The salarian desert game, p.18
The Salarian Desert Game, page 18
“What?” she asks.
“I… I can’t…” I stare at the station, fighting down panic. It wins. I can’t move a single step closer.
“Look at all the guards.” Master says with steely patience. “No one’s getting near there with an ex… with anything. It’s perfectly safe.”
I continue to stare past her, seeing the platform railings hurtle into the air, pieces of metal and body parts flying outward, red streaks against the white platform. It’s all I can do not to scream as I stand there shaking, gasping for breath, my face wet with tears, heart pounding, head aching…
“Stop it!” Master says. She puts her hands on my shoulders, holding them tight, her body shielding me. “The platform is perfectly normal,” she says. “There are guards watching, keeping it safe. I know you’ve been through something awful, but you are not in danger right now. Right this minute, there is nothing to fear. Is there?”
I look around. The platform is clear, only a few people walking about. A dozen or so guards look around reassuringly at the people on the platform as they wait for the lightspeed, three women, a father with his son, an old man, a group of girls laughing together. No one out of the ordinary.
I calm down. “No,” I answer Master. Nothing to fear. I’m not convinced, though, and when the lightspeed torpedoes in I have to close my eyes and cover my ears. Master does something unusual then: she pulls me against her, wraps her arms around me, and holds me tight. It’s not something I’d have thought was in her repertoire, it’s certainly not in mine, and I know we look weird, but I don’t want her to stop. Until the lightspeed settles and nothing happens except the sides slide up. We have to run for it then, because we were standing at the very edge of the platform. A couple of the girls give me strange looks until Master gives them a Master look, which makes them turn away at once. The rest of the trip is uneventful. Okay, heart-thumpingly, head-poundingly, terrifyingly uneventful, but I get through it without any more embarrassing tears or even more embarrassing hugs.
“The desert game starts in two days,” Master tells me as we walk toward the gate to the estate. “I expect to see you at training tomorrow morning.”
“The desert game?” I stop walking. Is she crazy? Are they all crazy? “You’re going through with it? People are setting off explosions and you’re sending fifteen-year-old girls out alone into the desert?”
If I wasn’t still rattled I wouldn’t have said it quite like that. She’s made excuses for me because of what’s happened, but this is too much. I can see on her face that there will be no more hugs. She pulls herself straighter, offended to her Salarian core, and says, “We will not let them frighten us.”
“They frighten me!”
“Yes. I expect you to get over it.”
As though avoiding death is a weakness, not a sign of intelligence. I take a breath and draw myself up straight. “I regret to disappoint you, but I’m not participating in the desert game, Master.” Agatha will just have to find another interpreter.
I watch Master walk stiffly away across the sand, before I enter the fifteens’ dormitory. My room is just as I left it. I fling the satchel onto the floor and fall into bed exhausted.
I wake from another dream of being chased in the desert, scorpions, snakes, and desert people throwing explosives all mixed together in a prolonged nightmare. It’s light out when I open my eyes, too early for breakfast. My heart is still pounding from the dream, but my headache’s gone, as the medic promised. I dress, put in my sun lenses, and go to the main mansion.
“Matriarch Ryo is at her breakfast meeting,” Ichiro tells me at the door.
“I’ll wait.”
He leads me through the foyer this time, to a room near the end of the hall. There’s a round table and several chairs in the middle of the room, as well as arm chairs and settees around low tables against the walls. Tinted windows, probably one-way glass, face out onto the estate.
“You’ll be here a while,” Ichiro says. “I’ll bring you something to eat.”
He returns almost immediately — this must be a morning room, near the kitchens, for casual meals — with a full plate, eggs and fried cactus slices, bread and jam, juice and a steaming Lato.
“Thanks, I’m good for the whole day, now,” I joke. Not entirely a joke. I’m hoping he’ll leave me alone for a while.
“I’ll let you know when Matriarch Ryo is available to see you. There’s a restroom across the hall,” he says, as if he’s read my mind. I thank him again and dig into my breakfast. Now that my headache’s gone, I’m starving.
