By the Sea of Sand Read online

  “I’m sorry,” he told her in a stiff, formal voice. “I shouldn’t have.”

  She gathered her robes in front of her, holding them closed as she rolled to face him. “You think I couldn’t have stopped you, if I wanted?”

  “You couldn’t have.” In the next pass of light, she saw that he was staring at the ceiling, one arm behind his head.

  “No. You’re right. But you didn’t force me, if that’s what you were thinking.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Still. I shouldn’t have . . .”

  “Did you do what you just did as an apology?” Teila pushed herself up on one elbow, wishing she could see his face. The sound of the wind had gone quieter, though the occasional spatter of sand against the window told her the storm hadn’t yet died.

  He said nothing.

  Stunned, moved, touched, her heart full, she leaned to kiss him. “You didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do.”

  The lights came back on. At the look on his face, awkward and clearly uncomfortable, Teila sat up and moved away. Giving him space.

  Kason—because that was who he was and who he would always be in her heart—sat up, too. “I’m a stranger to you.”

  It was her turn to stay quiet.

  Frowning, he gave her a long, steady look. “You fuck a lot of strangers, Teila?”

  Her chin went up, though his tone wasn’t accusatory as much as merely curious. “No.”

  “It’s not your habit, then?”

  “No,” she repeated and got to her feet. Her fingers fumbled with her laces as she closed her robes.

  She felt it when he got up behind her. Waited for him to turn her. He didn’t touch her, at least not with his hands. He didn’t have to. She felt him all over her anyway.

  “Teila.”

  She wouldn’t look at him. Couldn’t. She half-turned to give him the illusion of it, but cut her gaze from his.

  “Have I been here before?”

  Teila kept her words careful. “Do you think you have been?”

  “Curse it! Answer me!”

  She braced herself for his grip. His fists clenched, but he didn’t touch her. Her throat dried even as her eyes burned; she closed them against the tears and his look.

  “Am I a stranger to you?”

  Her breath hitched inward, choking. She backed up a few steps, her head spinning, the Rav Aluf’s warnings echoing in her head. Don’t tell him anything. Don’t lead him. Above everything else, do not trigger him.

  “You’ve been here long enough,” she said, thinking desperately of how to tell him something, anything, that would open the locked door between the present and the past. “No. You’re not a stranger.”

  “But when I came here? Was I a stranger then?”

  “Did you . . .” She had to swallow hard. “Did you feel like a stranger?”

  Kason’s back straightened. His eyes narrowed. “Yes. I did. All of this felt new to me. But now . . .”

  “Yes?” Teila couldn’t stop herself from hoping.

  “Now, I doubt.”

  Everything inside her began to shake—joy or terror, she couldn’t be sure. “It will take time for you—”

  “Did you know me?” His tone brooked no more confabulation. Without waiting for her to answer, he did it for her. “You did. I can see it in your eyes. You knew me, Teila. Before I came here this way, you knew me.”

  So close, so close, but she couldn’t risk it. Not for any reason. “Do you remember me?”

  “No.” He shook his head, fingertips working at his temples again. “I don’t, and I don’t remember knowing you. But I did.”

  She couldn’t say yes. But she could not say no. She let her silence answer, and that wasn’t good enough for him.

  Kason let out a low, angry growl. That was the only way to describe it. It was a sound of animal fury, culminating in a roar that had her cowering. With one swift motion, he swept the nearby table clean of the glass vase and tray. Both shattered on the floor. The table was next, toppled and broken.

  Was this it, Teila wondered, terrified. Had he been triggered? Was he gone over?

  When he turned on her, she stood her ground. Not from any bravery, but because she had no time to move before he had her in his arms. She’d been in just this place so many times before, sometimes with love or lust and a few times, lately, in anger. All she could do was look up at him and beg the Three Mothers to let him see her for who she was.

