Warchild Read online

  As I faced Ash-dan across that small gap of three meters, I felt his pointed humor lance through me like a laser bolt. As if all of this amused him in some dark way. I had no idea why. Some things were unknowable, like why Falcone had chosen my ship to attack, and why he’d kept me after he’d killed or sold the others. Like why Niko kept me but treated me better—he a symp, the Warboy, a murderer of merchant ships himself, if you believed the Send.

  I saw myself meeting Ash-dan’s smoke-gray eyes. Some part of me stood with the other sympathizers and striviirc-na—maybe because I’d faced it so many times already in my sleep, or maybe because I had learned it was good sometimes to take yourself away.

  As Niko took a step out onto the sparring floor I moved slowly into the ready position of the hante’sajie-na, the place of swiftness and silent blades, my choice of fighting style here. I balanced with my hands up to defend, like all the spars I’d done against Niko in the house. I didn’t have blades, but Ash-dan would. That was part of the test. I came back inside myself, inside my circle. A cold ball rolled in my gut and went hard. I watched Ash-dan’s eyes. I watched for when the light would change behind them.

  Niko commanded, “Begin.”

  I leaped back immediately to avoid Ash-dan’s attack. I knew he’d be faster than me off the mark. If I wanted to attempt a hit I had to first get out of his way so he wouldn’t take me down with one swipe, like I knew he could. He may have been a Second Master compared to Niko’s Incomparable status—what I was accustomed to sparring against— but at that moment it made no difference.

  Ash-dan prowled me for a second, then attacked again, kicking at the level of my chest. I sprang back and felt the breeze of its passing. He followed up with advancing kicks. I stayed just out of range, so the attempts grazed by. In his eyes I read his annoyance: He wanted me to engage.

  But I knew the moment I did I was beaten.

  He pressed his attack, which I kept avoiding—running from. It wasn’t pretty or neat or even brave. But Niko had said my advantage was in my swiftness—I was smaller and moved quickly. This seemed to frustrate Ash-dan. His face tightened. He wanted to be done with me in one blow. That was the weakness in my enemy that I could exploit. I was no match for his technical skills.

  Finally I allowed him to come closer—it was all over at that point. As soon as I let him into my combat circle he took me down. He didn’t try to be fancy about it. Like lightning his left leg shot around mine. His left hand grabbed my shoulder, the other free to block my punch. But I didn’t punch. I seized his forearm where I felt the hilt of his blade in its wrist sheath and yanked it free as I went down. I didn’t fight gravity or the force of his move. On my back I slashed with his blade across his chest.

  I counted on his agility. If he didn’t move I would bleed him.

  He danced back and I misjudged him. He wasn’t so in shock at my maneuver. Before I had time to roll away his foot shot out and kicked the blade from my hand. My wrist snapped. I yelled.

  Through pain-filled vision 1 saw Niko take a step and stop, staring at me fiercely. Tears squeezed from my eyes. The vas’tatlar was dead silent. They waited for me to get up. It was only my wrist. My legs could still move. Courtesy demanded I get up, even though the fight was over. At my level it was over with the first injury or surrender.

  Ash-dan watched me, just out of strike range.

  My breaths echoed raggedly in my head as I struggled to my feet. Fire lanced up my right arm and down the entire right side of my body. I faced Ash-dan. Slowly I approached. The arm that I was supposed to cross with Ash-dan’s, in that form of respect after a spar, was the injured one. I grit my teeth and held it up, elbow bent. I stared into Ash-dan’s eyes, hating him. He was good enough to stop his blows for the sake of a spar.

  He crossed arms briefly, jarring my broken wrist. I made a sound; it echoed in the silent room. Then he said quietly, so only I heard: “You should never have pulled the blade.”

  I was sweating. I said, “Next time I won’t.”

  From his eyes I knew he heard the double meaning. I could have stabbed him with it, instead of slashing. He knew it.

  Maybe it wasn’t smart to threaten a ka’redan. But I was in such pain I didn’t care.

  He whispered to me, “Falcone would be proud.” Then he brushed my hair back, as if in apology for breaking my wrist.

