“Say it. What do you want?”
Ryke’s demand was clear. She listened but did nothing, rapt in his hand in her hair, in his leg beside her.
“Ummm. Okay. What did you find out about our repairs, the status of the ship? I’ve been trying for weeks and have little from them.”
“Them? I saw Gyle...”
Gio let his voice fade, become background. She listened but barely knew the meaning.
If he’d only let her see, take off the caps on the mask, she knew she’d be thinking straighter, but she’d grown used to this. Nothing bad had happened; her immediate panic had settled and gone away. Though Ryke seemed to think the mask still scared her, it didn’t.
Not now anyway.
Instead it calmed her. He’d relegated her to the floor, to almost subhuman status. He’d mouth fucked her, but he’d not frightened her. She was turned on so much she feared not that he would do something awful to her but that he’d forget to fuck her.
The logic was bizarre. The throb of her heated pussy reminded her with every pulse of blood how good it would be to be filled.
Inside this mask, she owned a surreal fog. She existed as a thing, as his thing.
When he removed it, she’d be in the real world again.
Here was simpler.
And she loved his hand on her. This was a side of him she’d not encountered much before. He’d asked her why he was obsessed with her, had seemed worried. She didn’t know. Right now, she only wanted more.
Take off the mask and she’d be thinking the obsession his weakness, but...she nestled deeper into his hand. She would deal with that later. She didn’t love him, she wasn’t obsessed with him, he simply was...
He was her dominant. There. She’d said it to herself. It didn’t bind her to him with deep emotion. Except, she supposed, when he was gifting her with pain and pleasure, and then he was her beloved demon.
Then she felt and heard his fingers begin to unclip the caps, letting in blasts of light that made her squint and shut her eyes. She needed to pee, but the words they’d exchanged during the past few minutes ran into her head and deciphered themselves into sensible sentences.
She played them back to herself...
“Gyle said they had repair methods planned. No, I don’t know what they are. He didn’t say.”
“I don’t believe they are doing anything. How could they?”
“Maybe we will be borrowing materials and people off other ships at the Gathering?”
“Maybe. Do you think it’s that easy? I have people working at this nonstop and now we’ve been set back months. We needed all the cores. Now we have even less power, less speed, and so we get less raw materials and fewer new waik crystals.”
“I admit, I’ve lost faith with Above. There seem to be conspiracies within conspiracies, but I’m adrift. The king has never spoken directly to me, only to Gyle.”
“Which leaves you wide open to influence from others. This woman. I don’t know what she is supposed to be doing here but if it’s to help us –”
“No, and I’ve solved that. I don’t need her input anymore.”
“Then why are you here? Why is she?”
“Because...I think others, above, are planning something worse than we could imagine. Remember the assassination plot. I think something worse is going to occur.”
“Let me talk to her. Please.”
The last clip was undone, the eye caps came off, and she blinked into the room, her eyes flooded with light.
With all that was happening, she was feeling terribly disorientated, and not only because of this attachment to Ryke, this illogical, extreme, and probably self-destructive attachment. He was her addiction.
You could be addicted to alcohol and still regret it when sober.
She would, did.
“Gio.” Badh tilted his head. “Are you okay to talk?”
“Yes.” Her voice sounded rusty. Her eyelids seemed sticky, as if she’d cried in her sleep. She must ignore that she was naked before these men and try to remember to do and say what was in her best interests.
Remember this, even if he had his hand on her still, as if to claim her. He’d said he wanted to put a new collar on her. It was a symbol to him...and not to her?
Of course.
He was a liability, like a lame leg caught in a trap. If the time came, she must steel herself and cut him away.
“What do you want to ask me?” She moved to cross her arms across her breasts to shield herself but Ryke tsked and softly said, “No.”
She put them back where they’d been, with her hands on her thighs, and tried to concentrate.
“Do you have anything more to add about this vision you had? I’m trying to understand you and you’ve said very little. Why did it happen?”
“Well, I’ve never experienced anything like it before, so I can’t really say. It frustrates me too, not understanding.”
“Okay.” He had his legs spread, in the way men liked to sit, with his forearms on his legs, wrists loose and hands dangling. Relaxed, if not for the frown developing. “Very well. Then brother, if you have no use for her except to fuck her, but don’t want to give her back to your friends above?” He tweaked an eyebrow upward. “We need to lock her away securely.”
What?
“Why?” Ryke snapped.
“Because there is a simmering anger over a slave being loose here, even if she is under your hand.” Badh smiled, and around his eyes crinkled. “People want her gone, but I can’t do that, so locking her up is my best solution.”
