BETRAYAL AND THE LIBRARY
1560 4D
My father met me at Caladrina‘s the next day. I played with the salt on the same back table we had used before. He sat, and wrote, I sent a friend for the payment. It’s safe.
I wrote, Why didn’t you tell me everything sooner?
You were too young. The CIB would have found you and killed you.
And Thringe?
A hand fell between our faces, and I quickly dashed the salt message away. The hand opened, and dropped to the tabletop the crushed remains of the indigo chatbird I’d sent off to my father the day before.
We looked up. It was the Gellin Sintherou man who had spoken to me the first time I had come here with Thringe‘s band.
He smiled. “You have no idea of the trouble you have created,” he said. I looked behind him. Three corpos in full police uniform stood with their beam guns aimed at my father and me. With them was the tall City cop who had warned me at the beginning of all this, when I was someone else. He wore a grimace of rage. Two more cops, one of them Jannalisa, scanned the crossing outside, guns ready.
The Sintherou man went on, “If it hadn’t been for my friends, we wouldn’t have found you.” He inclined his head, and I looked past his shoulder, then down, to see Tavenal Tain grinning at me.
“You’re with them?” My shock was obvious.
He laughed, making the wheels of his cart squeak as it rocked back and forth a little. One of his hands opened, and in it lay a crushed chatbird. “Here’s the first bird she sent, back on Teshill Slope. The bird you got was mine.”
Still numbed, I mumbled, “Why me? I’m no criminal.”
“You were what we needed. A good match, it turns out, much better than anyone else we could have found.” His smile broadened. I wanted to leap over the table and kick his face in.
“The masquerade is over now,” the Sintherou man said. “Quessnar Viustin, stand up and turn your back to me, hands on top of your head. You, Thringe or Lejina or whatever you are now, keep your hands on the table where I can see them. We plan to find out what that bird carried, and what you’re carrying too.”
We obeyed. Two of the corpos came to my father and manacled his arms in front of him. He coughed.
Whatever I was… my mind raced. If I had become andro, or part-andro, that would mean I had the reflexes of andros, super-fast. And I had innerspace. I closed my eyes, and found the door, and it opened into a dark and roiling mountainside sky filled with wire lashes of rain.
“Jeddin!” I screamed. “Thringe! Help us!”
The wind roared at me. Lightning flashed up from some well of darkness into the grinding clouds, and I blinked against the thrashings of dark water. No one was there. I turned myself into a lightning bolt, zagged into the sky, branched and threw myself blazing at the invisible slopes and peaks. Stones exploded under me. I tumbled down over a dozen precipices to coalesce in a dusty crevice.
A rough hand seized me and hauled me back to the table. The tall cop. “Hiding in your head won’t help you, andro bitch. Stand up.”
I stood beside my father as they put manacles and leg chains on me, and closed my eyes again. The door hung open in my mind, and I vaulted through it once more, into a shadowed library.
A monstrous hand seized my head between two fingers, and squeezed. The pain paralyzed me, and I couldn’t breathe to cry out. My body burst open, spraying the floor and the books lining the walls, and the hand dropped me to a dark-blue carpet amid the warm stains of my andro blood.
“Thringe!” I gasped, and the room faded.
“Get up! Get up!” Her voice! I opened my eyes wide. I was blind, or there was no light. I flung my hands out, balancing, propping, feeling, the carpet-soaking blood slipping greasily between my fingers and running along my arms.
“Follow my voice!” she called. I stumbled to my feet, still unseeing, and rammed both legs into a low table, sprawling across it. The pressure in my head increased.
“Here, come on,” she said, and I clambered acros the table and fell, struggled up, and staggered after her voice while my brain pulsed in a vise. I clutched at my gut. My insides lay slimy in my hand. I reeled and fell, and I couldn’t move.
“Now you know my life,” said Thringe‘s voice, and her tone was soft, sad. “Come on! Get up, and make it change!”
I remembered Jeddin‘s words at the root trap. My hand smoothed across my belly, and it was whole again. I made a steel skull in my head and the pain and pressure faded away. This was innerspace. I touched my eyes, and the dark library formed around me, shelves of books, ancient printed paper books, lining every wall to a high pale ceiling.
