Page 53 of C is for Captive

“It can be done,” Ishala said, and there was something new in his voice now, something she recognized. It was the sound of a plan becoming a chance. “It can be done. If we work through the night.”

“Then we work through the night.” She took a deep breath, and looked around at all of them, and did not shrink from a single silver eye. “One more thing. When he comes, there can’t be one living soul in that valley. Because he can scent your presence.” A ripple of grim confirmation went around the room. “Then the wind matters. Which way does it blow down that valley in the morning?”

“Up,” the broad half-blood said slowly. “Towards us. At dawn, always.”

She nodded. Better and better. “Then he’ll be below us with the wind at his back. His scent comes up the mountain. Ours doesn’t go down to him.”

She looked towards the distant entrance to the hall, picturing the dead settlement far below.

“He follows the coordinates and they take him exactly where he expects to go. He finds an Aurelian settlement. He finds the graves from the Grorn attack. He finds proof that people lived there and died there. Everything his information promised is right in front of him.”

“And the road?” Serei asked.

“There is no road. Not anymore. You dampen every marker Brannik woke. As far as Thressk can tell, the mountain above the settlement is just a mountain. We don’t have to convince him he found nothing. We just have to convince him he found everything there was to find.”

For one dizzy moment she caught the sheer strangeness of what she was doing—little Amy from the diner counter, standing in a hidden mountain hall full of aliens, orchestrating their survival with the exact skills she’d spent four years despising herself for. Making herself small. Making a place look empty. Reading what a dangerous male wants to believe and feeding it to him. Cowardice, she’d called it. Hiding. Not living, only surviving.

She looked at it now and saw it for what it had always been, underneath.

A weapon. The only one she’d ever owned.

“We have until dawn,” Ishala said, and rose to his full height, and for the first time the ancient weariness had lifted off him. “You heard the human. Dampen the markers. Empty the upper valley. Strip the hearths and carry them down. Move.”

The hall broke into motion, silver-eyed figures scattering to a dozen tasks with the careful speed of people who had done urgent things before. Serei caught her hand as she passed and pressed it hard between both of hers. She didn’t speak, but her shining eyes said everything.

Then Brannik was in front of her, filling her whole field of view, and he took her face in his two huge hands the way he’d held his mother’s an hour ago, and tipped it up.

“If it goes wrong,” he said, low and rough, “if he catches your scent, if anything⁠—”

“Then you’ll come down the mountain and there won’t be enough of him left to send a signal,” she said. “I know. I’m counting on it.” She turned her face into his palm. “Ask me what I need, Brannik. You already did once. Ask me again.”

His thumb moved across her cheek. “What do you need?”

“I need you to trust that I’m good at this.” She held his silver gaze. “I’m not brave. I’m not a warrior. But I’m good at this the way you’re good at fighting. I need you to let me be the person I actually am.”

For a long moment the huge male said nothing at all, and she watched the devoted, terrified weight of him strain against what she was asking until it finally settled. He bent his head and kissed her, hard and brief and fierce, and against her mouth he said the three most extravagant words in his entire small precious vocabulary.

“I trust you.”

Then he straightened, and the warrior came down over his face like a visor, and he turned towards the mouth of the hall where the mountain waited and the dawn was coming. Somewhere far above a Grorn priest was flying towards the lie they were about to build for him out of graves.

“Tell me where to start,” he said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The ship came down through the pale morning like a knife looking for a place to strike, and Brannik held himself so still against the cold rock that even his breath went silent. Amy lay pressed to his side in the crevice they’d chosen, a fold in the mountain’s shoulder that looked down over the whole dead valley. He’d wanted her deeper in the enclave. He’d wanted a hundred things last night that she’d overruled one by one with that quiet maddening certainty, and every one of them she’d been right about. He was still learning to swallow how much he liked being wrong.

“There,” she breathed. Not pointing. She’d told them that too, during the long night. No sudden movement because movement is what they see first. Stillness is the lie they never question. “See how he’s coming down slowly? He’s being careful. He’s not sure yet.”

He saw. Below them the descending vessel hung on its thrusters over the abandoned settlement, and the settlement lay under it and told its lie beautifully.

It looked far worse than when they’d arrived. That was the thing he hadn’t understood until he’d spent a night making the transformation. When they had first walked into that dead cluster of stone houses, it had looked empty. Too empty, she said. Like a place people had deliberately cleared before they left.

Now it told a different story.

The Aurelians had spent the night returning what remained from the old settlement to the places it might once have occupied. A rusted tool beside a cold hearth. The remnants of a loom in one of the houses. A child’s carved toy lying face-down in the dirt of a doorway. Nothing new. Nothing false. Only old things arranged so that a searching eye would put them together in the wrong order.

And higher up, where the enclave truly lived, the road markers had been shut down until they read as inert stone. Every soul had gone deep, and the wind rose up the mountain and away, carrying every trace of the living with it.