“You want me to look inside?” When Ryke nodded, she opened the book.
“Tell us if anything else seems familiar?” he added.
“Okay, but...” Gio flicked through the pages. Though this was a slim book, the writing was by hand and very small. Since the Mekkers’ written language had been taught via some forced method when she first came to Aerthe, same as the spoken language, this was far too much to decipher quickly.
Which only gave her ideas.
“I need to take my time with this. There are a lot of sketches.”
“All copies,” Badh said, perching on the armrest of the chair.
“And some of the words I’m unfamiliar with.” She pointed at a few longer ones. “Is there a place I can go to study this? Where there are language texts?”
“Nothing in there Ryke or I can’t tell you, though we have a place of study for the children. But I doubt that’s what you meant.” He glanced over her head at Ryke.
“What if we let her tell the Followers this? Talk to some of them?”
“After I told you they want her gone?” Badh puffed out his lips. “I don’t –”
“Let her. I’m staying anyway and this might get them on her side properly. I know they lap up any new interpretation of Mother’s words.”
“True. You’d have to be careful. It could achieve the reverse of what you want.” His examination of her seemed to strip her naked and she was already nude. Had he seen her lie? “I’ll leave that with you. First, I’ll ask if they want to do this. If you see anything else in the meantime, Gio, tell Ryke.”
This was progressing faster than she’d thought possible. The Followers had sway. “I will.”
How far was she willing to go to sabotage this ship? What if she could send them off on an imaginary chase of whatever this book prophesied?
So many what-ifs.
“Come. I need to talk to you more.” Without fuss, Ryke unlocked the mask and removed it.
The relief as air washed over her skin, making it prickle and cool, was exquisite. He patted the sofa and took the book from her fingers.
“I need to pee. And eat, and drink.” Was she asking too much? With him she was never sure. Her lust had quietened. No matter how much this bullish mass of masculinity parked on the sofa said sex, sex, sex.
Okay, maybe her lust was back, just a tad.
“Go shower and when you come back, we will look at this book together. I’ve never read it before.”
Never? Wow.
What had she begun? But she nodded and walked away, aware of his scrutiny of her ass and her body. That he wasn’t coming with her said he was tired perhaps. All that talk of conspiracies and bad things about to happen made her wonder what he’d seen and found. If he hadn’t killed anyone she’d almost be shocked.
Why was he no longer concerned with her finding a portal mage aka scientist? That’d been his key mission from the king. The conspiracies might have something to do with that. A power struggle was occurring.
And the Above was hostile yet they relied on the power generated here? She’d always thought the mechlings somehow sucked power from the air here. It was what she’d been told, and though strange, she’d believed it. Perhaps they did both?
Maybe Aerthe was a planet where the rules of physics were treated like guidelines not laws. Newton and Einstein would’ve had conniptions.
She showered and returned, still naked. He hadn’t said to dress and it seemed safest.
He’d put his legs up on the sofa. As she climbed up to sit between his outstretched legs with her knees up to rest the book upon, he rearranged his legs to allow her to fit, and wrapped his arms around her. It stilled her thoughts. She held her breath, to better appreciate being wrapped up in man.
Nice. How bizarre to like this.
“Read.” Ryke tapped the cover.
She opened it, smoothed down the pages. Ivory-colored paper. Black ink. A language that seemed so very wrong and yet her eyes and brain interpreted most of it. It was as if she’d been born here.
Well, she hadn’t. Hell no. She was a slave here and had best remember that.
Mekkers were shit.
“Begin,” he murmured then he bit her ear. A frisson of heat slammed down her body, peaking her nipples, her clit. “Read or I’ll fuck your ass instead.”
“Oh.” What an incentive.
“It’s supposed to be my mother’s words but I don’t believe that. I’ve never read this before because it seemed made up.”
This was going to be an interesting book.
The story was much as she’d gathered it would be – about a woman being left behind after the landship was breached, alone after her husband died, and having to make her way across the land to where she thought she could meet the swathe again. Tough, determined lady, if true.
The passage about her watching the ships dwindle in the distance and disappear over the horizon was strangely affecting.
She put herself there, with Symaia, alone on a world where she knew she would die if she couldn’t move fast, knowing that merely keeping to walking pace was still going to be fatal.
Except somehow it hadn’t been.
She read, skipping parts she couldn’t translate, and Ryke didn’t bother to add words. He listened. He tensed. His body heat and stiffness heightened the more she read.
As if this reading disturbed him.
Of course it did. These were his mother’s words, or what people thought she’d said...or a fabrication. Who knew which? No one. That was his dilemma.
He wanted to believe but had rejected this for all his life, until now.
And here she was planning lies.
He’d kill her if he knew. Or worse.
Symaia was taken in by a group of Grounders travelling to a new town to market wares. Even when they saw who she was, they let her stay in their vehicle, in their caravan of trucks. There was a picture of that.
She ran her finger over the illustration.
“Go on,” Ryke murmured.
“Don’t you know it all?”
He shrugged. “I know the gossip. She never told us all this directly, only preached it. You remember you’re to say if anything seems to be of your world? Visions?”
“Yes.” She read on.
The rescue, the return to the Underdeck, her explanation of why the Aerthe did not kill her.
“She swallowed a waik crystal?”
“That’s the theory. She thought it changed her and then...then she proposed that only I had the power to make it work for others.” He stirred. “It’s drivel. I need to sleep and you will come with me. Lie on my bed.”
No sex then. Being disappointed about that was surely not normal.
How was she going to pervert this little bible of theirs? Because a religious text was what it was, really. They had faith in this yet no solid proof.
“No one has tested this idea? To swallow a crystal then walk on the land?”
“Some deckers did. It didn’t work. It killed. Though no one in the Above ever thought about her being lost for more than seconds. She was a decker.”
That summed it up, apparently – being a decker.
At the bed, he found a belt and punched a hole in it, wrapped it about her neck until she felt it grip then he slid the tongue into the hole. With a knife he cut off the excess, right beside her neck and her eye. She held very still. The blade loomed so near.
If she told more lies that knife could be used to cut her. Ryke was a man who lived vengeance and violence. Did she really want to go there? Her stomach churned. Ulcers, she was growing ulcers.
For someone who’d never had courage, she was walking on wobbly ground.
“Temporary.” He attached the leash to the makeshift collar then tied the end of the leash to the headboard. “I meant to put the mask back on you.”
He muttered all this in an absentminded way and she wondered why he was so distant.
The book, it could only be that.
She lay beside him in the dark, wondering. Perverting something so personal was fraught with danger.
Ryke stroked a finger down from her nape, along the center of her spine. “You’ll have Aunt M with you wherever you go from now on. I will be away sometimes helping Badh with repairs.”
Why? He wanted to watch her?
“Can he teach me then? So I can improve my reading.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
Yes, oh yes. This was a day for both small and large victories.
In the dark, she could hear if not see his breathing. It took a long time for Ryke to fall asleep. She wasn’t tired, so she lay and thought.
How could she do this? They’d no doubt dissected this book for years. Everything in it ran on faith. Even the person who’d set it down on paper had died. The words were immutable. Until now. What if she envisioned new words?
Possible, but if she did this, she played with Ryke’s family history.
Beware. He might’ve become less terrifying since coming here but she risked provoking the monster.