I give him enough time to leave the hall before I tiptoe to the door and peek out. No one in sight. Every door along the wide hall is shut, with no windows into the rooms behind them. That works in my favor — I won’t be seen creeping down the hall, checking the rooms out — but it also works against me, because I won’t know if anyone’s inside until I open the door, unless I hear them talking. I take a breath and walk carefully to the first closed door. Holding my empty juice glass to the door, I put my ear against it. Nothing. I take a deep breath, open the door, and peek inside the room. Empty. I let out my breath and move on to the next door.
The fourth room is as silent as the first three, but this door is palm-secured. I hesitate. It could be the room I’m looking for, or it could be where they’re meeting, and just be sound-sealed. You can’t enter a locked room and call it an accident. I bend down and listen through my glass again. Silence.
I look up and down the hall once more, and pull from my pocket one of the gloves I brought with me. I slip the thin plastic card hidden inside it into my palm. As I hold it, it warms to body temperature, becoming more and more flexible, until it follows the contours of my palm. I stretch it gently to cover my fingers and thumb as well. The swirl of tiny wires encased within it mimics the pattern of lines in a human hand. I rub my thumb lightly over it, adjusting the wires delicately to cover my own palm and fingertip signature, to fool the infra-red sensor beside the door.
Preparing a palm override can’t be rushed. One tiny wire out of place and the sensor will recognize an error and sound the alarm. So even though I’m sweating and every second feels like forever, I take my time before I press my hand against the sensor. The door slides open onto an empty office. I say a quick prayer of gratitude as I enter and close the door behind me.
My luck holds, the comp is running. I guess my grandmother thinks a guard at the gate, a man at the mansion’s door, and a palm sensor on the room door is enough security for her office. Now I just have to hope the new device I picked up from Sodum before I left works. I take it out of my pocket and put it in my mouth, positioning my tongue and lips as he showed me. It worked in his back room when I practiced on his comp, but for all I know he’d fiddled with the voice recognition system to fool customers. The thought makes me pause. I’ve never wondered if he’s trained any other thieves. Correction: in my case, ex-thief.
I take a breath — enough stalling — and say, through the voice distort, “mine four, personnel.” Instead of the ‘unauthorized voice’ message and shut-down I’m braced for, a list of Salarian male names comes up, along with their positions, salary, and so on.
“Mine four, indentured servants,” I try. A little note appears to tell me there’s no page matching that. I try a few more words, keeping a careful count, before I blurt out in frustration, “mine four slaves!” To my surprise a list of names appears. I should have guessed, Grandmother Ryo is not one to mince words, I think as I scroll through them. There it is: Oghogho Ugiagbe. Followed by a note dated yesterday: “Moved to Number Two mine.” I smile.
“Erase last six commands from memory,” I say. The comp returns to the page that was showing when I entered. I put the voice override back in my pocket, and walk to the door. Opening it a crack, I check the hall. Empty. I leave, making sure I hear the door lock behind me, and head back to the morning room. All I have to do now is go to mine two, find Oghogho, free her, and get us both to Prophet’s Avenue, where I will threaten to expose this whole operation and everything else I know about the O.U.B. if they don’t find a way to smuggle Oghogho and me back to Seraffa.
I’m almost at the morning room when a door across the hall opens. A Salarian woman about my grandmother’s age comes out. She looks up, sees me, and stops.
I bow. It’s almost automatic now. “I’m looking for the restroom, Matriarch,” I say.
She gestures toward the room Ichiro pointed out, on her side of the hall.
“Thank you.” I head toward it. Unfortunately, she’s going there, too.
“You are Idaro, the girl Ryo says is her second cousin’s daughter,” she says as she sweeps through the door ahead of me.
“Yes, I’m Idaro.”
“You’re here to join the desert game?”
“I have been considering it,” I hedge politely. “It was gracious of Matriarch Ryo to let me train with the fifteens.”
