“Do you swear that you won’t try anything?”
“I won’t try anything physical, but I’ll try like hell to convince you to let me go for real.”
He’s already reaching for the band around her head as he sighs. “If that’s the best you can do, I suppose it’s all I can really expect.”
The metal creaks open, and Vi’s head wobbles forward as if her neck were made of rubber. The relieved groan she makes is almost intimate in nature, and then he’s working on the straps around her wrists and arms. Each new increment of freedom, she’s sure, is the best feeling she’s ever known. When the strap around her chest is undone, she’s surprised to find her body pitching forward, and Cardinal is forced to catch her or watch her fall. The impact makes her cry out, and then she’s crushed by hard, smooth plastoid as he tries to help her move a body that’s lost all feeling and strength over the last day. All she can see is red.
“This is awkward,” she says as he tries to help her stand. She has all the elegance of a broken doll.
“I’m a bit new to this,” he admits, sounding all too human for the man who shocked her unconscious earlier. “Didn’t anticipate this part.”
Working together, they manage to get her folded into a real chair, her arms and head on the table. It takes everything she has not to slither down onto the floor. If Cardinal were someone on her team, she’d beg for him to help massage feeling back into her shoulders in a purely platonic sort of way, but the thought is simply too absurd. It’s hard to reconcile the Cardinal she’s researched for weeks with the decidedly not monstrous man gingerly pushing the bottle of caf toward her. Which begs the question: Who is he, in his heart? The orphan from Jakku, yearning to belong, or the brainwashed soldier, programmed to kill?
“The caf is cold, and I drank half of it, but I didn’t think you’d complain,” he says.
Vi figures out how to hold up her head, just enough for him to see her smile. Maybe he’s both of those things, after all. And maybe he’s also the red-armored white knight who rages against injustice and betrayal and treachery and wants to see the monster that is Phasma cut out of the First Order that he loves.
That’s another thing Vi has learned. No one is ever just one thing. The trick is finding out who they are in the moment and convincing that person to do what you want them to do. And in this case, that means she wants Cardinal to listen to her story and take the next logical step.
When she can get her arms to work, she slides the bottle of caf closer and nibbles at the straw until she gets it between her lips. She’s not about to try lifting the bottle just yet, but she can sip. The thought of Cardinal on hands and knees, mopping up spilled caf with a hankie, just about sends her into a fit of giggles, but she covers it up with a laugh.
“I couldn’t attack you anyway, you know. I think my whole body went to sleep,” she says between careful sips. “First Order works a girl hard.”
Cardinal snorts and his mouth twists into something like an amused grin. “So you’re saying the Resistance is lazy.”
At that, she really does laugh. “I’m glad you asked. But I’ll be honest: It’s a tough job. Not a lot of money, no official government support, brainwashed bucketheads and bounty hunters looking for you in every cantina, hoping to get whatever prize they’ve set on your head this week. It’s downright restful in here right now by comparison, I tell you.”
He seems quite surprised when a chuckle comes out of his mouth, but he quickly smothers it. “What keeps you going, then?”
Vi has managed to slide the food packet over, but she’s struggling with the perforated corner, so Cardinal takes it from her, rips it open in a professionally violent sort of way, and slides it back. She sucks on a few squeezes of dingy paste as she considers her answer.
“Hope,” she says. “Knowing that, one by one, we can beat something unstoppable. A giant that thinks we’re merely wrong-minded ants to be crushed. But do you know the power of ten thousand ants? Of ten million?” She takes another mouthful, her stomach crunching with hunger. “Hope, and better food than this. What is it, all protein? No flavor, no spoonful of sweetener. No wonder you guys are so angry all the time. Although I bet your teeth are just perfect.”
In response, Cardinal smiles, and he does indeed have perfect rows of white teeth. It’s a nice smile, Vi thinks, and she smiles back without really giving it much thought. Something about her gesture unsettles him, and Cardinal reschools his face into the more usual troubled frown.
