Sovereign Page 9

  Each minute they waited was one less they could use to put distance between themselves and the canyon, and the Immortals would be back to retrieve their comrade soon enough. She had no intention of being anywhere near the canyon when they returned.

  She held her space, crouched low, breathing steadily through her nostrils. Only a minute, and then she would go in to test fate.

  She needed only thirty seconds. She heard the creak of horse tack and then the sound of a retreating gallop—the Immortal had gone to join the others in the hunt.

  “Hurry!”

  Jordin ran forward to the pile and quickly searched for any sign of the body. The boulders had fallen in greater number than even she had hoped for, burying both horse and man beneath a small hill of stone.

  “Move the rock—look for a limb. We don’t have to get him out, we just need enough access to drain some blood.”

  “He’s dead?” Kaya asked, her voice high.

  “He won’t feel any more pain, if that’s what you’re worried about. Dig!”

  They began to push and roll stones off the pile. The clatter would be heard easily from above, but with hope the Immortals were too far to the east to hear it. It was a chance she had to take.

  Kaya grunted and jerked back, nearly falling off the boulder she’d mounted for better access to the boulders on top. She covered her mouth, staring into a gap between two boulders.

  “I think I found something.”

  Jordin scrambled to her position, doing her best not to twist or break an ankle—that was the last thing they needed—and saw the broken bone jutting from torn flesh down in the opening. An Immortal arm, torn through a black sleeve. Next to it, the leg and hoof of the rider’s mount, battered and lifeless. She felt more for the animal than the rider.

  “That’ll do.”

  She shrugged out of her pack and pulled out an empty collection jar and the large syringe she’d brought. They used the same device for the seroconversion of Corpses.

  There was no need to puncture the skin with the thick needle; the wound was seeping plenty of blood already.

  “Keep your eye on the cliffs,” she said.

  “How much do you need?”

  “As much as will fill two small jars—it’s all I have. Hopefully he hasn’t bled out completely.”

  Jordin quickly inserted the needle into the bloody mess that had once been an elbow, filling the syringe three times before switching jars and repeating the operation. The Immortals would never be able to tell that blood had been drawn from the wound.

  She secured the lid on the second jar, shoved it back in her pack, and waved Kaya forward, over the pile and down the far side.

  “Run, Kaya. Run.”

  They ran, side by side, out of the narrow passage and through the canyon. They slowed to a jog as they headed southeast along the same trail where they’d left the traces of Sovereign blood earlier. It would now mask their retreat.

  They had the blood. All that was left was to put it into their veins.

  And pray they lived to tell.

  “YOU’RE SURE about this?” Kaya asked. “What will happen if our blood rejects it?”

  They’d jogged and walked off and on for nearly an hour eastward, deeper into the wasteland beyond the point where they’d first sprinkled the ground with Sovereign blood. She knew that the Immortals would eventually circle around, searching for any scent of the Sovereign who’d killed their own.

  “Then we’ll know it didn’t work.”

  “Assuming we live.”

  “There is that.”

  “You’ve never heard of it being done?”

  “No.”

  Jordin stood on the rise and studied the horizon for movement against the night. It was as still and lifeless as it had been half an hour earlier. Satisfied, she dropped to one knee beside the girl.

  “I’m not sure this is wise,” Kaya said.

  “Neither am I. But I know that if we’re still Sovereign in a few hours, they’ll eventually pick up our scent and track us down. Trust me, they won’t give up.”

  “So if we don’t try the blood, they’ll find us and kill us.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what if we take the blood and live, but find ourselves dead, like we once were?”

  “We’ve already been over this.”

  But Kaya was brimming with questions.

  “Immortals hate Sovereigns. Will we hate Sovereigns too? Will we hate Rom?”

  Jordin didn’t want to entertain that question. No! Impossible, she wanted to say. But was it?

  She had less than a week. She couldn’t let herself become crippled by questions like those. She dare not.

