Nethe ch 2

She sulked. There was no other word for it. This group was her only chance at getting home, so she swallowed her pride and let Bethany tutor her. She could gather information about the humans on her own, through the classes and the library available to recruits for use as a reference and for leisure. 

But all the information she could learn about fae had been recently disseminated, mostly by the news programs. She could not have known it unless she had been living in the human city.

The humans were laughably wrong. It was no wonder that she had failed their test. They thought that her people had a lifespan of only 100-150 years, that they could only be killed with iron (what?) and all other sorts of superstitious nonsense. 

Their tactical knowledge was based on what seemed to be rumors and recycled superstitions from the people who had lived in the area before the Empire built the city she was currently enduring. The only mildly interesting fact was that the superstitions implied there had been contact between humans and fae generations ago. 

Perhaps the now-displaced locals had possessed some sense. Their stories seemed to have the moral of “and that was very sad, so stay away from those islands.” 

Any hint of that sense was clearly lacking from the inhabitants of the modern city. They were utterly ridiculous in their confidence.

Nethe had a lot of pride, she found. She was biting her tongue often when what she wanted to do was laugh and contemptuously let these infants know what she thought of them. 

It was not in her best interest. She was being stealthy and using their resources, so she should not draw attention to herself. She reminded herself of that often. And however ignorant she was, Bethany was a kind little soul who didn’t deserve the sharp side of Nethe’s tongue.

She learned to regurgitate the human misconceptions, she kept her head down when they gathered as a group, and she took petty satisfaction in repeatedly demonstrating her physical superiority at every task that they were set. Days turned into weeks, precious time wherein anything might be happening back home. And yet Nethe sat stone-faced through lectures about civic responsibility, procedures for small group expeditions, and teamwork exercises. 

She started reading the papers that they were given in the mornings, and discovered that there was a ranking system of the competitors. Their scores for physical and comprehension assessments were listed. Nethe found herself in the middle of the pack, due to her very low entrance examination. There was something satisfying about watching her name slowly crawl up the list, day by day.

Yamaguchi was in the top 3, jockeying for the top position. The other two leaders were names that Nethe didn’t recognize. Bethany, Nethe was a little proud to see, hovered around the upper ten. Given that there were about 70 humans in the group, it seemed quite respectable.

She was sitting in a lecture when the terrible noises happened. Nethe flinched at the intrusive sound. IT was a high-pitched wail of two notes that repeated. The educational video kept going, but her peers began talking in high, excited voices. Nethe twisted in her seat to watch them stand and mill about. Some of them went to towards the door, and then lingered.

She rolled her eyes and glanced up at the front. Although the grey-haired woman on the screen was patiently elaborating about the superiority of the Empire’s armies, it was impossible to hear over the din.

So she sighed and closed her notebook. She left it on her desk and sauntered to the door in time to join the few that finally gathered the nerve to leave. Yamaguchi gave her a hard look, but didn’t protest her inclusion. She was too busy talking with a tall human.

“should go to the front and see if there’s anything we can do,” the man was saying. 

“They’ll probably want us to stay out of the way,” Yamaguchi shot back. 

“Then they’ll tell us that.” He brushed his hair back. “But the timing, with the deployment yesterday- I don’t like it. We might be useful.”

Yamaguchi pressed her lips into a thin, hard line. “Fine,” she said. She glanced at Nethe. Her face twitched. “Daley and I will go and ask.”

Daley gave Nethe an amused look. “No, come with us.” He turned and held open the door before Yamamguchi could contradict him. “Let’s get moving.”

Nethe fought down a snort at the look on Yamaguchi’s face. She did not particularly care one way or the other, but she might learn something interesting by following along. So she jogged along at the pace that Daley set, crossing the maze of sterile hallways to the main lobby. It was an anthill, crawling with activity. Yamaguchi flagged down someone she seemed to know.

“What can we do?” she asked briskly.

The man gave a quick glance at the three of them in their trainee uniforms. “Crowd control,” he said. He jerked his head toward the glass doors. “Tell James that I sent you to fill out the numbers. We need to set up a perimeter while we wait for the decontamination team.”

Just like that, they were dismissed. Nethe found herself joining a line of humans piling into trucks as they arrived. They were crammed in to capacity. As soon as they had unloaded, the truck turned back toward the military facility.

Nethe pursed her lips and looked around, even as she was herded into standing ten paces away from her peers in a line facing outwards. There was already a line facing inwards, a distance down the road.

And… that was what they did. They stood and waited. The non-uniformed humans were unhappy, in different ways. The humans on the outside of the line gave them nervous glances and a wide berth. The humans on the inside of the line occasionally argued loudly that they be allowed to evacuate. She couldn’t turn to see them, but it was easy to hear. No one approached Nethe or the humans on either side of her.

The main excitement was when after about 40 minutes, they had to open up enough space for two white vans to enter the area. They shuffled to the side of the road, and then shuffled back into their positions. Waiting resumed.

Nethe thought that perhaps she ought to have minded her own business and remained in her seat in the lecture hall.

