Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) (6 page)

The heavy thump of boots on stone pulled him out of his reverie. Hirianthial set his face. As he’d hoped, Blond stood in front of their cage, staring at their group and playing with the key ring. Spikes of sweaty uncertainty jumped around his aura. He cleared his throat of thick phlegm and said, “What are you people doing?”

“What does it look like?” Hirianthial asked with just a hint of contempt.

The guard’s aura flared red. “Don’t you mess with me, pastehead. You’ll be dancing a different set when they put you in real chains.”

“Oh, I don’t think they’ll be doing that. Not with my new... friends... to help me.”

The guard’s left boot creaked, then the right. Nervousness gave his colors a green sheen. “Ummm ... look, I don’t know what they’re doing, but they should stop it.” He stared at Reese and the others. “What
are
they doing?”

Now for the lies. The premise had sounded so ridiculous Hirianthial couldn’t imagine anyone believing it, but Reese had convinced him. He thought of the last time he’d been angry from pit to fingers and summoned up that voice, the deep soft one with the hard edges, the one that made a lie out of his cultured accent. “Channeling power to me... so I can set this building on fire. Or didn’t you hear about the last time?”

On cue, Sascha began to hum.

“What the—”

“The power is flowing to me. I might spare you afterwards. Unlock the door.”

“I don’t, I...”

Irine added her mezzosoprano to her brother’s tenor. They started out in harmony and then Sascha dropped his voice until they were only an octave and a quarter tone off. Hirianthial wondered if they realized what they were doing or if they were just tone-deaf. He focused on the man. “Unlock the door. If you do, I’ll give you time to run before I start.”

Reese added her contralto, filling part of the lower register.

Blond shifted from foot to foot, books creaking. His fingers played almost spasmodically with the keys. Hirianthial stared him in the eye, willing him to do it.

“Unlock the door.”

“I—”

“Unlock the door.”

“It’s not—”

“
Unlock the door
.”

Bryer broke in with a shrill ululation that skidded up the scale of comfortable human hearing. Blond’s fear shot his aura with actinic sparkles, and the man lunged forward, keying first the field and then the door. The latter beeped its processing tone. A few seconds later, the door opened. Blond stood paralyzed before it, as if unable to believe his actions.

Gently, Hirianthial said, “Run. Now.”

Blond stared wildly at him; his eyes flicked to Bryer’s feathers. Then he turned tail and fled.

“All right!” Reese said, jumping to her feet. “Quick, before it’s too late!”

The two Harat-Shar dashed out first, striped tails swaying. Bryer loped after. Reese pointed. “Out. I’ll be behind you.”

Hirianthial rose, and she darted around him, closing the door behind him.

“Which way!” Sascha yelled back.

“Left!” Hirianthial called.

The two tigraines vanished around the corner, and then Irine yowled. He could just see two more people in front of them. “Guards,” he warned.

“I think they already found them,” Reese said dryly, running up the hall. They turned into the corridor to find Bryer leaping on one of the guards, his bronze claws muted by the red flash of blood. Disoriented, Hirianthial turned toward the smell—blood required two kinds of attention—but a hand grabbed the back of his tunic and yanked. He felt concern and pain and fear and adrenaline like a punch to the spine.

“This way!” Reese said, pulling him past the two Pelted and the Phoenix, who were doing more than distracting the guards.

“They’ll die,” Hirianthial said, transfixed by the deflation of the auras under Sascha and Bryer. Old instincts warred with new oaths.

“Have your crisis of conscience later!” Reese said. “Or have you forgotten what these people have done? Do you want to live your life in chains?”

He still couldn’t force himself forward. It had been so long since he’d seen blood spilled in violence. It woke demons.

“Blood on the dust, Hirianthial, MOVE!”

He moved. He couldn’t not move beneath the force of that command. He couldn’t decide if they were wounded or enemies and in the face of that ambivalence he could turn his back on them and leave them to die. Even if he’d wanted to turn back, Reese was at his heels, riding him, herding him. He didn’t want to have to push past her and her cut-glass aura.