He’d smiled at her when he’d said that. She hadn’t seen a true smile for so long – Ryke’s were cold as the dirt, six feet under. She didn’t want to be locked up somewhere else but what could she say if he was determined? Nothing.
“You’ll be safe, just not here.”
Which didn’t help, at all. She resisted sticking her fingernail in her mouth and chewing.
“Why not here? I can and will watch her. I’m staying here, Badh. Hiding, I suppose. But I want her with me. I’m in the one place I love. Here feels right.”
“Feels.” He shook his head, his face fallen to bleakness. “You never feel. Doubt you’ve said that for years. When we were young, I saw you with many women, shared some with you. You put this one out front of me, like this, naked, like you’re taunting me. On display. I think you might want to sort out how you feel about her.” He stood. “I suppose I cannot force you to do this, though I would prefer not to have the Followers riled at me.”
Ryke snorted. “So that’s why. I thought they’d accepted her?”
“Me too. They went away and read something in their text and changed their minds. They live on her words, or what she was supposed to have said.” Badh reached into a back pocket and pulled out a thin book with a pale blue cover. “Here. They wanted me to give you this. It’s a copy of the Text of Symaia. Our mother,” he added in aside to Gio. “Take it. Read it or not. They won’t know, but it’ll make them happier to think you did.”
The noise Ryke made was one of either disgust or something she couldn’t figure out. Not surprising when didn’t agree with this book based on his mother’s life, and his mother had suicided and walked into the Engine Sea when he was a child.
She almost sympathized with her monster. What child wouldn’t have been traumatized?
Badh seemed less affected. Growing into being a leader and having friends around him, people he wasn’t supposed to interrogate or execute, would’ve helped. Ryke had been like the hunchback of Notre Dame, locked in his tower room. If not ridiculed, he’d been exiled by where he came from and by what he was told to do.
“You know...” Badh turned the book in his hand and looked at the cover. “If you ignore their belief that you are something special, the possibility that our mother did discover a way to survive on Aerthe as a normal surface dweller, to be able to live in a house...” He swallowed. “If that were true, it would change everything. We would be free of the landships. Free to live where we pleased.”
Ryke scoffed. “Apart from the Scavs and grounders wanting to kill us?”
“There would be ways, treaties, you never know until you try.”
“A fantasy. A dream.”
“A dream worth chasing.”
When Badh came over to hand the book to Ryke, she felt the increased tension in Ryke’s leg where she leaned on him, and she looked up.
“Here. You take it.” Badh gave it to her. “If the bastard wants it, he can get it off you. I’m done here. Your mechling, the one that looks manlike, it let in a few more mechlings at the door. Try not to take too many. I need them for the repairs. A few have wandered off and we haven’t figured out why or where.”
“I didn’t know it had done that,” Ryke said. “It’s an old sort. I’ll reinforce what I expect it to do.”
Badh nodded to both her and Ryke then headed for the door.
By then she’d looked at the book in her hand.
“It’s junk.” Ryke nudged her with his leg. “Recollections from a man who probably got it all wrong.”
An idea popped into her mind. She wasn’t sure where this idea came from but it fit her aims. She could lead them on, distract them. They were short of time and of men. What better way to throw a wrench into their works?
This book was almost a religion to many. The power in this little book could be huge.
If the landship slowed, stopped, she could escape. Big if.
She just needed a way in, a crack.
“This...” Gio smoothed her fingers over the illustration on the cover. “It’s from my world. How did your mother see a place in my world?”
“What?” Badh snapped from where he’d halted by the door.
“What do you mean, girl? That?” Ryke leaned in and tapped the image.
“Where’d this come from? Who drew it?” She looked to Badh for an answer.
“It’s a good interpretation of an original sketch our mother did after her return from the lands.”
“The lands,” Ryke scoffed.
He might not believe, yet, but she had her ways. He wasn’t the only one who could mindfuck. “It’s a landmark from the world of Earth called the Eiffel Tower.”
“Well, that changes things.” Slowly Badh returned, his eyes almost aglow. “How could our mother see something from your world? Maybe I should wait for you to look at the rest?”
“It does...change things.” There was disbelief in Ryke’s tone, but also, she thought, hope.
She was being an asshole, messing with this. They deserved it, all of them.
“It does. Remember, she said she saw things, visions, which is like what Gio did. Yes?”
Hook, line, and sinker.
This image wasn’t quite the Eiffel Tower and was probably some slim tower their mother had seen here. The swathe of landships did pass towns, though Gio had not looked out as they’d done so. Not the same as the Eiffel but it was perfect for her use. If only lying wasn’t crafting knots in her stomach.
She had reasons, good ones.