Reclamation(94)

Now she was still wondering.

Arla stacked the crate on top of a container of silicate blocks and turned around. She saw Iyal in the doorway and flinched.

“Zur-Iyal,” she said as she recovered. “Sorry. Was … I was startled.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Iyal stepped all the way into the room and let the door slide shut behind her. “I need to talk to you, Arla.”

“All right,” said Arla, without hesitation, like she always did. Sometimes, Iyal had the feeling she could tell the woman to go jump off a cliff, and Arla’d still say “all right.”

Sometimes. Other times, out of the corner of her eye, Iyal caught Arla studying her with her innocent, brown eyes turned to black slits like she was memorizing Iyal’s motions, and calculating … calculating what?

Iyal shot the bolt on the manual lock. “Arla Stone, you’ve got two minutes to explain why I shouldn’t hand you over to the Vitae Ambassador who was here looking for you.”

Arla blanched until she was nearly as white as a Vitae herself, but her voice remained steady.

“Do you understand what you are saying, Iyal …”

“You’re lying.” Iyal said. “Now you’ve only got one minute.”

For a moment, Arla did nothing but rub her hands together and stare at their scarred backs. She murmured softly in her own language. Then, abruptly, she switched to Iyal’s. “I should’ve known,” she said, without a trace of accent or awkwardness. “You’re not like the Nobles in the Realm. You’ve got no expectations about what I can and can’t do. You’re not so easy to bluff.” She faced Iyal. “The Vitae. What is it they want from me? Did they say?”

“Yes. They say you’re their property. That you’re an artifact that was stolen from them and that they want you back.”

Arla sank into a rickety chair, wrinkling a short stack of polymer sheets that rested on the seat. “You do not like them.”

“No.” Iyal folded her arms. “But right now I’m trying to decide if I like you less. I’ve got security footage of you breaking into secured documents, Arla.”

Arla’s head jerked up. “You’ve got what?”

“Don’t try to go back to the country girl act, Arla Stone …”

“No! No!” Arla waved her hands violently. “I don’t understand. Security footage. What is that?”

Iyal stabbed a finger toward the boxy camera over the doorway. “Pictures from a camera like that one. Security surveillance. Yards of tape with your picture on it, pulling off ninety-nine different illegal maneuvers.”

Arla stared at the camera. Her mouth moved silently and her face went from white to green. For a moment, Iyal thought she was actually going to be sick. Then, Arla let out a cluster of syllables so bitter and explosive that Iyal couldn’t imagine them being anything but curses.

“No more time,” Iyal said. “Start talking.”

“All right.” Iyal didn’t have to strain to hear the new tone in her voice. This was not innocent trust. This was considered acceptance. “What do you want to know?”

A dozen different questions leapt to the front of Iyal’s mind: What are you? Why do the Vitae want you? How did you learn to read so fast?

At last, she said, “How did you manage to access the Diet transcripts?”

“I saw Zur-Allenden do it once.”

“Once?”

Arla nodded. “That is all I need. I was resetting one of the research tables and he was paying no attention to me.”

“So, you’ve got a photographic memory?”

Her lips moved, repeating the term, and her brow wrinkled. “Something like that, yes.”

“So you can read. The illiteracy was an act.”

“Sometimes, now. It wasn’t when I first came here.”

“Then how …”

Arla fumbled with a pocket on her tool belt and pulled out a pair of gloves; then she opened the leather pouch she carried with her and drew out an ice white sphere.

“This is one of my namestones.” She kept it cupped in her hand as Iyal leaned over it. “They give me the ability to remember everything I have ever seen, or ever heard. But they also let me have a base for those memories …” She frowned. “They correlate what is in my head so it makes sense to me. If I have a question, I hold the stones and they find the answer in my mind and give it to me. The more I have seen, the better the answers get.

“Before I came here, I was in a Vitae holding cell and a ship called the U-Kenai. I saw a great deal. I knew something about computers and I’d heard at least spatterings of your language. The stones were able to”—she frowned again—“create relationships for me so I was able to learn very fast.”