Sascha pushed past him, blood streaking his fur. “Are there more?”

“Two more ahead,” Hirianthial said. “They know we’re coming.”

“Stop!” Reese said. “They’re going to have weapons—”

“Yeah well, now so do we,” Irine said, holding up three palmers.

Reese crowed. “Excellent, fuzzy! Just be—”

Sascha and Bryer had already taken one of the palmers and run ahead.

“—careful,” Reese finished to the sound of palmer fire. She winced.

Irine shrugged, then ambled up the corridor. “It’s clear, boss.”

And just like that, they’d taken care of everyone in the prison that had held him for so long. Dazed, Hirianthial followed Reese up the corridor, paused to stare at the bodies. These two, at least, weren’t dead. Memories tangled with reality in his eyes, blurring the edges of the room.

“Come on,” Reese said. “No time to sight-see. The moment someone wakes up and realizes we’re gone our lives are worthless. Or at least, to us. I love my old crate, but she’s not going to outrun a pirate.”

“The tumbleweeds await!” Sascha said, pushing open the door. He threw a telegem to Reese. “Might as well use this. They’re going to find out about us anyway.”

Reese tossed it aside. “I don’t want to alert them any sooner. Let’s just run and hope Kis’eh’t can get the
Earthrise
ready fast enough without warning. You. Prince Charming. You go in the middle where we can—”

“—guard me?” Hirianthial asked, a brief sense of amusement blowing away the numbness.

“Just go.”

He went. Bryer ran alongside, wings and tail a flutter of bronze and muted crimson. Sascha took lead, with Irine at the side. Reese ran behind. They sprinted out into a purple twilight and onto the empty streets, avoiding the street lamps. There were no lights puddled in the windows, but the breeze that sloughed through his hair—Hirianthial had felt nothing finer.

“I assume,” he said once they reached the edge of town, “that we’re going somewhere.”

“Yeah. To the
Earthrise
. She’s parked a few minutes out of town,” Reese said. She stopped to pant, propping her hands on her knees. “Our ride out.”

“And then?” Hirianthial asked.

The beads on the end of her hair clicked as she whipped her head up to glare at him. “Providing we get out of here alive, I’m dropping you off at the nearest starbase. You’re way too much trouble for me.”

Hirianthial laughed. “Alas, lady. I hope it’s that simple.”

“Yeah, me too.” She straightened. “On we go!”

They ran. Leaving the town pleased Hirianthial greatly. He could almost forget they were fleeing and enjoy the run. He hadn’t been able to stretch his legs for days, and the expanse of the world around him, rolling away to the horizon in every direction, restored some of his tattered equilibrium. Enough of it, in fact, that when he saw their ride off-world he didn’t immediately fall into despair. The squat ovoid balanced on its landing stilts looked as much like the sleek Alliance ships Hirianthial had seen as an axe resembled a laser scalpel. He couldn’t imagine it outrunning a barge, much less a slaver’s ship.

Reese hobbled the last few yards to one of the stilts and whacked a panel with the heel of her hand.

“Kis’eh’t! Get us out of this system, and now!”

A ramp descended from the belly of the ship, too slowly for the twins who jumped onto it before it had fully extended. They scampered up it, followed by Bryer.

“Up,” Reese said.

Hirianthial stared up into the dark and wondered just what kind of future the Queen had planned for him to tangle him up with this human and her strange people.

But he went up the ramp. He was, he thought, short on choices.

The engines changed pitch. Reese didn’t hear it as much as feel it through the soles of her feet in the rattle of the deck-plates.

“Where to, Captain?” Sascha’d made it to the pilot’s chair already.

“The nearest starbase in civilized space. And move it, Stripes.”

“Starbase Kappa it is, boss!”

The floor beneath her jumped as the
Earthrise
lifted. Reese steadied herself against the wall and felt the faintest relief from the churn in her stomach. Maybe they’d get out of this one unscathed. She toggled the comm to all-hands. “Irine? Where are you?”

