Zee put an admonitory hand on my shoulder, and I sighed, then tried to remember what it had felt like when Inisar had spoken in my head. The figure above us shifted as Fourth Squad rose up through the gaps in the half-formed buildings below us, and I tried mentally saying: "Not allowed to talk?"
There was no reaction. I decided not to push it, since for all I knew I could be revealing things which would endanger Inisar. And then Fourth was there, spreading in a semi-circle behind me, Kaoren at my other shoulder.
Zee dropped her hand so Kaoren could enhance, and then she said: "Caszandra has a point. To watch, hidden, is hardly courteous."
All this achieved, though, was to make the Nuran leave.
"Teleported," Kaoren said, and Halla and I both nodded.
That killed the testing session. Maze took me back inside with First as an escort while Fourth tried to track the Nuran. Zee and Alay stayed with me until Kaoren returned, and I suspect if I wasn’t handily sleeping with Captain All-the-Sights, I’d have Halla on my couch. According to Maze, it’ll be a while before a decision is made about whether to go ahead with these sessions. That the Nurans can shield themselves from Combat Sight is something none of the Setari like.
KOTIS sent a ship to Nuri after Inisar first showed up, and were basically "escorted off the premises" by a couple of very uncommunicative Nurans. I can just picture tiny flying samurai staring down the Diodel or even the Litara. I bet Inisar could pull that off.
Whatever the Nurans want with me, they plainly don’t intend to start cooperating with Tare, which no-one thinks is a good sign. Kaoren’s really bothered by today’s (non-)appearance.
Tuesday, July 22
Crack
A day which started mildly, with nothing but training with Fourth scheduled. Martial arts in the morning – everyone pairing off and trying to hit each other. I was paired with Sonn, and Kaoren left me to her while critically watching everyone else. Toren and Dae were paired to start with, and Kaoren didn’t seem to pay any particular attention to them, just swapped them out after a while to fight Glade and Mori.
I still can’t tell how good people are at fighting – certainly not when they’re practicing rather than quickly taking their opponents down. Toren and Dae didn’t seem to me to be obviously better or worse than Glade or Mori, but the way their expressions changed – Dae acting intense and determined and Toren going all grimly quiet – I guess there must have been some kind of difference. Kaoren spoke to them briefly – five terse words – during a rest break and both of them looked like they wished they were anywhere else.
Most of Fourth Squad are twenty (I refuse to think of Kaoren as sixty), while Toren and Dae are a couple of years younger. You can’t actively serve as a Setari until you’ve hit fifty – nearly seventeen – which is the qualifying age on Tare for trying to pass the adulthood exams. Most Kalrani aren’t promoted until they’re closer to eighteen. Toren and Dae no doubt knew Kaoren’s reputation, and Fourth’s generally as a squad which focuses on close combat, but I think they were expecting less of a gap.
Still, with me around they never had to worry about being the worst in the room. I was genuinely trying, and I am a little better than before, but I always seem to make absolutely the wrong choice in response to an attack, and I think Sonn was having to spend a lot of effort to not wipe the floor with me.
The best part of martial arts training for me is seeing everyone in the martial arts training outfits. They apparently wear these because the nanosuits give too much cushioning, and can sprout weapons. They do training using the nanoliquid blades as well, of course, but work on the basic combat moves separately. Mori seems to be the best fighter in the squad beside Kaoren – or at least he sparred with her seriously toward the end of the session.
After that we changed and jogged over the stairs. I dropped far behind, unsurprisingly, but Kaoren stayed with me while the rest of the squad went ahead, and fortunately he didn’t turn into a drill-sergeant, letting me rest halfway up the longer flights of stairs. I told him it would be a great workout for him if he carried me, but he just asked me deadpan if I thought he wasn’t getting enough exercise.
"Am I going to be babysat for long?" I asked. "Haven’t failed to notice that Halla keeping close to me even when getting changed."
"That will depend on the Nuran," Kaoren said, not bothering to pretend I’m not under full-time guard. It was pretty obvious I’d been switched to training with Fourth because it has two Place Sight talents.
"Would Nuran really have any chance of wandering about undetected inside? Doors wouldn’t open, elevators wouldn’t work."
"And scanners are harder to guise against. But shielded rooms won’t necessarily keep a teleporter out, though it increases the risk." He tucked a straying strand of hair behind my ear, adding: "Very likely we will be relocated to Muina ahead of schedule, since even Nurans would find the Ddura an insurmountable obstacle. And, yes, that won’t change the fact that you are going to be constantly guarded for the foreseeable future."
"I don’t like that it was a different Nuran than Inisar," I said, sighing at the thought of constant guarding – for all that a large part of that constant guarding is going to involve just me and Kaoren and probably not a lot of clothing. "Do you think they found out he gave me that book?"
"It’s a possibility." He asked whether my legs hurt, and we had a brief, serious discussion about the conflicts between supervising me and sleeping with me. Kaoren prefers my training to be with First, but that I be assigned to Fourth whenever I go anywhere risky. I’m fine with either, just so long as no-one decides to station us on different planets again.
The afternoon was mixed combat training with Fourth and First, with Nils from Second along to make illusions for everyone to attack. He was being oddly quiet again, and didn’t even tease me about Kaoren, though I could tell he knew by the way he watched when Kaoren was talking to me. Surprisingly, I don’t think the gossip has spread very far. Other than Kaoren and I having lunch together one day, we haven’t been seen out publicly, and I guess those who know haven’t been telling.
Even Toren and Dae aren’t in that loop. Fourth Squad have been politely welcoming toward their two new members, but weren’t being relaxed and themselves during break times with them. They were well aware that Toren and Dae didn’t like that they’d been assigned to Fourth, and naturally they weren’t pleased with that. Or it could be they were still being quiet and non-chatty on account of me sleeping with Kaoren, but I don’t think it’s quite the case. Sonn seemed a little more like I was an accepted part of the team than she usually is, and I even had a bit of a conversation with Halla about Nurans and what they thought they were achieving by not joining forces with the other ex-Muinan civilisations.
And then, halfway through the two squad training session, the swoops Nils had been projecting abruptly disappeared. The look on his face, when we turned to find out why, was such straightforward shock that First and Fourth reacted by gathering as if to fight off an attack, but then Ketzaren said: "Unara."
I was a beat behind everyone else checking the news feeds, and the first channel I went to only seemed to be showing me a waterfall. A waterfall and a chair. That was from a scanner, but the feed switched almost right away to someone’s personal vision. They were in a triple-tiered atrium full of plants and there was water pouring down from a gash, a long, wide crack, in the whitestone ceiling. And there was a woman hanging down, tangled in, I don’t know, some kind of cable, with the water pouring past her.