Kingdom of Cages(153)

“It’s not enough,” snapped Chena. It wasn’t. Nothing would ever be enough until she had wormed every single secret out of the hothouse, until she knew enough that they could never steal another person from her. They were the real reason Teal ran away. They had Teal so scared she couldn’t stand to live in Offshoot anymore. “You know why we’ve never been able to break their system? They have got us all locked in cages. We need to open the doors.”

Nan Elle sighed and thumped her stick impatiently. “This is not about locks and cages, Chena, it never has been. This is about survival, for ourselves and our village. That is our work.”

“You said you’d help me defy them,” she shot back.

“Defy them, yes, but not conquer them.” Nan Elle shook her head solemnly. “The villages and hothouses have been using each other for fifteen hundred years. It is the way it is here, and it will not change for your wishing, or your daring. Leave it.”

“But—”

“Leave it.” Nan Elle’s eyes flashed. “You belong to me until you are an adult in your own right, and I have told you to leave it be.”

But Chena couldn’t leave it. She was right. She knew it. Confuse the cy-bugs with a different scent, something strong, but appropriate to the location—you couldn’t go with a citrus, say, in the marsh, but there was plenty that could be done with mint and loosestrife. Use the concealing scent along with the camouflage suit to disguise both the chemical and visual signatures from her body, and Aleph would never know where she was.

She could stipulate to her client that part of the price was that he get her in through the marsh airlock. That way she could start training Aleph to get used to the idea of her coming and going through there. Before long, she’d have free access to the hothouse.

It could work; she could do it. She would do it.

She pleaded with Nan Elle. She coaxed, cajoled, and, in the end, threatened—to withhold her work, to run away, even to go to the constables, until, at last, Nan Elle brought her stick crashing down on the worktable.

“Enough. After all this time, after all your disasters, you still do not see…” Spittle flecked her lips, and Chena had cringed. Had she finally said too much?

But Nan Elle subsided and shuffled back to the stove, sniffing at the potions brewing there. “If you are determined to commit this suicide, you had better do it before you learn anything else that might harm the village when the hothousers dump your brain into the city-mind. Oh, and when they do catch you, leave Tam’s name out of it for as long as you can. I have no other insider to turn to.”

So Chena had passed some additional conditions to her client, assembled her formulas, packed food and water, wrapped the camouflage suit in a bundle of old clothes, calculated the shortest route, and set out. She’d take the railbike to Stem, duck the fences at the lake-side, and set out overland to the marsh and hothouse.

Nan Elle said nothing to her as she left, and Chena had said nothing back. Everything can be said when I get home, thought Chena. When she sees that I’ve found the missing piece of the equation.

A clear blue twilight now settled over the marsh. As the light faded, the hothouse domes dimmed from white to pearl to gray. Mustn’t have an anomalous light source around at night, thought Chena, pressing her lips tightly together. It might upset the ducks.

Now or never. There was just enough light left to see by, and it wouldn’t last. Slowly, Chena began to wade through the swamp.

Mud sucked at her boots, making each step a struggle, but the waterfowl, ignorant of humans, seemed to think she was just another of their kind and only ruffled their wings as she passed. The frogs and crickets set up their own chorus at her movements, but they did that every time a bird moved too. She hoped that whatever monitors the hothousers had on them would not be alerted. The cy-bugs were most certainly the first line of defense. If they did not send out the wrong pulse, nothing else became active, and the cy-bugs thought she was a big cluster of water plants.

So far, anyway. She wondered if she should stop and make another application of her “insect repellent.” Sweat prickled her skin. She’d be perspiring freely soon, and if the cy-bugs caught one whiff of her real scent, the interceptor teams would spring into action. This time she might not be able to run fast enough, or they might send more than two, and then she’d never get to see the look on Nan Elle’s face when she found out what happened. Not even Nan Elle could get her out of the involuntary wing.

Wonder if Sadia’s still in there. Maybe she is. Maybe, if this works, if I can start coming and going when I need to, I can pull her out. Maybe there is a way. The idea drained some of the fear out of her blood.