A striped head popped into view from up-corridor. “Err... right here?”

Reese jerked a thumb at Hirianthial, who hadn’t moved since coming up the ramp. “See that he finds a place to sleep.”

“Right, Captain. You there, you’re with me.”

Reese watched them long enough for them to turn the corner, the solid and curvy tigraine girl and the willowy man. She wondered how he kept so much hair so healthy... nearly two weeks in captivity and he still looked like he belonged on the cover of a novel. It boggled the mind.

Reese jogged to the bridge, swaying as the ship rose through a few bumpy winds and rocking as the stabilizers balanced. The pressure exacerbated her headache; she’d never gotten used to gravities higher than Mars’s, and high accelerations always made things worse. When the lift ejected her onto the cramped bridge, she was only too glad to slide into a chair and buckle on the safety harness. Kis’eh’t was at the exterior sensor control panel, her own harness binding her centauroid lower body to the floor and Allacazam cradled between her forelegs. Sascha was in the pilot’s seat.

“Did we succeed?” the Glaseahn asked, glancing at Reese.

“We got him, yes,” Reese said.

“We’re clear of the atmosphere,” Sascha interrupted.

Reese slid her hand over the engineering display, scrutinizing the stress analyses as they scrolled past with a grim face. The ride smoothed out as the
Earthrise
rose, the transition from atmospheric night to the void-black of space invisible save for the glowing blue sensor data and the steadying of the starlight. Reese breathed a sigh of relief as the internal gravity evened to something approaching normal.

“We might even make it to Kappa in time to save the rooderberries,” Kis’eh’t said.

Most Pelted revealed their skin and its flushes at their ears. Humans, of course, suffered from whole-body blushes—most of them anyway. Reese had been blessed with skin dark enough to keep her embarrassment or upsets to herself, most of the time. But only a tiny corner of skin around Kis’eh’t’s eyelids was exposed. Reese was nevertheless startled by how stark a gray it turned.

“Uh... we’ve got a ship up our tail.”

“I see it,” Sascha said, voice distracted.

Reese twisted, staring at the sensor data. Her eyes rose to the aft windows where a gray splotch occluded part of the planet, growing even as she watched. “ID?” she asked hoarsely.

“It isn’t running a beacon,” Kis’eh’t said, bending over her panel.

Reese’s stomach screamed for chalk.

“What’s going on?” Irine asked, popping out of the lift with Hirianthial.

“We’ve got a tail, and it’s heading straight for us,” Reese said, fingers playing hopscotch over the keypad. “And it’s pulling a higher acceleration than we are.”

“They’ll overhaul us in fifteen minutes,” Kis’eh’t reported.

“Not if I can help it,” Sascha said.

“I thought I told you to put him in a room?” Reese said to Irine.

The tigraine shrugged. “You said to find him a place to sleep, not trap him there. He wanted to come with me, so I said ‘sure.’”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Reese said. Providing there was a later. “Buckle up if you’re going to stay.”

Irine wedged herself into the space next to the pilot’s chair and tied on a spare harness, then clamped herself to her brother’s leg. Hirianthial stayed in the back. Smart man.

“Reese, they aren’t exceeding our maximum limit,” Kis’eh’t said.

“She’s right,” Sascha said, “but we can’t go our max unless we—”

“Dump the berries,” Reese said, covering her eyes. “Blood and Freedom.”

“Captain, that boat is crammed with weapons. Half of them look like they’re going to fall off, but our one laser isn’t going to do much good,” Kis’eh’t said, still punching buttons.

Reese stared at the oncoming pirate: obviously jury-rigged, operating with only shoddy, low-level navigational shields, but with engines well a match for theirs and weapons all out of proportion to its size. It required effort to move her hand to the comm panel and twitch it.

“Lowerdeck.”

“Bryer, I want you to jettison the cargo. And make sure the clamps don’t go this time.”

The silence was eloquent.