34th of Uirra

My foot scuffed over a rock embedded in the dusty dirt of the road and I winced. After six weeks spent lying down in the bin, my feet had become tender, and the lightweight canvas shoes didn't offer much of a barrier between my heels and the ground. Keeping pace with the other women was getting harder, my breath burning my throat as I jogged along behind the tall woman, desperate not to fall behind.

It was a losing battle.

The road wound down the side of the mountain in a series of switchbacks hewn out of a sheer sheet of rock, and as we came around the first bend, the sheet of rock created a gap in the trees to the right.

Through that gap, I got my first glimpse of the valley.

My breath left me in a rush, and I stumbled, my mouth falling open.

At the farthest end of the valley, rising in the gap between two craggy mountain peaks, so huge it was clearly visible even miles away, stood a colossal dam that held back the mighty river that must have once flowed through the valley. The dam dominated the landscape with thick, rigid, unnatural lines, and the water that was allowed to go over the spillway was strictly metered into a vast canal system that spanned the entire valley bottom, gouged into the old riverbed as if stamped into the earth by a gigantic machine.

Because that was what it was. The entire thing was a machine geared for only one purpose: war. There were green hectares of cropland for feeding it, great smokestacks and furnaces to fuel it, storage yards full of monstrous weaponry to arm it with, mills and warehouses for assembling it, barracks for housing it, all connected by an engine line that ran over the ground like an endless black ribbon, silvery engines shooting along the rail.

It was a visual punch to the gut.

How in all the seven blue blazes was a merchant's daughter from Edon going to bring that to its knees? It took everything I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other as the full force of what I was up against hit with all the weight of a sledgehammer.

Focus. One task at a time. Survive first. Blend in. Watch. Listen. Learn.

They were Orrelian's words, but in my head, I heard them in a deep, rough brogue.

Watch. Listen. Learn.

I staggered forward again, teeth bared as my aching feet carried me after the tall woman, heading around a final bend and up to a set of wide metal gates set in a towering length of chain fence topped with zigzags of thorny wire.

On the other side of the fence lay a broad mountain meadow that had been completely given over to a series of livestock barns. Armed guards watched from the lofty platform of a heavily fortified gatehouse as our chain leader stopped at a checkpoint just inside the walls. More guards manned the checkpoint, and even more patrolled the road that ran between the barns.

Any one of those guards might have seen one of those fugitive bulletins. Any one of those guards might recognize my face.

You're going to die.

~~~

"New blood gets Meera's quota. In't that right, new blood?"

I stared down at the haft of the shovel that had just been dropped into my hands.

"'Yes, Chain Leader,'" the well-muscled woman in front of me said, high and mocking. Her voice dropped an octave. "That's what you say, New Blood."

I glanced up at her. She was medium height, but well-built, with a round face tending toward softness under the chin. There was a ruthless, razor-sharp edge to her, nonetheless, and in this place of hollow eyes and protruding cheekbones, that softness only meant one thing: she got more food than anyone else. The only way to do that was to take it from others.

This woman was not someone I could afford to insult. "Yes, Chain Leader." The words scraped their way out of my throat even though I had no idea what she meant.

The chain leader grunted, then gave her head a wag, dismissing me in favor of the girl behind me.

I walked out of the tool room with the shovel, then came to a stop. The livestock barn was long, long enough that the door at the farthest end was little more than a pinprick of light. A center aisle ran the entire length, lined on both sides with large pens occupied by a tall, heavy-boned herd animal that looked like a cross between a shaggy cow and a deer. The warm barnyard smell of hay and manure was familiar, at least, even if I had never seen a barn that big.

The other women who had gone into, then come out of, the equipment room ahead of me had started cleaning the pens, opening gates in the wall of the barn and shooing the cow-deer outside, then shoveling away the piles of droppings that were left behind in the sawdust.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands of pens, all of them well used.

"What you waiting for, new blood? An invitation?" the tall woman drawled, striding past, giving me another sneer on her way by. "Come on, my quota's not going to shovel itself."

Licking my lips, I fell in behind her for the third time that day. Watch. Listen. Learn.

Tall One led the way to one of the pens still full of animals and leaned a shoulder on the slats of the fence, that sneer still locked in place. "You clean my fifty, then you get to start on yours. Got it?"

Meera was apparently in the chain leader's good books. I nodded.

"Good. Because if you miss any, I'll have to take it personally," Tall One said, pushing herself back up straight. She looked me up and down, that sneer growing into a curl of derision before she went slouching off toward the equipment room.

Taking a deep breath, I opened the gate to the pen, slipping inside and shutting it behind me before facing the goat-deer things. Twenty pairs of bright yellow slit-pupiled eyes regarded me with animal curiosity.

Right then.

I skirted the nearest cow-deer and opened the barn half-door, glad when all the deer things trotted quite willingly out into their yard, nosing into the grain trough at the other end where their breakfast waited for them.

Then I took up the flat shovel, ground my teeth, and made my aching limbs begin heaving piles of manure into the barrow waiting in the aisle.

Watch. Listen. Learn. Survive.

