7
A DECISION
“Four dots. You know what this means? There are more, Ro. More than us.” I look at Ro.
Ro studies the boy in my arms. He doesn’t put down his blade. He doesn’t put down the Sympa gun. He grips each more tightly.
I feel a red-hot blaze of pure hatred that I have never felt before. Not from Ro, anyway.
“Three,” Ro finally says.
He points to me. “One.” Himself. “Two.” The boy. “Four. What about Three? What did they do to him?”
The boy says nothing. The boy only looks. He moves his head restlessly, and a moment later I hear why.
Embassy Choppers overhead, closer than before. The blades flap, low and loud. They want to make sure we know they’re coming. In force.
“Damn. Damn. Damn,” Ro mutters, wiping his sleeve against his face. “We need more time.”
I look down at the wounded boy and feel his rising panic. “We have to get him out of here.”
Ro’s voice is cold and hard. “Why?”
“Ro.”
“He’s one of them.”
“Look at his wrist, Ro. He couldn’t be one of them, not even if he wanted to be.”
“Why not?” He looks as stubborn as the rock he wants to throw at me right now.
“Because he’s one of us.”
Before Ro can respond, the boy struggles to get to his feet. I push him up from behind, but I can barely pull myself up along with him; he’s all but deadweight.
“Give me my gun,” he croaks. “Now.”
Ro laughs. “I must have hit you harder than I thought. You’re talking nonsense.”
“Give me back my gun. It’s your only chance to survive.”
“Really? What are you threatening me with? The gun you don’t have?”
“I’m trying to save you. They see you with my gun and you’ll die. Both of you.” He doesn’t look back at me. I slide my arms down, letting go of him. Now, just barely, he is standing—swaying—on his own.
“What’s your name, Buttons?” Ro smiles, without a trace of friendliness.
The boy hesitates.
I let my arm fall on his shoulder. “It’s all right. We know you’re from the Embassy. Just tell us who you are.”
“My name is Lucas Amare.”
I bite my lip so as not to gasp aloud.
Ro bursts out laughing. “Oh, very good. That’s excellent. You’re human contraband like us, and your own mother is the Ambassador?” He grins at me as if we are sharing a really exceptional joke. You know, have you heard the one about the three Icon Children and the Ambassador?
He says it again, shaking his head. “Lucas Amare is an Icon Child? And you thought we had secrets to keep, Dol.”
All I can do is stare.
Ro’s right. We aren’t contraband, not exactly, but it feels that way. Whatever we are is something the Padre went to great lengths to conceal, not just from the Embassy but from everyone, even from Bigger and Biggest. And now we find this Sympa, who’s also an Icon Child, living right in the Embassy itself?
It makes no sense at all.
I understand what Ro is thinking. There is no way the son of the Ambassador, the devil herself—the Hole’s only earthly link to the General Ambassador to the Planet, GAP Miyazawa, and beyond him, the House of Lords—can have anything in common with the two of us. No matter how many markings we share.
And with that, the world is back the way Ro likes it to be. A world of two.
“It’s not a secret. Not from my mother. She knows I’m here.” He sounds defensive.
“Here, in this miserable water cave? Or here, out poaching innocent Grass children?” Ro is almost laughing. He can’t believe our good luck, that we stumbled upon something so valuable.
Someone.
“I found out you were being brought in, both of you. I wanted to—I wanted to help.”
“Help us? Or help them?”
The boy lowers his eyes.
Ro smirks. “I see.”
The Choppers are growing louder. It sounds like they’re landing right on top of us. I inch my head out from under the lip of the bluff, and I can see the edge of the blades, maybe fifty feet up.
“That took too long. The Choppers.” The Sympa boy—Lucas—says what I am thinking. “They’ve gone back for reinforcements.”
“Good. They’ll need them,” Ro says darkly.
I step between them, placing both hands on the muzzle of the gun.
“Move, Dol.” Ro shakes the gun, exasperated.
“I can’t. Lucas is right.”
“You’re listening to Buttons now?”
“His name isn’t Buttons, and I trust him. I can feel him, Ro. You told me to.”
Ro’s mouth tightens into a scowl. He doesn’t like the idea of me poking around in Lucas Amare’s mind, that much is clear. I ignore him.
I try again. “You have to believe me. We can trust him.”
“You don’t know anything, Dol. We don’t know how he works, what he can do. Maybe those marks are fake. Maybe he’s controlling you with some kind of Embassy endorphins—they have every scientist in the Hole working on one Classified weapon or another.”
“Your new Grass Rebellion friends tell you that?” He’s angry, but now I’m angry too.
“Maybe. But either way, he’s been sent here to bring us in—he already admitted that much himself.”
The Embassy Choppers are so loud now, he has to shout. Even then, I can barely hear him. I pull on the gun with both hands.
“Let go, Ro.”
“Don’t, Doloria de la Cruz. Please.”
“Let go, Furo Costas. Please.”
I’m begging you. That’s what his eyes say, even if he’s too proud to ever use the words himself. I’m begging him too, with every tug on the gun barrel.
