Page 5 of Possessed By the Dragon Alien
“You may not.” He closed the channel, then called up the image again. 93-A. Terian. The only other thing in her record, which was of no real use at all and barely a data point:Compassion threshold exceeds median. Likelihood of subversive behavior: indeterminate.
He keyed in a private note to Rien and encrypted it.Monitor 93-A for indirect manipulation. If contact is initiated by a member of the Twelve, alert me immediately.
Madrian pressed his palm to the glass once more. The gardens had shifted subtly. The workers in white now spread out around a section that was being redesigned, uprooting plants and setting down new ones. Somewhere among them, the Terian might be at work. His gaze searched among the tiny figures. Hewas too far away to make out features, but long, light green hair would give her away.
He imagined her hands in the soil, dirt beneath her nails, the vibrant world rising around her. Why pull this female from the Falmic-5 auction? Why obscure her records, and why, of all places, consign her to the one part of this empire that had the most scrutiny?
None of the workers had her unique shade of hair, but he found himself leaning closer to the glass, straining his eyes, hoping for just a glimpse… Such foolishness was an embarrassment. He shook his head to clear his thoughts.
He let the gardens blur. The forms of the workers lost in the slow haze of the artificial dusk. The ache in his chest returned, sharper this time. He could not say what 93-A was doing here, only that someone close to him believed this female mattered more than the rules that governed the empire they all served. There was an answer somewhere in this, hidden like a larva beneath leaves, but he had far more pressing problems to deal with.
The Terian female’s fate was not one of them.
THREE
Life, in the strict dimension of fifteen cycles, became so stripped of variation that the hours themselves felt like an endless cycle, like the whup-whup rhythm of the irrigation pumps. Nena was still assigned to the garden’s glass enclosure. Inside, in the clean geometry of work, there was a kind of relief. Hands in soil, eyes averted, tender plants to nurture.
Some cycles, a cluster of the Twelve—the strange, high-collared officials, whose word was law—would pass by outside the greenhouse. When that happened, every worker turned their faces down to their work and angled themselves to be as obscured and invisible as possible. Mouths would work in silent chants of hope that the Twelve would not enter—keep going, keep going, keep going. Even the guards looked fearful. Fortunately, none of the Twelve ever entered. Nena found herself grateful for that. Inside the glass, she was mostly invisible and uninteresting, like a botanical specimen, one of hundreds.
Nena and Lulit knelt side by side in a row of peat beds that lay on the floor. Nena had come to appreciate Lulit’s reserved, careful way of working, and her incredibly sharp mind. This female, one of a species that was mostly in exile after failingto fend off the Axis from seizing their generational ship, would likely have been a leader, had she not been imprisoned here since childhood.
At first, Nena and Lulit kept their conversations brief and barely whispered. But in the greenhouse, it became apparent that the guards’ attention wasn’t on them as much as the happeningsoutsidethe greenhouse. Burrl watched for productivity—Nena suspected the large supervisor was hard of hearing—and only reacted when someone spoke loudly. Add to that the noise of the irrigation and air transfer machines, and Nena and Lulit had no problems holding long chats as they worked.
It was Lulit who further explained the system to her in the hard, clipped accent of one raised in Axis facilities. “Keep your head bowed, but always watch the floor for their shoes. If you see blue shoes, it’s an inspection. If they’re white or light gray, it’s a low-level aide or a courier passing through. They have no authority, so you don’t have to worry about them. But if you see black or dark gray boots, that’s possibly one of the Twelve. You should make yourself disappear as quickly and quietly as you can,” Lulit advised.
Nena listened, absorbed. She was used to watching the stars and their gradual trek across the sky at Settlement 112-1. They told her so much about when to plant, harvest, prune, and she’d relied on them in her old life. Inthislife, the stars were obscured by the shimmering dome and the purple atmosphere above, but the same attention to the stars worked for the people. By watching them and their shifting expressions, she could tell when a guard or supervisor was having a good cycle or a bad one. Which one was harried or distracted or worried. It gave different insights, as the stars did, and it was just as useful in knowing who to avoid.
