Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part Two

 Notes: Having some FEELS this chapter. Oh Kieron, babe. We're gonna get you out of this...no guarantees it's not going to suck, though.

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part Two

***

Chapter Thirteen, Part Two

 

Photo by Ryan Stone

Carlisle scoffed. “You think I trust you enough to give you a weapon? After what you pulled?” She stood and began to pace again, which was fine with Kieron because it gave him the space he needed to trace the schematic and send it through to Blobby. He followed the lines as closely as he could, tapping out the identifications of everything as he traced over it so Blobby had the best possible overview Kieron could give him from where he was.

“What if you lose your mind again? What if you can’t stop yourself from being an idiot and lashing out?”

Kieron hummed as he wondered whether he was asking too much of Blobby. The bot was just a baby, after all, hardly even able to walk upright, and here he was asking the little lifeform to figure out how to infiltrate an entire base and help Kieron sneak himself and his reluctant…whatever she was to him out of it. It wasn’t very fair.

“Are you listening to me?”

With a flash of insight he really could have done without, Kieron suddenly drew an unwelcome parallel between himself and the General. As a child, Kieron—all of the kids—had been treated as soldiers almost from the moment they could bathe and feed themselves. They’d been expected to act like little adults and take orders like them too, and the pain of failure had been extreme. Kieron had never intended to be a parent, but here he was, in a position of authority over Blobby, asking him to risk valuable pieces of himself. He’d almost certainly lose some of them in the attempt to get them out, and if they failed, it wasn’t just Kieron who would lose his life. Blobby would be destroyed too.

“God damn it, I am talking to—”

“How did you bear it?” he asked quietly, making eye contact with Carlisle even as he tapped a final message through to Blobby. .. ._.. _ _ _ …_ . _._ _ _ _ _ .._

Carlisle stopped for a moment. “Bear what?”

“What he did to us. What he made us do.” .. ._.. _ _ _ …_ . _._ _ _ _ _ .._ “Everyone who had a child, who had to watch how we were treated. How did you bear it?” The pain of it was close to ripping his own heart out, and he hadn’t even made Blobby. Compounded by how worried he was about the rest of his family, and Kieron wondered how anybody stayed sane like this.

.. ._.. _ _ _ …_ . _._ _ _ _ _ .._

“What else could we do?” Carlisle asked.

“You could have left.”

She sighed. “And gone where? It’s not like there were a host of planets out there ready to welcome in militant refugees with nothing to recommend them but scars and battle mania. We were dosed on so many drugs back then, things intended to make us fight-ready at any moment that really just made us unstable…it’s hard to explain, but it felt…normal.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t until the very end, when the drugs were running out, that I realized it really wasn’t normal. I hadn’t felt so much since I first had you, and it…well.” She gestured at him. “You’re alive because of it. What are you doing?”

“Just sending a little message.” All of a sudden a reply came back to him: ..  .-.. --- ...- .  -.-- --- ..-  - --- --- I love you too. He smiled at the tiny piece of Blobby he held, then slid it into his pocket.

“What is that thing?” she asked quietly. “What is it really?”

“It’s a piece of something important.”

“You look at it like it’s a piece of yourself.”

“Something like that,” he agreed.

Carlisle sighed again. “I suppose it’s my own fault you can’t tell me things.” She tilted her head a little. “You turned out a lot like your father. It wasn’t so obvious when you were a child, but now…”

It was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Who was he?”

She shrugged. “A nobody. No one important at all, just a man I met in a station in the Fringe. He had tough, calloused hands, I remember that much. He could have been a miner or, stars, a janitor for all I know. I never asked, and he never asked me much either. I was only with him for a night.”

Well, that was… It wasn’t that Kieron had ever really wondered much about his father; he’d been too worried about the rest of his immediate family for that. But a part of him, a small part that he couldn’t quite deny no matter how much he wanted to, did think about the man sometimes. Had he known his mother was pregnant when they parted ways? Did he have other children? How would he have treated Kieron?

“He was handsome,” Carlise supplied. “But soft at heart. Not a soldier. I could never have brought him back here, my father would have ensured that he was killed almost as soon as he touched down.”

“Good thing you left him alone, then.” Kieron meant it, too. He just wished she’d left Kieron with the unknown man as well. Or…maybe he didn’t. It was true that he’d had a hard life, the sort of life he wouldn’t wish on anyone else, but it had led him to everything he had now. A family he’d never been able to imagine for himself, and a man who loved him so much he was willing to put up with Kieron’s wild flights of fancy and come here with him, of all places, just to make him feel better.

