The goddess is a better caretaker of human life than I am.
John said that. At the farm, where he woke, he said it. Siris stared at John now. The cell submerged in shadow, its light panels dimmed. Siris wondered if the lights had been darkened for effect, to encourage her to sleep. She and the others had been fed chicken strips, baked bread with butter, green beans, and potatoes. Their first meal in captivity, not the fare she expected. There was, too, bottled water with no label. They'd been given no utensils.
After he manipulated the comm bead under his skin, John nibbled at his plate. Siris wanted to know what information he sent. The comm bead wasn't set up to receive, only to transmit. There would be no reply.
And why was he taking food?
He should not need to. No, he should not want to.
The pressure on his sensory package, the deluge of stimuli, for good or bad, would increase the more John ate.
Siris long ago determined the gilding, as a mechanism committed more or less to survival of the host, exhausted a significant portion of its energy staving off starvation. Loss of interest in food, water was the earliest, easiest defense young affarites had against their burgeoning awareness of the minds of others. There was no discomfort, no discernible disadvantage. As far as Siris could tell, affarites turned from food as a defense technique years before they learned to build and use an internal shield. Disinterest in sustenance continued into adulthood and beyond mainly because they lost taste for food, and the balance struck by their dampened sensory apparatus and their other abilities suited them. Nutrients hyped Hephaestion across the board, his senses, strength, everything. Hephaestion considered the boost akin to an overload, like lighting a rocket when he just wanted to pedal a bicycle to the next corner, so he ate and drank only when he was weak, or when he wanted to bring up his reserves.
Was John preparing his power to achieve some feat?
With her plate set aside, Siris rose into something resembling a crouch. The dimness of the cell was oppressive, tangible, and cold. She did not want to rise fully under its weight, not while she was a meter from John's aura, his invisible strength. Nevertheless, her movement toward him was furtive, tentative; and when she sat next to him, she trembled, knowing that she might as well be sitting there naked. All of her was bare to him, and though she was used to the uncertainty of privacy around affarites, she knew that this time he was going to use her private thoughts to reconstruct reality.
He began by lifting an arm and settling it across her shoulders.
He was a stranger then, someone she did not know. His past, even the recent past, became vapor in her mind. He was a young man with hard blue eyes, terrible blue eyes, and a mouth set against some rigor or struggle she knew nothing about. When she put her head onto his shoulder, she felt like she was laying her cheek against a rock. And though they sat twined like friends, like lovers perhaps, she grew afraid. Afraid for him, but also of him, in a way she'd never feared Hephaestion.
John stopped chewing and slipped down the wall a bit, so that his back curved. Siris heard him sigh.
He said, "I haven't words."
Her fear deepened.
"Ssh," he whispered. "Ssh, no." He held her tightly, his fingers spread against her arm, his muscles growing harder.
"I saw you looking at us," Siris told, unnecessarily.
And he asked, "What did you see, in my face?"
"I saw in your face that we did not matter, that you were giving us to your god."
He lowered his chin, and then his gaze, to look at her.
She shifted to meet his gaze.
"Which shall it be," said this stranger with danger in his eyes, "the lie or the truth? Which do you prefer?"
She said, "Do you know where the device is?"
-- Yes.
Then the Holland-Tchey knew. And Hephaestion.
What was left to do? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps he knew the Holland-Tchey intended to leave them as they were, victims for Holbek and the Manegolds.
"We're not getting out of this, are we?" she said to the heavy dark, to herself.
Knowing whom she addressed, John said nothing.
-- Next Chapter
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