She tilted her face up to feel the sun. Idly, she noticed that someone was turning circles far overhead. She visually tracked the black wings, envious that she was not cutting lazy loops that would eventually take her to someplace interesting. 

The bird flew out of sight after a while. She tried to amuse herself by watching humans. Businesses were closing. More than a few humans walked near the line of stern-faced soldiers and made a flummoxed expression before uncertainly turning around. Probably, she thought, they were trying to return home. Unfortunate. 

“We’re leaving,” someone said. Nethe twisted to look at the speaker, a hard-faced man holding a communication device. He was standing at the inner line.

She quickly turned back around, because a human would not have been able to hear from that distance. It only took a minute or so for her to hear the information again, passed down the line. 

It didn’t take a long time for the transport vehicles to return. Nethe got into the 4th vehicle and was quite relieved to be deposited back at the training facility. She was cutting an efficient line through the halls when someone called her name.

She turned to see Davey and Yamaguchi. One of them looked tired, but was smiling. The other one was Yamaguchi. 

Nethe nodded. She did not bare her teeth.

Davey didn’t seem to mind. He clapped a hand on her shoulder. “That was dull,” he said cheerfully. “’Hurry up and wait’ is right. But at least we helped, yeah?”

‘It’s hard to see how that added value to anything.’

She blinked. “I think so,” Nethe said noncommittally. “I wonder if we’ll find out what happened.”’

Yamaguchi grimaced, just a second. And then she said, “We’re going to the media room. By now, the news will have the story- at least, the official story.” Her lips twisted.

‘Is this a peace offering?’ Nethe wondered. ‘Is she simply informing me? Is she warning me to stay away?’

She ran her tongue along the inside of her teeth. “Alright,” she said. “I’m going to get my things from the lecture hall. Then I’ll join you.”

Yamaguchi gave a stiff nod.

The news was featuring an older man standing on the street. Whatever he was talking about was so distant as to be a useless image. Nethe found a seat on the couch as the screen changed to a pretty young human in an office. She began gesturing at a graphic depicting black ovals against a white screen. Nethe was momentarily distracted by the pleasant contrast between the woman’s dark hand and the glaring white visual aid. Then she blinked, trying to focus on the words.

“24 bodies were recovered at the site, in what seems to be some kind of pattern. If it means anything, we don’t know so far. These ten bodies were badly damaged, and in what seems to be their original clothing. The others were wrapped in white cloth.” 

Nethe glanced at the pattern, re-imagining it with red at the center and white around the outside. It was clearly meant to represent bleeding heart vine, traditionally used to denote the boundary between the territory of two distinct but friendly powers. Someone was saying that the issue would be considered closed if the humans were willing to call it even. 

In other words, if the humans would mind their distance and business, whatever offense the deceased humans had committed was forgiven.

‘Given that they’re planning to return to the island, I suppose that the issue will not be resolved.’

Pity, that. It was a little unfortunate that the humans apparently didn’t understand the message. Their approach would be interpreted as aggression.

“-believed to be a rudimentary attempt at biological warfare. The real question, however, is how the bodies were moved into the park.” The image widened to show a man was also sitting at the desk. “Here with us is a professor at Circle University, to discuss the possibilities.”

How they were put in place? There were more than a few ways to do that. They’d either involve a strong and accurate banishing, or a clever bird or fish delivering a spell. But that part wasn’t important.

“Thank you, Nicole,” the professor said. The loose skin hanging under his wrinkled face wobbled a bit.

Nethe lost interest entirely when the camera angle changed to a close-up of the man. She leaned back and gave a stretch.

“If 24 people went missing in the city, wouldn’t we know?” a recruit wondered aloud.

She felt her gaze flick to him. That was information that she genuinely did not know. But he did not continue with a convenient explanation of why that would be true.

Well. Nethe stood and brushed her clothes off. Then she set off to find Bethany, who already believed that she was a city outsider who had somehow managed to slip under the gaze of authorities. Bethany would answer questions.

And she did.

“Everyone has to have a job,” she said. She was cross-legged on her bed, with a book open on her lap. “If you don’t show up or get fired, it’s reported, and you’re either reassigned, monitored, or detained until a good position can be found for you. Due to our enclosed, self-sustained economic model, it’s important for everyone to be productive.”

The last sentence had the sing-song quality of a memorized phrase.

‘This is such an unpleasant place. I wonder if that’s why the humans were trying to leave…’

Nethe frowned, a little uncomfortable that they might have had a good motive to encroach on the islands. She nodded, though, because she understood. “In this system, it’s difficult for a person who has been entered into the records to get off of them,” she summarized.

Bethany gave her a pitying look. “Yes,”’ she said. “It is impossible. Unless you get out of the city walls, anyway.”

Well. That was the plan. “How about births?” Nethe asked. “Isn’t it possible that someone fails to become entered into the record?”

“Really unlikely.” Bethany scrunched up her nose. “I mean, a pregnancy is usually really noticeable. At the end of it, you’re going to have to produce either an infant or a body, so…” she shrugged uncomfortably. 