“Who are you thinking about when you smile like that?”

“My fiancé,” he said.

“What’s his name?”

None of your business, he wanted to say, but he also wanted to talk about him. “Elanus,” he offered like a peace treaty, and his mother accepted it with a nod. “He’s an inventor. He owns his own company.” About a hundred of them, actually. “He’s not a military man, but he’s a genius.”

“Hmm.” She nodded. “He sounds like a challenge.”

“He is.” Every day with Elanus was its own particular kind of challenge. Sometimes it was exhausting, but mostly it was exhilarating. At the very least, Kieron knew he would never be bored with the man. “I need to get back to him.”

“Well, if your robot is any good at its job, there’s a very slight chance that you will.” That was about as comforting as Carlisle seemed able to be. She put her hands on her hips and looked around. “I can’t give you access to any of our weapons, they’re DNA-coded to the user, but let’s see what we can take apart in here to give you something to work with, at least.” She scowled at the little kitchen space. “I’ve always hated that automatic kettle. It boils way too fast.”

“Sounds promising.” It was a start, at least.

And with Blobby on his side, a start was all Kieron really needed.

 

Lord of Unkindness Ch. 28

 Notes: Back to the den of iniquity we go!

Title: Lord of Unkindness Ch. 28

***

Chapter Twenty-Eight

 

In the end, they don’t wait around after starting the fire. Nephele decides she’d rather head back to the private airfield where their jet is waiting for them—“It’s not like I’m letting this girl go, after all.” Ciro doesn’t try to convince her otherwise. Engaging with Nephele is a delicate thing—she’s as likely to go off the rails when she’s being argued with as when you’re trying to be passive and ignore her, and being in Maria’s body makes her invulnerable to him right now. Once Maria is on her own again, Ciro might be able to do something, but he’s not going to risk damaging her by trying to force his cousin out.

Instead they stay just long enough to watch the flames really catch on Angelo’s family house. This refuge, this beautiful home that his parents left him, a place of ethereal music, his connection to his people—it goes up in fire and burns down to ash, and it feels like Ciro’s heart does the same inside his chest.

I should have run. I knew it. It’s too late to indulge in those sorts of regrets, though. He’s got to armor up before he sees his family again.

Nephele is oddly quiet all the way to the airfield, her control of Maria’s body herky and jerky. It’s bad enough that they almost go off the road several times, but Ciro doesn’t say anything. There’s nothing for him to say; he won’t offer to help, and antagonizing her will only mean more pain for himself later on. Instead, he sinks into a form of meditation he perfected as a child; awake and aware, but drawing in on himself. He tucks his emotions deep into a box in his head, along with all his most vulnerable thoughts. Angelo goes into the box, and so does Annette. He can still think about them, but it’s dispassionate, and anyone scanning him with mental magic will see the same.

His family will know what he’s doing, of course. They’ll try to break him down, drive him out of cool distance into their suffocating heat, but he’s not going to make it easy for them. He closes the box with the magic from one of his sole raven’s feathers, binding it in an intricate pattern that reminds him of some of the textiles in Angelo’s safehouse. When he thinks about the destruction Nephele wrought with only the slightest pang, he knows it worked.

One hurdle down. Only a hundred or so more to go.

The airfield is surrounded by a chain-link fence. There’s an office and a series of hangars attached to it, but the place feels deserted. The only plane there is a very familiar jet, painted red and black and stupidly ostentatious against the desert landscape. They park the car next to it, and Maria gets out and takes all of two steps before falling to her knees with a gasp.

Ciro doesn’t run to help her. He barely even glances at her; he can’t afford to give anything up now, not with the welcoming committee coming toward them across the tarmac. There’s Nephele, tall, upright, and skinny as a twig. She looks gleeful but exhausted—controlling another person’s body for that amount of time is no easy task. At her feet, a whole pack of rats is running alongside her, welling and falling back again like a brown, furry wave. And beside her is…

Richard, Uncle Magnus’s bodyguard. His cougar familiar is beside him, but she’d walking with a nasty limp. He looks grim, and is hands are working like he’s imagining breaking all the bones he promised Ciro he would.

“There’s the man of the hour!” Nephele says as she gets close, slurring the words. It’s part fatigue, part the result of the soft palate deformities in her mouth. She’s gone through dozens of surgeries to correct the results of generations of inbreeding, but there’s only so much you can do when your family tree is as twisted as the Hapsburgs. Her hands are twitching as well, but it’s with a desire to grab. As soon as she’s in range, that’s what she does, reeling Ciro in and clamping on to him like a lamprey. “Baby, it’s been so long,” she whispers against his ear before pressing a kiss to the skin right below it.

