Raven Stratagem (The Machineries of Empire, #2)

Nija’s demurral died in her throat when she looked at the handkerchief, an elegant affair in matching cream silk. For a second, words appeared in red light upon the handkerchief. Words in Mwen-dal, her native tongue: Come with me. Beneath the words was the Shuos eye in yellow.

She almost bolted, but it was too late already. Although the street was by no means crowded, there were enough shoppers and people sipping tea outdoors or taking strolls that someone would notice and alert the authorities, assuming the authorities weren’t already paying attention. Besides, if the woman was a genuine Shuos, she could drop Nija unconscious with a flick of her fingers.

“Thank you,” Nija said, accepting the handkerchief with a forced smile.

“I’m Trenthe Unara,” the woman said. She fell in beside Nija. “Do you know where’s a good place to get flowers around here?”

Why couldn’t she look it up the way normal people did? Still, Nija had passed an extravagant florist earlier today. She tried not to wonder what a Shuos needed with flowers. “I’ll show you the nearest one I know,” she said, feeling hopelessly stilted.

Unara smiled. “I’d like that.”

Nija wanted to demand an explanation. Why the charade? Why not arrest her? A Shuos agent didn’t need a pretext to detain her. Nija had no faction affiliation or friends in high places to protect her.

She lost the ability to notice anyone but Unara, as though they walked about hedged by walls. Even the sight of the extravagant florist only increased her anxiety. Maybe some of the flower arrangements were used for assassinating people, or drugging them.

The curl to Unara’s mouth suggested that she had divined Nija’s worries, but she didn’t say anything. Instead, she forced Nija to stand there with a burgeoning headache as she picked out a bouquet of fantastic proportions. If not for the headache, Nija would have enjoyed watching the florist put it together. Some of those flowers, with their wildly disparate shapes and colors, shouldn’t have harmonized, yet the florist made it work. Nija’s favorite touch was the lace-spray of drooping cloud-bells.

A hoverer awaited them when Unara declared herself satisfied with the bouquet. The driver, in front, was hidden behind a shaded partition. Meekly, Nija climbed in the back. She had given up trying to understand the situation. Unara sat across from her. The bouquet, held up by stabilizers, took up an impressive chunk of the back. The mingled fragrances, stronger in the enclosed space, aggravated Nija’s headache.

As the hoverer took off, Unara said, no longer bland, “I’m Agent Shuos Feiyed. You know, if it were up to me, I’d fucking recruit you. I put three of my people on report because you slipped out from under their noses earlier.”

“I’m sorry,” Nija lied, although she did remember to use an appropriate humble verb form now that they weren’t pretending to be chance-met strangers.

“I’m not saying the Shuos are infallible,” Feiyed said, “because we’re clearly not, but as one of them, I have to ask. Where’d you pick up that trick for vanishing into crowds? Your school records looked completely unremarkable. Perfect attendance, glowing conduct reports, all of that.”

Nija flushed and stared out the hoverer’s window. Below, the city with its streets appeared to be calm and orderly, with flashes of silver or gold as other hoverers swooped by. No sign that an entire people had been scrubbed out of it. The parks were patches of cloudy green. Sunlight glinted faintly off the snaking river. “Iusedtoshoplift,” Nija mumbled.

“What?”

“I said, I used to shoplift,” Nija repeated, blushing. The shopkeepers hadn’t caught her, mainly because she had been too smart to go after the pricier items and, like any number of her classmates, she knew the tricks by which you could fool the more common security systems. She had only stopped when her grandmother took sick and she felt irrationally guilty, as though purloined baubles attracted germs.

Nija’s mortification grew when Feiyed started making alarming wheezing sounds. “Oh, that’s priceless,” Feiyed said when she was done. “Like my aunt’s always telling me, never underestimate teenagers.”

Nija glowered at Feiyed in spite of herself.

“You’re very stupid for being so clever,” Feiyed said without any trace of kindness. “Headed straight back to your hometown, of all places, instead of some quiet city where they don’t know your face. Do you want to end up in a detention camp? The only reason your people aren’t already extinct is that the Vidona get slowed up by petty paperwork almost as much as the Rahal do.”

“I’ve been watching the news reports,” Nija said, trying to hide her renewed terror. Mostly she’d had useless fantasies of sneaking onto Shuos Jedao’s command moth and kicking him naked into vacuum for what he’d done to her people. “I—I watched some of the executions.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I caught up to you,” Feiyed said. “As I said, it’s a pity I can’t recruit you. Knock some of the dumb ideas out of your head and you might be good for something, but it’d be a pain to arrange on such short notice. We’re headed to a nice, boring, remote campground where we’ll get you to the shuttle that will take you to a nice, boring moth to get you out of the system.”

Nija crossed her arms and glowered some more. This had no effect on Feiyed. Finally, Nija burst out, “You’re a fox, what could any of this matter to you? What are you getting out of this?” Especially since the measure was supposed to punish Jedao, or pressure him, for all its blatant ineffectiveness. There was a Shuos game going on, but she couldn’t imagine what it was.

She had the dangerous tickling thought that the Shuos weren’t supposed to be rescuing randomly selected Mwennin. Unfortunately, she couldn’t leverage this knowledge. What was she going to do, turn Feiyed in to the Vidona? That was supposing Feiyed hadn’t selected her for some extra-gruesome form of execution.

Feiyed’s answer didn’t reassure Nija. “We’ve been holding a betting pool asking that very question ourselves,” she said. “Not like your lot have much to offer us. But our hexarch, well, he’s whimsical. He gets these notions in his head, so we carry them out.”

Nija could have done without the reminder of the assassinated Shuos cadets.

“Anyway,” Feiyed said, her eyes canny, “are you registering a complaint?”

Nija was aware that she’d slipped up on the formality level of her speech. She resolved to speak more carefully. “The Vidona took away Boherem Roni’s family,” she said. “I went to school with the son.” The Boherem boy had had the annoying tendency to drone on and on about his collection of inkstones, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to wish him dead. “Why me and not one of them?”

There had to be others, lots of others, but the initial evacuation, the one she had slipped free of, had been hushed and hurried and full of rumors. When she thought of it, it came back in snatches: the brusque Shuos agents, the carefully regulated lines, the transports. It had been pure chance that she had heard about the Boherem family from two adults whispering to each other before they were separated. Most of the Mwennin had been convinced that the Shuos were taking them to face firing squads. The general sentiment had been that Shuos bullets beat Vidona torture any day.

“You want to know the truth, Nija?” Feiyed smiled. “I can’t speak for my hexarch, but I don’t care about your people one way or the other. It’s just orders, as arbitrary as”—her smile turned cutting—“fashion. If I wanted to be in the business of rescuing people, I’d be a firefighter.”

The Shuos’s frank callousness reassured Nija. She didn’t have to pretend to like her.

“Logistically speaking, my superiors picked people based first on ease of extraction, then ran a lottery because we couldn’t get more of you out without attracting attention.”

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