Was he about to slam a knife between her ribs?
Think fast, Terese!
“Wait, listen,” she stammered. “Look. The reason I’m here in Sumad is to make sure our involvement in the Immersion Chamber doesn’t get out. It wouldn’t just be me losing my job; the entire chapterhouse would be dissolved!”
Morgenheth didn’t move or speak.
“I have more to lose than you, if this gets out. You’re four people whose lives were… changed. Armer Stone employs over two thousand people. How many of them will be able to stay Seekers if this gets out? It’s madness for me to try bringing you in.”
Please Gods, let them believe me.
Morgenheth’s head tilted. “A truce, Saarg?”
She held back a relieved sigh. “We have one another over a barrel,” she said, fumbling for words. “The mission has twelve, um, eleven months left with Sumad Reach Chapterhouse. If I can keep the other Seekers off your scent—easy if you’re not infected—you won’t have to go writing anonymous letters to Sumad Reach, or the newskeepers, here or back home.”
He stroked his beard. “We abducted you in front of your complement. Infected don’t do that. How are you going to explain this to them?”
“I’ll figure something out. I’ll say I escaped while you four were screaming in pain all night.” She pressed on, in case their mystery medical condition was a sensitive subject. “If we keep away from one another, we both win. I go home, you stay hidden.” She decided to push her luck. “But you lot will have to hide well, and not kill anyone.”
He raised an eyebrow. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”
“No, I think it might be. It’s human nature to have bad luck sometimes, but I’ve read your files. All of you have left bodies in your wake. Except you, Dantet. Your stepfather is still in the asylum. If you four can’t not murder anyone for a year, we’re all in trouble. You might not be Darkness worshippers, but you are murderers.”
Faster than her eye could follow Morgenheth lunged, grabbing her by the cuff of her plate armor, and lifting her, leaving her feet dangling. Their eyes were level. She stared into furious blue whirlpools, dark as sin.
“None of us murdered anyone, Saarg! You don’t know what happened to us!” he hissed in her face, his hot breath reeking.
“Even if I tried, I couldn’t defend myself against you, Morgenheth.” She managed to not stammer. “Go on. Hit me.”
He dropped her.
She lay on the ground staring up at her captor.
He spat. The spittle hit her face, running down her cheek.
“We’ll vanish for a year if you don’t search for us. Get out. Go find your complement. And try not to abduct and experiment on anyone for a year. I hear that’s illegal.”
Terese wiped her cheek slowly, not allowing herself to look away. She stood, ignoring her thumping heart.
She spread her arms to indicate the broken shelter and landscape outside it. “Enjoy Polis Sumad.” She turned and strode past Zale. Three shaggy outlines watched as she walked past them and out through the shelter’s shattered door.
Another hot Sumadan morning had begun. She sweated the moment she emerged from the shelter, one of an ancient cluster resting in a large clay hollow. None would have heard her, over their bizarre screaming, if she’d called for help last night. Save lions or cadvers. Or both.
If the sun was rising there, then that way was north. Further in, toward the Center. Hopefully her complement was in that direction. She would find some running water pipes along the way, and her shockpole functioned perfectly.
“Everything will be fine,” she declared to the universe, refusing to look back at the shelter’s gaping entry.
She kicked a nearby stone. The impact sounded dull and unsatisfying, and the stone bounced off to one side and rolled in a circle before falling and stilling. Heading home, over the bumpy clay ridges that Cenephans called hills, and around ancient ruined settlements that made her feel watched, Terese Saarg left the Refugee Territories.
3
“I don’t know, sir,” Terese said.
She stood at stiff attention before Keeper Lijjen, forcing her legs to remain straight and her chin high, not allowing herself to scratch the persistent itch at her side but letting her eyes blur and not focus on the dark-skinned Keeper. Some part of her had to stay relaxed or she’d break entirely.
Lijjen neither moved nor spoke.
On his desk, a small inset bulb within the rectangular recording artifact blinked steadily as it had in each ‘debrief’ she’d endured in this room. They were gifts from the Seekers’ patrons: the Royals, within Polis Sumad’s Center.
“You suspect why I summoned you though, Head Saarg,” Lijjen said after Terese had been silent too long. His elbows rested on his thick wooden desk, his fingers intertwined.
Terese kept her face neutral. Here we go again.
Keeper Lijjen was trying to break her. That would be understandable, had he suspected her involvement with the Immersion Chamber back in Polis Armer. But he’d shown strangely little interest in it.
“My research report on standard infected subjugation theory was insufficient and incomplete, sir?”
“No.” Lijjen didn’t blink his brown eyes or shake his perfectly groomed head.
Terese stared at the stacked bookshelf behind the Sumadan, just above his head, wondering how it would feel to pull the whole thing down on him.
“My procedure during the recent group patrol led under Head Murrat was not to standard, sir?”
“No!” Lijjen barked. “Use what little sense Polis Armer bestowed upon you and tell me why you’re in this room, wasting my time and oxygen!”
“I… I don’t know, sir. My… cataloguing… of local chaos surges is unsatisfactory?” She didn’t have to fake her stutter. Damn the man, he’d rattled her.
It was how Lijjen’s harassment worked. He pressured her, demanding responses only he could fathom, wanting to confuse and exasperate her into mistakenly revealing something damning. He never smiled, but, sure as cadvers prowled the night, Lijjen loved their regular cat-and-mouse sessions, taking joy in the protracted, miserable hunt.
He could