~~~

It took several hours to muck the livestock barn. Blisters rose and broke on my hands, my muscles burned, but I was listening and watching, and after a while I managed to piece together a few things.

There were at least seven divisions of the labor force.

At the very top of the pecking order was the Military Sector. They all wore grey uniforms instead of jumpsuits. There was the active military branch that trained for battle, and then some sort of civilian section that patrolled the yards and kept everyone in line. The kreighvalden was one of those. She answered to a short, stocky, balding man who had a white braid on the left epaulette of his otherwise plain grey uniform jacket. He was the stadhevalden, in charge of twenty kreighvaldens. Above him was the stadhepheravalden, or overseer. There was a bit of a stir when the S.P.V. and the S.V. both made a surprise inspection of the livestock barns.

All of us immediately dropped what we were doing to run out into the aisle and bow as the small procession came down the aisle, led by the kreighvalden, who strutted along with her short whip under her arm, a stiff smile pasted on her face.

We bowed until the little string of grey uniforms had gone all the way down the aisle and out the other door. Then we scrambled back to work, moving as fast as we could to catch up the precious time lost standing around looking at the floor.

According to some of the other women, Military was the best sector to be in. They were fed better than the other sectors, for one thing, and they were allowed to have parties. They came and went in large, armored lorries instead of walking everywhere.

If Military was at the top, then Medical was the very bottom. From what I overheard of a conversation between two of my neighboring stall cleaners, the idea of 'medical' seemed to be a fuzzy concept. The way they talked, there was very little medical care going on in the Medical Sector. In fact, it inspired fear. The sick went there, never to return. So, apparently, did some of the healthiest men and women. The children of the compound were kept there as well, taken from their mothers at birth, which had been the subject they had been whispering about. One of them had a friend who was pregnant without an approved natal script, whatever that was, and was terrified of what would happen to her when her chain leader found out.

The Medical buildings weren't far from the livestock barns. Their heavy, rounded roofs hunched among the pine trees on the eastern slope of the mountain, set low over narrow horizontal windows and wide, buttressed ironbound doors. Judging from the number of armed guards walking the perimeter of the fence, it was not a hospital.

I added that to my mental records and kept listening.

One of the other sectors wore yellow jumpsuits. A handful of yellow-clad repairmen came up to work on a broken milking apparatus and passed right by the pen I was working in. Their tattoos were different - crossed hammers. I heard one of the women calling them the Manufactury boys.

Mining was white, and not far above Medical. I didn't hear much about it, other than that it was a punishment to go there.

Hospitality was green. The Hospitality sector occupied two separate compounds, both smaller than any of the others. One was down on the valley bottom, centrally located to most everything else. That station was for the laundry and cleaning, cooking, and serving staff. The other compound was built around a high meadow on the western side of the valley and looked very much like the rich end of a continental town, with stately villas, summer manors, hunting lodges and hotels.

I made note of that too. Fierda had been sent to Hospitality.

If I had to guess, Agriculture would be like Mining and Manufactury. It was labor intensive and viewed by the military as a low position. Interestingly, not all the slaves in agriculture had been brought in from outside. Many of the younger ones had been born there and knew nothing beyond life on the Paradazh. They bowed more quickly than the rest of us and talked and laughed as they worked. To them, slavery was just the way things were.

Last but not least, and the place my gaze found every time I carted a barrow of manure out to the midden heap: the Officiate Sector.

It stood in the middle of the valley, a fortress of concrete and stone built atop a flat-topped mound of battlements and ramparts, surrounded by a moat and guard towers. In the center of the fortress square sat a featureless rectangle of a building that gleamed white in the hot afternoon sun.

Inside that building were the three most powerful figures in the Order of the Coventry: the High Councilor, the High Minister, and the High General. Each was the head of a different aspect of the Paradazh, and together they formed the Triumvirate.

