Chapter 31:

“Vek! Wake up!”

It was Hanjan. Vek yawned, shaking off his sleepiness as he got up from the ground. He started to grope his way in the darkness towards Hanjan’s hammock, when he felt his friend’s hand on his shoulder.

“Come with me, outside.”

“Why?”

“Just come.”

“She’s asleep.”

“It’s too risky.”

Trying not to feel irritated, Vek shuffled after Hanjan as the older serf led him through the revolving door back into the main body of the Temple. There it was completely and totally dark. Mildly surprised, Vek tried waving his hand in front of his face. He saw nothing but blackness.

Out of that blackness came Hanjan’s voice. “The princess says that if I stay here too long the bites will likely get worse, that I need medicine.”

“I know,” Vek said. “I heard her.”

“What do you think I should do?”

Did Hanjan really drag himself out of his hammock to ask Vek this? Didn’t he have better things to do, like rest? “Go, get out of here! Unless you have an assignment from Lady Nari to finish.”

The silence was answer enough.

“Tell me what it is, and I’ll do it for you,” Vek said, softening. Hanjan was not in an enviable position. “Lady Nari probably put us both in here so we could cover for each other.”

“But what about the princess?”

At that, Vek couldn’t help but grin. “Well, you’ve probably guessed who she is by now.”

Even in the darkness he could sense Hanjan’s disapproval. “You’re being too obvious. You’ve told her how special she is, what, like three times since I’ve joined you? You’re supposed to keep things secret.”

“Policy says she can’t know she’s the Promised Daughter until the right time. That’s all. All I’m telling her is that she’s special.”

“Just be careful. You don’t want her to defect because she finds out something she doesn’t like.”

“The Free Serfs are fighting for freedom from oppression! What’s there to dislike?”

Hanjan chuckled into the darkness. Vek could hear the weariness in his laughter. “I can see why Lady Nari assigned you to her. You’re so earnest, you could persuade anyone, no matter what you said.”

“So do you want me to pick up your assignment?”

“But what about the princess?”

“What about her? I think she’s demonstrated that she can be pretty useful on a mission. I don’t know anything about taking care of injuries. My strategy was always to go and find Sukren. So tell me what you came here to do, and I’ll do it.”

Hanjan was silent.

“Well?” Vek pressed.

The older serf sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I was sent here to steal the Dome Ring.”

“What?” Vek whispered. “It’s here – in the Temple?”

“Yes.”

Excitement rushed through him. “Are we that close to the Uprising?”

“I think so,” Hanjan whispered.

Vek almost whooped. The Dome Ring. The Promised Daughter. The pieces were coming together…

“I would trust only you to get this done,” Hanjan continued. His voice broke, just a little. “Lady Nari is going to have my head if I go back out there without the Dome Ring, but I have a wife and if I don’t make it out, the Golden Castle will eat her alive. My parents and the rest of my family, they aren’t going to consider her part of the Matterist sect if I’m dead, and without their protection… well, you know as well as I how unmarried women fare.”

“I’ll do it,” Vek said at once. “Of course I’ll do it. Besides, the Dome Ring is supposed to go to the Promised Daughter anyway. That’s what the prophecies say. Over the shelterbelt, the Rajas Daughter who is Promised, Must go. Over and to The Lake Tower, Her feet will tread. With the Ring of the Dome, Dripping in her hand.”

Hanjan gave a low laugh. “You’re right, I suppose it is. I don’t know if that’s the way Lady Nari intended it, but scripture is scripture.”

Vek barely heard him. “I can’t believe we’re almost there,” he whispered. “Almost there, we’re almost there…”

***

A few days later, Mayah sat down on the trunk, leaned forward, and addressed Hanjan directly. “You need to get out of here. There’s nothing more I can do. I know only the basics, and nothing in here is very clean. In fact, why don’t we all leave?”

Her hints had been getting less and less subtle. For some reason Vek seemed to find them hilarious. “We’ll leave soon,” he always said with a laugh. Hanjan, on the other hand, seemed reluctant, almost ashamed to leave, which was curious as he was the most likely to suffer from prolonged exposure to this filthy place.

At the moment, though, Hanjan looked content, if tired, his side swathed in bandages as he lay in his hammock. For lack of anything better to do, he and Vek – when Vek wasn’t in the main body of the Temple scoping out the area – had been passing their time bandying insults.

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“How long have you two known each other for, anyway?” Mayah asked with a yawn, after Vek once more smiled and told her they would be leaving soon.

“We grew up in the same children’s group home, in Gear Post #4,” Vek replied. A grin lit up his face. With Hanjan’s extra lightstick, it was easier to see everyone’s expressions, even with goggles on. “Can I tell her about the playground, Hanjan?”

“Sure,” Hanjan replied.

“Well, I don’t know if you’ll remember, but about seven years ago or so there was this Giving Movement craze in the castles. All the Rajas going on about new theories that said serfs needed more things. Some regents even got sent back as schoolteachers to the villages. In our village we got a young woman regent, and she came along with this bioplastic playground set that all the serfs had to help put up in the children’s home yard.”

“It was the stupidest idea ever,” Hanjan interrupted. “We had to build it in our free time since we were still required to meet our production quotas. So after slaving all day long in the factories we had to come back and set up this playground that nobody asked if we even wanted.”

“Nobody did want it,” Vek echoed. “Least of all us kids. I was nine at the time, I think, and Hanjan was fourteen.”

“Why didn’t you want it?” Mayah asked, tucking her cold fingers under her arms to warm them up. “I saw some of the playgrounds they had for Rajas children in the castles and they looked nice.”

