Despite the fact that Taye and Keiran seemed intent on not getting along with each other, they ended up having a pretty good night. Keiran had brought berry wine and a bottle of Adveni-brewed liquor that Georgianna had given him to get them significantly merry, and Taye had enough foinah leaf to last them until the early hours.
In the predawn they made their way, admittedly with some wavering along the path, back into the city, Taye peeling off when they reached the entrance to the Carae. Georgianna knew that really she should go back home. Though, seeing as she needed to speak to Beck, she accepted Keiran’s rather blunt and dirty suggestion that she come to his place instead. Wrench made the usual jokes of course, but in all reality, by the time they got back to Keiran’s shack, Georgianna was so tired that Keiran just slipped an arm around her under the blankets and pulled her close. Georgianna was asleep within moments.
Later that morning, she set about locating Beck. His tunnel car was empty and no one had seen him since they emerged from their own homes. In the end, she stopped by Medics’ Way to find Lacie in the hope that she might know where her adoptive father may have gone. Lacie informed her somewhat distractedly, as she sketched in a notebook, that Beck had been gone before she woke that morning.
The sun’s highest peak had been and gone before Georgianna found Beck, sitting with a group of men, plans lying across a couple of crates in front of them. One of them, an older man Georgianna didn’t recognise, glared suspiciously at her, but Georgianna waved him off.
“I’m not staying,” she explained. “I just, uh, need to speak to the marshall.”
Beck took hold of Georgianna’s elbow, leading her down the tunnel a hundred yards or so before he turned to her. He looked tired, lines that previously appeared and vanished depending on his expression slowly wearing their way into his skin. The circles under his eyes were darker than normal and Georgianna gazed at him in worry for a few moments, even after Beck indicated that she should start talking.
“Georgianna…” he urged, his eyes widening expectantly.
“Oh, right, yeah. I uh, I wanted to ask if there was any chance of getting a few Belsa to stand guard for us.”
Beck looked at her, puzzled as he shifted his stance, crossing his arms over his chest.
“For?”
Shuffling her feet awkwardly, she didn’t know why she felt so nervous asking this of Beck. She’d asked favours of him before and never felt this knot in the pit of her stomach. The only thing she could think of as the cause was that Beck was a friend of her father’s and she already knew that he would not be happy about what his daughter was planning to do.
“A friend’s partner was taken by the Adveni a few months ago. She was sold to a man living in the Adveni quarter and we want to get her out. We need a few men to stand guard in Oprust while we remove her collar to let us know if any Adveni are coming.”
Beck frowned as he looked down at her, pushing his lips into a thin line, his expression thoughtful. For a moment, Georgianna thought she saw a hint of anger in his face and wondered if she should say more, if she should explain that Keiran and Wrench had already agreed to help them. She considered telling him that they had a plan in place, or at least, the beginnings of one, but she quickly decided against it, standing silently as Beck considered what she’d said.
“I’m sorry, George,” he said, letting out a low sigh. “I can’t risk a number of men for the freedom of one girl. If they were discovered to be Belsa, they would face the rope.”
Georgianna sighed and looked down at her boots, but she couldn’t fault Beck on his logic. If they were discovered, the people who stood to lose the most were Wrench and Keiran. They would be executed for Belsa affiliations if it became clear the Belsa were involved. Having a group of men standing guard would make it obvious that this was a Belsa operation. Nyah would be sent back to her owner, Georgianna and Taye to the yard. The Belsa faced a much fiercer penalty.
“I understand,” Georgianna answered sadly.
She immediately felt bad that her tone was not cheerier, that she was possibly making Beck feel guilty about not being able to help. While she’d hoped he would, it would be stupid to have expected it.
“Look, if I can help in some other way…” he suggested.
“No, no, it’s okay,” she interrupted, trying her best to sound more cheerful. “I understand that you need to look after the Belsa. I was only hoping anyway.”
Beck nodded slowly. Suddenly remembering Wrench’s list, Georgianna tugged the book from her bag. She opened it to the last page and turned the book around so that Beck could see.
“Can you get any of the things on this list? Wre… We need them to get the collar off.”
Studying the list, Beck’s brow furrowed. He tapped a finger against his jaw until he pointed to two of the items on the list, one of which, Georgianna had been sure would be the hardest to find.
“I can get the absorber,” he answered. “Managed to get a couple from a raid a while ago. I’ll keep the other bits in mind.”
“That would be great, thank you!”
