Carnival

Robert applauded lightly, so Kusanagi-Jones lifted an eyebrow at him and angled his body from the waist, a bow amid clanking. Then he raised his hands to his mouth, the cool, sweating bulb turning the filth on his palms into mud. He tore through the stem with his teeth.

The beverage was an acquired taste. It stung his mouth like tonic water.

It might be nasty, but it cleared his head. He drank slowly, so as not to shock his system, and then retrieved the second globe the same way as the first before he said anything else to the patient, motionless Robert. “So,” he said, weighing the soft-sided container in his palms, “what price charity?”

“No price.” He hesitated. “If you gave me your promise of good behavior, I could see you moved to better quarters.”

“Don’t pretend concern for my welfare.”

“I am concerned,” Robert said. “We’re freedom fighters, not barbarians. And I’m sorry your arrival here was so rough. It was improvised. They were under instructions not to harm you or Vincent, or Lesa.”

“You make it sound almost as if we’re not bargaining chips.”

Robert smiled, teeth flashing white in the darkness. “You’re almost not. You won’t give me your word?”

And Kusanagi-Jones opened his mouth to lie—

And could not do it.

He could justify his failure in a dozen ways. The simplest was to tell himself that if he gave Robert his word and broke it, here, now, under these circumstances, he would become useless as an operative in any capacity relating to New Amazonian culture, forever. Their system of honor wouldn’t tolerate it. But it wasn’t that.

“Thanks for the drinks,” he answered, and shook his head.

And Robert grunted and stood, and made a formal sort of bow with folded hands. “Don’t forget your fruit,” he said, and turned to rap on the door, which opened to let him leave.

By the time Kusanagi-Jones finished the fruit, the hut was as dark as the one he’d woken up in. He dried slick hands on his filthy gi, and then clutched his chains below the shackles, holding tight. Leaning back on his heels, pulling the heavy chain taut, he began to rock back and forth against the staple, trying to limit the pressure on his wounded arm.

Something sniffed Lesa’s lair in the dark of night, the blackness under the shadow of the trees. Whatever it was, it found the wire-plant discouraging and continued on its way. Lesa slept in fits, too exhausted to stay awake and too overwrought to sleep. She’d never spent a longer night.

In the morning, the cheeping and whirring of alarm calls brought her from a doze as the skies grayed under an encroaching sun. Lesa froze in her paltry shelter, jammed back against the leaf litter that cupped her meager warmth, and held her breath.

There were three of them, two males and a woman. All carried long arms—the woman in addition to the honor at her hip, while the men had bush knives—and one of the males and the woman held them at the ready. The third had his slung and was nodding over a small device in the palm of his hand. They conferred too quietly for Lesa to make out the words, and then the woman leveled her weapon and pointed it at Lesa’s tree. “You might as well come out, Miss Pretoria. Otherwise I’ll just shoot you through the vines, and that would be ignominious.”

Lesa’s cramped limbs trembled as she pried herself from her cave, collecting more long superficial scratches from the wire-plant as she pushed it aside. She stood hunched, her resting place having done nothing to help the spasm in her neck, and stared at the taller of the two males. His hair was unmistakable, a startling light color that Lesa was almost tempted to call blond, though nobody classically blond had survived Assessment. He was out of context, though, and it took her a moment to place him. The shock of recognition, when it came, was disorienting. Stefan. Stefan, the gentle male who worked as a secretary in the Cultural Directorate. Under Miss Ouagadougou.

Not a direction in which Lesa had been looking for conspiracy.

“Your hands,” the woman said, continuing to cover her while the second male slid his detecting equipment into a cargo pocket and came forth to immobilize her wrists. No cords this time, but ceramic shackles joined by a hinge that allowed only a limited range of motion.

At least he cuffed her hands in front of her and the smooth ceramic didn’t irritate her lacerated wrists. He stepped back three quick steps and grabbed Stefan by the shoulder, turning him away.

The woman didn’t let her rifle waver, and Lesa watched her for several moments, and then sighed and sat down on the mossy log, her bound hands in her lap.

Backs turned or not, she could hear more than they intended her to. And it wasn’t reassuring. Robert’s name was mentioned, followed by a mumble that made the woman snap over her shoulder, “I don’t give a damn what shethinks.”