“Wasn’t it? An unusual trait for her, graciousness.”
“I am grateful for it.” I bow again.
I hear her lingering at the sand scrub afterwards, but I stay in my cubicle until she leaves.
So now I know which room the meeting’s in. They may only be talking about the running of the estate. But what if they’re discussing the desert game, calling it off or something? They can’t all be as blind to the danger as Master. They might talk about desert people in the city being rounded up, too. Did they catch Nyah, or did I warn her in time?
My grandmother’s lost a mine, and she’s not the forgiving sort. She’s a big player on this planet. People know who she is, the customs director, the Select, everyone I talk to. If they’ve found out anything about who’s behind these explosions, my bet is she’ll know about it. I tiptoe back to the room the woman came out of, place the rim of my glass against the door and bend to listen.
“It’s settled then.” My grandmother’s voice. Calm. She could be talking about putting another row of globe cacti in the gardens next year, or the death of every suspected member of Out of the Desert.
“What about our daughters?” A younger voice, one of the fifteens’ mothers. Good.
“We’re moving the location of the desert game. I’ll let the other four estates know in the morning, just before they leave. We’ll launch a drone overhead to watch for anything suspicious, and each estate will post a unit of guards four or five miles from the camp. Far enough not to interfere in the desert game, close enough to monitor the drone and prevent an attack, if that becomes necessary. The fifteens will be perfectly safe, except for the normal dangers, of course.”
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until after the girls get back?”
Wait? Wait for what? I press my ear harder against the glass.
“And let the savages who destroyed our mine and killed our workers and their supervisors, think they can attack us with impunity?” Grandmother’s voice is fire and ice. No one else speaks for a few minutes.
I wish I’d arrived earlier. They’re planning something, but that’s not much to go on. I need to know what they intend to do, but judging from the silence in the room, the meeting might be ending. I’m about to leave when a cool voice, the voice of the woman I met in the hall earlier, says, “It’s possible, Ryo, that the people in the desert aren’t involved. That the explosions are the work of only a small militant group from among those in our city, and most of them have been detained. Only a few escaped the round-up. Do we really want to get the whole race involved?”
“They are all involved. Those who live in Tokosha already have their citizenship, they have nothing to complain about. You think they’d risk their status to gain what? What they’ve already got, the rights of a citizen? No, I believe ‘Out of the Desert’, as they call themselves, is for those who are still in the desert, and don’t want to earn their way out honestly. They want to steal their citizenship from us with threats and explosives, just like they stole their way onto our planet. Well, I won’t stand by and let them. Will you?”
“A little dramatic, as usual, Ryo.” There’s a brief silence, then she continues, “We all have family who died in the mine or on the lightspeed platform. I won’t oppose you. But wait a week. The fifteens will have left their camp then, to walk out through the desert. They won’t be a sitting target if the desert people do find their drop-off camp, and if we have to get them out, at least they will have formed their triads.”
There are murmurs of agreement, rustling movements. I hear Ryo agree. When I hear a chair scrape backward I slip the glass into my pocket and run, on tiptoes, across the hall. I wave the door to the morning room closed behind me just as I hear the door across the hall open.
I sit down, stunned. They’re planning some kind of reprisal in the desert, against the desert people. By themselves, not the Salarian government. Just how powerful is my grandmother?
She doesn’t think the desert people in the city are setting off the explosions. I don’t think she’s right, but I wish she was. Despite everything, I liked Nyah. I don’t believe she was involved in the explosion that killed Norio. Then I remember: Agatha’s out there in the desert, talking to the leader of the desert people. Exactly where a retaliation is most likely to take place.
What can I do? I don’t even know where Agatha is, I have no way of warning her.
But I know who can. I jump up. I’ll tell the Select on Prophet’s Avenue what I heard.
I get to the door and stop.
What exactly did I hear? They blame the desert people for the explosions. We all know that. They don’t want them to get away with it. Well, nobody does. Even if the Select agrees my grandmother’s triad is planning something, I have no proof, no details, nothing she can act on.