Lucas watches us. “I give you my word. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Shut up, Buttons.” Ro is panicking, which is dangerous.
I put my other hand on his wrist. “We can do this. We have to. We don’t have a choice.”
Now I see the ropes falling into the water, all around us. Sympas are about to drop from the sky, along with the rain.
Then I say the words Ro doesn’t want to hear most of all. “We have to trust him. We have nowhere else to go.”
“Give me the gun, Ro.” Lucas is shouting now. He holds out his hands. I feel Lucas reaching toward Ro. I feel the warmth unfolding, the rush of his influence.
Lucas is intoxicating.
Ro’s fingers flex on the grip. Dazed, he takes a step backward, trying to brace himself. But I already know it’s no use.
Ro lets go. I stumble from the weight of the gun, almost knocking Lucas over. I press the gun into his hands and step away, just as the cave fills with Sympas.
Armed and masked.
Now the tracking dots are on our foreheads, dancing between our eyes.
“Took you long enough. Bring them in, boys. I’m beat. Stubborn Grass. Had to hold them here all afternoon.” Lucas lurches out from the rocks, splashing through the water. He stops, steadying himself. “One thing. I don’t want anybody talking to them without my permission.” He shoots Ro a meaningful look. You don’t have to read minds to know what he’s saying. Shut the hell up.
Then it’s my turn.
“And careful with the girl. She needs medical attention. They both do. Send them straight up to Doc when we land.”
Lucas speaks with authority, more than his years, more than he has. The Sympas salute as he passes. Only I know he barely has the strength to hold his gun.
“Mr. Amare.” An angry-looking man in a heavily decorated military coat stands next to Lucas.
I recognize the wings on his jacket, and the bile rises in my throat.
He was there, in the chapel. He is one of the Sympas who killed the Padre. Their leader.
I swallow. I try to get my breath, but it feels like there isn’t enough oxygen in the air.
I watch him speak. The words are civil but the tone is not. Lucas reddens, and I realize the words were meant to remind him he is not a Sympa soldier at all. He only wants to be.
Lucas nods. “Colonel.”
The man’s eyes move over him, taking in the blood on Lucas’s face. The wet clothes. The swaying weakness in his body, how he’s not standing quite right.
The Colonel’s head is completely bald, and a jagged scar interrupts the sheen of his skin. As if someone has taken a knife and sliced halfway around the top of his head, as if he were a jack-o’-lantern.
His coat has a strange collar, like a priest’s. I see in a glance that he has nothing to do with any church, on any planet.
He doesn’t acknowledge us, though I know he feels me staring at him. I tentatively reach out for him in my mind, but I feel a shock of cold, like I have been repelled by freezing water.
He fingers the buttonless edge of Lucas’s jacket. Lucas says nothing. Then, slowly, the Colonel raises his eyes to me. They are the color of dirty ice.
I shiver and stop trying to see behind them.
Lucas and the Jack-o’-Lantern Man turn back to the waiting command Chopper, sleek and silver and emblazoned with letters and numbers that somehow spell out wealth and importance. The Chopper is deceptively small for something worth more than a year of wages for everyone in the Hole combined.
As they climb in, I notice a slender girl standing next to the Chopper. She wears the same uniformed coat as Lucas, but her hair is silver and severe, with a slash of bangs cropped against her forehead. It’s possible that I wouldn’t have seen her at all in the crowd of Sympas that surround the Chopper.
I do, though, not because of how she looks, which is striking enough, but because of the way her eyes track Lucas.
Like a predator locked on her prey. A king snake, maybe, or a rattler.
I close my eyes. I can’t sense my way through to her, not in the chaos and the noise of the scene.
In a second the opportunity is gone. The girl falls into step behind Lucas and the Colonel, and they rise into the clouds with a few flashing twists of blades, without so much as a look goodbye.
I glance over at Ro, next to me, as they cuff him. He resists, but a Sympa guard kicks the back of his legs, and he falls awkwardly to the ground. Another Sympa yanks him up with a threatening scowl. “You want a fight, boy?” The others laugh. Ro is seething, looking at me accusingly. I hold his eyes, pleading. He turns and shakes his head, climbing onto the transport. He is miserable, his eyes dark and wet. I try to remember if this is the first time I have ever seen him cry.
I think it is.
I hope I’m not wrong to trust Lucas and let them take us. I hope Ro’s not right.
Out here in the rain, as I board the transport, I can’t feel anything but scared.
RESEARCH MEMORANDUM: THE HUMANITY PROJECT
CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET / AMBASSADOR EYES ONLY
To: Ambassador Amare
From: Dr. Huxley-Clarke
Subject: Icon Children Mythology
Subtopic: Lover
Catalogue Assignment: Evidence recovered during raid of Rebellion hideout
The following is a reprint of a recovered page, thick, homemade paper, thought to be torn from an anti-Embassy propaganda tract titled Icon Children Exist! Most likely hand-published by a fanatical cult or Grass Rebellion faction.
Text-scan translation follows.