She looked at him as if he had gone insane. “Why, Reede? Why are we out here? Is it about the mers?”
“No,” he said grimly. “Not directly. I want you to listen to me, really listen. I don’t work for your mother—”
“I know,” she said softly.
He looked at her, half frowning. But he only said, “Don’t interrupt. I work for somebody called the Source. I do research for him, he brought me here to study the mers so I could make him a supply of the water of life.” She stared at him, silent now. “He—owns me.” He held up his palm, showing her the scar. He had seen her looking at it from time to time, but she had never dared to ask him what it was. “He tells me to do things, and I do them, or he cuts off my drugs. If I can’t get my fix, I’ll die.”
“He—he addicted you?”
“No,” he said harshly. “I did it to myself. But he controls my supply—” pushing on before she could ask more. “I brought you out here because now he wants me to give the drug to you.”
Her breath stopped; he saw sudden fear in her eyes.
“I brought you out here because I won’t do it!” he said angrily. “He told me to get close to you; he told me to sleep with you, he made me—made me do everything. Except this. By the Render—” His hands knotted over the controls.
“Everything…?” Ariele said, her voice thin and tremulous, her cheeks reddening with humiliation. “I don’t believe that. Not everything.” Her fingers touched her lips, her breast. “Not last night—” She looked back at him, her eyes burning his flesh.
He kept his own gaze fixed on the endless bluegreen of the sea. At last, looking out, he found what he had been searching for. He pointed ahead. “There. The Outermost islands. They’re as far south as anybody still lives, from what I can tell. There’s a Summer village on one of the islands in the chain. It’s so remote they’ve barely even heard of Carbuncle. It’s habitable through Tiamat’s whole climate cycle, so they never have to leave it. You can tell them your boat was swept off course by a storm, and you washed up on their beach.”
“Alone—?” she asked faintly. He answered her with his silence. She looked away from the sea, from the distant specks of purple-gray that marred its perfect surface, into his eyes. She looked down again abruptly, with her hands clenching in her lap. “And then what? You expect me to live with them, like a—a dashtu in a stone hut?”
“It’s how the Dawntreaders lived for generations,” he snapped. “Even Arienrhod lived like that before the Change. It’s in your blood; you’ll get used to it.”
“How long do I have to do this?”
He took a deep breath. “Maybe for the rest of your life.”
She turned in her seat. “Forever—?”
“If you know what’s good for you. The Source wants to use you against your mother and Gundhalinu. He thinks they have something that he wants, and he’ll use you to get it. He’ll hook you on the water of death and then he’ll let it work on you; he figures when the Queen and Gundhalinu see their own child dying by inches, they’ll give it to him. But they can’t, even if they want to. And I can’t stop him. Nobody can. Except you. You can disappear, completely.”
“All this … because I love you?” she said, her voice falling apart. “That’s why all this is happening to me? I’ll never see Carbuncle again? Never see my family, or …” Her anguish and betrayal, her helpless rage, filled him until he could not breathe, as he watched her realize all she had lost in the space of a dozen heartbeats; all he had done to her, in the space of a dozen words. She pressed her hands against her face, her fingers whitening. Her eyes welled with tears of fury, of hatred … of shame, and unrelenting hunger, as she murmured, “Or you—?”
He took a deep, ragged breath, feeling the same desperate rage against impossible fate fill him the way the air filled his lungs. He had never wanted this, never wanted her— She had been forced on him, against his will, used like an instrument of torture by the man who had made an exquisite art of torturing him. He should hate her. And yet … He looked away from her blindly, before she could see the same unrelenting hunger in his eyes.
He began to check readouts and systems obsessively, things whose preprogrammed functions needed no adjusting; trying to insulate himself from her inescapable nearness. But his traitorous senses registered her presence through every fiber of his body, as if her every breath and movement was an extension of his own … until he was not even sure how he had come to be touching her, kissing her, holding her against him. He groaned softly as his degenerating nerve synapses shocked him like live wires, the pain intensifying his arousal with exquisite perversity. He held her closer, savoring every sensation as if it were his last.
“Are you… are you going back to him—?” she murmured, her lips soft and warm against his throat. To the Source.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m letting the hovercraft take me down. No more. Let him think we died together.” A wave of terror inundated him, as he imagined the cold waters of the sea closing over his head, filling his lungs, possessing him at last. He forced himself to remember that it would be quick, it could be over in seconds if he canceled the emergency safeguards and hit die water just right. He forced himself to remember the alternative.
He felt her stiffen against him. “Take me with you, then,” she murmured. “Let me go with you. I don’t care, I don’t want to live without you—”
He pulled away from her, his hands tightening over her arms until she winced in pain. “No. Then he’ll win, that fucking, diseased bastard! You’ve got to live!” He shook her. “If you love me, it’s what you’ve got to do.”
“Why can’t we both live, then?” she demanded. “The Chief Justice will help us. Gundhalinu said he knew you, and he could help you. It isn’t too late—”
“It is for me! He can’t get me what I need. And he can’t protect you. I’m going to die, Ariele, don’t you fucking hear me? Unless I crawl back to the Source on my belly and beg him like a dog to give me what I need, I’m dead. And he won’t give it to me unless I give him you.”
“But if it’s only a drug—”
He gave a sharp laugh, the sound of disbelief a man being impaled might make, at the moment of first penetration. He turned away from her in bleak disgust. “The Summer village is the next island down the chain. You’re getting off there.”
“No—” She moved suddenly, unexpectedly, reaching past him. Her hands attacked the instruments, fighting him, fighting them, unlocking the system and putting it under manual control. The craft bucked and plunged as he shoved her away, hard, against the door. He struggled to get it back under his control, but she flung herself on him again, wedging her body against the panel. He felt the hovercraft drop precipitously out from under them. “Ariele!” he shouted; he struck her openhanded across the face in desperate panic. She fell back into her seat, held there by acceleration as they plummeted headlong toward the bluegreen water that was suddenly all he could see.
He shouted frantic voice commands at the craft’s guidance system, pulling back on the manual controls with all his strength, trying to stop their fatal arc with his own strength. He was not an experienced pilot, he had always had others to do the job for him. Now, when it was too late, he cursed himself for it.
But abruptly he saw a line of pale ocher, a vision of rustred and green-gray filling his view: giving him just time to realize that they had reached land, before they struck it.
The hovercraft hit with a grinding crunch and spun like a plate, heaving and pitching, across the rock-strewn surface of the plateau. It slammed to a halt inside a grove of tree-ferns. Greenery rained down on them, covering the windshield with fronds.