  I couldn’t breathe. He smiled into my eyes, then walked from the sparring space, picking up his blade as he went. Niko approached and lightly held my good arm.

  Nausea rolled in my chest. The world seemed to cave in.

  “Niko,” I said. I tried to be brave. But now it was just myself and my teacher, and even to my own ears I sounded like a child.

  * * *

  XIX.

  In the empty vas’tatlar, Niko bandaged my wrist with the open aidbox beside him. The numb-out he’d injetted killed the pain, but as the tiny bot-knitters worked on my bones they itched like a dozen insects scurrying under my skin, and I couldn’t scratch. After three weeks they would crawl out the tiny tube in my arm and “die.” Which meant I wasn’t going to spar again anytime soon, or go to any new class.

  Except the comp work with Ash-dan.

  “He didn’t have to do that, Niko. He could’ve stopped before.”

  My teacher frowned, smoothed the bandage, and sat back on his heels. “I know.”

  “Are you still going to leave me with him?”

  Niko breathed out. “This was a reckless moment. I’m going to talk to him.”

  “He mentions Falcone like he wants me to remember. I don’t like him, Niko.” I wiped my eyes, couldn’t help it. Drugs always messed up my emotions, even numb-out.

  “He mentions Falcone.”

  “Yeah. And I don’t want him to teach me anything. I don’t see why I have to know comp stuff. I mean, I already know how to use one. Just let me take that class with Enas-dan, Niko.”

  “You need to know the comps, Jos-na. The ka’redane can’t only depend on the scientists and engineers to help us. EarthHub has advanced technology. All of us need to keep up with it.”

  “Then why aren’t you?”

  “I said it’s not my area of expertise, but I’m not unfamiliar. Ash-dan is an expert. You learn from the experts.”

  “He doesn’t like me.”

  “I will talk to him. And you won’t be alone. My mother will be here too.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He stood. “Let’s go home, Jos-na.”

  Home. My home was going back to the stars.

  * * *

  XX.

  Usually strivs and symps made no fanfare when they left and returned. They hadn’t with Ash-dan, at least. But I still hoped Niko would give me some warning before he went back to his ship.

  Two nights after my spar with Ash-dan, while I was lying on my pallet in the dark trying to ignore the nastiness going on beneath my bandage, my door slid aside.

  “Jos-na,” Niko said, a shadow in the doorway with a soft voice.

  I sat up, hugging the blanket around my shoulders with one hand.

  “May I come in?” he asked.

  I nodded before I realized he couldn’t see me in the dark. “Okay.”

  He stepped in and slid the door shut, then turned up the lights to a comfortable glow. He was dressed in his coiled clothing and a long robe. The one I’d first seen him in, when I’d awakened on his ship after Chaos.

  I held my injured wrist. He approached and knelt across from me, not too close.

  “Jos-na, I expect you to do well for ki’redan Enas. And for Ash-dan.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “If he says anything inappropriate, I want you to tell Enas-dan. Do you understand?”

  He was the Warboy. He had to go.

  “I’m trusting you to still be my student, even in my absence. The student of the kia’redan bae. I am already so proud of you, Jos-na.” He searched my face.

  “I don’t want you to go.” I barely said it. “
You won’t come back.”

  “I plan to.”

  “You’re going to get killed.”

  “Jos-na…” He took a breath. “Believe that your teacher will try his hardest to return.”

  “That doesn’t matter!” My arm was aching and itching. I wanted to rip off the bandage and my skin while I was at it. “Just go then. I don’t care.”

  “I know that’s not true.”

  “I don’t care!” I shouted it into his face. “You all just leave anyway. Except the people I want to leave. They always stay.”

  “Striviirc-na don’t usually say good-bye. But I wished to see you. I’m going to miss you, Jos-na, even though you’re a stubborn, sulky ritla.”

  He never pitied me. That was all it took. I was a kid and my arm was killing me and the snake in my chest kept coiling tighter until it smothered my breath and squeezed the tears from my eyes.

