Ysira could not parse a word he’d said. It probably didn’t matter.
She closed her eyes, exhausted, and mumbled, “Who are you?”
“You may call me Doctor Ertagaz. I’ve been filled in on your case.” He leaned toward her. “I’m terribly curious about your condition. You’re extradimensionally insensate, and yet Iyelekirin bonded with you nonetheless.”
“Ee—yeh—” Ysira stumbled over the unfamiliar word. “What?” “Iyelekirin,”the man enunciated. “Your demon. Most of my colleagues call it C4-013, but I’m fond of the Zal nomenclature. So poetic. Did you know it meanseternal sunrise? There are precious few records of this one, few enough that it seems my subordinates mistook it for a Category One.”
Iyelekirin.A Zal word. Ysira had gathered as much. This man spoke her own language as though she were incapable of understanding it—and, of course, he was right.A new sensation crept up on her: shame. She managed to rub two fingers together and became aware of a deep ache in her skull.
“If you had the capacity for extradimensional communion, I theorize you could achieve full control of your body at the molecular level.” Ertagaz clicked his tongue. “A waste, really. In an insensate, the demon’s sole mandate is survival. All it can do is restore you to what it perceives as your . . .default.”Hegestured up and down at her with a grimace, as if he found her lacking. “Tell me, do you still feel pain?”
Ysira blinked at him, perplexed, but he didn’t wait for an answer. “And what of your son? Was it a difficult birth?”
The way he was looking at her . . . She didn’t like it. As the ache in her head intensified, she found she did remember pain. She had labored for so long with Neri, she lost track of the days and nights. Delivery had felt like being torn in two. And theblood . . .
“We could extract whatever information we need from your mind,” said Ertagaz. “But the brain is an unfathomably complex organ, and telepathic interrogation is an art. None are as masterful as Lord Tharanoth, and even for him, it’s slow and impractical. You’ll save us all a great deal of time and discomfort by answering my questions.”
He made a compelling argument. But something gave Ysira pause. She fought through the fog perfusing her mind, homing in on details of her surroundings like rungs of a ladder back to consciousness.
A ceiling lined with strips of light that made her eyes hurt. A mass of tangled tubes, connected to a panel blinking red and blue beside her. All manner of machinery, unfamiliar and strangely organic in quality, enclosed in a metal box of a room. A door that evoked one of the memories Tharanoth had uncovered—barred shut and heavy enough to contain monsters. ThisDoctor Ertagaz,pulling up a chair but maintaining a healthy distance from Ysira.
She asked, as it occurred to her, “You’re not a god, are you?”
Ertagaz chuckled. “No. Lord Tharanoth is the one you call a god. I am merely a humble servant, of the same species as his host body.” There was reverence in his tone. He spoke of Tharanoth in a manner Ysira had only heard from the devoutly religious.
“Do you worship him?” The notion struck her as odd. “He told me he would eat the ones who failed him.”
“Lord Tharanoth punishes incompetence,” said Ertagaz. “I serve with distinction.” He cleared his throat. “Questions of godhood aside, my lord is the only one who can help your son.”
Ysira’s muscles tensed. If she concentrated, she found she could move her arms and legs. They met resistance—those shackles. The noise they made seemed to startle Ertagaz. He fiddled with one of the many blinking devices and bliss flooded her veins once more. Ysira’s headache pulsed at the juncture of her spine and skull, a tiny nexus of heat as her demon moved.
“Where is he?” she croaked.
“The demon of the canyon, C5-001, is extremely destructive. It is not safe to handle unless paired with a suitable host, and finding one has proven . . . difficult. Hence, we would prefer not to excise it from Neri.” The name sounded forced from Ertagaz’s lips, condescending, as though he were discussing an inanimate object anthropomorphized by a child. “But he, and by extension C5-001, has proved uncooperative. For the moment, we can contain him, but we cannot safely approach him. We require your cooperation to convince him it’s in his best interests to comply. A, ah . . . mother’s touch.”
Ysira fell automatically back on eleven years of practice. “I’m not his mother.”
“You don’t have to pretend,” said Ertagaz. “And you certainly can’t lie to us.”
It was all Ysira could do not to demand,Does he know? Did you tell him? Does he hate me?Instead, she closed her eyes and shook her head. “I mean he doesn’t see me that way.”
“Whether you acknowledge it or not, it’s apparent that the boy trusts you and that you care for him. Why else would you have gone to such lengths to protect him? Lord Tharanoth has looked inside his mind, too?—”
“What,” Ysira choked.
“He respects you, admires you,” Ertagaz went on. “He’s spent his life wishing he knew his mother. He imagines thatifhe had known her, she might have been someone like you.”
He could have been lying to manipulate her, but it didn’t matter. Ysira heard what he left unsaid. If she refused to cooperate, or if she failed to convince Neri, they would use her against him. Torture her to get him to cooperate. She would never leave this place. They’d experiment on her again and Neri, too?—
Her body moved without her input. She jerked violently against her restraints, as if she might break free and strike Ertagaz. Something under the bedcracked.
He flinched and scooted back his chair. He seized hold of the device at her bedside, and this time, his fingers trembled. Another wave of peace washed over Ysira.
It was gone almost as soon as it came.
Ertagaz was keeping her sedated for more than one reason. As her mind cleared and her strength returned, she thought back to the memories Tharanoth had unearthed. The way those armored guards had kept all their Harvested victims at a safe distance. The way Ertagaz’s ilk had slowed their steps when they found Ysira alive. When one had shouted a warning at the other as he approached her. And by the Gate below Zal Fel, from the strangers who’d abducted her, Ysira had heard it in their voices again:Trepidation.
Tharanoth wasn’t afraid of her, but his lackeys were. Ertagaz was.
