A Flight of Broken Wings, page 23
part #1 of The Aeriel Chronicles Series
He cleared his throat.
“Baaaaaaaaaan!” a bundle of uncontained exuberance flew into his arms, forcing him to stagger back a few steps to try and keep his balance. “You brought cake!”
“I always bring cake.”
“You’re the bestest, Baan! Is it chocolate? It’s chocolate!” Throwing her arms around his neck, Hiya pulled herself up to give him an excited peck on the cheek. Then she hopped down, snatched the bag of pastries from his hand and ran out of the room, flying into the kitchen presumably for extra icing. Well, so much for a healthy lunch.
“I thought I told you to call me the moment he woke up,” Ruban called after her, catching the magenta fighter-jet between his fingers as it soared into his vicinity.
“I texted,” Hiya shouted back with a put-upon huff. “Not my fault you don’t check your messages, Baan.”
Ruban rolled his eyes. He remembered his father often saying: kids these days, with a sagacious shake of the head. At the time he had thought the man was being melodramatic. At the ripe old age of twenty-six, he could totally relate.
“So, you’re Prince Shwaan,” he said, walking slowly into the room, his gait precise and deliberate. Ashwin said nothing, just stared at him with an expression somewhere between apprehension and amusement. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
“If I say it is, will you feel compelled to stab me again?”
Ruban shrugged, nonchalant. “Depends.”
Ashwin sighed. “I suppose it’s just as well. I am Shwaan, yes. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I should warn you that if you do manage to kill me, my sister will have your head on a pike so fast you wouldn’t know what hit you. She can be quite heavy-handed that way.”
“Is that a threat?”
The Aeriel shook his head. “Quite the opposite. It can be rather embarrassing to have your sister swoop in to defend your posthumous honour after you’ve managed to screw up enough to wind up dead. I’d rather not put either of us through that ordeal, if it’s all the same to you.”
After a few seconds of contemplative silence, Ruban said: “I suppose we can work with that for the moment.”
“Okay.”
Chapter 10: The Vaan Court
A helicopter flew into his chest and crashed to the ground with a gurgling noise. Ruban groaned, stepping into the flat with a sigh of resignation. They had graduated from origami models to electronic ones.
“Oww shucks! And we’d just finished that one too!” Hiya cried, rushing over to the front door to cradle the martyred toy in her arms.
“It’s okay. We’ll make more after dinner,” Ashwin said, setting the wiring for what looked like a partially constructed plane with a dinosaur head. He sat on the couch, his body curled into the little patch of meagre sunlight provided by the setting sun, as plastic and metal toy parts lay strewn around him. “It’s amazing, the things you come up with to amuse yourselves. Back when I was a kid, we could never have imagined anything like it.”
“It’s annoying when grandparents say it. When centuries-old Aeriels say stuff like that, it’s downright creepy,” Ruban drawled, taking off his coat and setting his briefcase on the centre-table. It had been a week since Zikyang, and to Ruban’s immense relief, the media seemed to be getting over the hype of the four dead Aeriels and focusing on things that did not require sound-bites or statements from him. In that context, he would be forever grateful to Casia Washi for breaking the scandal of the Home Secretary’s alleged affair with the Textile Minister’s ex-husband. Sex and politics – or sex in politics – always managed to get the public’s mind off more mundane issues like Aeriel attacks.
Ashwin hadn’t come to the office with him since he had woken up. Someone needed to keep an eye on Hiya, after all, and he said he was still recovering from getting stabbed in the wing. It wasn’t like Ruban was going to complain. He had never been particularly comfortable with letting a foreigner – even a delegate from an allied nation – into the Quarters. Knowing who – or rather what – Ashwin really was, was just going to make it harder for Ruban to ignore his presence. He didn’t care how friendly Dawad said the Aeriels had once been; Ruban had years of training hammered into pure instinct making his hackles rise every time the guy so much as breathed in his vicinity. He could feel a headache coming on, and decided to redirect his thoughts in a less destructive direction.
“What d’you two want for dinner, then?”
“Zainian noodles!” came the shrill – and unanimous – reply.
Ruban spared Ashwin a sidelong glance that he hoped conveyed his annoyance without the need for words. He decided to add the words anyway. “You do remember that you were just pretending to be Zainian, right? You can drop the act now, really. Nobody’s paying you to be the brand ambassador for Zainian cuisine.”
Ashwin tilted his head to the side in that way that indicated he wasn’t exactly sure what Ruban was saying, but was going to run with it anyway. “I like it. Zaini has…a way with the flavours, I have to say. A subtle delicacy not always present in the spicy concoctions of the Vandran kitchen.”
“Are you trying to provoke me into stabbing you again? We haven’t had anything but noodles in days.” Ruban didn’t like how plaintive his voice sounded in that last sentence.
“We can have chop-suey,” Hiya piped up from the kitchen, browsing through the menu of the local Zainian deli.
Ruban rolled his eyes. “Fine. Noodles it is.”