  I stared at my pallet as if it would transform before my sight.

  I didn’t move, not even when I felt his hand on my head. It was uniquely his touch, the way he ran his fingers through my hair like I was something worth remembering. Or just something of worth. It was nothing more than that. It had never been more than that.

  But then it was gone.

  * * *

  XXI.

  When I woke up, Ash-dan was in the room. I sat up and slid my back to the wall.

  “Let’s not waste time, Jos-na, now that Niko is gone. Eja, since you can’t spar in Enas-dan’s class, we’d best get started with the comps.”

  He held a comp, stood looming in my door like a tree. I rubbed my injured arm and climbed out of the blankets.

  “Can I eat first?” My head was still foggy from sleep and I needed another injet. How did he expect me to work?

  “Be quick. I’ve other duties.”

  I went to the door but he didn’t move away. I looked up at him. “If I’m such a chore, then don’t bother.”

  “My brother has asked me. I think it’s a waste of time but who am I to question the kia’redann bae?” He stretched an arm and blocked me further from leaving the room, leaning on the door frame. “You are a smart little one. Eja, I regret breaking your wrist. It was instinct only.”

  I stared up at him, didn’t answer. People like him didn’t care what you said.

  “I will teach you these comps. And what we talk about will stay between us, yes? You are my student in this. Students and teachers don’t report on each other.”

  I looked at his robed arm. I couldn’t see an outline of a sheath, but I knew it was there.

  “Nikolas-dan is my teacher, kii’redan.” I tried to duck under him but he was fast and lowered his arm, put his other hand on my shoulder.

  I stepped back against the opposite side of the door frame, but his fingers gripped.

  “Jos-na. Nikolas-dan isn’t here. Enas-dan is going on an excursion to the northern province with the ki’redan-na until you are healed and class can begin. It will be you and I in this house. Let’s be wise.”

  I could’ve fought him. The anger rose in my throat like bile.

  But he was right. Niko wasn’t here.

  I looked up at him without raising my chin. “Let me go, Ash-dan.”

  He smiled and straightened, opening a way for me into the hall. “Come back here when you’re finished eating. We have much work to do.”

  * * *

  XXII.

  “Now, Jos-na, I want you to think of the hante’sajie-na.”

  I sat on my pallet, in my room, like all those mornings I’d spent with Niko learning the language over a year ago. Dull light filtered through my curtains. The days were shorter, colder. It would never snow a lot here, but the winds came down from the mountaintops and shook the houses.

  “The hante’?”

  “Yes.” Ash-dan opened his black comp case. “Any facet of it you wish. Perhaps one of the jii strikes.”

  I pictured a single han set on a wall, blade upward in the respectful manner. Then I imagined myself taking it down and swinging it in the first form.

  “Do you have the image?”

  “Yes.”

  “That will be your symbol then, your image of protection and identification. Your symself.”

  I frowned. “For what?”

  “For when you learn to step inside of a comp.”

  He didn’t just mean figuratively, as the striviirc-na used the phrase for knowing something thoroughly and without doubt. He meant literally.

  He turned his comp toward me and told me to spend some minutes manually exploring the system. It was much more complicated than the compslate I was used to, and the primer, with many more access points and even light teleportation satellite hookup. I didn’t understand what I needed these for, and told him so.

  “I’m going to teach you communications and comp infiltration, of course,” he said bluntly.

  I stared at him. “Why?”

  “Because your teacher wishes you to learn, buntla-na. Stop asking questions you know the answers to. You will irritate me.”

  “But why do I need to know this? Comp infiltration—do you mean burndiving?” That was illegal in EarthHub. People still did it, though. Evan’s brother Shane had dabbled in it. But what was illegal for a symp? Nothing, of course.

  “Eja, I don’t know that word, ‘burndiving.’ But you need to know this because Niko says so. Now shut your mouth and listen.” He dislodged a small case from the side of the comp and handed it over. “Put these on your eyes. They are optical holopoint receptors.”