“You’re free. You’ve eaten. You’ve had something to drink. Now tell me the rest.” He puts his hands on the table and settles down as if the weight of the world is on his shoulders. “Because what I have so far…is not enough. And you might be out of the chair, but you’re not safe, and neither is your brother.”
She frowns. “Are we still doing that? The threats?”
“We’re doing that until you give me whatever intel you’re holding back. I’m not going to that assembly until I have what I need, and if I don’t have what I need, our deal is off.”
Vi looks up at him, and the room suddenly feels cold, as if she can taste the night air of Parnassos, feel the sand whipping across her face.
“Just one more story, then,” she says. “And an older one. But it’s a doozy.”
NOW, THIS STORY SIV TOLD ME takes place a few years before all the others, when Phasma and Keldo were both children. Keldo still had both his legs and was the warrior in the family, and Phasma was not yet the fighter and leader we know today, although Keldo was training her. They weren’t even part of the Scyre group yet. They lived with a much smaller, weaker family group, and their only territory was directly around the Nautilus, which was considered a great prize.
Keldo told Siv that his mother and father were getting older and weaker, along with his aunts and uncles. A younger cousin was too small yet to contribute. As you saw in the earlier stories of Parnassos, it was becoming a land hostile to anyone who wasn’t in top shape and ready to fight at a moment’s notice. In their family, Keldo and Phasma were forced to rise to the occasion.
Around this time, life went from unbearable to nearly impossible. The small goats died out, and the already stinging rain turned to acid that burned uncovered skin, and everyone’s ribs began to show through their clothes. Their diet shrank to mollusks and sea vegetables. Teeth began to loosen. Wounds started to fester, and they learned that if they didn’t amputate and cauterize, even the smallest scratch from the rocks would induce the dreaded fever. They were exhausted, their skin pallid and their hair falling out. They’d never heard of detraxors. The family group had lost half their members in the last year alone, and despite being children, Phasma and Keldo were their only hope.
It was all they could do to defend the Nautilus from the Scyre and Claw raids, and even then much of their strength came from weapons passed down through the generations, sharp bits of metal and one blaster that only occasionally worked.
As the raiding intensified, it became clear that the Scyre were losing their patience and wanted the Nautilus. Phasma and Keldo had to sleep in shifts so that one of them was always awake and ready to fight off any forays from older, battle-hardened Scyre folk. Balder stole their small cousin for the Claw folk, and the raids took on a new terror. They lost ground every day until there was practically nothing, and Scyre scouts could be seen always watching from the edges of their territory like vultures circling a limping eopie.
Keldo argued with their parents over how to handle the encroaching raiders. It was obvious their group couldn’t last, but the older generation refused to give up their ancestral home, much less share it with vindictive invaders who wouldn’t honor it.
“You’d rather die than share?” Keldo asked his father one night as they sat around the fire that burned in the center of the Nautilus.
“At least then I wouldn’t be here to bear witness to the desecration,” his father said. “Better to leave our dying world than see some other man sitting on this throne.”
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“You’re no king,” Keldo said. “You can’t even fight anymore.”
For that, his father slapped him. Although the man wasn’t as fit as he’d once been, it left a mark.
“I understand,” the boy said, and he climbed up out of the Nautilus to take his watch and relieve Phasma.
But when he crawled out onto the stone above, he didn’t see his sister anywhere.
“Phasma?” he called, scanning the area.
Back then, stone tiers marked the border between their territory and the Scyre, but Phasma was nowhere to be found. He walked to the edge of the cliffs and looked down, but all he saw was the dark and roiling sea, the progenitor of all his troubles. Perhaps his sister had flung herself out into that great beyond, eager to be done with the cruel world, as Keldo sometimes longed to do. But no. Phasma, most likely, had never considered such a thing.
“What are you doing, brother?” she asked, appearing behind him like smoke with the blaster in hand.
“Looking for you. Where were you?”