  His fury drained as she watched. His grip loosened, though he didn’t let her go. He leaned in, and she thought he might kiss her. Instead, he closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. His nose traced a line up her throat to her jaw, the heat of his breath not quite a caress.

  When he looked at her again, his gaze was flat. “You knew me. But you won’t tell me how. Or who I am.”

  I can’t. But even that was too much to say. All she could do was stare.

  Kason put her from him so firmly it was as painful as a slap. He gave her his back. “Get out.”

  “Everything takes time—”

  “Get out,” he repeated. Softer this time, but far more dangerous.

  The man she’d married would never have turned his back on her that way, no matter how angry. Perhaps it was time to admit it, Teila thought as she left the room. He was no longer the man she’d married.

  Chapter 17

  This was a dream, but a real one. Knowing it gave him no more control over it than he’d had during any of the hallucinations, but that was all right. This dream wasn’t full of sex or gluttony.

  It was filled with flowers.

  A field of them, red and blue and yellow, on a carpet of lush green. That’s what had tipped him off to knowing this wasn’t really happening. Sheira was a planet of dust and sand, its foliage gray and brown and dry. The only time he’d ever seen plants like this had been in his mother’s greenhouse, grown at great effort and expense, or on the Sheirran sister planet of Asdara. That world had all the green Sheira lacked. He’d only been there for a short time during his training.

  Training.

  For the Sheirran Defense Force.

  He remembered that.

  His time as a soldier had been so much a part of him he’d never lost it, no matter what the Wirthera had ever done to him. Just as he’d never lost the Wirthera themselves. He could’ve gone without remembering them forever.

  He wasn’t training, now. He was in uniform, his hair shorn, his feet weighted with the heavy boots he remembered that had been so hard to get used to after wearing sandals for his entire life. He was alone, though, not paired with his training partner who’d never leave his side until one of them got promoted or died.

  He’d been promoted, he remembered that. But only after his partner, Leora, had been killed during one of their initial missions. A Wirtheran hornet had launched a laser missile, catching a stupidly vulnerable section of the scouting craft they’d been in.

  Leora. She was not a dream, even if this was, and he’d forgotten her until just now. He looked around, expecting to see her—after all, the dead did come back in dreams, didn’t they? But there was still nobody. Just him and the field of green and red and blue and yellow. And the blue sky. Brown earth. But she had been real. He knew it and clung to that memory even though it tried to slip away and become fantasy.

  Here, at least, he didn’t suffer the constant stream of scrolling data in the corners of his vision or the pain that went along with trying to constantly suppress it. The relief of it set him to laughing. Then running. Leaping. Turning handsprings, backflips, athletic feats he’d have been hard-pressed to manage in the waking world even with all his enhancements.

  If he tried hard enough, he thought, maybe he could even fly.

  A soft breeze tossed the flowers. He drew in their scent, heady and rich and unlike anything he’d ever known. He wanted to throw himself down into them and roll around, and with that thought he was in the thick of them, the sweet stink all over him. Then, as is the way of
dreams, he heard his name being called.

  Rather, he heard a voice calling and he knew it was calling for him, but the name was muffled as though whomever it belonged to had covered her mouth with a scarf or filled it with stones. He strained to listen for it.

  Far in the distance was a woman. Her long hair blew in the breeze and covered her face. He couldn’t see the color of it, or of her dress. Not a dress. Robes, long robes. She didn’t move toward him, and he couldn’t move toward her, but she kept getting closer. She stopped an arm’s length away. He should’ve been able to see the curve of her features but all he could make out was the faint shadow of eyes and mouth. Her murmuring rose above the wind, but the words remained unclear.

  “Who are you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Everything began to turn dark. The sky. The ground. The soft breeze grew no fiercer, but the sound of it became something else—the chittering, terrifying sound of the Wirthera.

