Free The Red Queen by Isobelle Carmody Page A

resist, I wondered drowsily at what point empathy actually
became
coercion.
    ‘We will move you to the hut,’ Swallow told me. ‘The bed there is far more comfortable than this altar.’
    Altar?
I wondered, but had not the strength to say the word aloud.
    ‘Let’s keep her here until the sun moves off her,’ Analivia said, sounding far away. ‘Sikoka told me all those resurrected are sun-starved. I am sure that is the reason for the opening in the Hub roof right over the altar.’
    Sun? Opening?
I thought muzzily.
    ‘Sleep,’ Dameon commanded and my mind floated away into unconsciousness like an untethered boat carried from the shore.

Each waking restored more of my memories, but this time I woke in a deep darkness that felt like night, still unable to move a muscle, with three clear convictions.
    The first was that Miryum had been taken captive by the Tumen, and even now lay sleeping in a cryopod in the Galon Institute in Pellmar Quadrants.
    Even before leaving Obernewtyn, I had been struck by the similarity between the description of a sleeping Miryum in dreams set down in the Coercer guild’s dream-book and my own past-dream of Cassy, waking from sleep inside some sort of transparent container. I had dismissed the similarity at the time, for the idea of there being any connection between two women separated so widely in time had seemed absurd. Now it was utterly clear to me that both women had been enclosed in cryopods at some point. All I had learned of Miryum during my strange encounter with Straaka’s spirit fitted. He had said Miryum left the mountains seeking a city she had dreamed of, where she had imagined she would find Beforetimers with the power to resurrect him from the dead. His only access to the world of matter had been through the coercer’s senses, and as she had become ill and then fevered, her perceptions had grown confused and distorted. Straaka had said nothing of the Tumen because he would not have seen them if Miryum had fallen unconscious and had been brought to Pellmar Quadrants and sealed into a cryopod without ever waking. Straaka had spoken of a period in which she had been unreachable, then she had communicated with him in spirit-form, first begging him to help her because she could not wake, and then later, asking him to help her die. That she had not been resurrected in Habitat probably meant she had taint sickness. The story Swallow had told of the twin Speci sisters made it clear that a sick person would not be resurrected in Habitat until they were well, and according to Pavo, even the Beforetimers had been unable to cure taint sickness. Perhaps a person who could not be made well would never be wakened . . .
    I shivered and tried again, uselessly, to move, before retreating again into my thoughts.
    Despite everything it was still difficult to accept that the coercer had managed to bind the tribesman’s spirit to hers, thereby preventing it being drawn into the mindstream when his body died. But given what had happened with the spirits of Miky and Angina, not to mention the story Rasial had told of the merging of his spirit with Gavyn’s, I could hardly doubt it. Besides, it was Straaka’s striving to free Miryum that had enabled him to reach me in my dreams, even as the overguardian of the Earthtemple had foreseen.
    Originally I had assumed the overguardian’s prediction meant Miryum had been taken captive by someone in the Land, but if I was right and the coercer had been taken by the Tumen and put into a cryopod, she was no less a prisoner than if she had been locked in a cell. Even aside from Straaka’s insistence that she had some part to play in my quest, I could not leave her in the Galon Institute trapped in undying, unageing sleep. I felt a visceral horror at the thought of such a fate, not to mention the knowledge that Straaka’s spirit would share it.
    My second realisation, though less immediately important, was that Hannah had been
with
Cassy at Inva when