Carnival

When Mikhail released her and the thorns took her weight, she couldn’t even scream. She choked out a whimper, bit her lip, managed to pull it back to the barest whine. Her flesh stretched against imbedded thorns.

Mikhail backed up, scrubbing his palms against his capaciously pocketed trousers, and the woman looked down as Stefan draped a few more vines artistically across her chest. Then he also moved away, frowning at his handiwork. Lesa could barely see him, though the morning had grown bright. Her vision was empty at the edges, and every breath, no matter how shallow, sank the vine’s three‑centimeter thorns more deeply into her skin. Some of them shattered, stripping off the vines, but there were many more, and they were fresh and green.

They took her weight.

Stefan dropped out of sight. Lesa heard scuffling, but couldn’t turn her head. A moment later, he reappeared, sliding from under her log with her improvised club in his hand. He weighed it across his palm, and then took good hold of it and smashed at the ground with a croquet‑mallet swing.

Whatever he was doing, a few blows satisfied him. He whirled the club overhead, and slung it tumbling deep among the trees. Mikhail stared down at his feet, and flinched when Lesa couldn’t hold back another whimper.

“Right,” Stefan said, grabbing the woman’s wrist in a liberty that would have shocked Lesa under other circumstances. “Come on,” he said, and paused long enough to smile up at Lesa. “Pleasant dreams, Miss Pretoria.”

Then he herded his companions away.

They were out of sight, and Lesa considering her options for the least painful method of breathing, when she felt the first savage, stinging bite on the edge of her foot and jerked stupidly against the thorns, and cried.

Stefan had broken open a nant’s nest. And while they might not think humans were good eating, they were more enthusiastic about driving off something that might be the predator that had attacked their home.

Except this predator didn’t have anyplace to run.

22

KUSANAGI‑JONES WAS STILL AT IT LONG AFTER SUNRISE, but he thought the staple might be loosening. He heard a faint clicking now when he rocked it against the wood. When it went, it would go all at once, and he’d find himself sprawled flat on his back in the dirt. At least the chains and the staple were steel, unlike the manacles. They’d make a reasonably effective weapon, once the other end was no longer bolted down.

The clatter of the door lock left him plenty of warning that somebody was about to enter, if the murmur of voices hadn’t been enough. He released his grip on the chains and began pacing, wearing out the brief arc permitted. Two steps and pivot, two steps and pivot the other way. Exactly what Vincent would have been doing in his position.

He had less than a meter of slack.

Light spilled in when the door opened with the brilliance of midmorning. Kusanagi‑Jones averted his eyes, staring toward the darkest corner of his domain, and waited until the door banged the frame again and the brightness dimmed.

“Michelangelo.” Robert again, standing by the door, his left hand cupped beside his thigh as if he held something concealed in the palm.

“Breakfast already?” Kusanagi‑Jones asked. “Seems like you just left.”

Robert’s smile was tight. “Do you remember what I said about the Right Hand not being the barbarians we’re painted?”

Kusanagi‑Jones folded his hands in front of him and nodded slowly, the chains pulling against his wrists.

“I was wrong,” Robert said, and flipped something through the air.

Kusanagi‑Jones caught it reflexively. A code stick, the sort that worked as a key. He held it up inquiringly, the shackles stopping his hand before it came level with his face.

“Go ahead,” Robert said. He crouched, and began digging in the capacious pockets of his vest. Objects piled on the packed dirt before him. Kusanagi‑Jones recognized emergency gear, a primitive datacart of the sort that seemed ubiquitous on New Amazonia, a two‑foot knife that Robert pulled from under his vest, a pocket lighter, and the crinkly packaging of a sterile med‑kit.

He didn’t stand and gawk. He skipped the code stick over the manacles and pried them open with a sigh, careful not to let the chains clang against the pole when he lowered them. He dropped the code stick on the floor and kicked dirt over it, and stepped toward Robert.

“You’re helping me escape.”

“We’re going together,” Robert said. “The team that went after Lesa came back.”

“Without her?” Kusanagi‑Jones sank onto his haunches and began picking items out of the pile and slipping them inside his gi, where the belt would hold them in place. Robert had also provided socks and a pair of low boots, which Kusanagi‑Jones jammed his feet into.

“Stefan and Mikhail said they found no sign of her.”

Kusanagi‑Jones was not Vincent, but even he could read the irony in that tone. He hefted the knife–he would call it a machete–and shoved it through his belt like a pirate’s scimitar. The hilt poked him under the ribs.

“There was a third with them. Medeline Angkor‑Wat. The tracker. Who told me the truth, after Stefan and Mikhail went to get coffee.”

Kusanagi‑Jones waited.

Robert lifted his head, fixed Kusanagi‑Jones with a look that froze his throat, and filled the silence, the way people did. “We might have a chance to get to her while she’s still alive,” he said, and shoved a water bottle into Kusanagi‑Jones’s hand. “There’s a GPS locator and a map in the datacart. If we get separated. Medeline’s best‑guess location for where they left Lesa is plotted. It won’t be off by more than a few hundred meters. She’s good.”

Unless she’s lying to you. Kusanagi‑Jones pressed his elbow against the pad inside his gi, without voicing the comment. “What about the guard?”

“I brought Chun breakfast,” Robert said. “He should be unconscious by now. And the guards at the gate won’t know you. Here.” He produced a wadded‑up dark green shirt from somewhere, and tossed it at Kusanagi‑Jones’s chest.

Kusanagi‑Jones shrugged it on over his gi. It looked less out of place, and the bottoms were dirty enough to pass for the same sort of baggy tan trousers that Robert was wearing.

Robert stood and rattled the door. “Chun?”

There was no answer. Kusanagi‑Jones breathed out a sigh he knew better than to have been holding, and waited while Robert pulled the chain through the hole in the door and used another code stick to unfasten the lock.

They had to heave Chun’s unconscious body aside to slip through. The sentry had passed out leaning against the door with his plate in his lap. Kusanagi‑Jones carefully reclosed the door, pulled the chain free and slipped it into his pocket, and propped Chun back up as he had been. There was no need to leave the place looking like an escape in progress.

And then, side by side, Robert chatting aimlessly about some sporting event, they headed for the gate.

“Easier to steal an aircar,” Kusanagi‑Jones suggested in low tones. “I can hotwire those.”

“They all have beacons. Besides, it’s only about fifteen kilometers. We’ll be fine.”

The boots were too tight and pinched across the ball of Kusanagi‑Jones’s feet. He could already feel every step of that fifteen kilometers. “I hope you can run,” he quipped, which earned him an arched eyebrow.

He wondered what Vincent would have made of that look, of the jaunty set of Robert’s shoulders.

And if it would have meant anything. Because if Robert had been fooling Lesa for as long as he must have been, the only explanation was that either he was a Liar, too, or he’d been very lucky never to find himself in a context that Lesa could pick up what he was concealing from her.

Of course, it was possible that the New Amazonian women just didn’t talk to their men very much.