“So what does Tauheen plan to do with the reinforced sifblade formula now that she has it?” Ruban asked, standing with his back against the kitchen counter as Ashwin put the dishes away. He would have helped, but he had been forced to eat noodles for the fifth day in a row by some goddamn creature that didn’t even need to eat in the first place, and he wasn’t feeling particularly charitable at the moment.
Ashwin shrugged. “Develop hyper-effective sifblades? Use them to attack Vaan and retake the throne from Safaa, perhaps. Who knows? My mother moves in mysterious ways her wonders to perform. What?”
“Nothing. It’s just…it gives me backlash to think of her as your mother. Evil psychosis aside, she looked young enough to be my younger sister.”
Ashwin smirked. “Careful now, Ruban. Don’t go getting ensnared by my mother’s wily ways. Better men than you have fallen for that over the centuries, and it’s never ended well.”
“You Aeriels really do have a jacked up opinion of yourselves, don’t you? How does she plan to use the sifblades? Not like she or any of her kind can actually wield sif.”
“She wouldn’t have to. Not if she attacked Vaan with a human army.”
“A human army?” Ruban couldn’t help the disbelieving snort that escaped him. “Really? That’s her big master plan? Get an army of humans to be her cannon fodder in some stupid war against her own daughter? In what universe does she think that’s gonna work out? What human is she going to enlist?”
Ashwin’s mouth quirked into a wry little smile. “You don’t know her, do you? How do you think the Exiles held power for as long as they did even after the sealing of Vaan? She had humans fighting for her during the Rebellion; much more so than Aeriels, in fact. Spying on and killing their own kind at her command. My mother can be…very persuasive. If she wants a human army, she will have a human army. That is, unless we stop her before she can actually use the formula to get her arsenal in place. No army’s going to do her any good without the weaponry.”
“You know, I was thinking–”
“Were you, now?”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I know, right?”
Ruban rolled his eyes. “I was thinking…about what Reivaa said that night at Zikyang. About Hiya’s mother.” He shot a quick glance at the bedroom. The door was shut. Hopefully, the girl was already asleep.
Ashwin’s expression sobered. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Well, I was doing some digging. Nothing official, you understand. If Tauheen really has an insider in the government or the IAW, I don’t want to raise any alarms until we have something solid to go on. It would only put Uncle Subhas and Hiya in more danger if the mole thought we know something we shouldn’t.”
“And? Did you find anything?”
Ruban sighed, his shoulders sagging slightly. It had been a long day, and not a particularly productive one. “It’s not easy to find anything on a case this old. Most of the evidence that could’ve given us a clue about what really happened is gone. The case has been closed for nine years, and there wasn’t much of an investigation to begin with. Apparently, everyone always assumed it was a simple car accident.”
“Depending on where it happened and what she crashed into,” said Ashwin, chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip, a look of concentration on his face. “An accident like that would be easy to fake with an energy-blast. Especially if the car blew up afterwards. Unless someone specifically suspected Aeriel involvement in the case, it would just be blamed on a gas leak or something of the kind.”
Ruban nodded. “Exactly what I was thinking. Which is why I started looking into the paperwork. Vehicles leave paper trails just as much as people, you know. The physical evidence might be destroyed, but words on a piece of paper…” Ruban walked over to the centre-table and flicked open his briefcase.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing very concrete, but I did manage to recover some of the files from the original investigation. Apparently, the car had been serviced the day before the accident.” He held out the servicing bill dated February 5th, 2008. “Now, I find it hard to believe that a mechanic would have completely missed a technical issue serious enough to cause a fatal accident. Because there is no mention of any kind of a glitch in the receipt or anywhere else in the records of the garage – it’s within SifCo premises and caters almost exclusively to their employees and interns. They maintain detailed electronic records of all transactions. And well, there’s nothing to indicate that there was anything whatsoever wrong with Aunt Misri’s car when she collected it from the garage the day before the accident. I know it’s not conclusive, but…”
“But it doesn’t seem right. I agree. Reivaa may have been half delirious with pain and loss of energy by the time she started spouting all that, but she described your aunt in far too much detail for it to merely be a product of her twisted imagination. If nothing else, Reivaa had definitely seen her before.”
“And it’s not just that either. The accident happened behind Kanla Park. The place is a hub of activity now, what with the Select City Walk and all the shopping malls coming up around it. But that area was still under construction less than five years ago. In ‘08, they had barely laid the foundations for the buildings. It would have been nothing more than a long stretch of deserted road on the fringes of the city. If there was any place an energy-blast would have gone unnoticed, that was it.
“And why would Aunt Misri drive all the way around Kanla Park on her way to SifCo from the Kinoh Residence? I mean, I guess you could say she did it to avoid the traffic but really, it makes no sense when you think about it. She would have had to drive an extra hour just to get back into central Ragah, and then drive to SifCo from there. Why would she burn more gas if she wasn’t even making better time?”
Ashwin sighed. “Well, I suppose I might as well say it.”
