Chapter 39:

“You can’t stay here,” Petrika told him. “Not without an overnight pass.”

“I… can’t leave,” Sukren replied haltingly in Xhom. He hesitated, then repeated himself in the castle serf pidgin, a Xhom-based creole he knew better than he knew pure Xhom. “I can’t leave, either. The agent took all my papers, including my travel slip.”

Petrika began drawing shut the curtains around her stall. Sukren helped her, then leaned against a column and watched as she lit a firelamp hanging from the center of the ceiling. “They’ll come check soon,” she said, without turning to look at him. “They always come after sundown.”

Sukren buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t believe he was in this position. It was bad enough that he had failed to accomplish his mission. If he got caught without papers, he’d be caged in the lake until someone came to vouch for him. The Free Serfs would send someone to get him eventually, but Sukren didn’t know how long he could survive the caging for. Oh Sarana, why had he let go of his satchel?

“You know I’m going to report this.”

Sukren looked up. “What do you mean?”

“Your mission’s failure. I have to report it.”

Sukren had told Petrika what had happened. “I wasn’t going to hide it,” he replied.

“Good.”

There was nothing quite like the self-righteousness of a twelve-year-old girl. Some of them were Lady Nari’s best agents, but that didn’t make them any less irritating. “You don’t need to threaten me.”

“I’m not threatening. I’m just telling you.”

Sukren looked at the ground. “Fine.”

After a few moments of silence, Petrika spoke. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you get caught, they’ll take you to the cages –”

“I know.”

Sukren had been caged once before. His doctor-priest had been angry at him for something, probably for accidentally breaking some equipment, and had decided to have him punished. Thirteen and terrified, Sukren had spent a night inside one of the cone-shaped cages. Only the vertex of the cone had been above the water’s surface. He and the other two serfs with him had taken turns breathing, all night long. He still remembered the feeling of cold water all around his naked flesh as he waited, waited, holding his breath, for his turn to swim up to the top of the cone and thrust his mouth and nose out of the water into a space just big enough for one person’s upturned face.

He stood upright. Damned if he was going to let that happen to him again.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

In the darkness Sukren could just make out the troubled look on Petrika’s face. “Listen,” she said. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but lately a lot of serfs have been crossing the shelterbelt to live in the Cursed urb. You might be able to join them. Just for a week, until the Promised Daughter arrives. I’ll have new papers for you by then.”

It was a better plan than nothing. “How do I get there?”

Petrika knelt and started tracing a design in the dust on the floor. It took Sukren a moment to recognize that it was a map of the bio-dome. A giant eye, that was what it had always looked like to Sukren. There was the pupil – the holy lake in the center. And the shelterbelt circumscribing the bio-dome proper, that was the iris. The dome itself, stretched over everything, was the convex lens.

Sukren studied the iris. The two Chenta-majority quinters of Woodheart and Lost Technology were to the north. Stoneset Quinter, the only Xhota quinter among the five, was to the southwest. Sandwiched between the two Eenta-majority quinters, Stoneset Quinter was bordered on its east by Industrilia, and on its other side by LakeCentral. Each quinter bordered the holy lake; each quinter’s castle grew by the lake’s shore.

“The Cursed live here,” Petrika said, pointing to the southern end of the eye, in the sclera. She then drew two short parallel lines crossing the shelterbelt, as if marking a gate. “I hear there’s a gap at the top of the shelterbelt here,” she said, pointing to the lines she had just drawn. “You can go through it to cross into Cursed territory.”

Sukren nodded. “I’ll be back in a week,” he said. He felt Petrika’s eyes on him as he left.

Meandering through the ever-thinning crowds, Sukren managed to get to the last row of Xhota huts. He leaned into a column and observed the semi-circular area he still had to cross in order to get to the tightly packed row of trees that made up the shelterbelt. It was filled with shrubs and small vegetation. There was nothing to hide him from the sight of others. He would have to make a break for the gap at the top of the shelterbelt.

Sukren heard the electrical hum before he saw the man rushing him. Instinctively he ducked. The end of a serf prod smashed into the column where Sukren’s head had been a mere second ago. Lashing out with his hand, Sukren scratched the man’s face. With a snarl the man brought the serf prod down on Sukren’s arm; electricity shot through it. When the prod came down on his flank, Sukren dropped to one knee, gasping, trying to keep from moaning. Then it smashed into his back, knocking him to the ground.

The sound of sliding bioplastic reached Sukren’s ears. He knew then that the man was there to kill him. He tried to crawl away, but the electricity was still coursing through his muscles, crippling him.

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“Please,” Sukren croaked. “What – what do you want?”

In response, the serf prod came whistling down on his head. Sukren’s eyes drooped shut as the electricity rocked through his skull. He could feel the edge of a knife pricking his throat. Desperate, he prayed. Please, don’t let me die here, not like this, not with the truth unsaid to Mayah!

Whether a god heard his prayer or not, Sukren didn’t know. But when the man dropped to the ground beside him, a moment after the hiss of a dart, Sukren responded in praise, touching his numb fingers to one closed eyelid, then the other.

He felt someone pulling at him. “Get up,” a small, high voice said.

“Petrika?” Sukren mumbled.

“I thought you might need help.”

“His bag, my bag,” Sukren heard himself say. “My papers.”

There was the sound of rustling cloth. “Is this your bag?”

“Yes.”

“There’s only a medicine kit in here, and a daysclock.”