  “I don’t want to discourage your questions, Kaya, but none of them will change the fact that becoming Immortal is our only hope for survival right now. And if I fail….”

  She stopped short of completing the thought. But she’d already said too much.

  “Fail to do what? Find Jonathan?”

  This time Jordin didn’t try to shut her down. They were about to leap off a cliff—a few moments of transparency were understandable. Perhaps even called for.

  She let her shoulders relax, elbow on one knee as she squatted on the rise, peering into the night. “You’re right about one thing, Kaya: Jonathan is in us, if only in his blood. I’ve always known that. But I don’t feel it anymore, and at times I wonder if I ever did.”

  She took a deep breath and studied the girl who knelt back on her heels, watching her.

  “Something’s broken in me. I can’t find the love I once had. My mind’s full of darkness. You said it yourself. Misery follows me like a cloud. I’m Sovereign, but I feel completely lost. It’s not Jonathan I need to find but myself.”

  A calm seemed to settle over the girl. She finally nodded, her expression placid.

  “Then we’ll help each other find ourselves. Sometimes my mind’s as dark as yours.”

  “I hope not.”

  “I don’t have all the terrible memories you have, but I wonder all the time why we seem to be getting weaker. I think it’s getting worse by the month.”

  Astute words for such a young woman.

  “I think the only way we can find ourselves is to find Jonathan,” Kaya said.

  “Then let’s hope he comes out of hiding.”

  To this, Kaya said nothing.

  “Promise me one thing,” Jordin said. “If the blood changes us, remind me often that we want to be Sovereign.”

  “And if I forget?”

  “Then I’ll remind you.”

  Kaya might have pointed out the obvious challenges they faced if they both forgot their purpose. Instead, she stood up, pulled off her amulet, and stuffed it inside the waistline of her pants. “I don’t want to lose it,” she said.

  Jordin gave a slight smile. Being caught with the Sovereign amulet around their necks could be hard to explain. And yet keeping them near would prove a constant reminder.

  She stood and did the same.

  “What about our clothes?” Kaya wanted to know. “This isn’t what they wear.”

  “You’re right. I’ll handle it.”

  Kaya nodded. “Well then, I guess that’s that.”

  “Yes.”

  Jordin rolled up her sleeve to expose the crook of her elbow and quickly applied a rubber tourniquet to her upper arm. A large vein swelled below it. She took a small pouch from her pack. It contained one sanitized needle attached to a short tube with a rubber inline pump. She unscrewed the lid on one of the blood-filled jars and lowered the end of the tube into it, primed the pump, then she set the jar carefully on the sand.

  “I’ll inject you if it succeeds with me. If things go badly, find a place to hide for the night and head back to the city at first light.”

  “We both know I wouldn’t survive the night.”

  “Then this had better work.”

  With a last glance at Kaya, Jordin pressed the tip of the needle against her vein. It pierced the
skin then slipped in. Releasing the needle, she took the pump in her right hand and squeezed. Holding her breath, she watched the blood fill the translucent tube and flow, sluggishly at first, into her vein.

  The jar emptied in less than thirty seconds. She pulled the needle out and handed it to Kaya. Then released her tourniquet.

  “What’s happening?” Kaya asked.

  “Give it time.”

  She tried to observe any change in herself, but a full minute passed with no sign of transformation. What if it didn’t work, as the old Keeper had once suggested? She had seven arrows left—she could kill one or two perhaps, but Kaya was right. They would never….

  All at once, heat bloomed in Jordin’s head. It spread down her spine as if it were filled with gasoline and lit with a match.

  She gasped.

  “What is it? Is it working?”

  The night exploded with color. A flash of white light turned the night to day, blinding her to all but the silver horizon.

  Panicked, she leaped to her feet, arms spread wide for balance.

  And then the night returned, and with it her focus. The heat had spread to her extremities, leaving her fingers and toes prickling to the point of pain. The top of her skull felt as if it were crawling with a thousand ants.