To hear the kreighvalden talk about them, they were practically gods. They had the good of the entire world at heart, and this place was part of their vision for a better future.

Their portraits were the ones that we bowed to so we could get breakfast. Orrelian would have sold an arm to get ahold of those portraits. Here they were omnipresent, hanging in the dining hall and above the doors in the livestock barns, and emblazoned larger than life on the sides of buildings, the three of them staring resolutely off at a distant dream world in the clouds as real human beings toiled endlessly beneath them.

Watch. Listen. Learn.

There were fifty women on my 'chain.' But that did not make them friends. Slavery and long-term imprisonment had not bred kindness or a desire to find freedom in the working sectors. It had beaten the humanity out of many of these women, until they no longer fought for anyone but themselves, and they only fought over the meager scraps the Coventry wanted them to have.

That caught me off guard. How could so many people just give up and burrow into the holes they had been given? Why weren't they trying to get out? Why fight to get a lump of soap when there were so many bigger, more important things to battle for?

I wanted to grab them and shake them, make them lift their eyes from the dirt and look around, but I didn't dare. The longer I worked and listened and watched, the more obvious it became that our chain leader was friendly with the guards, and that she wasn't above turning on her own chain to advance her interests.

This became perfectly, painfully clear when the bell rang for dinner.

Everyone finished up what they were doing, put their tools away, and trudged to stand in a line down the middle of the aisle between the stalls.

I wound up next to a blonde who looked like she could pick up a full manure barrow and walk around with it under one arm. She didn't seem threatening at all, just tired and sweaty, but then, after having disappeared for most of the day, the tall woman reappeared, sauntering down the line to stand in front of the blonde, towering over her until she looked up.

Tall One indicated with a jerk of her head that the blonde was supposed to find another spot. The girl ducked and scuttled away.

Tall One sidled into the space beside me, a cocky smirk tugging at her lips.

Another bell rang, and all the women bowed. A moment later, the kreighvalden came out of the equipment room, and processed slowly down the aisle at a leisurely pace, double-checking the work that had been done.

I was standing there, bowing like everyone else, my stomach rumbling at the thought of finally being allowed to eat again. The only hint that something was about to go horribly wrong was a slight movement out of the corner of my eye. Just a flicker, barely more than a blur of shadow over the patch of floor I was staring at, but in the next instant the kreighvalden came to a halt in front of me.

Her patent boots clicked together at the heels as she faced me.

"What is that?" she asked quietly.

My breath froze in my throat. A crumpled square of paper was resting on my right boot.

The blow came from nowhere, and without warning. Fire cracked across my shoulders, and the force of it sent me staggering forward. The next slashed between my shoulder blades, and a third had me down on my hands and knees in the straw-dust on the floor, gasping as pain broke over me in a super-heated rush.

"You will answer when I speak," the kreighvalden said calmly. "Get up."

Somehow, I schooled my face into rigid lines and started to push myself to my feet, only to sprawl forward under another lash of that short whip.

"I asked you a question. Answer me." She sounded so matter of fact, but there was a note of vicious satisfaction under that cool veneer, her words coming just a shade too eagerly.

"I don't know, Kreighvalden Ygraine," I got out, then bit back an involuntary grunt as another lash sliced at my spine.

"I told you to get up."

I understood, then. This was a game, but I was not allowed to win. Get up or not, answer or not, I was going to be whipped. I closed my eyes, drew in a ragged breath, and tried to push myself up onto my hands and knees.

Crack! "Answer me."

"I don't —"

Crack! "Get up."

That one caught the back of my skull, driving me down and snapping my head forward, bouncing my chin off the floor with an audible crunch of tooth and tongue. My mouth filled with the taste of metal, thick and liquid. I spat it out, and blood splattered on the dirt beneath my head. The pain had become white-hot, each welt of the whip a molten line that pulsed and throbbed with every beat of my heart. My vision began going blurry, pops of black spreading from my peripheral.

To my shame, that was the last straw. My fight ended after only a few humiliating seconds, the slender thread of resistance I had been clinging to snapping like so much wet paper. I couldn't make my body obey me, my hands resting heavy in the dirt, my arms and legs as unmovable as if they had been cast of lead. From the end of a shrinking tunnel, I heard that crisp, deceptively cool voice saying, "Useless piece of disease-ridden gutter trash. Get it out of my sight."

