I recognize the tale, if not Sean’s unique embellishments. We were told these stories as kids by our parents, who heard them from our grandparents. I bet Jubilee would be surprised to find out we hand down our myths and legends, Scheherazade and Shakespeare and stories from a time before men left Earth. The suits from TerraDyn and their trodairí lackeys think we’re all illiterate and uneducated. I only have hazy memories of comscreens and the bright, dancing colors of shows on the HV from my childhood, and it pains me that these children can’t even imagine modern technology. We may not have the books and holovids anymore, or the official schools the off-worlders have, but the stories themselves never go. Right now, I want nothing more than to linger in the shadows and listen.
But instead, I step forward and catch his eye before tilting my head toward the corridor. Wrap it up, I need you.
His mouth drops open, the relief clear on his face. Even some part of Sean thought McBride might be right and I might be in danger. He nods, and I lean against the wall to rest my leg while I listen to the end of the tale. “So Oisín slips away home on a shuttle to Ireland for a quick visit, and Niamh warns him that if he gets out of his ship and touches the ground, he can never come back. It’s the only thing he has to do, is make sure he doesn’t touch the ground. So what does the fool do? He might be too lazy to pick up his own laundry, but he can’t resist showing off. He forgets—or he wasn’t listening, like some people we know, right, Cabhan?—and he jumps out of the shuttle to help these guys move a rock. The second he hits the grass…” He pauses, and the kids lean in, then jerk back when he claps his hands. “Bam! Three hundred years catch up with him, and he’s dead as a soldier on a solo patrol. So the moral of the story is, never pick up after yourself, and certainly never pick up after anyone else. It could be fatal. Now, off with the lot of you, before I ask who’s done their homework.” They scatter, and he hoists Fergal up into his arms with casual confidence to wade free of them all. He’s had him a year and a half now, since his brother and sister-in-law died in a raid.
“I’m almost sure that wasn’t the moral when we learned it,” I say.
He grins, unrepentant. That’s Sean—always grinning, smooth as silk. “Should have been. I take it you ruined McBride’s latest tactic?” Fergal reaches up to grab at Sean’s face, trying with great determination to inspect the inside of his nostrils.
“For now.”
Sean leans down to pick up his nephew’s favorite toy, a strange, pudgy creature with wings and a tail called Tomás. I’ve never been sure what Tomás is, but I know he’s sewn from one of Sean’s brother’s old shirts, and Fergal won’t go anywhere without him. Placated, Fergal rests his head on Sean’s shoulder as his uncle speaks. “I tried to hail you, but you didn’t answer. Figured there was too much interference today.”
Our radios almost never work due to Avon’s atmosphere, but that wasn’t why I didn’t answer. “Thanks for trying. Don’t worry, I can handle McBride.”
“Clear skies, cousin.” Good luck, he means. There are never clear skies on Avon, no blue, no stars. But we don’t give up hope, and we use those words to remind ourselves. Clear skies will come, one day.
I turn a little so he won’t see the bloody bandage over my pants leg from Lee Chase’s hot-pink souvenir; I’ll get him to pull it out later, but for now we’ve got a more pressing concern. “Forget good fortune. We don’t have time to wait for clear skies.” I duck my head to catch his nephew’s eye. “Fergal, go get into bed for your nap, and we’ll come and tuck you in soon. I need your uncle’s help.”
Sean stares down into the bottom of the currach, voice hushed in horror. “Flynn Cormac, you never did. McBride is going to throw a party and use her head for a punch bowl.”
“This is an opportunity, Sean. If the military will ever trade for anyone, it will be her. If we play this right, we could exchange her for medical supplies, perhaps some of our people they’ve got in their cells—maybe even leverage for the planetary review in a few months.”
“Or she could tell everybody who you are, and what you look like, and where to come calling if they feel the urge to visit.”
“She doesn’t know.” I let myself grin. “Fair to say she didn’t exactly volunteer to help steer the currach home. She saw nothing, and we can make it that way when she leaves.”
“You’ve got to be joking. That’s Lee Chase, Flynn. We can’t let her go back. You think she can’t tell them plenty about you?”
“What, you think I let her scan my genetag?” I cut in over him. “I didn’t tell her my name.”
“They’ll never trade for her. They don’t trade. McBride would say asking will make us look weak.”
Weak. Why is it weakness to want to talk before I kill someone? “McBride won’t know.”
“You seriously think there’s a chance they’ll listen to us?”
“I seriously think we’re going to ask them. Now help me get her somewhere out of sight, before she wakes up.”
We muscle her out of the bottom of the currach together, draping my jacket around her shoulders to hide her uniform. I thought she’d be stirring by now, but whatever dropped her out in the swamp hit her even harder than the fumes from my gas can did. As we navigate the corridors toward the disused caverns below, I keep having to catch her head before it can loll against the stone walls.
Sean huffs softly, shaking his head at me for taking the trouble. This is the guy who has a collection of photos tacked up on the stone wall next to his hammock, women from brightly lit worlds laughing and smiling and pouting for the camera. Wives or girlfriends or lovers, I suppose. Pictures he takes off the bodies of the soldiers and pins up as morbid trophies. This is what the fight does to people. To someone like Sean, who devotes his time to teaching our children, but can’t bring himself to see the soldiers as human.
There are a number of caverns at the bottom of our network of tunnels that we don’t use anymore. Too damp for living space, and there are far fewer Fianna now than there were during my sister’s time. Sean binds the trodaire while I keep watch at the door, scanning the empty passageway, waiting for someone to round the corner and discover us. He’s tying her down, looping the rope tightly through a post drilled into the stone that was once used to stabilize shelving. At one time this had been a storeroom for weaponry. “You really think there’s any chance this works out at all?” he asks, finishing off a knot and stepping back to inspect his work.
I can hear the doubt in his voice, and the long, exhausting night I’ve had crowds in on me all at once. I need a moment’s respite. I need Sean, of all people, on my side. “Lecture me later,” I say, as pain pulses through my leg again. “I need a little first aid before I can take any more.”
Sean’s initial alarm fades when I unwrap my makeshift bandage to reveal the miniature stab wound in my leg. Leaning close to inspect it, he frowns and asks, “What is that?”
I lean against the wall, taking the pressure off my leg. “A cocktail garnish,” I mutter.
Sean’s head jerks up so he can look at me—my expression prompts a burst of laughter as he realizes who’s responsible for the plastic sword in my thigh. The bands of tension around my chest ease a fraction. Sean leaves me there as he goes off in search of a pair of pliers; no sense risking anyone else discovering Lee Chase nearly bested me with a cocktail sword. By the time he comes back, Sean’s still grinning.
“You’ve had worse luck with girls,” he points out, widening the rip in my pants leg so he can get at the plastic with the pliers. “Remember that time you tried to sweet-talk Mhairi and she laughed at you?”