“When do you need them?”
“Soon as possible,” Georgianna answered shyly.
Beck nodded.
“Alright, stop by my car tomorrow, I should have them for you,” he said. “Now, I’m sorry, Georgianna, but I really need to get back.”
Georgianna nodded gratefully, closing the journal and slipping it into her bag.
“Thank you again, Marshall.”
Beck had already turned and taken a few steps back towards the other men when he waved a hand above his head dismissively.
“Beck!” he called back.
Georgianna laughed as she made her way back down the line.
***
She had promised to meet Taye that afternoon in the hopes that they’d be able to find some of the items on Wrench’s list down in the Junkyard. While she had considered ripping out the list and simply giving it to Taye, she was now glad that in their slightly drunk state, she’d completely forgotten.
As she walked, she took the journal from her bag, placing marks next to the items that Beck had said he could find for them. They really were lucky that Beck thought he could get an absorber, as the likelihood of finding one in the Junkyard, or anywhere, was going to be slim.
The small device was Adveni by design and practically impossible to pronounce in Adtvenis, so it had been dubbed “absorber” by the people of Os-Veruh. It was only a small tab, the size of a coin, but when attached to a sheet of metal it absorbed the charge of a copaq weapon, or a less powerful cinystalq collar, rendering the shock administered useless. The Adveni had them attached to their shields when they fought to protect against being hit by their own weapons. Obviously none were offered to the Veniche, so the only way to get one was take down an Adveni in full combat gear. When Taye had asked Wrench, the Belsa explained that it was to do with the charge of an Adveni weapon, neutralising it by sending out an equally powerful counteractive charge.
Wrench had drawn a rough sketch on the back page of Georgianna’s journal of the collar, showing that when the collar was detached, the charge constantly flowing through it, usually administered in small doses to send a jolt of pain through the wearer, escaped and jumped into the nearest compatible substance, the neck of the person it had been fastened around. That amount of charge jumping straight into the body was enough to kill instantly, so the absorber was used to take away at least a portion of the charge. He couldn’t promise that Nyah would be completely unharmed. She might receive a burn from the overflow, but at least it wouldn’t kill her.
It was only as Wrench explained these things, how he would detach the collar and ensure that the charge went into the absorber and not Nyah, that he would need to be very careful to cut the right parts at the right time, that Georgianna fully understood how Wrench had earned his nickname.
Finding Taye in his tent, idly strumming on a guitar that Nyah had scraped money together for months to buy him, Georgianna slumped down onto the thin mattress he used as a bed.
“Beck can’t give us men for a guard,” she explained. “But he got two items off the list, including the absorber.”
Taye looked disappointed about the guard, but he couldn’t exactly be angry when Beck was offering them an absorber to use.
They made their way down to the Junkyard, though this time, instead of leaving Georgianna at the outer fencing, Taye took full responsibility for her with the guard and led her inside through the stacks.
The place was a maze, and an exciting one at that. Every way Georgianna looked there were different things to see. Every few seconds she had to stop herself from squeaking in excitement as she spotted something that she could use, and every thirty seconds or so, had to hold her tongue from asking Taye what the hell something was.
Finally coming to a break in the stacks, Taye turned to her.
“Ok, so what do we still need?”
Georgianna tugged the journal back out of her bag and opened it up. She counted down the list once before she went back to the top, glancing around her as she did.
“Ok, a silver or gold knife, a pair of hide gloves.”
“He doesn’t have gloves?” Taye asked, cocking an eyebrow in amusement.
“Burned out, apparently,” Georgianna explained. “Shows he’s done it enough times, I guess.”
“I guess,” Taye repeated. “What else?”
“Umm,” Georgianna murmured, scanning down the list. “Rubber sheeting.”
Taye nodded, glancing in each direction leading off from the gap in the stacks before he nodded more firmly. Setting off down the gap in front of them, he walked a few metres before stopping, looking at the shelves in front of him. Georgianna had to admit, it was pretty cool that they’d managed to build shelves in here. She could only imagine how it would have been if they hadn’t: piles of objects and supplies, with the thing you wanted down at the bottom. The problem, however, quickly became apparent as Taye looked up, and realised that even he wasn’t tall enough to reach the top shelf.
“Here,” Georgianna suggested, slipping the strap of her bag from her shoulder and dumping it on the floor. “Give me a leg up.”
Taye stepped away from the shelves, interlinking his fingers into a cradle, which he bent down to hold at a decent height for Georgianna to put her foot in.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Alright, up!”
