Lindsay Buroker: Encrypted

The ground was vibrating. No, Tikaya realized as awareness returned, not the ground, the floor. Cold, textured metal chilled her bare calves and seeped through the back of her dress. A rocking rise and fall accompanied the vibrations.

She opened her eyes to a dim, fuzzy cell. Her spectacles were missing. Unimaginative gray steel surrounded her. The monotone color marked the bulkheads and even the sturdy gate dividing her from a corridor. No portholes allowed a view of the outside, but the swells of the sea and the reverberations of a nearby engine told the story: she was locked in the bowels of a Turgonian warship.

And her brother-had the marines brought him too? She remembered the sickening thud of that rifle butt striking his head. She prayed they had left him alive, where her family could tend him, but a selfish part of her wished he was in the brig with her. The idea of being alone on a ship full of hostile marines…

She shuddered.

Tikaya rolled onto her belly. No pain lanced through her body, but stiff muscles suggested she had lain on the deck for hours.

Across the corridor, a second gate marked another cell, though darkness-and her poor vision-shrouded the interior. She stood and pressed her face between the bars. A blurry lantern burned at the base of a ship’s ladder leading up. No guards stood within sight.

She probed the small lock set in her gate. She could not even get a fingernail into the fine hole. Alas, picking locks was not a typical course in the Kyattese school system.

“ Wonderful day.” Tikaya realized she had probably been on the floor throughout the night and amended the last word: “week.”

Chains clanked in the cell across the way, and Tikaya jumped.

“ Hello?” she asked in her tongue.

Maybe her brother was there, or others of her people had been taken. Maybe she was not alone against the Turgonians after all. The clanks stilled, leaving only the rumbling of the engine.

“ Hello?” she asked again, this time in Turgonian and this time with less hope.

Silence.

Tikaya peered into the cell. Was that a human form slumped in the back corner? She tried other languages from the islands and coastal nations on the Eerathu Sea. Nothing elicited a response.

A hatch thudded open, catching her trying yet another greeting. Boots rang on the ladder, and a pair of marines strode toward her.

“ Don’t poke the grimbal, girl.” The tall man in the lead jerked a nose sharper than Herdoctan potsherds at the opposite cell.

“ Grimbal?” Tikaya frowned.

“ Giant shaggy predators up on our northern frontier. They’re probably the most irritable beasts in the empire, and they’ll sink their teeth into you if you get anywhere near their territory.”

Tikaya stopped herself from saying she had heard of the creature and the expression-if she hoped to deny she was their cryptomancer, she ought not appear too worldly. It was curiosity about the other prisoner that had prompted her query. Her shoulders, and her hope of denying anything, slumped when the second marine drew close enough for her to identify without her spectacles: the man from the cane fields. No doubt he had arranged her capture when she failed to convince him she was no one of consequence.

She squinted to read the name sewn on his jacket: Agarik. He stood, hands clasped behind his back, watching the other marine, his superior, she assumed, though she did not know what ranks the pins on their collars denoted.

“ How’re the accommodations, Five?” The speaker-his jacket read Ottotark-rapped a baton against the mystery prisoner’s gate. “A lot better than what you’re used to of late, eh?”

There was no response, not even a tinkle of chains rattling. Despite the silence, Ottotark chuckled at his own wit. He turned his attention to Tikaya and when his gaze lingered on her breasts, she forced herself not to step back.

“ Where is my brother?” she asked. “Is he…”

“ We left him in the distillery,” Agarik said. “He’s alive.”

“ Thank you,” she murmured, hoping she could trust his word.

“ So, the source of so many of our troubles. A woman.” Ottotark shook his head. “Seems strange you’d be involved in military matters.”

Tikaya bit back a response about how it was hard to remain uninvolved when invaders were trying to take over one’s whole island chain.

“ I reckon you just sat in an office on a beach,” Ottotark continued, “and someone brought our messages to you. Is that how it worked?” The lamplight glinting off Ottotark’s dark eyes did nothing to warm them, and a challenge hardened his voice. He resented her. Every Turgonian she encountered probably would.

She lifted her chin. “What are you going to do with me?”

“ For the trouble you caused us? We’re going to kill you, of course.”

Tikaya swallowed, or tried to. Her throat constricted, and her mouth was too dry.

“ Sergeant…” Agarik frowned at the other man.

Ottotark bent over, hands on his knees, and laughed. The raucous noise echoed from the metal bulkheads. “I jest-we’re not killing you. Not now anyway. We need you to translate something for us first.”

Tikaya barely kept from snorting. After what the Turgonians had done to her people-to her — she would not even help them tie their shoes.

Ottotark fished a keychain out of his pocket. “Time for you to visit the captain.”

While Ottotark unlocked the door, Agarik slipped Tikaya’s spectacles through the gate. She blinked in surprise and met his gaze as she accepted them. Nothing so friendly as a wink or a smile suggested she had a secret ally, but he seemed someone who treated people, even prisoners, with respect.

She had barely hooked the spectacles over her ears when Ottotark grabbed her upper arm and jerked her into the corridor so she fell against him. The amusement on his face, however crude, was gone now. He grabbed her breast, even as his other arm snaked around her waist to keep her jammed against him.

Tikaya shoved a hand against his chest and tried to thrust a knee into his groin, but his strong embrace left no space to maneuver.

His lips curled into a snarl. “We may need you, but you deserve a lot of pain for the deaths you caused.”

Ottotark’s fingers gouged her breast, and she gritted her teeth at the pain, determined not to gasp or cry out, though fear surged through her body. She craned her neck toward Agarik, hoping he might step in. Though his clenched jaw made tendons bulge on his neck, he made no move against his superior.

“ What’s the matter with your sergeant, Corporal Agarik?” a deep voice spoke from the other cell. Though quiet, it cut through Ottotark’s angry lust, and he jumped, relaxing his grip. “Doesn’t he know the Kyattese are sorcerers as well as scholars? In another second, she’ll probably cast a spell to shrivel his testicles into wrinkled, rotten walnuts.”

Ottotark frowned into the cell. “Nobody wants to hear you speak, Five.” Still, he released Tikaya, shoving her toward the corporal.

Agarik was gaping at the dim cell, but he recovered enough to take her arm. Under his firm, professional grip, the heartbeats hammering in her ears slowed.

Tikaya watched over her shoulder as the guards led her away, but the unseen man did not speak again. The trek took her up to the main deck, where they marched past two long rows of cannons. The sharp tang of gun oil competed with the briny scent of the ocean roaring past beneath them. She peered through an open cannon port, hoping to glimpse her islands. If they had not sailed too far, maybe she could escape to a lifeboat-if the Turgonians had lifeboats. With that warmongering culture, one never knew. They had idiotic notions about glory in dying a warrior’s death, so they might condemn their men to go down with the vessel.