have them put Sukren in there as well. Then all of you –”
“Sukren’s here?”
“Uh, yes, he’s a prisoner of the Eenta.”
The Promised Daughter’s eyes were hard. “When will you send him to the greenhouse?”
“As soon as I can,” Vek replied, wondering if he should actually keep Sukren in his cell until the day of their departure. But no, he wanted Sukren out of the hands of the Eenta. They had agreed to refrain from torturing him until the negotiations were concluded, but the sooner they no longer had access to Sukren and Sukren’s information, the better.
“Good,” he heard the Promised Daughter say. “Good.”
He watched as she turned and flung her arms around Lainla. The two girls held each other for some time. The Promised Daughter said something to Lainla. The older girl responded. Vek didn’t know what they were saying, but he couldn’t help but admire Lainla’s courage. He wanted to find a way to honor her for it. To thank her for the last few hours they had spent together.
“Your people must be worth a lot for you to take this risk,” he said to Lainla.
When the Promised Daughter translated the words, a smile lit up Lainla’s face. “When you see my sister,” she said to Vek through the Promised Daughter, “Tell her I did this because I am a hunter. She’ll understand what I mean.”