Then hands were pulling at me, lifting me, and I was half-carried, half-dragged out of the barn between two of the other girls.

I regained my footing at some point, stumbling along on wobbly legs for what seemed like forever, back up the hill then past the canteen and down a narrow, winding path to a hut tucked out of the way behind a thick stand of trees.

They took me up the steps of the front stoop, sat me down, and propped my back against the lintel of the doorway. One of them rapped at the door, and then they were gone, jogging back toward the road again.

I had been disposed of.

I spat another glob of blood, not really caring where it landed. Everything hurt. I opened my mouth, testing my aching jaw with my fingers.

Footsteps sounded inside the building, and the door opened. A second later a pair of worn-out canvas shoes appeared, a pair of faded grey-blue pants above them. "Would you care to come in, or are you going to stay out here?"

I lolled my head sideways to look up.

A lanky middle-aged woman was peering down at me, eyebrows raised.

She was waiting for some sort of response. I considered a moment, deciding whether it would be worth the effort to move.

"I have ice," the woman added. "That's about all I have, but it is better than nothing, yes?"

I spat again. Then, slowly, I eased myself up onto my feet. Ice sounded heavenly.

Without a word, the woman held the door open for me, then aimed a wave at a bench against the wall.

I sat carefully, wincing when the fabric of my jumpsuit tugged on the welts on my back.

The hut was an infirmary of sorts. There were no beds, but there were people lying in rows on the floor, and the astringent scent of a medical ward hung in the warm air, adding a sharp note to the stink of unwashed human.

Someone began coughing in the shadows at the other end of the room. He didn't sound very good, his breath wheezing when he inhaled.

After a few minutes the woman came back with a chunk of something wrapped up in a wet rag. She tilted her head, considering me through a speculative squint, then held out the rag without offering any other medical care.

I took the rag – which was freezing cold – and began dabbing at the back of my neck.

The woman sighed and sat down next to me on the bench. "Got on the wrong side of Rushidi, huh?"

The corner of my mouth ticked up. "If Rushidi is the chain leader in hut fifty-six, then I guess I did," I rasped.

"Chain leader... racketeer... smuggler... She has her tentacles in many nets," the woman said, eyeing me askance. "To her you are a... how do you say... game piece? Pawn? Kreighvalden Ygraine has a certain... reputation to uphold. This you know already, I think. Cold, brutal, like a snake... She takes joy in breaking those she thinks are weak. Rushidi she used that to her advantage. You were just the loravash. The distraction. Because of you, there will be a new batch of liquor to sell tonight. Kampha leaf to smoke." She made a droll face. "Maybe even candies."

I shifted the ice to my lower back, letting the wet from the rag soak through my jumpsuit. "She sounds like an incredible person."

The woman shrugged a pragmatic shoulder. "She is a necessary evil. Every so often she gets medicines from over the wire... And even as the newest distraction, you are lucky to be where you are. There are worse places for a young woman like you."

I lifted an eyebrow.

She gave me a smile, her green eyes frank. "Girls like you are usually sent to Hospitality. You would have been made to wait on tables in one of the big houses. One of the officers would have turned you into his plaything and hooked you on Whitecloud. He would have been followed by another, and then many more, and then, when you were wasting away and the fun was gone, you would have been sent to the Medical Sector to be used as cannon fodder in their munitions testing field." She pushed herself to her feet with a grunt. "I have seen hundreds of girls just like you gone within a year. Azion saved your life, sending you here." She raised her voice as she padded down the makeshift aisle between the bodies on the floor, heading for the far end of the room. "You may be beaten, and they will work you hard, but here at least you have a chance."

My breath caught in my throat. Without thinking, I raised a hand to Arramy's necklace, tucked into the strip of linen binding my chest. Azion wasn't the only one who had saved my life.

Across the room, the woman was kneeling next to the man who had been coughing. His coughing jags had escalated into great, ragged, barking hacks that had him scrabbling weakly for a nearby bowl. The woman helped him lean over it, patting his back and murmuring gruff encouragements in Panesian as he began bringing something up.

When the man at last collapsed onto his filthy bedroll, the woman glanced around, her gaze snagging on me, bright with warning. Then she moved so her shoulder was blocking my line of sight. Most of it, anyway. I still saw the glint of light on glass as she brought a slender vial of dark liquid to the man's lips and let him take a sip.

