As she cleared the doorway and broke into a bare, scuffed‑dirt yard, the unwary guard lunged for her and missed. The unshod footsteps behind her were Kusanagi‑Jones’s. She heard the grunt and thud as he slammed into the sentry and hoped Michelangelo had body‑checked him hard enough to break bones.
Not hard enough to shut him up, unfortunately, because he was shouting before he’d picked himself up on his elbows. But Michelangelo was still with her, pulling up beside her, running hard as the camp boiled like a kicked nant’s nest.
Gunfire spattered around her, ended by a curse. Chemical accelerant had a distinctive sound. These were lethal loads, and they came close enough to sting her with kicked‑up earth and splinters. Kusanagi‑Jones grunted as he dropped back a step, falling in behind her, shielding her body with his own.
She wasn’t going to get him shot by running slow. Lesa dodged around the side of a low hut constructed of thatch and daub over a wooden frame and dove past two unarmed males, elbowing the nearer in the jaw as she went by. Judging by the collision, Kusanagi‑Jones took the other one down without breaking stride.
“Go,” Kusanagi‑Jones yelled as she slid around the second corner, between the shelter and the thorn wall. She could see green jungle through the gaps in the canes, and the wall was no more than a meter beyond the hut. His footsteps stopped, his breathing no longer close on her heels.
He was buying her time to get out, turning to make a stand.
Below the edge of the overhang, Lesa bent her knees and jumped. Not for the thorn wall–the long curved spines of wire plant rendered it as impossible to climb as a heap of razors–but for the roof. Her fingers slipped in rain‑slimed thatch, and insects and shreds of vegetation showered her face and shoulders. The top layers were wet, but underneath the fronds were dry–old enough to need replacing–and her hands sank through to latch onto the beam underneath. Wood cracked under her weight, and for a moment she dangled, cursing. Then she got her motion under control, pumped her legs, and half swung, half scrambled up, arms trembling and chest aching with the strain.
This was not a roof built for walking on. She lay flat and turned to pull Kusanagi‑Jones after her.
“Go,” he said, with a glance over his shoulder. He had a weapon in his hands that he must have liberated from the first, unwary guard, and he was bleeding, red dripping from the right sleeve of his gi and spreading over his fingers, more than his torn wrists could explain.
There was no time for thanks, for apologies.
She went.
She slithered across the hunchbacked roof on her belly, turning so she faced the thorn wall, and paused where rafters gave way to the unsupported fringe of thatch. The flat sharp cracks of three more gunshots echoed through the trees, the birds of morning shrieking and then silent. The bullets came nowhere near their position. Encouraging, because the hut wouldn’t offer Kusanagi‑Jones anything except visual cover, but she hoped the partisans might think they were working their way toward the gate.
Kusanagi‑Jones conserved his ammunition, making them find him and thendeal with his ability to shoot back. Smart boy. She’d seriously underestimated the Coalition males.
Lesa clenched her hands around that last flaking roof beam and drew her feet forward into a crouch. It was hard to judge distances in the gray morning light, but she could hear calls through the camp now. Another two or three random shots might serve to raise the alarm for any distant sentries. She stared at the thornbreak one last time, closed her eyes, and jumped for her life.
She might have made it if she could have gotten a running start. As it was, she kicked off hard, stretched, tucked, rolled, and almost cleared the wall. She made it over the top, but the sloped sides were too wide. Thorns tore her shins and forearms, lacerated her shoulders, pierced the hands she raised to shield her eyes and throat. Brittle canes shattered under her weight, and momentum sprawled her clear, lungs emptied, diaphragm aching from the impact.
She gasped and shoved herself up, shaking off bits of twig and barb, driving thorns into her palms and knees as she scrambled to her feet, piercing her unshod soles as she staggered forward through the rubbish. She was leaving a trail of blood and bits a girl could follow, but there was nothing to be done for it now.
Tears and sweat stinging her lacerated face, she ran.
20
ELENA HANDLED KATYA’S ARREST HERSELF. SHE SUMMONED Agnes–a Pretoria cousin who had the same stocky build and epicanthic folds as Lesa–and requested Vincent wait for their return. He was left alone on the sun porch that served as Pretoria house’s center of operations, but deemed it unwise to wander about the house with Elena in the mood he’d put her in. So instead he paced the length of the veranda, reviewing documents on his watch that he already knew by heart.
He’d accomplished everything he’d come here to do–the real reasons, not the surface justifications. He’d met his mother’s opposite number, deemed her honest, established a secure line of communication, exchanged the necessary codes.
Now all he had to do was wrap up two kidnappings, a sabotage operation, a first‑contact situation, a duel to the death, convince Michelangelo he didn’t want to play kamikaze, and figure out exactly how he was going to get rid of the Governors andprotect Ur and New Amazonia from the imperial ambitions of the Coalition. Oh, yes, and at least give his ostensible task–that of reaching some sort of dйtente with whoever was in charge of the New Amazonian government by the end of the week–enough of a lick and a promise that he could justify declaring the mission accomplished and heading home. Or, potentially, blow it so badly that he and Angelo were both discharged in disgrace, which would save him the additional delicate operation of prying Michelangelo loose from the OECC.
Because Michelangelo wascoming home with him.
Just as soon as Vincent reclaimed him.
Piece of cake.
He closed the documents and stood in the darkness, running fingertips along the slick leaves and soft petals garlanding the lattice. A flicker of movement in his fisheye alerted him to company, and he turned his head, but it wasn’t Elena or any of her servants. Instead, a child stood framed in the doorway, pressed close to one of the posts as if he thought he could meld into them. A boy child, nine or ten Old Earth years, six or seven New Amazonian.
Lesa’s son, the one she so desperately wanted to be gentle.
“Hello,” Vincent said.
“Hello,” the boy answered. He came forward a few more steps, from the lighted hallway to the darkness of the porch. “Are you really a diplomat?”
Vincent smiled. The boy–Julian–was hesitant and calm, but the lilt in his voice said he was curious. And Lesa thought he was a genius, and wasted on New Amazonia.
She might even be right.
In any case, if Vincent was likely to wind up smuggling the kid home in his suitcase, he might as well get to know him. “I am, among other things. Your mother’s very proud of you.”
The child sidled along the wall sideways, back to the house but meeting Vincent’s eyes defiantly. “She says if I want to be a mathematician I have to be like you.”
“Like me?”
Julian nodded, his hands linking behind him, shoulders squeezing back as he crowded against the wall. “Gentle. Otherwise I’ll be sent to foster and train soon, and then I’ll go to the Trials and be chosen by another house.”
“And you won’t have time for mathematics then?” As Vincent understood it, not everybody was as…permissive…with their stud males as Pretoria house. His heart skipped painfully while he waited for the answer. Poor kid.
“Mother says,” Julian said, tilting his head back as he recalled her words, “that women don’t like males who seem too smart. They find them threatening.”