Through Lulit, Nena learned some of the Axis’ activities beyond Central and the settlements, which weredefinitelyprison colonies, she discovered. “My family had a research post on Otu Station,” Lulit said, her voice tight. “When the Axis came, they took my mother and father for the genetics projects. They took my older brother, too. I was too young to remember much of them.” Her words were like the small, hard seeds in the peat beds: one could overlook them, but they carried something alive within.
On her twenty-second day plucking runners from the seedbeds, Nena’s head snapped up at the sight of a familiar face. Nok9, her supervisor, appeared in the greenhouse entryway. She went straight to Burrl and showed him a datascreen. Nena exchanged a look with Lulit, who worked on the opposite side of the space that cycle. Lulit’s expressive eyes communicated a question:What is your supervisor doing here in the middle of a shift?
Nena replied with the tiniest of shrugs. She hoped Nok9 wasn’t there for her, but her gut told her that the supervisor most certainlywas, and that was confirmed when the cold-eyed female looked at her and flicked her fingers. “93-A. Come with me.”
Nena’s stomach dropped. She placed down her tools, lowered her head, and obeyed. Nok9 waited outside the greenhouse and did not acknowledge her approach. She only turned and walked, forcing Nena to follow. She cast a backward look at Lulit, who stared after her for a beat, then dropped her gaze and resumed the slow, stubborn rhythm of weeding.
The larger dome’s air wasn’t unpleasant for the most part. The vegetation added moisture and various scents, but it couldn’t smother the thin taste of ozone from the vessels regularly coming and going. Beyond the greenhouse, the grounds opened in labyrinthine rows. She felt the difference atonce. In the open, there was no insulation between her and the supervisors. She was always visible. She could feel the sensors in every drooping sky panel, the gaze of the distant towers as any of the Twelve could survey the land from their glass fortresses.
Nena trailed Nok9 along a path of stone, past a grove of silver-barked trees, and through a corridor of low, prickly hedge. There were more workers out here than she expected—maybe two dozen prisoners. Their heads stayed down and their white uniforms were spotless. Their expressions were hollowed and blank. Nena glanced around, knowing the naked rawness of her unease was visible to anyone who happened to look. She already missed her safe, humid bubble. She even missed Burrl’s constant prowling. That felt safer than being out here, exposed.
Nok9 stopped on a round clearing where the floor was covered in a frosted glass mosaic. Five paths shot off from this hub and wove into the lush gardens. Without preamble, Nok9 handed her a data reader. Its screen was already loaded with text, but Nena just looked at it. She swallowed hard and glanced up at Nok9. “I can’t read this.”
The skin between Nok9’s eyes folded into dozens of creases. “You cannotread?”
“Correct.” Nena took in a deep breath, choosing not to add that she could make out only a handful of symbols on the screen—certainly not enough to understand the instructions. “We were forbidden from learning to do so at the settlement I am from.”
Nok9’s lips compressed as she snatched back the device. “Inconvenient.” She added something to the datapad and handed it back. “This will read your instructions to you. You will complete these duties before your shift ends. If you have not finished, you will stay until you have. Is that understood, 93-A?”
“Yes,” Nena replied.
“I will add reading instruction to the screen in your cell. I suggest you make use of it during your off-duty time.”
Nena’s mouth moved, but no words came out. She was beingencouragedto read now, by the same entity that originally forbade it? “I will.”
Nok9 appeared satisfied enough to stride away, leaving Nena alone with a datapad in the middle of a maze. Nena pressed the indicated field on the device and a soft voice said, “Field five, quadrant B: dig out all parasite-infected roots. Field seven: repack the mulch. Field nine: collect fly-seeds from the border trees, document any abnormalities, report at shift-end.”
Nena gazed at the pad and looked up through the canopy of leaves. The noise of the irrigation pumps was replaced by the harsher, more sporadic racket of machinery, ships exiting landing bays, and an ever-present hum from the dome itself.
It took a little more time to find where she was and where she needed to go to begin work, but the datapad was more useful than she’d thought. It contained a map in its main screen that laid out all the fields, and after starting on the first task, Nena worked through the cycle, keeping her movements efficient and silent. She watched, as Lulit had taught her, what color the guards’ boots were, but none came near enough to take note of.