  She closed her eyes. Opened them. This time, when she peered into the night, she knew she had been changed.

  She’d been seroconverted three times: from Corpse to Mortal with Jonathan’s blood before his death, from Mortal to Sovereign with Jonathan’s blood after his death, and now from Sovereign to Immortal. Her two previous conversions had left her in a cloud of overwhelming peace and love.

  Not this one.

  She felt the terrible urge to run, so great was her fear. She didn’t know what frightened her, only that she was terrified.

  A green phosphorescence laid the night landscape bare before her. Nearby, a snake slithered across the sand to her right, she could hear it. The breeze had suddenly shifted farther to the west, she could feel it. The air tickled the fine hair at her nape, hot as breath.

  For the first time, she could smell the Sovereign scent, strong as spice, like jasmine but more pungent. So acidic it stung her nostrils.

  Her pulse raced and for a moment she thought her heart might rupture.

  “What’s happening?” Kaya cried.

  The girl was on her feet, hands on her head, eyes wide.

  Jordin pulled deeply at the night air, first through her nostrils, then through her mouth when Kaya’s scent proved too much. The air tasted of death and life at once; water and earth, blood and sweat.

  It also tasted of hope. With each breath, ease began to settle in her mind.

  And then it was over. She was an Immortal—or a Mortal, as they had once called themselves—and filled with awe at the tactile expression of the physical world, her senses fired.

  Could she still slow time with her eyes?

  “Move,” she said to Kaya.

  “Move? Are you all right?”

  “Pretend you’re swinging your fist to hit me.”

  “What?”

  “Just do it.”

  Kaya did, in a far too unskilled manner. It came in slow motion. The vibrancy of living with heightened senses flooded her memory, drowning out the fear that had engulfed her earlier.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Kaya asked. “Did it work?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re Immortal?”

  She lifted her hand, moved her fingers, the skin paling before her eyes. Living underground, she’d lost the color of those who ranged beneath the sun, but now she could practically see the veins beneath her skin. This was different, more like the skin of the Brahmin royals than the Mortal she had once been. So then, the Immortals had evolved these past six years. And she was changing into what they were now, rather than what they had been.

  Were her senses sharper as well? It had been so long but yes, she thought so. She couldn’t remember ever tasting the air so strongly. Or feeling the pleasure of the breeze—the tiny grains of sand carried in it, the dryness of the air itself—crossing her skin with such intensity.

  Her whole body hummed with sensory perception. A tuning fork, set on edge. But it brought her no peace. Instead she found it unsettling.

  “Will you kill me?” Kaya said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I’m a Sovereign. Immortals hate Sovereigns.”

  At the sound of that word, “Sovereign,” Jordin felt slight revulsion. Or perhaps it was just the stink from Kaya’s skin and breath.

  “No, I don’t hate you. I’m a Sovereign at heart and always will be.”

  Are you so certain? You missed this life….

  She dismissed the thought, knelt to her pack, and pulled out the second jar of blood.

  “Roll up your sleeve.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE RANGE of emotions that swept through Jordin in the wake of becoming Immortal came in like an unrelenting storm that only began to ebb near dawn. The feelings weren’t alien in the way emotion was to a Corpse coming to life for the first time, but they were devastatingly visceral and only intensified when she tried to resist them. And then again as she realized she didn’t really want to resist them.

  She’d watched Kaya’s seroconversion with morbid fascination—particularly the paling of her skin. The girl might have passed for Brahmin royalty, her flesh had turned so white. She looked like a ghost in street clothes, her steps silent on the barren earth as they headed north in search of their new kind.

  The first shockwaves of visceral emotion and of the color fleeing Jordin’s skin were subservient to the greatest change of all—the change in her senses. The entire volume of life had crescendoed in her ears. What she had barely heard or not heard at all just hours before came full fledged to her now: a cricket under a rock a hundred yards away, the wind sighing over the low hills, the trickle of a tiny stream a quarter mile east. The wasteland, lifeless to her before, crooned her secrets in majestic symphony.

