Page 26 of C is for Captive

“Exactly what did he say?”

She closed her eyes for a moment.

“Something like, But this specimen is even more valuable. You were the specimen.” Her eyes opened. “After that they started talking about you. They said they’d thought they’d found Aurelian blood before and been wrong. That your eyes proved your heritage, but didn’t prove you were a Key.”

“Key.”

“That’s what Krebb said. Then he said that Thressk wanted anyone with the old blood. Bloodlines that could wake the machines.”

He forgot the pain for a moment. He remembered his mother kneeling in the dirt beside a black metal object some farmer had dug out of a field. Her small pale hand settled against a surface that had been dead and cold for longer than anyone could remember.

Light bloomed beneath her fingers.

He’d been six, perhaps seven. He’d thought she could do anything.

“I think my mother could do that,” he said. “Wake old things.”

“Because she was Aurelian?”

“I don’t know.” He’d never asked. He’d been a child. Children didn’t ask why their mothers could do the things they’d always done. “I thought so.”

“And can you?”

“No.”

The answer came automatically, but her head tilted as she regarded him thoughtfully.

“Have you ever tried?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it again and shook his head.

“No.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“I worked cargo ships,” he said. “I didn’t come into contact with precursor artifacts.”

“All right.” But there was something thoughtful in her expression that told him she had filed the answer away.

He thought of the lock on Krebb’s ship opening beneath his fingers and dismissed it. That had been circuitry and experience. Nothing more.

“What’s a Key?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“Krebb didn’t either. But apparently Thressk does.”

“Perhaps. I heard whispers about the Grorn when I was chasing rumors. I ignored them.” His mouth hardened. “That may have been a mistake.”

“So Valkesh might have something to do with Aurelians.”

“Maybe.”

“But we don’t know.”