Page 52 of C is for Captive

“Amy.” A warning and a plea folded into two syllables, the most he’d ever managed to pack into her name. “He’s a Grorn priest. You are the one person in this valley he already knows the scent of, the one thing that connects this place to me, and if he⁠—”

“I know exactly what he is.” Her heart was slamming but her voice stayed firm, and she was fiercely, distantly proud of it. “I know better than you do, because you’ve been seen your whole life, Brannik. You walk into a room and it moves around you. You have never once had to figure out how to survive being nothing. I have. That’s all I’ve done for four years.” She stepped into his hand instead of pulling away from it, and felt his fingers loosen in confusion. “You want to hide me in a hole in the ground while you go up there and fight. And you’ll win, probably. You’ll kill him. And then in three weeks a ship full of Grorn warriors comes because their scout went silent, and every one of these people dies, and your mother dies. And it will be because the only person in this valley who has a solution that doesn’t involve violence was locked in a basement.”

Utter silence. The hall of pale silver-eyed people was watching the huge half-blood warrior and the small human woman who had planted her feet in front of him and refused to move.

Serei made a soft sound, but Amy didn’t dare look to see if it was horror or something else.

“I’m not a warrior,” she said quietly. “I know that. I can’t lift a blade and I can’t wake a lock and I can’t do a single thing you all can do. But I spent four years learning how to be overlooked. I made myself into a person nobody wanted to look at twice, in a port full of people who’d have sold me for parts, and it worked, Brannik. Every day it worked. You called it hiding. You looked at me across that cell and you saw someone who’d made herself small out of fear. You thought being invisible was something I had to escape from, didn’t you?” His flinch told her she’d hit it. “But it’s not nothing. It’s a skill. And it is the exact skill this valley needs. I am not going to sit under the mountain and let people die because you couldn’t stand the thought of me being useful somewhere you couldn’t stand in front of me.”

For a long moment he didn’t move. She could see the terrifying weight of his instinct to pick her up and carry her to safety and bar the door. She’d seen his father in her mind’s eye all afternoon, the male who’d crossed a galaxy and died in a doorway. She understood now what she was asking. She was asking a Tuori male to stand in a burning building and let the woman he loved walk towards the fire because she was better at fire than he was.

His mother said, very softly, “Garmek would have carried me down those stairs over his shoulder.”

Her heart sank.

“And then,” Serei went on, “he would have come back up, and I would have already fixed whatever needed fixing, because I always did, and he would have stood there furious and relieved and the next time he would have asked.” A crooked smile. “It takes them a very long time to learn it, child. But they can learn.”

Brannik let out a breath. She felt it move through his enormous frame as something in him surrendered—not the protectiveness, but the control, the part that wanted to decide her safety without her in the room.

He didn’t tell her to go hide. He didn’t try to stop her. He went down on one knee so his battered scarred face was level with hers, and the sight of it did something to her chest she couldn’t afford right now.

“Tell me what you need,” he said.

That was all. No argument, no bargaining, no only if. Just those five words, laid at her feet like a weapon he was handing over hilt-first. She had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheek because there was no time to cry and she wanted to, badly, at the enormity of being asked.

She turned instead to the room, and let the old invisibility fall off her shoulders like a coat she’d finally grown out of.

“The road to this place starts at the old dead settlement, right? The abandoned one. Empty houses, tools left out, like everyone just walked away years ago.”

“Yes,” Ishala said slowly. “When we withdrew up the mountain, we left the old settlement in the valley below. It has stood empty for a generation.”

“Good. That’s perfect. He doesn’t know what he’s coming to find.” She started to pace, the plan assembling itself in her head the way a lunch rush assembled itself, twenty-five orders and two cooks and one narrow window and no room for panic. “That’s what matters. He has coordinates to an Aurelian settlement, but he doesn’t know they’re coordinates to a hidden enclave. So we give him exactly what his information promised. An Aurelian settlement.”

“The abandoned one,” Serei said.

“Yes. He finds the buildings. He finds the graves. He finds proof Aurelians lived there and proof the Grorn attacked them. Everything tells the same story: his coordinates were real, but they’re old. He followed the trail correctly. He was simply too late. And once he thinks he’s solved it, that’s when his arrogance helps us. He won’t go looking for another answer after he’s already congratulated himself on finding the first one.”

“You want to make him believe the lower settlement is all there is,” Serei breathed. “That we died there. That we left.”

“I want to make him believe it so hard he doesn’t even bother climbing higher.” Her mind raced ahead of her mouth. “The markers that woke for Brannik. Can they be turned off and made invisible again?”

Ishala and another Aurelian, a broad grey-skinned half-blood with Brannik’s build and none of his stillness, exchanged a rapid look. “The road markers, yes,” the broad one said. “We can dampen them, and set the ones in the wall below to inert.”

“Then dampen them. Every one between here and the bottom. If he starts up the mountain, he doesn’t find a road. He finds nothing but bare rock.” She spun back. “The dead settlement. It can’t just be empty because empty means hiding and that’s suspicious. It has to tell a story he can read at a glance and believe. Graves. Are there graves down there?”

The silence that answered her was the wrong kind.

“There are graves,” Serei said quietly. “From the last time they came. When Garmek—” She stopped, then started again. “There are graves. Old ones.”

Her stomach turned over, and she made herself keep going, because that was the terrible truth of it and there was no time to be gentle. “Then that’s the story. And it’s true, which is why it’ll work. The Grorn came here once. There was a settlement, and there was a fight. People died—” her eyes flicked to Brannik, to his mother, and she softened it as much as she could, “—people died, and the survivors buried them. Then they abandoned the place and scattered off-world, and there’s been nothing here for years but emptiness and graves. He walks in, he sees the dead houses and he sees the graves, and it confirms the story his arrogance already wants to tell. ‘The trace was old. I found where they made their last stand. They’re gone.’ He goes home with the story he expects without ever looking up the mountain.”

Brannik had risen back to his feet as she spoke, and she felt him watching her, not with the fierce protective stare, but with something that made heat crawl up the back of her neck even in the middle of all this. She glanced at him.

“You’re staring.”

“You’re—” He stopped, and his jaw worked. “Frightening,” he said at last, and it was the finest thing anyone had ever said to her.

“I’ve read a thousand customers and a hundred guards,” she said. “A priest who’d rather find a corpse than a prize is easy. He’s already made up his mind. That’s the whole trick. You don’t fool people who want the truth. You fool people who are already lying to themselves and just need help believing it.” She turned to Ishala. “But I need help down there. We don’t make it look lived in now. We make it look like it was lived in then. Whatever you’ve taken from the lower settlement over the years that belonged there when the Grorn attacked—put it back. Tools. Cooking things. Bedding if any survived. Anything that makes the graves and the empty houses tell the same story. Can we do that? Make the bottom settlement look like it used to?”