Then another shriek floated to her, and that sense of the child abruptly sharpened—and beneath the simple surface lurked alien currents of feeling, so strange and varied that Isana found herself wholly unable to tell one from the next, much less fit an accurate name or description to the emotion. They were cold things. Dry things. As they pressed against her, Isana was reminded of the rippling legs of a centipede that had once slithered up her calf.
She realized, with revulsion, that the being she sensed was the vord Queen.
Her two escorts began to descend, and her ears popped several times under the changing pressure.
Wherever her captors were taking her, it had not taken them long—and it seemed that they had arrived.
They landed roughly, and Isana would have fallen without the support of both guards. She was propelled forward, being dragged every few steps, and she stumbled upon a slight rise in the ground, as if their path had taken them over a flat stone a few inches high.
But instead of stony earth beneath her feet, the ground gave slightly with a kind of rubbery tension. Isana forced herself to keep breathing slowly and steadily.
She was walking on the vord’s croach.
None of her captors spoke, and the surface beneath their feet deadened their footfalls to silence. Eerie sounds drifted in the air around her, muffled by the hood. Clicks. Chitters. Once, there was an ululating call that raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Very faintly, she could hear booming reports, like distant thunder. She swallowed. Somewhere far away, Alera’s firecrafters had begun their work, filling the skies with their furies.
The ground suddenly sloped down, and a rough hand pushed her head forward, her chin to her chest. She bumped her head against what felt like a rocky outcropping in any case, and it stung momentarily. Then the sounds all faded to silence, and the noise of her captors’ breathing changed subtly. They must have brought her inside or underground.
One of her guards pushed her roughly to her knees. A moment later, he removed the hood, and Isana blinked her eyes against the sudden invasion of soft green light.
They were in a cavern, a large one, its walls too smooth to have been formed by nature. The walls, the floor, and a pair of supporting pillars were all covered in the croach. The waxy green substance pulsed and flowed with unsettling light. Liquids flowed beneath its surface.
Isana craned her neck, trying to find Araris, her heart suddenly hammering against her ribs.
A second pair of guards dragged him into Isana’s line of view. They jerked the hood from his head and dropped him in a heap to the cavern floor. Isana could see that he’d suffered a number of abrasions and contusions, and she felt a physical burst of pain in her heart to see the bruises, the blood—but he had sustained no obvious critical trauma. He was breathing, but that was no guarantee of his safety. He could be bleeding to death internally even as she stared at him.
She never made a conscious decision, but she found herself suddenly straining against her captors, trying to go to Araris. They pushed her brutally to the floor. Her cheekbone dimpled the croach.
It was humiliating, how casually, how easily they had taken away her choice. She felt a blaze of anger, suffered a sudden urge to respond in earnest through Rill. She fought the impulse down. She was in no position to resist their strength. Until she had a better chance—until she and Araris had a better chance—to succeed in escaping, it would be wisest not to resist. “Please!” she said. “Please, let me see to him!”
Footsteps, softened by the croach, approached her. Isana lifted her eyes enough to see a young woman’s bare feet. Her skin was pale, almost luminous. Her toenails were short, and the glossy green-black of vord chitin.
“Let her up,” the Queen murmured.
The men holding Isana down withdrew at once.
Isana didn’t want to look farther up—but it seemed somehow childish not to, as if she was too frightened to lift her face from her pillow. So she pushed herself from the floor until she was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, composed her wind-raveled dress along with her own equally frayed nerves, and lifted her gaze.
Isana had read Tavi’s letters describing the vord queen he had encountered beneath the now-lost city of Alera Imperia, and had spoken to Amara regarding her own experience with the creature. She had expected the pale skin, the dark, multifaceted eyes. She had expected the unsettling mixture of alien inconsistency with everyday familiarity. She had expected her to bear an unsettling resemblance to the Marat girl, Kitai.
What she had not expected, not at all, was for another achingly familiar face to appear, contained within the canted eyes and exotic beauty of Kitai’s visage. Though the Queen resembled Kitai, she was not identical. There was a subtle blending of the features of her face, as parents’ faces would combine in the face of their child. The other face within the Queen’s was one Tavi had never seen—that of his aunt, Isana’s sister, who had died the night he was born. Alia.
Isana saw her younger sister’s face in the vord Queen, muffled but not subsumed, like a stone lying quietly beneath a blanket of snow. Her heart ached. After all this time, she still felt Alia’s loss, still remembered the moment of awful realization as she stared at a limp bundle of muddy limbs and ragged clothing on the cold stone floor of a low-roofed cavern.
The vord Queen’s distant expression suddenly shifted, and she jerked her head back from Isana as though she had smelled something vile. Then, an instant later, seemingly without crossing the space in between, the vord Queen’s eyes were immediately in front of hers, her nose all but brushing Isana’s. She took a slow, seething breath, then hissed, “What is it? What is that?”
Isana leaned back, away from the Queen. “I… I don’t understand.”
The Queen let out a low hiss, a boiling, reptilian sound. “Your face. Your eyes. What did you see?”
Isana struggled for a moment to slow her racing heart, to control her breath. “You… you looked like someone familiar to me.”
The Queen stared at her, and Isana felt a terrible, invasive sensation, like a thousand worms writhing against her scalp.
“What,” the vord Queen hissed, “is Alia?”
Rage struck Isana without warning, cold and biting, and she flung the memory of that cold stone floor against the sensation upon her scalp as though she could crush the worming caress with the very image. “No,” she heard herself say, her voice flat and cold. “Stop that.”
The vord Queen twitched, a motion that moved her entire body, like a tree swaying in a sudden wind. She twitched her head to one side and stared at Isana, her mouth open. “Wh-what?”
Isana felt the creature abruptly, her presence coalescing to her watercrafting senses like a suddenly rising mist. There was a sense of complete, startled surprise in her, coupled with a child’s flinching pain at rejection. The vord Queen stared at Isana in wonder for an instant—an emotion that segued rapidly toward something like…
Fear?
“That is not yours to take,” Isana said in a hard, firm tone. “Do not try to do so again.”
The vord Queen stared at her for an endless moment. Then she rose with another eerie hiss and turned away. “Do you know who I am?”
Isana frowned at the vord’s turned back. Do you? she wondered. Why else would you ask?