Sukren forced himself to stand. “Give it to me,” he told Petrika. She handed him the bag. He wanted to tell her that she needed to find a new safe house, that Lady Ki’s agents probably already knew where she lived, but he couldn’t clear his buzzing mind enough to articulate the words. “Don’t go home,” was all he could manage.

Thankfully, she understood. “I won’t,” she replied. “Meet me in a week at the corner of the firelamp stall, row 6. Now go!”

Afterwards Sukren could never quite understand how he had managed it. But a minute or so later, he found himself climbing through the gap that the Cursed had cut out of the shelterbelt’s branches. He hoisted himself through the opening, then clambered down to the other side, panting.

He could see lights all around him, a glowing green and blue nested into the bio-dome itself. There was cooking smoke up ahead. Voices, too, a slow, steady chatter.

He staggered towards them.

***

The serf nudged Sukren’s legs. “Move.” Sukren did his best to shift out of the way, but the ditch was not very wide, and the serf ended up crawling over Sukren’s feet. Welcome to the Gather’s Children ditch, someone had said to Sukren upon his arrival. His body still ravaged by electricity, Sukren had acknowledged the words, but not thought about them. It wasn’t until the next day, after looking at the worn faces of the serfs lying in the dug-out channel, that Sukren thought he understood what kind of people the Gather’s Children were. Hungry, thirsty, and in need – like him.

Those needs, however, were soon met. Water he got from wells inside the Cursed urb, the western edge of which was marked by the Gather’s Children ditch. Rations, too, came from the Cursed. Before long, Sukren found himself anxious for work. A whisper here, a meeting there, a wound cleaned and bandaged, a report given, a story told, a diagnosis made – this had been Sukren’s life. A week was a long time in which to do nothing.

In its poverty, the Gather’s Children ditch felt just enough like a greenhouse village that sheer force of habit led Sukren to begin inquiring after the medical concerns of the other serfs. Almost at once the prescriptions in his kit were used up. His continued efforts won him trust, and the serfs there began sharing with him not just their physical stories but the ones inside their souls.

Most of them were village Chenta. They wept as they spoke of the Eenta soldiers who had taken their food, their children, and their dignity. They cried as they told him of their decision to leave the bio-dome proper to become refugees. Many were furious at the Cursed. They are the descendants of the mutineers! one young woman had cried out. Yet they act as if they were better than us!

From what Sukren could tell, the young woman’s statement was not inaccurate. The Cursed whom Sukren did see were not friendly. They gave food, they gave water, and prayed every day, it seemed, that the Saranai would go back home.

But while Sukren understood his people’s frustration, he himself was not as bothered. He’d always found village life to be more relaxing than the maneuvering that made up a castle’s day-to-day. A simulacrum though this ditch might be, it wasn’t so bad. Especially as Sukren wasn’t staying for long.

The night he was supposed to return to the Xhota urb, he slipped outside the ditch to stare at the planet through the hexagonal gaps made up – and framed by – the bio-dome’s branches. He had never seen Chudami’s surface before. As far as the eye could see, identical, red-crusted plants with giant, drooping leaves lined the ground outside the bio-dome. Mountains loomed in the distance, gray and cold.

Someday we will leave this place, Sukren thought. Someday we will thrust ourselves off this wretched planet and go home.

A longing swept over him, deep and lonely. Alone, now, Sukren could feel himself relax, could feel himself finally facing the emotions he’d pushed down ever since his meeting with Lady Nari. I don’t want to obey her, he thought with a quiet desperation. Oh, Sarana, I don’t want to, I don’t want to!

Sukren could see Mayah in his mind’s eye, eager, happy, excited to be in on the secret he’d kept from her all this time. He didn’t know if he had it in him to reject her. For two weeks, it’s only two weeks, he told himself. But those two weeks loomed large, as large as all the years of his life.

Sukren looked up at the sky. The solar flares danced across the starry night. He thought about the first time he heard the oracle of the Promised Daughter. The hope that it had inspired in him. Earth was the goal, the end. Where everything would be better. The brokenness gone, the pain redeemed. A place to start over.

Sukren had long ago understood that he was not like the other Free Serfs, to whom Earth was a bonus prize second to winning serf freedom. Their fervor was different. At times he had tried to mimic them. It was almost ironic that it was the memory of his parents, Chenta village serfs in every bone of their bodies, that arrested his efforts. Be grateful, they told him in gentle, soft, barely remembered voices, his mother and father both. Always be grateful. They had been happy when Sukren was selected as a four-year-old to become a doctor-priest. It was a better life for their boy, and they should always be grateful.

Sukren himself had carried that attitude with him into the castle, not making a sound of protest when the doctor-priest to whom he was apprenticed first touched him. He was obliged to the man, wasn’t he? Be grateful. Even joining the Free Serfs, for Sukren, had been less about upending the Golden Castle, and more about Lady Nari, and what he owed her.

But caring for Mayah…

That had been about Earth, at first. Definitely it had been about Earth. Sukren had felt himself restored as he raised Mayah to know all she would need to know in order to lead them there. If it had been up to him, he and Mayah would have stayed in the village until she was ready. He would have raised her to identify totally with the serfs by not even telling her that she was a Rajas.

Taking a deep breath, Sukren rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, blinked, then looked again at the planet’s surface through the bars of his home. Oh, if only there was a way for the prophecy to be fulfilled without all the lying. If only there was a way for the Promised Daughter to enter into her own without all the politics.

If only I didn’t have to obey Lady Nari next week…