Her lips are wet, her hands clammy. It’s the last thing Ciro wants to feel, but he doesn’t let on. He doesn’t hold her back, either; capitulating won’t do him any favors.

“Miss Hambly,” Richard grinds out. “We need to get going.”

She giggles and jumps up and down a little bit. Her grip is so tight her nails are digging through Ciro’s clothes and leaving marks. “Ciro,” she whispers, “Ciro, my Ciro, I missed you. Tell me you missed me.”

Ciro doesn’t say anything.

“Ciro. Tell me you missed me.”

“Miss Hambly,” Richard tries again.

Nephele pulls back just far enough to look into his eyes. “Tell me you missed me,” she hisses, “or I’ll have my rats eat that girl alive, right now.”

“We need the girl, Miss—” Richard grunts with pain as half a dozen rats suddenly swarm his familiar, biting viciously. He holds the cougar in check; no one lashes out at a Hambly unless they have a death wish.

“I missed you,” Ciro says dully, not for Richard’s sake as much as Maria’s. Maria must have been conscious while Nephele was hag-riding her, because she’s not trying to run—she knows there’s nowhere to go. She’s on the verge of hyperventilating, though, so Ciro needs to keep her calm. He can’t help her if she loses control now.

Nephele melts against him. “I knew it,” she says with satisfaction. Ciro stares at her and wonders, for the thousandth time, why a person as smart as his cousin constantly deludes herself when it comes to him. Their relationship is her most consistent lie. “I told Uncle Victor he was too hard on you. I knew he was going to make you run.”

You killed Annette’s familiars, not my father!

“I told him not to beat you,” she continues. “You’re too delicate for that.”

Ha. Where’s the woman who was threatening to amputate his legs an hour ago? But that’s Nephele—burning one moment, freezing the next.

“Miss Hambly,” Richard finally speaks up, and now he’s less brimming with an urge for vengeance and more hoping to get through the next few minutes without taking more damage. “We should go. Your uncle is expecting you.”

“Mmhmm,” she says, finally pulling away from Ciro. “Okay.” She glances at Maria. “Put her in the cargo hold,” she says contemptuously. “With my rats.”

“Ciro,” Maria whimpers, turning big, scared eyes on him. “Don’t—”

“Don’t what?” Nephele asks, getting in her face. “Don’t let me do that to you? Bitch, has he been able to stop me from doing anything I want so far?” She laughs. “This is what you get for messing with powers you have no business knowing about.”

“I—but I—”

Dispassion, except Ciro can already feel it breaking. He reaches absently up to pet his raven, and a tiny feather comes loose in his hand. It’s a second’s work to waft it over to Maria and tuck it into her hair. Protection. She’s nothing to you. You barely even notice her.  The charm seems to work, because neither Nephele nor Richard say a word when the rats turn their backs on Maria like she isn’t even there.

Good. Hopefully it will last her all the way back to New York. Then…well, Ciro will have to have another plan in place by then. Angelo will never forgive him if he lets Maria get killed.

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part One

 Notes: I'm back, baby! And being very fucking careful about how I sit, how often I get up for breaks, how to stretch my spine...arg. I'm not at 100%, but I've got story for you, so I'll take it ;)

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Thirteen, Part One

***

Chapter Thirteen, Part One

 

Photo by Nadiia Ganzhyi

 

“Talk to me about layout,” Kieron said once Carlisle was able to breathe again. “Entrances and exits, weapons systems, transport.”

“That’s all classified,” she snapped at him from where she was pacing back and forth. Her arms were crossed over her chest protectively, but at least that meant she wasn’t preparing to shoot him at the drop of a hat.

“I don’t give a shit about this place,” Kieron told her bluntly. “Nobody gives a shit about this place.”

She scoffed. “You gave enough of a shit to try and take out the General.”

Momentary madness. Lapse of sanity. Impaired judgement. Stars, Elanus was never going to let Kieron out of his sight again after this. He might even be persuaded to go back to therapy, if it meant he didn’t so stupid shit like that. “That was a mistake,” he admitted. “And I’m pretty sure you know why I made it—” she flinched, but he didn’t press “—so let’s move on, all right? What’s the layout of this compound?”

Carlisle sighed. “It doesn’t matter. Every hall is recorded, every room has cameras. You’re not going to be able to sneak out of here.”