Even if I had heard something definite, the Select here wouldn’t do anything about it. The O.U.B.’s position is clear: It’s a planetary issue. They know about the explosions set off by Out of the Desert, and they haven’t even made a statement condemning them. I grit my teeth. The militants have killed off-worlders, including Lady Celeste. What do they have to do before the Interplanetary Council intervenes, kill a Select?
I sit down again, slowly. They have to kill a Select. But Out of the Desert can’t bomb their own people. No one would back them then, they’d lose whatever sympathy they have among their people. So they bomb the mine of the most powerful triad on Salaria, outside the government. Where a wealthy, well-connected off-worlder happens to be working. On the day a Select is going to inspect it. The pieces fall into place horrifyingly. Agatha escaped because her train was stopped after the bomb went off early. Because someone called it in. Just like the other time. Who’s calling them in? And why?
I think of Nyah, and her complicated love for her sister, Malah.
If I can figure out who the leak is, they can, but it probably doesn’t matter now. They’ve done what they intended to do. Out of the Desert wants a reprisal. Their own people are the target now, as well as Agatha. She’s their insurance if the Interplanetary Alliance doesn’t care about the desert people who’re going to die. Killing a Select or an Adept means an automatic intervention by the Alliance.
Agatha is still their target and my grandmother is their bomb.
The militants probably justify it as a ‘calculated loss’. I’ve read about such things in history books, but I’ve never come face-to-face with it before. I want to throw up.
I have to do something to stop them.
What if I told Matriarch Ryo she was being used? Right. That would go down well. And I could add that I eavesdropped on her meeting, and I know Agatha’s with the desert people because I’m actually working with the O.U.B., and I’ve been fooling her all along about the reason I’m here. She’d probably drop me into the desert strapped to the bomb.
The door to the morning room slides open. The dragon walks in.
“Hello, Grandmother Ryo,” I gasp, bowing.
“Matriarch,” she snaps. “There is no family bond between us. Why are you here?”
For a moment I’m speechless, then I do the only thing I can do. I bow once more and say, “I’ve come to tell you I’m joining the desert game.”
***
We are taken by aircar deep into the desert. Kama looks fiercely ecstatic, the others chat and fall silent in varying degrees of excitement and nervousness. Kayo has the sense to look depressed. I sit by myself, holding my backpack like a kid with a security blanket. Scorpions, snakes, scorching hot sun, I’ll be lucky to get out of this desert alive, let alone do what I’ve come for. At least I’m wearing boots like everyone else, soft inside, lightweight, wrapping my feet up to mid-calf with a breathable plastic blend that’s tough enough to repel any snake or scorpion that comes near me. Our tents are made of the same stuff, and soaked with the repellent that keeps the creatures away.
Through the window I see a small camp of armed guards below us. I frown down at them as we fly over. A few minutes later I notice an airborne drone in the sky, monitoring the area around our site. According to Master’s last words to us before we took off, it’s staying there, “until the threat posed by the desert people has been dealt with” — as chilling a phrase as I’ve ever heard. The other fifteens cheer when she says it, though.
The aircar sets down in the middle of a circle drawn in the sand, about sixty feet across. This area was sprayed just before dawn, in preparation for our arrival. Two other groups of girls are already there, setting up their tents. We scramble to get our supplies out of the aircar and set up our tents before the last two aircars arrive, bringing in the fifteens from two more estates. Those who set up their tents earliest will be closer to the center of the circle, and farther away from the untreated sand. Not that we get to avoid the desert sands; we’ll have to forage for food and cactus milk, and eventually we’ll have to walk out through it. But in the meantime the center of the circle is prime real estate.
I’m one of the last out. I thought it was hot in the city, and even hotter on the estate, but this — I’ve never imagined heat like this. Drawing a breath is like breathing in fire. I stand beside the aircar, swaying, imagining myself curling up right here like a singed leaf.