Both Hanjan and Vek laughed, dark, dry sounds that echoed together. “The playground was where all the bigger kids took the smaller ones to abuse them,” Vek explained. “You know, all those covered slides and tunnels you crawl through? In there. So if you’re seven or so, all you’re thinking about is how to never be near the playground ever.”

“Oh.”

“Hanjan’s family was different, though. Most of us in the group home, myself included, had been separated from our parents. But Hanjan’s family – you had what, six brothers and one sister and both parents? – were all together still.

“Serf kids are usually sent to live in group homes in villages other than the ones their parents live in. But Hanjan and his siblings got placed in the group home located in their parents’ village, because they were all Matterists. So they were able to look out for each other. And if they chose you as a friend, you were golden.”

“Don’t say golden,” Hanjan interjected. “That’s Rajas glorying.”

Mayah paused for a moment at Hanjan’s words. Did he mean her too? Surely he couldn’t – he had been fine with Mayah’s helping him, and he had never said anything rude to her. Hanjan had to mean other Rajas. Not Mayah.

Reassured, Mayah asked her question. “What are Matterists?”

“They’re a serf religious sect,” Vek said. “They believe that the Prophetess Darshana came to tell the serfs that they needed to make purposes for themselves, that they were not to mindlessly fulfill the purposes the Rajas made for them. So they do things like deliberately fail the caste exams, which are often used to break serf families apart.”

Mayah frowned. Was that why the families in her serf village always seemed to be missing children? One day, there would be a kid, the next day, he would be gone. The grandmothers hadn’t seemed too broken up about it though. Sad, yes, but not devastated. As if it were normal. Mayah hadn’t even asked Sukren about it, that was how normal it had seemed.

Strange. It was almost as if the serfs had their own version of disappearances. They, too, had to face something unbearable, uncontrollable. They, too, acted like it was completely normal.

Vek was still talking. “Anyway, the point is that if someone in Hanjan’s family chose you as a friend, you were the luckiest kid in the group home, because some of that protection extended to you. So this, what, fifteen-year-old serf came? He was just transferred so he didn’t know that Hanjan’s family was off limits. He took Hanjan’s little sister to the playground. She wasn’t that young, around twelve I think, but, you know, girls are targets for longer. If you were twelve and a boy, you were safe enough from the other kids unless you were a runt.”

“What happened?” Mayah asked, her eyes darting to Hanjan. An ugly smile was on his face.

“All of Hanjan’s family was going to kill the new serf boy, and they would have,” Vek continued. “Except the regent schoolteacher got in the way. Saying all this Giving Movement stuff about peace and love.”

“Nothing about justice, of course,” Hanjan said. “Probably because nothing unfair had ever happened to her, her entire life.”

“So while all this arguing is going on, Hanjan takes the serf boy, and drags him out to the playground.” Relish crept into Vek’s voice. “All of us serf kids are sitting inside the group home, waiting for the argument to be over and for someone to die, when this big, bright light and huge heat wave hits our faces through the open windows and cracks in the walls and roof. We rush outside, and the playground is on fire.”

“Fire,” Mayah repeated. “Hanjan… you set it… you set the serf boy on fire?”

“That’s right,” Hanjan replied.

Mayah didn’t know whether to feel impressed or horrified. She was sharing food bars with an arsonist and a murderer. Mayah wasn’t sure she wanted to do something so gruesome even to the princesses who had threatened her for so long. But then Mayah tried to imagine what it would feel like to set the castle of Lost Technology on fire, and without meaning to, she found herself smiling.

“Looks like the princess liked your story, Vek,” Hanjan was saying. “Did you show her your mark?”

“What did you do to get it?” Mayah asked.

Hanjan chortled. “More like what didn’t Vek do.”

“Nah,” Vek said smoothly. “I didn’t actually do anything that crazy. I just kept up a stream of small things. Throwing rocks at Eenta soldiers while I was still in the village, and then when I turned ten, and got assigned to be a servie in Lost Technology Castle, I’d pull pranks on the Eenta in their dorms.”

Hanjan smirked. “I used to hear stories even back in the village about Vek. He was infamous for getting the living daylights beaten out of him, only to get up the next day and throw stones at the Eenta again.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Vek interjected. “Sukren took care of me.”

It took a few moments for the words to sink in.

“What?” Mayah’s head snapped up. “Sukren took care of you?”

“Oh yeah, we were very close.” Vek was smiling, apparently at some fond memory.

“Oh,” Mayah said. “He never told me that.”

Hanjan coughed, very lightly. Vek didn’t seem to hear him. “Sukren was the best doctor-priest in the dome,” he continued happily. “Never came down on you for getting beat. I always recommended him. Just about any serf in Lost Technology Quinter who couldn’t get regular care would know to go to him.”

“He never told me that either.” Mayah’s heart was thumping strangely. Despite the chilly air, she could feel sweat on her palms. “He never told me about any of that.”

Come to think of it, there was a lot Sukren hadn’t told her. She hadn’t known he was involved in this serf support organization at all. She hadn’t even known about his keeping a journal.

Why hadn’t he told her?

Mayah couldn’t think of an answer. The only thing she could hold onto with any clarity was that Sukren had not been honest with her. There had been something much deeper in his life that apparently even his notebook hadn’t revealed the full extent of.

But why? Mayah looked down, trying not to feel the pain coursing through her. Why didn’t Sukren tell me? He cared enough about me to rescue me in the end, but not before? Was it because he didn’t trust me? Or – could it be – that Sukren’s real life’s this underground life with the serfs? All the time he spent with me, all that was fake, just a tiny part of his heart instead of the whole of it?

It was a very unpleasant thought. Like taking a step into a rice field and falling headfirst into it because you hadn’t realized how deep it was. Mayah had thought she’d known Sukren. To hear that he had another whole life without her made her wonder, and not in a nice way.

What else had Sukren hidden from her?