Free Guardians of Paradise by Jaine Fenn Page B

swallowed hard. He wasn’t likely to ever forget the things he’d seen on the derelict ship. ‘Nual hadn’t been affected because she’d been isolated from the rest of them. Later she told me she’d rebelled, questioning the authority on the ship, and they’d put her in a cell. When the madness started, she barricaded herself in.’
     
    ‘How did she know you weren’t one of these crazy Sidhe when you turned up?’
     
    ‘Because she called me to her. Somehow she pulled me out of shiftspace.’
     
    ‘That sounds pretty heavy.’
     
    ‘It is. I’ve no idea how she did it. She didn’t know herself. I doubt she’s done anything like it since, but she was desperate, scared out of her wits and half dead from thirst and hunger.’ He remembered that most clearly, his pity when he first saw her, filthy and naked - pity which, she later admitted, she’d amplified to make sure he helped her. Even now it was futile to try and work out how many of the choices he’d made that day had been truly his own. ‘When I found her, she couldn’t even speak.’
     
    ‘Had they . . . tortured her?’
     
    ‘Maybe; I didn’t ask. What I meant was that she didn’t know how to speak. The Sidhe on her ship hardly used verbal communication, unless occasionally to reinforce what they were “saying” - the way we use body language. They’d use certain sounds to add extra emphasis.’
     
    ‘So how did she talk to you?’
     
    ‘At first it was pure emotion: terror, pity, then when she realised I used spoken language, she read how to do that from me.’
     
    ‘How long did that take?’
     
    ‘About ten minutes, for the basics.’
     
    ‘Shit! That’s fast—’
     
    ‘Yeah, I know. Once we’d established communication, I helped her out of the cell and we set off through the ship. There were bodies everywhere, and some live crazies, but they hardly seemed to notice us. Then we bumped into a Sidhe who wasn’t mad, or at least, not totally psychotic. There was something different about her. Something . . . focused, I guess. By this time Nual was flagging and I was supporting her; this other Sidhe came up behind us, shoved me forward, and pulled Nual out of my arms. I stumbled and fell, but once she’d got Nual she lost interest in me and by the time I’d got to my feet she’d pinned Nual down on the floor and was staring into her eyes. There was some sort of silent battle going on, and Nual was losing. The Sidhe had her back to me, so I shot her. Then we ran.
     
    ‘We got back to my ship and I transited out to the beacon I’d originally been heading for. Nual said the transit-kernel in her ship was damaged, but even if it had been working I don’t think the Sidhe were in any state to come after us.
     
    ‘I took Nual to Khathryn. I don’t know if she told you, but she reacts very badly to transits, so she could hardly stay with me - I travel all the time. I didn’t have a comabox then—I could’ve bought one for her, but I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of trolling around the spaceways with a Sidhe in tow. Elarn and I had our differences but I thought - stupidly - that the two of them might help each other. Elarn has - had - a sort of misplaced mothering instinct, and Nual was completely alone in the world, with no clue about the wider universe. Anyway, it was a really bad idea. They got too close, and then Elarn realised I’d brought a Sidhe into her home. She threw us both out and said she never wanted to see me again. I took Nual to Vellern in the Tri-Confed system because I thought it was a good place for her to hide, being so busy and anarchic. I was right, because they didn’t find out she was there until they captured me at Serenein and . . . interrogated me.’ They sat in silence for a while. Then Taro said, ‘I reckon she hates herself sometimes. For what she is, the stuff she can do.’
     
    ‘Yeah,’ said Jarek, ‘you may be right.’
     
    Though neither of them had any more than the