She ignored the question. They didn’t wear masks yet, and the moon was full, so he was able to see into her eyes. And she was able to see the handprint on his cheek, which only made her face go harder.
“What has he done,” she said, and it wasn’t much of a question.
“Father won’t compromise,” he said. “Not with the Scyre, and not with anyone. He’d rather die than lose the Nautilus.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think I’d rather stay alive than die for something that’s already halfway dead.”
She put her hand on his shoulder, clamping down.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Sure about what?”
She didn’t answer, just nodded decisively. Before he could question her further, she whipped out her small stone knife and buried it in the muscle of his calf, deep enough to hit bone.
Keldo screamed and went down, and Phasma guided him to the rough stone with a strange gentleness, lest he slip off the cliff into the sea.
“You’ll understand later,” she told him as she yanked out the blade. “But know that it had to happen this way, and I’m sorry.”
Keldo was going into shock, and he could only mumble, “Why, Phasma? Why?”
She stood and dragged him toward the hole that led down into the Nautilus. When he was close enough to look down into the cave, she pushed him into it with no warning.
“Help!” she screamed. “We’re under attack!”
Keldo landed hard and looked up from the ground of the cave, far below. Several masked faces appeared around Phasma, but they weren’t fighting her, and she wasn’t attacking them. They were waiting for something.
“Don’t go,” Keldo mumbled to the rest of his family, on the verge of blacking out. “She’s…”
The last thing he saw was his small, tired, feeble family taking up their weapons, their blades and axes and clubs, and clambering up out of the Nautilus to fight the Scyre.
When Keldo woke up, he was still in the Nautilus, but he was laid out at the foot of the throne, nestled in his father’s blankets. Phasma sat beside him dressed in leathers as the Scyre did, holding out soup. The sound of talking, laughing, and footsteps echoed around him, and as his vision came back into focus, he saw dozens of people, more people than he’d ever seen in one place in his life, happily lounging and cooking and eating around the Nautilus.
“What happened?” he asked. Because for all that he remembered plenty, none of it made sense.
“We were attacked,” Phasma said. “By the Scyre. Mother and Father and all the rest…are gone.”
She watched him strangely, like a hawk hunting for some small and telling movement.
“But you stabbed me. My leg.”
He scrambled to sit up and look down, but his father’s blanket was spread out over him. He realized that he couldn’t quite feel his foot, and when he whipped back the blanket, he found he’d lost most of his leg. The stump was coated in a thick green salve that smelled of the sea.
“No, Keldo. The Scyre did that. They caught you on watch, and I threw you into the Nautilus. I saved your life. We are lucky that they’ve invited us to stay here, to live among them. All we must do is agree to join them in good faith. To fight for them and contribute. And then we can stay here, in the Nautilus. It will still be ours. What say you?”
Keldo knew she was lying. He remembered her apology on the cliff and the bite of her knife. And he understood in that moment that she had, in one fell swoop, rendered him alive but incapable of fighting her while securing the Nautilus for them both. All along, Keldo had argued that they should join the Scyre, but his father had disagreed. Now Keldo realized that Phasma saw things the same way he did, but her method of saving both their lives and keeping their cave had been decisive, dastardly, and unyielding. And he knew that he now had only two choices: join the Scyre with her…or die.
A brawny fighter came to stand behind Phasma, a tall man Keldo had never met but who looked like a leader forged in battle.
“Brother, this is Egil, and he is the leader of the Scyre. He is a good and fair man, and he will use the Nautilus for the benefit of his people. For the benefit of our people.”
“Now tell me, Keldo,” Egil asked, a hand on his blade. “Will you join us? Or will you join them?”
“Join whom?”
Egil stood back and pointed to six bodies laid out neatly along the wall, each wrapped in the fine fabrics they’d carefully hoarded in the Nautilus, filmy gray and too silky to ever use for clothes. Blooms of red shone through the gray, and Keldo didn’t have to see their faces to know who they were or how they’d died. Two of them had machines stuck into their thighs like strange, unwanted growths, and a dark-skinned Scyre woman squatted beside one, her teen daughter by her side with a basket full of waterskins and dried plants.
