heavily armed people all relaxing at once.
The van accelerated. Sula let the breath sigh slowly from her lungs, and put her rifle carefully down on the floor of the vehicle. She turned to the others and saw at least six cigarettes being lit. Then she laughed and sat heavily on the floor.
Casimir turned to her, his expression filled with a kind of savage wonder. 'That was lucky,' he said.
Sula didn't answer. She only looked at him, at the pulse throbbing in his neck, the slight glisten of sweat at the base of his throat, the fine mad glitter in his eyes. She had never wanted anything so much.
'Lucky,' he said again.
She didn't touch Casimir till they reached Riverside, when the van pulled up outside the Hotel of Many Blessings. Careful not to touch him, she followed him out of the van – the others would store the weapons – and then went with him to his suite, keeping half a pace apart on the elevator.
He turned to her, and she reached forward and tore open his shirt so that she could lick the burning adrenaline from his skin.
His frenzy equaled hers. Their blood smoked with the excitement of shared danger, and the only way to relieve the heat was to spend it on each other.
They laughed. They shrieked. They snarled… They tumbled over each other like lion cubs, claws only half- sheathed. They pressed skin to skin so hard that it seemed as if they were trying to climb into one another.
The fury spent itself some time after midnight. Casimir called room service for something to eat. Sula craved chocolate, but there was none to be had. For a brief moment she considered breaking into her own warehouse to satisfy her hunger.
'For once,' he said, as he cut his omelet with a fork and slid half of it onto Sula's plate, 'for once you didn't sound like you came from Riverside.'
'Yes?' Sula raised an eyebrow.
'And you didn't sound like Lady Sula either. You had some other accent, one I'd never heard before.'
'It's an accent I'll use only with you,' Sula said.
The accent of the Fabs, on Spannan. The voice of Gredel.
Lady Mitsuko signed the transfer order that morning. Transport wasn't arranged till the afternoon, so Julien and the other eleven arrived at the Riverside station late in the afternoon, about six.
Sergius Bakshi had a long-standing arrangement with the captain of the Riverside station. Julien's freedom cost two hundred zeniths. Veronika cost fifty, and the Cree cook a mere fifteen.
Julien would have been on his way by seven, but it was necessary to wait for the Naxid supervisor, the one who approved all the ration cards, to leave.
Still suffering from his interrogation, Julien limped to liberty, on the night that the Naxids announced that the Committee to Save the Praxis, their own government, was already on its way from Naxas to take up residence in the High City of Zanshaa. A new Convocation would be assembled, composed both of Naxids and other races, to be the supreme governing body of their empire.
'Here's hoping we can give them a hot landing,' Sula said. She was among the guests at Sergius's welcome- home dinner, along with Julien's mother, a tall, gaunt woman, forbidding as a statue, who burst into tears at the sight of him.
Veronika was not present. Interrogation had broken a cheekbone and the orbit of one eye: Julien had called a surgeon, and in the meantime had provided painkillers.
Sula looked across the table at Sergius, and silently mimed the word 'ten' at him. He smiled at her, and when he looked at Julien the smile turned hard.
'Ten,' he said. 'Why stop there?'
Sula smiled. At last she had her army. Her own team of three plus a tough, disciplined order of killers who had decided – after a proper show of resistance – to be loved.