  She could see perfectly for a mile and make out the veins on an insect’s wings as it careened overhead. She could smell the scat of a rodent on a far hill and taste the tang of a juniper’s berries brought to her on a breeze so faint she could feel it lift the tiny hairs on her neck.

  Alive. So very much so that it terrified her, tempted her. But she wasn’t truly alive, was she? Not as a Sovereign was. Not as one who’d died with Jonathan in the communion of his blood. But with her senses blooming to almost unbearable highs, she couldn’t help but wonder why he had ever wanted them to leave such an exquisite existence.

  Or had he?

  These were the thoughts that plagued her now. Sovereigns taught that emotions other than love and peace were merely bodily reactions to thoughts—reactions that alerted them when something required resetting if those thoughts were negative, much in the same way that physical pain alerted a person that something might be wrong with his body. Change a thought, change the emotion. A practice that had become increasingly difficult as of late.

  Now her emotions seemed to be running amuck, requiring far too much effort to control. She assumed Kaya felt the same as they walked side by side in introspective silence. The girl’s talkative nature had taken leave.

  For a panicked moment, she wondered if she was losing her mind to the change.

  No. She clung tenaciously to her truest identity as Sovereign. A weaker will might easily forget the value of Sovereignty in the headiness of becoming Immortal. No wonder Roland had only grown bolder as his kind had evolved, sure that they would live a thousand years barring death in battle or from disease. No wonder the Immortals had only increased in number while the Sovereign population had dwindled. Who could resist such an existence?

  At Jordin’s insistence, they’d walked through the night. With any luck, they’d put themselves in the way of an Immortal patrol or raiding party, a task made easier in the darkness with their expanded sight.

>   But they found no one that night.

  They’d stopped by a tiny watering hole to refill their canteens as the first gray of dawn tinged the eastern horizon.

  “Jordin?” Kaya’s voice cut the silence for the first time in hours. It sounded different to Jordin’s ear since her conversion—sinuous, somehow, as the woman herself.

  Jordin reached for her canteen.

  “Are my eyes black?”

  She glanced up at Kaya and immediately saw the change in her eyes. Maker. They’d gone black in the night, ringed by a golden burst as though they glowed from behind. Disturbing and strangely beautiful.

  And far too similar to the eyes of the Dark Bloods.

  That wasn’t the only change. Her lips were darker—they had deepened in color to a rich burgundy, as if stained by wine. Against the pallid skin of her face, they seemed to pout passion. Gone the flush of innocent pink on her cheek, the coral of her lips. She was stunningly seductive. Her tongue was darker as well, colored by the same rich wine as her lips.

  Kaya lifted her hand and touched her fingers to her lips. “What’s wrong?”

  Jordin’s gaze fell to the girl’s fingertips. Her nails had turned several shades darker than her lips, so they appeared nearly black.

  She lifted her hands and saw that her own nails were the same. Marked. Altered in body, mind, and soul. Her heart was racing but not with fear or even with disgust. So this was what it was to be Immortal. A part of her eagerly embraced the transformation.

  The more reasonable part of her felt defiled.

  Kaya dropped to her knees and stared into the small pool’s glassy surface. “We have the eyes of Dark Bloods!”

  “So it would appear.”

  She might have expected a stronger reaction from the girl, but Kaya only stared at her dim reflection with strange wonderment.

  “You don’t sound terribly disappointed,” Jordin said.

  Kaya looked up at her. “It’s ghastly!”

  But her tone wasn’t as sharp with disgust as it could have been. Or was Jordin only projecting her own hollow guilt onto the girl?

  “Will we forget? What it means to be Sovereign—will we forget?”

  “Never,” Jordin said. “I’ll die before I forget.” But she had heard her own hesitation before the answer.