Keldo went cold, and he later told Siv that he could feel the chill spread down to the toes that were no longer part of his body. He looked up at Phasma, his jaw dropped and his eyes pleading with her to tell him that he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing.
“What are they doing? To Mother and Father? To our family?”
“Those are detraxors,” Egil explained gently. “They recover vital nutrients from the fallen. Vala and her daughter, Siv, use this essence to make a salve that prevents disease and another that heals wounds. The liniment on your leg has saved your life, and this is where it comes from.” He turned away and shouted, “Siv! Bring a tin of salve. The fresh one.”
The teen girl picked up an ancient tin that had been sitting beside the largest wrapped shape, which Keldo recognized as his father. She stood gracefully and walked across the Nautilus as if she’d always lived there. Her eyes flicked curiously over Keldo, and she smiled shyly as she held the open tin out to Egil.
“Will you fight for the Scyre?” Egil asked Phasma.
“Proudly,” she answered.
The leader drew his broad thumb through the dark green salve and swiped a wet slash under each of Phasma’s eyes. Everyone in the Scyre had always worn such stripes, and Keldo’s family had assumed it was to make them look more ferocious during battle. Now Keldo understood its true function: It made them strong enough to fight.
“Welcome to the Scyre, Phasma,” Egil said with great solemnity. “Body to body, dust to dust.”
Phasma bowed her head. “Body to body, dust to dust,” she repeated.
But before Egil could repeat the ritual with Keldo, Phasma took the tin from the girl called Siv and dipped her fingers in. Without asking Keldo the question, she drew the slashes on his face.
“Body to body, dust to dust,” she said.
But Keldo didn’t repeat the phrase at first. And, of course, he couldn’t have answered the same question; without his leg, he couldn’t fight for the Scyre, could he? Phasma had seen to that. Egil’s hand landed on the dagger on his belt, and the Nautilus went quiet as they waited for Keldo’s oath.
“You have to say it,” Siv whispered, her eyes wide and worried.
The salve was cold and thick on Keldo’s cheeks, a dark line hovering at the edge of his vision. It smelled of the sea, of death, of darkness. At least it didn’t carry the scent of his father, for all that it was drawn over the same cheek the man had slapped what felt like years ago, when Keldo had been whole and his family had still been intact.
He looked into Phasma’s hard blue eyes and tried to remember what she’d looked like without the green paint, before he had seen her true face.
He couldn’t remember.
“Say it,” she demanded.
He had no choice. Egil and Phasma had made that plain.
“Body to body, dust to dust,” he murmured.
Egil clapped him on the back and smiled.
“Welcome to the Scyre.”
VI WATCHES CARDINAL’S FACE AS SHE finishes the tale. The trooper has his chin on his fist as he stares off into nowhere, his mouth set in a frown.
“So you’re telling me they painted him with salve made from his own—”
“They both did. That was how they came to join the Scyre. She sacrificed her parents and family to survive.”
Cardinal shakes his head and stands. “But she loved her brother. She avenged his death by killing Brendol. It makes…a kind of sense.”
Vi sits back, finally able to hold up her head and laugh at him properly. “Oh, is that what she was doing when she murdered Brendol? Avenging her brother? Funny, I thought she was getting rid of the only witness who knew her true past back on Parnassos. Who knew how far she would go to survive and succeed. Did she protest when Brendol slaughtered her people? Did she beg for peace, or speak up for her warriors? Or did she consider it a tidy way to begin her new life with the First Order? It’s the same way she joined the Scyre. She made a sacrifice, cut all ties, and pledged her allegiance to the stronger clan.”
He slashes a hand between them as if to erase what he’s heard. “This doesn’t help me. Just because I’m convinced she’s a traitor doesn’t mean my superiors will care. They obviously don’t.”