  He ran, but there was no escaping it. The sound was everywhere. The air grew thick as syrup, and he fought against it though his fists punched nothing but empty space. He went to his knees, crouching, his hands over his ears. Still the furious chattering stabbed at his ears. He couldn’t see them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  He fell to the ground in the softness of the flowers, though now instead of bright colors they’d all gone black and gray. Their tendrils bound him, holding him tighter the harder he struggled. The woman came closer. Her soft murmuring, still incomprehensible, nevertheless blocked out the relentless, grating sound of Wirtheran voices.

  Calming, he looked up at her. “Do you know me?” The gripping vines released him so that he could get up, but no matter how many steps he took toward her, he could get no closer. “Do you know who I am? What is my name? What’s my name?”

  He woke with the question shouting from his mouth, so loud he thought at first someone else had asked it. Breathing hard, he collapsed back onto the bed, the delicious scent of the flowers fading fast. But something had remained, captured from the dream and imported into that cursed fucking scrolling data stream.

  The woman.

  Chapter 18

  “It’s ridiculous.” Teila gripped her handheld communicator hard enough to turn her knuckles white before forcing herself to relax. “We can’t keep this up. It’s not right!”

  “Would it be better to tell him and risk triggering him into going over? Do you want to be responsible for that, when he goes mad and slaughters all of you?” The Rav Aluf was far less intimidating in the small screen than the large.

  Teila shook her head. “He won’t. I know he won’t.”

  “Let me tell you a story, Teila—”

  “About Lorset Deen? I’ve heard it,” she interrupted coldly. “Every schoolchild has. He was the soldier who came home from the war, suffering what seemed to be the mildest of injuries, after being rescued from one of the Wirtheran prison ships. How he returned to what seemed a normal life, only to go suddenly crazy and kill everyone in his housing complex before infiltrating capital headquarters. He was caught trying to access high security information before being shot down by the SDF. I’ve heard it.”

  “That story was propaganda. It wasn’t true. Lorset Deen was never held by the Wirthera. He suffered from a non-related mental break due to his addiction to opiates. He never made it past the capital’s front steps, and he didn’t kill anyone.”

  Teila’s jaw dropped. “What?”

  The Rav Aluf didn’t crack a grin. “His family was paid very nicely for the scandal. None of them have suffered any hardship.”

  “Except that their son, husband, brother and father is known throughout history as the first soldier to go over for the Wirthera!” She grimaced, sour bile rising in her throat at the thought of Kason upstairs, fighting demons only he could see.

  “Deen’s story wasn’t true, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. It does. The ones who come back are . . . damaged. Several cycles ago, we had an internal attack at the capital much like the one in that story. The soldier, a former Rav Gadol, managed to get close enough to the Melek to get her hands around his throat. She could’ve killed him. Sent the entire government into confusion.”

  Teila didn’t believe the government could be so fragile. “But she was stopped.”

  “Of course she was. You think we’d let anyone kill our world leader?” The Rav Aluf snorted.

  “You let her get close enough to throttle him,” she pointed out.

  “He was fucking her,” the Rav Aluf said flatly. “He has a thing for the ones who come back.”

  Teila’s lip curled. “As if it’s not bad enough for them to be captured and held in prison ships, they have to put up with that sort of harassment after being rescued?”

  “We don’t get our men and women back from the prison ships.” The Rav Aluf rubbed at his temples in an eerie echo of his son’s habit.

  Teila propped the handheld on her desk so she could sit to talk to him. “I don’t understand.”

  “As far as we know, there are no Wirtheran prison ships. The only crafts we ever see from them are the hornets, their scouting crafts. Anyone who’s ever seen a true Wirtheran warcruiser—if they even exist, we have no idea—has never been able to talk about it. And the only soldiers who ever come back to us are never rescued. They’re returned.”

  Sickness twisted her guts. “What are you saying? The SDF doesn’t save our soldiers?”