  I opened the case. Tiny, vaguely red lenses floated in a clear liquid. I knew they were used for holoaccess to comp systems, but I had never touched them before. Even the games we used to play on Mukudori or in cybetoriums used an eyeband instead, just because they were cheaper.

  “Put them in,” Ash-dan said impatiently.

  It was awkward and took me a few minutes, but I did it. A slight red tint covered my sight. Ash-dan leaned over and tapped something on my comp. Suddenly the 2-D list of files erupted into tall corridors, with me in the center of it, looking up. Except it wasn’t me. A vague red shape hovered where I thought I should be.

  “Now,” he said. “You will learn how to build your sym-self.”

  It took hours of disciplined concentration, like my jii training, to memorize the strings of code that would activate my symbol once I’d let loose the ID packet in the system. Moving my symself through the virtual world of communication and information was similar to the mental part of martial training I’d already begun. The jii-klala, blade mind, fit comp work too.

  Sometimes Ash-dan joined me in the false world of the comps. I felt his dark humor rising off him like body scent. When he burndived with me inside the pyramids of programs it was like having an assassin at your back in real time. I almost heard him laughing, even in the comp. Nervous that he’d somehow lock me in the matrices, I always tried to keep him near my symself. His image was a flowing white shape, a bird of some kind, and he moved swiftly. The forum of a comp seemed no different to him than the vas’-tatlar.

  “Are you ready to spar me?” he asked a week into the training, while he showed me how to deke out a comp’s systematic security patrols. He didn’t say it aloud, but the words appeared at the edges of my field of vision, in the progging shorthand he’d had me memorize on the first day.

  My symself flickered and I had to stop, pinned against a wall of yellow files.

  “Concentrate,” he said. I saw lines of security probes snaking through the comp corridors from the direction of the files I was supposed to break through. “Pay attention, buntla-na.”

  Then his symself blinked away—gone.

  “Ash-dan!”

  It was a city grid, and my shout was like a siren going off.

  He’d left me to be gobbled by the polisyms. I had nowhere to run, or nowhere I knew to run to—every alley sprouted a security probe, a hard blue comet of polisym. I wondered if I died in the comp if I would die on the outside.<
br />
  I tried to pull down the pocketed code for an exit but I couldn’t find it. Instead I found purposeful white traces of Ash-dan’s footsteps. He’d broken through my security tabs and stolen my code before leaving. I hadn’t even felt it. I had no way out.

  “Ash-dan!” I said out loud as the polisyms came toward me down an alleyway of protected files.

  He appeared again on my left and opened up an exit, a round red ring that he chased my symself toward, a mental shove. I blinked and dumped the exit code in a flurry. The holopoints disconnected and I saw his face across from me, my room around us, sparking with the ghost lines of the comp. It was cold and my eyes burned.

  “It’s no place for children,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant the comp or the room or the planet.

  I’m not a child, I wanted to say. But I didn’t, because he wouldn’t believe me. He wanted to step on me, like adults did with kids they hated having underfoot.

  * * *

  XXIII.

  A week and a half since Niko left, a week and a half into comp training with Ash-dan, I got sick. Headaches plagued me, my stomach refused food, and all my muscles ached like I’d spent a nonstop day doing nothing but drills. Ash-dan said sometimes the headaches happened at first because you were getting used to the world of the comps. The other sick feelings, he said, were just my weaknesses.

  “Sraga,” I told him. He didn’t even have the decency to make me soup. I dragged myself to the kitchen twice a day to force liquids down my throat before I got sicker. Enas-dan commed twice and seemed genuinely concerned about me, but she was still tied up in some sort of meeting in the north. She said she’d be home in a week.

  I stayed out of Ash-dan’s way and he mostly ignored me, told me only to tell him when I was ready to get back to work.

  The days passed and I was alone. I sketched, sometimes painted. Ugly misshapened faces, melting eyes and open mouths in streaks of black and red. Not pretty like the striviirc-na paintings. I drew segmented arches like the bulkhead skeletons of some ships, yellow spots in the corners like old lights, little white points like stars. Stars that never changed and didn’t care. After, I threw all the pictures in the garbage.