Page 45 of C is for Captive

Whatever you find up there. I love you. Go free.

Then, high in the cold and the dark with the road waiting above them, she slept.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Amy was doing the thing again. Brannik recognized it now, the way she tucked some part of herself inward when she thought he wasn’t watching. But he was always watching—that hadn’t changed and never would—and this morning, as they broke camp and started up the glowing road with the cold thin air biting at their faces, he watched her tuck something small and quiet away behind her eyes.

She thought she hid it. She hid most things well. After all, she’d survived four years by hiding. But not from him.

“Amy.”

“Mm?” She glanced up, quick and light, arranging her face into something easy. Too easy.

He said nothing for a while. The road climbed. The Aurelian map still hung faintly in the air overhead, its bright thread pulling them up and up between shoulders of grey stone, and every step of it felt like walking into the mouth of something he’d wanted so long he no longer trusted his own wanting. He set that aside. Amy first. Amy was always first now; that had happened somewhere on a stolen ship and he’d stopped fighting it.

“You’re afraid,” he said at last.

She missed a step. Recovered. “I’m always a little afraid. Occupational hazard.”

“Of what’s up there.” He nodded at the thread of light, the mountain, the unknown waiting at the end of the road. “You don’t know these people. Neither do I. You don’t know what we’re walking into.” He reached back and caught her hand, wrapping it inside his own, and felt how small and cold it was and how it warmed the moment his hand closed around it. “You don’t have to be afraid of that. Whatever’s up there. Whatever they are.” He looked down at her, and he made his voice as certain as anything in him had ever been. “I’ll stand between you and all of it. Always. You know that.”

Something crossed her face—and it wasn’t the relief he’d braced for. It was almost the opposite. A softness, and under the softness a grief he didn’t understand, gone before he could name it.

“I know,” she said. And she meant it. He could hear that she meant it, which was strange, because it didn’t fit the rest. She squeezed his hand. “I do know that. That’s not—” She stopped, and bit her lip. “That’s not what I’m afraid of, Brannik.”

“Then what.”

She looked up the road, then looked back at him. He watched her gather herself the way she did before she made herself do a brave thing, the way she’d gathered herself before she first crossed a cell to clean the blood off his wrist, and his chest tightened, because whatever she was about to say, it was costing her.

“When you find them,” she said quietly. “When you find your people, and hopefully you find the answers you came all this way for. I need you to know that whatever you decide, I don’t want you to feel like you⁠—”

The road turned around a shoulder of rock without any warning at all, and they walked straight out of the bare grey pass into a bowl of green.

He stopped so hard that she collided with his arm.

The valley lay below them, folded into the high mountains where no chart would ever look for it, warm and sheltered and alive. Terraces stepped down the sides, green with growing things. Water ran silver through it. Low buildings of pale stone stood amongst trees, their walls threaded with the same faint silver lines that had woken under his hand a day and a lifetime ago, and over all of it hung a shimmer in the air. A great dome of something he couldn’t see except where the light bent through it, held the warmth in and the cold and the world out. Precursor work. Aurelian work. A living settlement hidden deep in the mountains, and every instinct he owned told him it had been hidden for a long, long time.

They’re here. The thought came up through him like the hum through the stone. They’re actually here.

Then the guards came out of the rocks.

They came from three sides at once, silent and fast and well-taught. He identified the training even as his body dropped into a ready crouch, one arm sweeping Amy behind him. Six of them. Weapons up, the slim silver kind he’d only seen twice before and never wanted to see pointed at him. He went utterly still. He’d learned long ago that stillness read as no threat to nervous people with weapons, and he made himself a mountain of it, and he kept her behind the mountain.

“Hold.” A tall male stepped forward. And his breath caught, because⁠—

Because some of them looked like his mother.

Not her features. But her kind—slim and fine-boned and luminous, with skin that held light strangely and hair like pale metal and those same silver eyes, his eyes, a whole ring of them staring at him out of faces that resembled his mother. He’d spent his whole life as the only silver-eyed person on every deck of every ship, the strange one, the wrong one. And here stood several of them looking back at him with his own eyes and he didn’t have a word for what it did to him.

But the others weren’t like her at all. One had scaled skin along his jaw. One stood nearly Brannik’s own height, broad and tusked, some warrior species crossed into the fine Aurelian line the way the Tuori had crossed into him. Mixed. Like him. He wasn’t the only one of those either. He’d thought he was the only one of those in the entire galaxy.

The tall one’s weapon didn’t waver, but his eyes moved over Brannik’s face and his horns and his size and stopped on his eyes. They stayed there.

“Silver,” the guard said, half to himself. He looked at the others, and something passed between them, quick and wordless. “He woke the outer markers. The valley door recognized him, or he’d not have found the road at all.” He turned back to Brannik. “Only our own can wake those.”

“I’m not here to take anything,” he said. He kept his voice low and even and his hands where they could all see them. “I came up the road it showed me. I didn’t know what waited at the end. I didn’t know—” His throat worked. “I didn’t know if there was anyone left to find.”

“Yet you looked.”