  She thought he might be angry at her tone, but the Rav Aluf only looked grim. “Do you think we wouldn’t, if we could?”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “We fight a battle against an enemy we never see until they’re defeating us. The Wirthera remain hidden, always, except for their hornets. The best our troops can do is destroy the hornets before they can relay any information and alert the Wirthera about our presence.” The Rav Aluf sipped quietly from a mug of something steaming. He wasn’t in uniform, Teila realized uneasily. It was the first she’d ever seen him in civilian clothes.

  “But . . . if they capture our ships and troops, how is it that nobody’s seen them? Nobody escapes? Not ever?”

  “Never.”

  This stunned her into silence for a moment. “But . . . the viddy reports. The lists of our wounded and rescued, the stats about the numbers of Wirtheran warcruisers destroyed, the battles won . . .”

  “Fabricated. We win nothing except the defense of our borders from their hornets. They take our ships and our troops, and the only ones we get back are the ones they give us. My son was found in an escape pod, naked, evidence of their experiments all over him. He was alone. The rest of his crew, his ship, disappeared. No trace. They sent him back.”

  “But . . . why? Why don’t you go after them? Why don’t you look for any of them?” She could tell his answer before he gave it, but it sat no better with her than if she’d been unable to guess.

  “We suffer the loss of a few,” he said, “for the good of the many.”

  “You’re lying to all of us,” she whispered. “Having us believe the Wirthera are our enemies!”

  “They are the enemy.”

  “How do you know that?” Teila cried. “When you’ve never even seen them? All you hear are stories of other places they’ve conquered and destroyed—”

  “From within. The way they try to do with us, by sending our people back to us, ready to break. They seek to destroy us from the inside out!” The Rav Aluf’s shout sent a squeal of static and feedback through her handheld’s tiny speaker. “That’s how they do it, Teila! Believe me when I tell you, they’ve done it in other places. Entire planets wiped out in battle amongst themselves, their people triggered into homicide and rage! Even in Sheira’s history, we had in-fighting among our own people. But united against an enemy, we stand together.”

  “Everything you’ve ever told us has been a lie,” she said. “And you sent your own son into that knowing it.”

  “We’ve been keeping Sheira safe f
or the past decacycle, girl. Don’t you tell me we haven’t kept the Wirthera from breaking our borders.”

  She put her finger on the button to disconnect the call. “It sounds to me like they just haven’t decided they want us bad enough yet. And what will happen when they do?”

  She didn’t wait for his answer. The screen of her handheld went blank. A moment later it vibrated angrily, but she ignored the call from her father-in-law and went instead to gather her son in her arms and cradle him close.

  Stephin suffered the embrace for just a little while before struggling to get down. He was more interested in playing with his toy boats and whales than letting his mother cuddle him. She watched him play for a while, wondering what she would do if she ever had to watch him become a soldier the way his father had.

  Leaving him under his amira’s sleepy care, Teila checked the lamp room for the coming night. Downstairs, she made sure everyone had what they needed. Adarey and Stimlin were, as always, self-sufficient. Pera and Rehker were mysteriously absent, though when Teila passed Pera’s room she thought she heard the faint sound of murmuring voices from within. She didn’t knock.

  “Venga,” she said, surprised when she found him in the parlor. He usually preferred to sate himself on viddy programming, not read. “Are you all right?”

  He wasn’t overdressed today, and his gaze was clearer than she could remember seeing it in all the cycles he’d been here. “I had a wife, once. And a daughter. A son. Did you know?”

  “No.” Teila took a seat across from him. “But I’m glad you do.”

  “I have grandchildren.”

  She smiled. “How lovely for you, Venga. Would you like to contact them?”

  He shook his head. In front of him was his ancient handheld, a unit so old she was surprised it still connected to the transmissionate. “I looked them up. My children. I saw pictures. That might have to be enough.”

  “It doesn’t have to be. You know you’re not tied here.” Teila moved a little closer to him to cover his hand with hers. “If you like, I can help you get in touch with them . . .”