A soft click sounded in the core of the device.
Tikaya arched her eyebrows at Rias who gave her an encouraging hand gesture. She gripped the edge of the device and waited. Nobody stirred nearby. She tried to decide if the distant shouts were diminishing. Minutes passed, and a deathly quiet fell over the town.
Rias walked to the door. He cocked his head, listening.
“ What is it?” she asked.
Rias lifted a finger, cracked the door, and peered into the hallway. He leaned back in with a smile, and Tikaya heard the noise now too.
“ Snoring?” she asked.
“ The two men out there are sleeping, and the air has that sweet smell of chloroform.”
Tikaya exhaled slowly. “Good. That should mean we’re safe from being shot or knife-stabbed for the moment. Of course, now we have a lesser problem.”
“ How to wake everyone up, leave town, or even leave this room without succumbing to unconsciousness ourselves?”
“ That’s the one.”
She dropped to her back on the floor to gaze up at the writing beneath the machine. Before, she had been trying to translate it. Now, she just thought about cutting the artifact off. Only one of the groupings did not have alchemical elements in it. The first one. Nothing so obvious as a switch stood out anywhere on the machine, so she poked and prodded that grouping. They sat flush and she did not expect them to move, so she nearly cracked her head on the bottom of the box when they did. By pushing and twisting, she could rotate them.
“ What’d you do?” Rias asked. “The symbols are flashing.”
She could rotate them further, but she paused and peered up at him. “You sure you want those people awake again?”
He smiled gently. “I’ll possibly regret it later, but yes. We’ll need help to tackle the tunnels.”
“ Or you and I could devise some kind of masks, gather as many supplies as we need, take a couple of those dog sleds down the coast until we reach a port, and then sail somewhere far away, leaving the empire to deal with its own problems.”
Rias sighed and gazed into the night. “I cannot.”
“ Even though these people left you to die? Even though they probably got themselves into this situation?”
“ Even though,” he said. “But…” He took a breath and, with palpable reluctance, said, “If you want to go, I’ll keep them busy long enough for you to do so. It’s about three hundred miles south to Tangukmoo. If you grabbed a dog team and supplies, I’m sure you could make it in a couple of weeks. It’s technically an imperial town, but it’s eighty percent natives, and I suspect they’d hide you just to irk us. After the thaw, trade vessels come in to barter for whale oil and bone. With your skills, I’m sure you could bargain for passage and find a way home.”
“ Sounds like a lonely journey without any company,” Tikaya said.
“ Probably.”
“ Last week, you told me your people really needed my help. What’s changed?”
He looked back and forth from her to the dead bodies. “This is only the beginning, Tikaya. It’s going to get worse. I suspect this is also the only opportunity you’ll have to leave.”
That Rias offered meant a lot, but the journey he described would not be a speedy one. It was likely Bocrest would make it back to civilization first and send the order to have her family assassinated long before she reached home.
She rotated the grouping of runes as far as they would go. The crimson symbols in the air winked out. “When I’m complaining later about how horrible it is out here with your marines, remind me I had my chance and was an idiot who gave it up.”
The glum expression on his face waned, and one side of his mouth curved up. He pulled her to her feet and wrapped her in a hug, mindful of her injured shoulder. His stubbled jaw brushed her cheek, and a pleasant shiver ran through her.
“ Only if you remind me I was an idiot first,” he murmured.
“ Deal.” Tikaya wondered if that talk of marriage had been inspired only by the moment, by the uncertainty that they would live to see dawn, or if it meant something more. She lifted her good hand to brush strands of hair away from the cut on his temple.
Rias drew back slightly, eyes flickering, watching her face. Soft breaths frosted the air between them, and some distant part of her mind announced that this was a ridiculous place and situation for a first kiss, but what if they didn’t survive the coming weeks? What if there were no other opportunities to be alone together? What if…
Rias bent his head and kissed her gently, warm lips as welcome as the sun in this frozen wasteland. Forgetting about her injury, she started to wrap her arms around him, to pull him closer. Pain blasted her shoulder, and she gasped at the cruel reminder.
Rias drew back, wincing, eyes guilty. “Sorry, my fault. I’ll go find the sawbones.”
“ No, it’s all right. I was just…”
But he had already grabbed his rifle. He hopped through the broken wall with a quick wave before disappearing into the snow.
Tikaya wrapped her arms around herself. She already missed his warmth. And his last words sent a thrum of worry through her. The man who would come to deliver her medical attention was the brother of the man she had just killed.
CHAPTER 10
Something bumped Tikaya’s foot, jerking her awake. She sat up and cracked her head on the bottom of the device. Her shoulder offered its own jab of pain as her journal and pencil clattered to the floor.
Bocrest and Bones loomed over her. The captain’s presence surprised her. Surely the ship’s commander usually stayed with his vessel, but then this was no ordinary inland excursion.
Thuds from the ceiling announced someone walking around in the crawl space. Probably retrieving bodies.
Beleaguered red eyes haunted the sawbones’s stubbled face, and an invisible weight slumped his shoulders. He must already know his brother was dead, but he could not know she had fired the fatal shot. She hoped. He carried a black leather bag, and she swallowed, wondering if he truly kept a saw in there.
“ Get up, librarian.” Bocrest eyed the device. “Bones has a lot of men to tend.”
After the battering she had taken, Tikaya expected more pains as she crawled to her feet, but she had not slept long enough for her body to stiffen. Only the shoulder throbbed. Darkness still smothered the snow outside. Given the icy temperature and the hard tile floor, she was surprised she had slept at all. She had painstakingly copied the two hundred alchemical elements into the journal and had been sketching the runes on the bottom of the device when she nodded off.
“ Did Agarik make it?” Tikaya asked.
Bocrest prowled around the device, started to touch an indentation, but decided against it. “He got jumped by-it doesn’t matter who by now-but he was cut up pretty bad and left to bleed in the snow. Bones stitched him up earlier.”
Relief and regret mingled in her mind. If she had not asked Agarik to fetch Rias, he might not have been hurt at all. Would he resent her for it?
“ Where’s Rias?” she asked.
Bocrest scowled. “Prisoner Five is making some concoction in the vehicle house. Said we’ll need it in the tunnels. After that, he’ll be shackled again.”
“ Let’s see your shoulder,” Bones told Tikaya.
She eased her parka off under the cool gazes of the two officers. She was surely too old to want someone to hold her hand while a doctor worked on her, but she wished Rias had come back. Strange that he had disappeared so abruptly. Had he felt guilty about more than her shoulder?
Bones huffed and tossed her parka aside. Apparently impatient with her undressing speed, he unfastened the buttons of the black uniform jacket for her. Uneasy, she wondered how much disrobing she would have to endure for this medical treatment. Fortunately, Bones left her undershirt on. Icy but professional hands probed her shoulder. She tried not to wince.