My mouth is dry. I nod my head. “Water sounds good.” Giffen produces a canteen. Opening it, he takes a sip before setting it down on the table. He pushes it in front of me. I lean forward; my hands behind me rattle the metal shackles against the slats of the chair, causing them to clang. My eyes lift expectantly to Giffen’s, but he doesn’t move to put the canteen to my lips; he slouches back in his seat negligently.
I understand. I lean back in my seat too, squaring my shoulders against the hard wood. I glance at the man with the knife. He’s moving away to stand by the hearth near the head of the table. I’m surprised that I recognize him. He’s the Comantre conscript who was part of the team that came to remand me to Defense Minister Telek’s office. He called me something when I was with Trey in his apartment on the Ship of Skye. What was it—a baboon—boosha? What was his name—Randal? Rankin? Raspin!
“I would like some water. Could you get some for me, Raspin?” I ask with a tilt of my head.
“She’s a corker, that one! Remember me, do ya?” Raspin asks with an ear-splitting grin. It is quickly chased away by an anxious look. He’s worried about something.
“I remember everyone who calls me a shefty boosha. How’s your mouth?”
He rubs the auburn-colored stubble on his chin, probably remembering that I elbowed him in the face in the Premiere Palisade’s rail station. “I did not have to cut my hair.” He takes off his cap, and cornrows of wiry copper hair spill down his back.
He’s one of us—a freak. I’d bet a venish on it. “You’re a lost boy like Giffen, aren’t you? You have the freak gene too, right?” I ask him.
Raspin moves forward to the long, rectangular table where Giffen and I are seated. With one hand he grips the wood, picking it up. Without much trouble, he pushes the table away from him, over my head. The wood splinters as it crashes into the transparent window wall behind me, spilling the water as well. My heart beats painfully in my chest at the sheer strength of him. “I’m not lost,” he glowers. “But me truluv is. You have to get her fer me.”
I blink at him as he scowls at me threateningly. “Your truluv?”
“His girl,” Giffen translates.
“Who’s your girl?”
“Astrid is me truluv,” he breathes heavily, raw emotion in every word.
I blink again. Astrid?
Giffen clears his throat so that I’ll look at him. “We need you so that we can get Astrid back.”
I feel dizzy. “Who’s Astrid?” I ask, really needing that water now.
Giffen’s steady gaze never wavers from me. “Astrid is your sister.”
“She’s my what?” I think I hit my head too hard.
“She’s your baby sister.”
“I don’t have a sister,” I whisper lamely. I have another sister.
“You do. She has risked everything to extract you from the conflict in the Isle of Skye, but she miscalculated the Alameeda and was taken hostage by them.”
He’s not lying. “I don’t remember her—she’s nothing to me—”
Raspin’s face turns red. He picks up a heavy wooden chair and throws it through the glass wall. So many cracks form in the surface of the glass that I can see what is left of the chair only by looking through the hole it made.
Giffen pulls his wooden chair close to mine; he turns it around so he can straddle it, resting his arms on the seat back. “You’re something to her. You’re her ‘Kick-it.’ That’s what she calls you when she talks about you. If you’d gone with me when I came for you, you would’ve met her.”
“So she wasn’t in on your plan to kill me before?” I ask with a frown.
Giffen sighs heavily. “She knew it was a contingency plan so that you wouldn’t be turned over to the enemy and used against us. She was not in agreement with it—she threatened to cut off my . . . she threatened to cut me if I killed you.”
“Wow. This is quite a change for you, Giffen. Now you’re okay with handing me over to the Alameeda because they have her and you want her back?”
His eyes narrow at the bad light I just put him in. “We didn’t have any leverage with you before now!” he retorts as justification to his prior plan. “And we didn’t know where your loyalties lie. We had no assurances that you’d work with us. I was not at liberty to tell you about your sister then. We had to protect her identity.”
“You have no assurances now, either!”
“I beg to differ. I have all of your friends. All the ones you risked your life to save before,” Giffen threatens.
“You’re going to blackmail me?”
He scowls. “I shouldn’t have to! You should want to help your sister who loves you!”
My mouth hangs open for a moment before I snap it shut. “Loves me?” I stick out my bottom lip and shake my head with a shrug. “I don’t know her! Where has she been? I didn’t even know who she was until a second ago. Where did she go?”
“She’s been on Ethar—hidden with us since she arrived here.”
“When was that?”
“When your mother died.”
I try to process what Giffen is saying. “If she’s younger than me, she couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. She couldn’t have gotten here by herself.”
“Her father brought her.”
I feel sick and hopeful at the same time, and the fact that I feel hopeful makes me feel sicker. “Her father brought her? You mean our father brought her?”
He nods, looking uncomfortable. “Pan brought her here when she was almost four floans old.”
“Water,” I manage to say, begging Giffen with my eyes.
It’s Raspin who brings it to me; bending down, he tips a canteen to my lips. He’s surprisingly gentle for such a strong, raging knob knocker. When I’ve had enough, I move my lips away. He manages not to spill any of it on me. I can’t yet ask them the only question I want to ask them. I’m too afraid of the answer. Instead I ask, “When you said ‘they’ve been with us,’ where was that? Is there a Valley of Misfit Boys or something?”
A grudging smile appears on Giffen’s lips. “Pan made a home for us in the Amster Rushes—in the annexed area. Then he set about finding all of us—all the Alameeda males with special talents who were being hunted down and slaughtered—bringing us there. He saved most of our lives.”
“He must be a saint,” I reply with sarcasm.