cast your shadow in flame

mask

This wasn't the plan—as if that mattered now.   The last punch had connected with his teeth and split Dorea's knuckle.  Standing over him, she tugged a kerchief loose from her shirt pocket.  She cleaned her hands.   He coughed and splattered blood on the marble between her boots.  One nudged at his shoulder.  He rolled onto his back.  Blinking at her through blood, he squeezed at the charm about his neck.  For the sixth time that night he began to whisper a prayer.

     larth protect all mine as if your own
     larth forgive my fumbling my wretched heart
     larth think of me now and in the hour of my dying

Over and over, he rasped those words.   Over and over until they were a buzzing in her ears. Dorea crouched down next to him.  With flat fingers, she smacked at his cheek, already swelling with violet crimson, already wet with blood and sweat.   He flinched.  She cleaned her fingers again.

"Do you know what I am?"

"Praedita."

Gifted—she frowned.  Only Liberi born in the Imperium or staunch loyalists still used the old words. Only a fanatic still prayed to spirits of springs and grottos, groves and stones in an age of space colonization.

She nodded.  "I can read faces."

She stood.   Folded the kerchief.   Tucked it back into her pocket.   Her grey eyes flicked over the man.  The pale gold of his shirt was well stained.   When she'd first lifted him up by it, from behind the black lacquered desk, tortoiseshell buttons had popped off.  They'd gone skittering across the smooth stone floor.   One was stuck to his cheek now.  She bent over him.  His eyes widened, pupils constricted, lips twisted into a grimace.  Her fingers brushed the button away.  It clinked onto the stone beside him, and he glared down at it.

"Mater taught me.   Most have nothing worth reading.  By turns, they have moments of kindness, of brilliance.  By others, they are ravenous, desperate for whatever need trumps concern for their follows.  Or else they are lost in a haze, in dreams of distant things.   They are consumed by constructs of import only to that space behind their eyes.   Their own thoughts, their own feelings barely occur.  Even to them."

She grabbed his chin, turned his face up to hers.  "You are lost.  You have been consumed.   I can see it in your eyes.  What is her name?"

The man laughed, a harsh, dry sound.  He began to cough, and she knocked his head aside.  Hacking, gasping, he curled over, toward the wall of glass behind his desk.  He pressed a hand against it.  They were nearly eight hundred meters up.  The city was dim beneath them, and beyond a forest blanketed the swell and dip of the earth.  The forest stretched out into the dark.  Gaitanion had no moon.  Dorea had been born on Nan, with its solitary Gavia, and she had spent years on Apulum, with its three satellites.   The infinite black beyond the man's shaking fingers unsettled her.

"His name—I will never tell you."

The man's dark eyes glared up at her.  His gaze was steady, though his voice had wavered.  Mater taught Dorea how to hear the truth in someone's voice.  How to see intention in hands.   One part or the other would always betray the whole.

"It doesn't matter.   I'm here for the prototype."

"All this?  For that?"

Her boot pressed and pushed at his shoulder.   She forced it down against the marble.   Her heel dug and ground down until she could feel the vibration of bone on stone.  The man groaned.

"Where is it?"

"I won't—"

"If you insist on resisting me, then I will be forced to take what I need.  If you cooperate, then I will have what I need.   Either way, I'm not leaving without the prototype and all the information you have on it."