By the Sea of Sand Read online

  If only, Jodah thought as the heat of her dying covered him, she’d done it before being captured by the Wirthera.

  He dragged her corpse to the corner and let her fall. He knelt next to Venga, certain the old man was dead, but he found a faint throb of a pulse. The blood flowing from his wound had slowed, but only because his heart was going to stop soon.

  Jodah hadn’t been medically trained. He knew that much without having to force a memory. But as a Rav Gadol he’d been given the information necessary to provide care in the field. Programmed into his auxiliary data sources, accessible via the data stream, if only he could finally figure out how to access it. He was so close and still too far.

  Pressing his hand to Venga’s, Jodah murmured a prayer to the Mothers to take the old man under their fiery skirts, should he not survive. Venga didn’t move. Vikus did though, when Jodah checked over his wounds.

  “Billis. Are you hurt?”

  “Not too bad. No.”

  “Is there a handlight or something down here?”

  Billis gestured wildly. “Yes. There’s a box of them in one of the cabinets. For emergencies. We’ve never had to use them, the backup power always comes on.”

  Jodah went to the cabinet and found the handlights, cracking the inner tube to get the light glowing. He gave a few to Billis and tucked a couple into his sleeve pocket. Also from the cabinet, he pulled a medkit of sutures, surgical glue and bandages. The seal on it had never been opened, and the box hissed when he cracked it.

  “Take this,” he told Billis. All of this came from common sense, not from the data stream, which still danced elusively out of his grasp. He rifled through the contents, searching for poison antidotes, but there were none. “Pressure on the wounds. Use the glue to seal them. That bottle is anti-infection meds, make sure he takes some.”

  “Where are you going?” Billis cried.

  “I need to get the power back on. And help Stephin and Teila.” Without waiting for an answer, Jodah left through the back door.

  Lightning bathed the sky when he ran out. In the flash, he saw the dark shape of a whaler, dangerously close to shore. Without the light, it would surely crash.

  The crack of thunder, flash of lightning, the crackle and sting of smoke. Rope skidding on his palms, burning them. The rough kiss of sand against him, over his head as he held his breath and tried not to drown.

  Jodah shook his head free of the images assailing him. Breathing hard, he spat the taste of sand that had become so thick on his tongue he passed a hand over his face to convince himself he was on land and not suffocating beneath the sea. In the next crack of lightning, the ship had come closer. He needed to get the power on.

  The mechanical equipment was all housed in a small shed connected to the lighthouse. Jodah had never had reason to be inside, yet when the door opened with a tug instead of being locked, he froze in surprise. Bathed in the amber glow from the handlight, the interior of the shed gleamed with machinery and solar cells.

  He had been in here before.

  A vision overlaid itself on top of the one he was actually seeing. Most of it was the same, except for the stream of golden sunlight through the windows and a few pieces of equipment that were shifted. He blinked and blinked again, but the vision didn’t fade. From behind him, he heard a woman’s voice and turned even though he knew she wasn’t there for real. Only in his mind.

  In his memory.

  In moments it was gone, nothing but darkness behind him. Focus, he told himself grimly. Get the power on. Find Rehker. Get help for the boy.

  The problem with the solar cells was clear at once—a tangle of wires that had been torn apart. There’d be no fixing it. Whoever had done this, whether it was Rehker or Pera or even Venga, they’d known what they were doing . . . and Jodah did not. Helplessly, he shone his light over the shredded wires, components hanging from the ends. The solar cells had been smashed, all but one, and that one was still connected to the main power grid. One small green light glowed on the circuit board, showing it was live.

  One live connection, but where did it go? He scanned the board but couldn’t tell where any of the wires went. Jodah held the light closer, but none of the ports had been labeled. The data stream brightened as he looked, and for one miraculous moment he thought he was going to be able to access it, figure out the schematics, find a solution. But it was only so much distracting gibberish. Useless and annoying. He blinked it away as best he could.

  From far away, he thought he heard the sound of screams. Teila’s voice, so familiar to him now, brought to his ears only because of his enhancements. He still couldn’t make out her words, but the fact she’d raised her voice enough to carry to him with this much distance between them told him more than he needed to know. She was upstairs with her son, and he needed to get to her.

  Chapter 31

  “You don’t need to do this, Rehker.” Teila, her head spinning and woozy with pain, did her best to stand upright.

  Rehker had dragged her by the hair all the way down the hall and up the stairs to the lamp room, where he’d tossed her against the low wall below the windows. He barely gave her a glance when she managed to get to her knees, but when she put a hand on the windowsill to pull herself higher, he hit her hand with the long metal pipe she used for hooking the storm shutters.

  “Shut your mouth,” he said mildly. “Or I will beat it so swollen you can’t speak.”

  She shut her mouth, but not out of fear. If he beat her any harder, she’d be unable to stop him from whatever he was doing in the lamp room. She’d be incapable of helping her son.

  “Let me go back to Stephin. He needs me.”

  The pipe slammed onto the wall so close to her head she felt the breeze of its passing. Rehker bent over her, the stink of his breath sour enough to choke her. His hand cupped her chin, forcing her to look at him though the lamp room was so dark she could see nothing but the faint glint of his eyes.

  “The lamp or your son, Teila. Which would you choose?”

  She thought of the ship on the storm-tossed sea, but there was no question. No doubt. “My son. Always my son.”

  “Sentimental bitch.” He didn’t sound angry, only thoughtful. “Do you know when they took me, I was one day away from being sent home. To my family. I’d been injured in a hornet attack. My face. I was meant to be blind. They hadn’t done anything to my eyes, they said when I got home I could apply for surgery and might be eligible. The money’s there for the Rav elite, to be sure, but for us plain soldiers, we have to limp along with what scraps we can glean. When the Wirthera took me, I didn’t even care. What life could I have led back here, supporting a family without my sight? Before I joined the SDF I was a sculptor. I made beautiful things, Teila. How could I do that without being able to see?”

  She thought better of speaking, and Rehker clearly didn’t care to have an answer because he kept on.

  “The Wirthera took me and the rest of the crew on the mediship headed for home. One minute we were cruising along. The next, I was naked in a metal cell with no windows or doors, no sound. Just like that. They don’t tell anyone back here that truth, do they? That the Wirthera don’t need to cross our borders to get to us. We never see their ships because they don’t need to leave them. Maybe,” Rehker said, “they don’t even have them. Maybe they’ve never left their homeworld at all. However they take us, it has nothing to do with a ship. They take us and keep us while they study us . . . and then—”

  “Then they send you back,” Teila said quietly. She wanted desperately to turn her face away from his to keep the stink of his breath from making her want to gag, but she didn’t dare. “I know.”

  “They gave me back my eyes.”

  Teila closed hers. She cringed at the brush of his mouth against her cheek, then to her neck. He sniffed her, and she shuddered.

  “They are the enemy and yet they gave me what my own government would not. Better than the ones even that the Mothers themselves gave me. What do you thin