No one had asked for proof when her little brother had died. She took a moment to imagine how even composed Mira would have reacted if they had been required to bring his body to a government facility to document the death.

Nethe pursed her lips and considered cultural sensitivity. And then she said, “That’s invasive,” anyway.

“It’s kind of important to know who is living here,” Bethany disagreed. The rejoinder was fast, practiced. “In order for resources to be produced and distributed, we need accurate information.” 

She cocked her head to the side. She didn’t like the taste of that answer, but she didn’t know enough to argue.

‘It’s not a good idea to push Bethany, either,’ Nethe remembered. She gave her roommate a conciliatory smile. ‘She is covering for me and providing me with information that I should already know, were I a local.’

“Fair enough,” she said. She let the conversation die as Bethany went back to her studies.

The weeks of training dragged on without any further incident. The announcement went out that only the top 50% of applicants would go on the proposed mission, and the mood among the recruits became desperate. 

Nethe was fairly confident that she would make the cut, but the stress was contagious. 

Bethany no longer had time to tutor. She spent every evening with her nose in books, and the early mornings working on her marksmanship or lifting heavy metal. The gym and running tracks were always occupied in free time by people trying desperately to get a slightly better personal best for the record.

Nethe, who held the records in literally every physical event except for ‘Men’s Run Time,’ (sprint, medium, and long-distance) did not spend extra time exercising. She found the human weaponry charming, but ultimately useless and overly loud. Her time was better spent in an attempt to read everything available in the little reference library. A particularly smug social studies book lacking any self-awareness gave her the hint she needed to understand her classmates’ panic: 

The military was normally a closed institution, with positions reserved for the upper classes. This program was a rare chance for successful participants to move themselves and their families up a social class.

She couldn’t begin to guess what that might entail. But from watching the humans, Nethe quietly suspected that it was significant.

…She also wondered if it was significant that the theoretically less-valuable members of society were the ones being sent on this specific task.

It probably did not bode well for the projected survival prospects of the recruits, is all that she was saying.

It did remind her of the nobility and their games. There was always a prince or princess willing to risk everything to get one step closer to the court, and plenty of fae happy to watch the bloody aftermath. Social climbing was a risky business. A humble river bird had no part in it.

That put her hackles up, a bit. She couldn’t say if this situation was terribly similar, but she was wary of getting caught in a similar game for the human nobility’s purposes. 

When they reached the final assessment, Nethe knew that she had done perfectly on the ridiculous paper test, regurgitating “The Empire’s” position on any number of issues, from insubordination, to naval warfare, to making contact with outsiders. 

(Said positions were anti-insubordination, pro-naval warfare, and anti-cultural exchange, broadly speaking). 

The weaponry and hand-to-hand finals were simple as well. Nethe got a little thrill from using the loud projectile weapon that fired the amusingly useless iron oval. It wasn’t a bow, but it was similar enough to make her feel like she was flouting the restriction of archery to the upper classes. The long knife was more familiar to her, so it was a little less interesting. Physical combat was just plain fun, although it seemed to rather unrealistically expect that all participants would retain two arms, have no claws or fangs, and stay planted on the ground for the course of the scuffle.

Privately, Nethe thought that the humans were not, in fact, very well-prepared for any martial encounters with fae. But that was not her problem. She accepted her commission into the task force and the new uniform that came with the position.  

They were transferred to a boat, which made her feel quite sick. She was not the type of bird that swam. They endured a training course on it while it was still docked- they ran laps around the deck, they climbed the riggings, they learned how to make it go quickly and how to make it turn. Leaders were assigned from their numbers, and Nethe found herself to be an officer in this mad human navy. 

That was when Nethe realized that no experienced sailors were scheduled to be attending the voyage. There were also no experienced military officers attending.

She privately put her estimations of the humans’ survival rate between 0 and 10 percent. This mission seemed to be expected to fail, which was why so few resources were being put into it. That likely meant that it would be a wonderful surprise for the leadership if anyone returned with information about the terrain and what had happened to the missing persons, but that the leadership privately expected very little.

They were, in other words, being seen to do something.

‘And maybe even getting rid of a few of the mouths that their strained resources have to feed,’ Nethe thought cynically. How long which supplies were expected to last was a daily topic of conversation, and a successful shipment arriving to the walled city made the news.

Damningly, there was no education in swimming or rescuing someone who fell into the water. Nethe had been dreading it. She was fairly certain that the instructors would not let her drown, but there would be no way to avoid showing that she was simply incapable of it. Water would be her death, as it had been the death of her brother and her grandmother and so many before her.

And that was why her heart was beating far too fast when the fateful day came and the ship left the harbor without any fanfare. She was trapped. Nethe shut herself away, first in her room and then in her duties, to avoid thinking. If she let herself consider where she was, she might lose her nerve entirely and fly back to the human city. It would mean losing the only chance she saw for getting home.

On the third morning, she stood in the aptly-named “bird’s nest” and looked around. Water, water, as far as her sharp eyes could see. There was nothing that could indicate which way they had come and which way was home. She was powerless and completely reliant on the tub made of wood and the path that it took under Yamaguchi’s direction.