The next instant footsteps sounded outside, approaching the front stoop, and then suddenly a group of men in grey uniforms were tramping up the steps and into the hut, one of them calling, "What do you have for me today, Karalli? Any subjects showing signs of joint stiffness?"

A subtle pallor crossed the woman's face, and for one wild heartbeat I saw her trying to tuck the vial into her pant cuff before she stood. She failed, though, and the vial was still clutched in her fist as she rose from the floor to bow in the stiff, formal manner expected when facing officers of the Military Sector.

The man who had spoken was gazing around like a farmer surveying a herd of livestock on auction, and began walking down the lines of patients, poking at this one, prodding at that one. "Well? Any promising prospects?"

The woman – Karalli – shuffled out of the way, trying to keep the hand with the vial in it out of sight as she bobbed and answered in a dull, flat voice,"The first woman by the window has only got hours left, Lord Councilor. She is exhibiting the symptoms you are looking for."

"Ah, wonderful," the Lord Councilor said, hastening toward the window with eager steps, as though a dying woman was a gift that he couldn't wait to open.

My stomach twisted, but there was nothing I could do, so I simply watched, that familiar numbness settling in. After crossing the ocean in a cargo bin, death had become as commonplace as washbuckets and sealing wax, and my heart had turned to ash right along with it.

A few of the other soldiers began fanning out among the other patients, but some of them stood guard at the door, watching the room like big grey ghosts.

Karalli was trying to sidle inconspicuously into a corner, but as she moved, one of the guards began watching her, his eyes narrowing. He took a step toward her. Then another. "You. Stop," he snapped.

She froze. She was only a few feet from me, close enough that I heard her take in a strangled breath.

"You hiding something, Sectorist?" the guard demanded, moving away from the door and coming toward her. His next words hit like a cane switch. "Show me your hands."

He was about to find that vial. I didn't know Karalli, but she didn't deserve to be punished for helping a man. I bent low as if I were cowering before the oncoming guard. Bending brought me just a little closer to her and put my hand within inches of her ankle. "Drop it behind your leg," I hissed.

Karalli took another breath. Then she straightened her fingers, releasing the vial behind her.

I let my chunk of ice fall at the same moment, the thud of it masking the clatter of the vial on the floor, then I bent even further as I reached swiftly to pick it up again.

Any prayer that the guard would simply buy the ruse went up in smoke when he kept coming, faster, big boots thumping on the floorboards as he stomped to a halt right in front of us. His commands now included me as he growled, "You! Up, now! Show me your hands, both of you."

I got to my feet, moving stiffly as I bowed and held out both of my hands.

I am the distraction...

The guard grabbed my wrist, yanking me forward, his other hand pulling the rag from my unresisting fingers. "What's this?" He asked, giving the rag a shake.

The ice fell out, landing on the floor with a clatter.

"Ice, sir," I got out, letting my voice wobble. "Only ice. For my back."

He held my wrist for a second longer, then let go with a sound of disgust, shoving me back down onto the bench.

Then he proceeded to search Karalli, running his hands down her spare figure, pausing in all the usual places. Pockets. Zippers. Waistband.

"Oh, for all the blue, Wadestone, leave the poor woman alone. She's more use to me than you are," the Lord Councilor said, finally glancing up from his prize by the window. "You two, I need this one in the lorry. And take that man by the door, too. He's got blacklung."

The guard glared at Karalli, looking her up and down. Then he sucked his front teeth and turned away, striding off to do what his master bid.

Karalli remained exactly as she was until the last of the military personnel had trailed the Lord Councilor out of the building. Then she released a huge, gusty breath and straitened, one hand to her lower spine.

I drew the vial from inside my sleeve, holding it out without a word.

Karalli took it, eyeing me, a new, odd expression on her face as she slipped the medicine back into her pants cuff. "So... How did you..."

I shrugged a little and picked the chunk of ice up off the floor, wrapping it in the rag again. "People believe their eyes. Make them see what you want them to see, and they'll convince themselves they saw it."

Her mouth twitched. "I'll have to remember that." She sobered and held out her hand in a formal Panesian greeting. "Karalli Dor-ishan-iyar. Or Kar for short. Thank you. You just saved my life, I think."

I grinned a little, and touched my fingertips to hers, then went back to applying the ice to the welts scorching across my shoulders. It wasn't exactly trust, yet, but it was a start. I needed all the friends I could get.

Watch. Listen. Learn.

I had the feeling I was going to learn a lot from Karalli.