Carnival

“They’re out of the city. In the jungle?”

“That follows as a strong potential.”

“Hell,” the biped says. “Now I have to tell Elena that her granddaughter is a traitor. I do not get paid enough for this.”

19

LESA WOKE COLD, A NOVEL EXPERIENCE IN PENTHESILEA in summer. Her hands in particular were numb (the left one beyond pins‑and‑needles and into deadness), her ankles sore, her neck cramped from lying slumped on her side. The hair that dragged through her mouth was foul with blood and dirt and the acrid bitterness of tangler solvent, and she spat and spat trying to clear it away.

She lay on an earthen floor, and she could smell the jungle. Smell it–and hear it. Night sounds, which explained why her eyes strained at darkness. The canopy filtered daylight, but blocked the Gorgon’s light almost entirely. She heard birds and insects–and a fexa’s warble, closer than she liked, even if she was lucky and there was a stout stockade between them.

She flexed and kicked but didn’t learn anything that surprised her. Her wrists were bound at the small of her back and her ankles strapped. When she lifted her head, her neck amended its status from painful to excruciating, and she fell back, trying to ease the spasm, crying between her teeth.

Incapacitating pain was the first priority. That, and getting her weight off her left arm.

A wriggle of her hips flopped her onto her back, yanking her wrists against the cords. This position was no kinder to her hands, but she bore the pressure and the cutting tautness for the sheer, blessed relief of letting the earth support the weight of her head.

Something feather‑quick and many‑legged scurried across her ankle, but she managed not to react. Pointless caution. She’d made enough noise already that one little thrash and scream would cause no harm. But most New Amazonian “insects” were completely disinterested in any Old Earth fauna that wasn’t actively forcing them to defend themselves. Lesa guessed that when it came down to it, human type people just smelled wrong.

Something stretched on her left side, close enough that she could feel the heat radiating from it and hear the slow hiss of breathing, in and out. Now that Lesa could concentrate on something other than the pain in her neck, she smelled unwashed male over her own sweat and tangler solvent. The solvent explained why she was cold. The stuff was something like 95 percent isopropyl alcohol.

Michelangelo. She got her knees drawn up, straps cutting the tendons of her ankles, and with one hard shove flopped onto her right side. Pain seared up her neck and her left arm sizzled violently to life. She had preferred it, she decided, when it was flopping from her shoulder like the corpse of a dead animal.

Kusanagi‑Jones wasn’t cold. She pressed against his back, but he breathed regularly, his body swaying in response to her nudges with the fluidity of deep unconsciousness. Her right shoulder and upper arm scraped earth painfully as she squirmed closer, writhing over broad shoulders to press her face against the close‑clipped base of his skull. As she cuddled up, she realized she heard two sets of snores–Kusanagi‑Jones’s, faintly, and muffled as if through walls, a louder rasp.

I hope Vincent’s not the jealous type.Gallows humor. The pain of one bitten‑off chuckle brought tears to her eyes.

“Miss Kusanagi‑Jones.” She heaved herself against him. Every movement jostling her neck felt as if somebody had run electrified wires under her skin. “Miss Kusanagi‑Jones!”

His breath caught and a light moan fluttered at the back of his throat, but he didn’t wake. She lowered her head and shoved, smacking her head into his neck. “Dammit, Michelangelo.”

He vanished.

A second later, air cooling against her chest, she realized she hadfelt him move. One moment, Kusanagi‑Jones was a yielding obstacle rocking in time to her efforts. The next, she was alone in the dark, and something thumped–a meat‑on‑bare‑earth sound–followed by silence.

And then a voice, barely a breath. “Miss Pretoria?”

She sighed, trying not to dwell on the strength it would have taken to flip himself to his feet while bound wrist and ankle. “Very impressive. So how are you at square knots?”

Michelangelo’s wardrobe wasn’t functioning, information delivered quite unceremoniously by the weight of imitation cloth on his shoulders. He couldn’t tell if it had failed due to power drain or because of exposure to an electromagnetic pulse weapon of some sort.

The wardrobe was shielded, but shielded was not invulnerable. His low‑light add‑ons, his watch, and his other sense enhancements weren’t functioning either, which told him it was a power problem and not just the wardrobe. But in the case of failure, the fog assumed a default configuration. In Kusanagi‑Jones’s case, his gi–and that was what hung around him now with a strangely materialweight.

A quick triage would not rank a malfunctioning wardrobe as the greatest of his problems. The foglets would have made short work of his restraints, but he was trained to operate without them. No, the immediate problem was one of where he was being held, and how to get out of there.

“Keep talking,” he said. “I don’t want to step on you.”

“What would you like to talk about?”

The voice located her. He sat in a different direction, with as slight a thump as he could manage. The rammed earth didn’t give. He rolled onto his back, lifting his legs, forcing his arms down against cords that cut at his wrists.

“Talk about anything,” he said, keeping his voice as level and soft as he could. She didn’t need to know about his pain.

“I heard someone snoring before you woke. I think our guard is napping against the wall.”

“Who do you think is holding us?”

“Right Hand,” she answered immediately.

Discomfort escaped him on a hiss as he stretched to work his arms around his hips, dragging his shoulders down. “Why?”

“Well,” she said, “we know it’s not Parity. And whoever it is has dragged us off to a hut in the jungle, where you might expect bandits and runaways.”

His hands were free suddenly, with a scraping pop. Or, not exactly free, but bound behind his knees rather than behind his back. Awkward, but easily remedied, and once he got them around his feet, he had teeth. A bloody good thing they hadn’t had shackles. “You weren’t kidding about pirates.”

“No,” she said. “Damn Robert to a man’s hell anyway.”

Kusanagi‑Jones brought his legs up, hooked his hands under his heels, and stretched and wriggled until blood broke through his scabbed wrists and trickled across the skin. If he had Vincent’s loose‑limbed build, this would be easy, but long flexible arms were another of the advantages that hadn’t made it into Kusanagi‑Jones’s heritage.

He made it happen anyway, and then sprawled on his back, panting as quietly as he could manage while blood dripped off his thumbs and spattered his chest. It wouldn’t soak into the gi the way it would real cloth, but it could seep between the minuscule handclasped robots that made up the utility fog, and there was no way he was getting it out of there–short of wading into the ocean–until he found a power source.

“Ow,” he said. “Ever noticed this doesn’t get easier?”

“Indeed,” she said. “I have.”

A good smearing of blood and sweat hadn’t made the thin cords binding his wrists any simpler to manage. They were tight enough that they’d be more accessible if he gnawed his thumbs off first. Also tight enough that he wouldn’t even feel it much.

Which would defeat the purpose of getting his hands free. Instead, he dug at the cords with his teeth, scraping at the fibers and working as much mayhem on his own flesh as on the bindings. But eventually he heard a pop and felt a cord part, and the constriction loosened.