Georgianna was pushed into the air. Kicking out, she placed her other foot on one of the mid-level shelves, pressing more weight onto that foot and using Taye to merely keep her steady as she picked up a box and lifted it from the shelf with one hand, peering in. She quickly replaced the box and took the next one, finding that it had the knives they wanted. A little blunter than perhaps would have been useful, Georgianna glanced down at Taye.
“Solid?” she asked.
Taye shook his head, and Georgianna sighed, placing the box back on the shelf and grabbing up the next. The knives in the next box looked much sharper. Thin and small, she had no idea what they were usually used for, but she took one out and placed it on a reachable shelf before putting the box back.
“Ok, I can come down,” she said.
Taye slowly lowered her back to the ground, Georgianna walking her hands down the shelves until she could place a foot on the ground and lift her other from the cradle of Taye’s hands.
“Alright, so that’s the knife,” Georgianna said, picking up the knife from the shelf and collecting her bag from the floor.
Luckily, the gloves and the rubber sheeting were much easier to find, and didn’t involve any more lifting on Taye’s part, as he insisted on making jokes about straining his back from lifting her for that short time. The first time, Georgianna was worried that he was serious, but when he grinned, she smacked him and moved along.
Once out of the Junkyard, Taye noted down what he’d taken, paying with some coins he’d earned from selling down in Rion district. It was tough, the money the guard asked for was easily enough to have cost Taye half a month to scrape together, even without having to feed and clothe himself. Still, Taye barely batted an eyelid and Georgianna realised that it wouldn’t have mattered if it were ten times that amount, he would have figured out a way to pay.
“You should keep those,” Georgianna said, handing over the items. “Seeing as I won’t be there.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Taye said slowly. “And I think I agree with Keiran, surprisingly enough.”
“Surprisingly enough, huh?”
“Well, yeah, alright, he isn’t as bad as I thought,” he admitted. “I really do appreciate him helping.”
“So you’ll stop badgering me about finding someone better?” She raised an eyebrow at him as they made their way down the tunnel.
“Yeah,” he said before smirking. “For a month at least.”
Georgianna laughed, step in step along with Taye.
“Make it three and we have a deal.”
“Deal.”
When they reached the tunnel entrance that led back down to the main line, Georgianna paused, expecting Taye to go back. However, from the way he was looking down the tunnel, Georgianna frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking that I should go see Nyah. Try to talk to her.”
Georgianna’s eyes widened and she reached out, taking hold of Taye’s arm.
“Taye, you can’t! What if you’re caught?”
“I’m smarter than that.”
“Yeah, and Nyah was smarter than attacking an Adveni. Things happen!”
Taye didn’t look convinced, which worried her. What if she left him and he went over there on his own? As awful as it was to think, she didn’t actually trust Taye to be able to hold himself back.
“We need to tell her, so she can plan,” he insisted.
“We don’t even have a plan on how we’re getting her out of that house! What’s the point?”
“I have to see her!”
“Taye…”
“Come on, Gianna! You know she’ll need to know what we’re planning.”
Georgianna’s brow furrowed as she dug her hands into her pockets. She glanced towards the exit into the main line. Taye did have a point that Nyah would need to know about it sometime, but she still didn’t like the idea of Taye going over there alone. If he actually managed to speak to Nyah, if he saw her, would he be able to convince her to go back inside until they were ready? Would he even want to, or would he think that running that second might be better? Georgianna took a deep breath.
“Alright, but not now!”
Taye opened his mouth to argue but she placed a hand on his chest.
“No!” she insisted. “Not until we know when it’s going down and how we’re getting her out. Just a few days Taye, I promise!”
Taye finally nodded.
“Okay, but if you’ve not agreed in three days, I’m going.”
She didn’t like that ultimatum, but nodded just the same.
“I’ll see you in less than three days then.”
Taye didn’t wait for any long goodbyes. He turned away from her and walked down the tunnel back towards the Carae. Georgianna watched him until he disappeared into the darkness before she sighed and started down the thin tunnel towards the main line, for the first time in what felt like weeks, towards home.
YOU ARE READING
Dead and Buryd
Science Fiction"You are an inmate, not a medic. You should get used to that." On the planet Os-Veruh, the native Veniche have endured a decade under the oppressive rule of a race of invaders, the Adveni. When Georgianna Lennox, a Veniche medic, discovers her child...