“How about you stop assuming things about what I can and can’t do and start telling me something useful?”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Fine. Let’s see what you can do with this.” She slapped the top of the coffee table, and the glass turned opaque. “It’s a standard rectangular compound with star turrets in each corner.” She sketched it all out in quick lines. “Training and medic halls here, barracks here, mess here, supply and storage here. Weapons systems on each tower and lining the walls. They’re solar powered, so not at peak efficiency right now, but more than enough to blow you away in under a second. All ships are kept here, under heavy observation.” She sketched out a round building adjacent to the main one. “And all land vehicles are kept in the center of the compound, with only one entrance and exit, here. Also under heavy observation.”

“Huh.” Okay, that was… not ideal, but not insurmountable either. “Sewage system?”

“Gravity powered over porous rock.”

Gross. It had to come right back up through the rocks they shit on during rains like this. “That’s lazy.”

“It’s efficient,” Carlisle said stiffly. “And also none of your business.”

“It’s my business if it means I can’t use it to escape,” he pointed out. “Water?”

“Cisterns, attached to the roofs. Also under observation.”

Not helpful, then. Time for a different tack. “What are your total numbers?”

“You don’t need to…” This time Carlisle stopped herself. “Just under a hundred.”

A hundred people. The colony had once held thousands of them. Thousands of people, and all but six of them were supposed to be dead. “Any more originals?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not anymore.”

Kieron wanted to ask about it. Who else survived? How did you? How did he? Why didn’t you go out in the pathetic blaze of glory that everyone else did? But it would only hurt to know at this point, not help. “Working in shifts?”

Carlisle rolled her eyes. “What kind of idiots do you take us for? Of course, working in shifts.” She went on to describe a system very similar to the one he’d grown up with—triple shifts, mandatory PT and scut time, a bullshit favoritism system when it came to getting off-planet…the most surprising thing about it all was that any of these people were willing to abide by the rules.

“Why?” Kieron finally asked once she’d laid it all out.

“Why what?”

“Why do people listen to him. To you? Why do they stay?”

She blinked. “Why do you think? He gives them a place to belong.”

“That’s a bunch of—”

“No, listen to me.” She leaned in, staring at him intently. “That’s how he works. It’s how he’s always worked, and it’s always worked. Some people have a kind of…charisma, a way of presenting themselves and saying things that makes people want to listen to them. The General has that. He says a lot of terrible things—truly horrific things, stuff that would make a sane person run the other way.

“But the people who stay? They’re not insane. Most of them just want to belong. They wanted a place that would give them a second chance, or would give them the ability to indulge in beliefs and actions that wouldn’t be permitted in their home societies. He gives them an excuse to be monsters, and they take it.” Carlisle rubbed a hand across her temple. “The comfort rooms? That’s the least of it. Trust me, once they find out who you are…”

Yeah, nothing good was going to come of that. “We won’t be here by the time they do.”

She smacked the table and the image disappeared. “Have you missed everything I’ve been saying? You’re stuck here, we’re all being watched, and it’s controlled by a computer system in the General’s own quarters. He’s got the best protection, and we’ve got nothing to get past it with now.”

“That’s not true, actually,” Kieron replied. He pulled the single unit of Blobby he’d kept ahold on out of his pocket.

“You’re not going to be able to threaten him with an explosion the way you could on the ship,” Carlisle said. “Whatever that thing of yours is, right now it’s being stored in a bunker beneath the center of the compound. We keep all our excess ammunition there as well—it’s been designed for explosions to go down instead of up. Even a nuclear device won’t be enough to scare him.”

“It’s not a nuclear device.” Kieron smiled down at the smooth, black oval in his hand. Then, very deliberately, he tapped out a message in MORSE. He tapped it once…twice…three times, then waited.

“What are you—” Carlisle went quiet as the piece suddenly began to vibrate in his hand.

Long…short short…long… Kieron closed his eyes and concentrated. “A few seconds’ delay in communication,” he murmured. “But he’s able to configure himself, and he thinks he can get out of the place he’s been shut into.”

“Who is he?”

Kieron ignored the question. “Pull up the schematic again so I can pass them on. We’ll let him see how well he can get the lay of the land before I ask him for anything specific.”

Carlisle looked furious. “Any transmissions will be picked up for sure! You’ve just doomed us before—”

“Not these ones,” Kieron assured her. He was almost sure he was right, too. If tech on Gania couldn’t pinpoint communication on the level Catie and Lizzie operated on, then this Podunk fucking compound wouldn’t be able to detect Blobby. “I swear. Now pull up the schematic, then let’s start brainstorming our next step.”

“Which is?” she asked skeptically.

“Weapons for the two of us.”