“Say what?”
For a moment, the Aeriel looked away. He looked almost guilty. “Remember the first time you took me to your uncle’s home? Right after Tauheen had stolen the formula?”
“Yes.”
“Well, remember when Hiya dragged me up to her room? I noticed a picture of your aunt on the bookshelf. I didn’t know it was her at the time, of course. But well, Hiya said that she had died in an accident nine years ago. And it just struck me as odd,” he sighed, rubbing a pale hand over his face. “Look, you have to understand. It was just a vague hunch, what I was feeling. I had no real basis for it and no reason to think it was true, at least back then. If I’d thought there was any actual chance of my hunch being right, I would’ve found a way to let you know–”
“Just spit it out, will you?” Ruban snapped. His heart thundered in his ears and his fists clenched of their own volition, the nails leaving reddened marks on the skin of his palms.
Ashwin closed his eyes, releasing a breath. “Try not to kill me, okay? Some time ago – I suppose it would’ve been around nine or ten earth-years – Safaa’s spies brought news about some abductions and assassinations being carried out by Tauheen’s followers on earth. Not unlike what happened with Hiya, I suppose; only on a much larger scale, more organised. They mostly targeted high-ranking officials and politicians, and their close families. For political leverage, that kind of thing, you understand? Or that’s what Safaa thought anyway. She sent some of our soldiers to intervene, but she refuses to get more involved than absolutely necessary in the affairs of earth.”
He opened his eyes, his gaze almost apologetic when it met Ruban’s. “So when I heard that your aunt had been a scientist at SifCo. And your uncle being who he is, I couldn’t help but wonder. The timeline certainly adds up. Had I known the circumstances of her death back then, I would have known my suspicions were valid, at least in part. But I didn’t. And well, we had more immediate concerns to deal with, what with the IAW trying to take you off the case. So I didn’t think much of it then. And after we left, I guess I kept getting distracted with one thing or another until it just slipped my mind.” He sighed again. “I’m sorry. It’s no excuse, but I hadn’t known.”
Ruban was angry. But then, at this point, that was one of the constants of his life. Eight years after the deaths of his father and girlfriend, the destruction of his home, he could barely remember a time when he hadn’t been angry.
What he wasn’t so sure of, though, was what, or who, he was angry with. Was he angry with Ashwin for withholding information about his family? Information that would have blown Ashwin’s cover sky high, that Ruban would probably not have believed anyway, given the source. But information that could have brought him just a little bit closer to avenging the destruction of his family, the cold-blooded murder of his loved ones.
Or was he angry at Safaa and the rest of her subjects, for seeing it all and letting it happen anyway? For sitting in their pretty little goddamn bubbles in Vaan and thinking they deserved the peace of which they had robbed humanity. For dumping their castoffs on earth and locking the door, leaving him and his kind to deal with their mess. Ruban didn’t care what Dawad said. The Aeriels had screwed humanity beyond all justification – and if it wasn’t malice that drove them, it was indifference. And really, what difference did it make, when the end result had been all the same?
Most of all, though, he was angry with himself. For failing, time and time again, for almost a decade, to do what he should have done years ago. Find the creatures responsible for all the deaths, all the pain and bloodshed, and make them pay – for what they did to him, what they did to his family, and what they were doing to the world. And if it was the last thing he did in his life, he would make Tauheen pay for what she had done. He would find her, and he would kill her. Set her on fire and watch her burn. It was the only way he could forgive himself, and the universe by extension.
“What could Tauheen possibly have hoped to gain, though?” he heard himself say, his voice oddly calm. It was as if his brain had forgotten to communicate to his mouth the storms raging through his mind. “By killing her, I mean. Blackmail only works if the subject is still alive. Killing Aunt Misri would only have pushed Subhas to go even further against her.”
“Only if he knew that she was the one who had killed her. Besides, maybe it had nothing to do with him at all. She was a scientist at SifCo. Do you know what she was working on at the time of her death? If it had anything to do with the reinforced sifblade formula, that may have been the reason why she was targeted.”
“Perhaps. But then, why did she bother trying to kidnap Hiya now? She already has the formula she wanted so badly. What more can she hope to gain, through blackmail or otherwise?”
Wiping his hands on a dishrag, Ashwin threw himself onto the couch, draping his legs over the armrest. It was hard to think of him as an immortal demigod with superhuman abilities, at times like these. With a resigned shake of his head, Ruban nudged the Aeriel’s feet off the couch and seated himself in the newly empty space.
“For the raw materials, of course,” Ashwin said, scowling. “A formula alone doesn’t make a weapon. And reinforced or not, these are, after all, sifblades we’re talking about. What’s the one thing you need to manufacture a sifblade? Sif, obviously. Raw sif-ores, to be more accurate. Tauheen can’t really enter a sif-mine herself. Quite apart from the physical discomfort of it, it would attract a lot of unwanted attention. Remember Ghorib? Caused quite a stir, didn’t it? And those were just run-of-the-mill Aeriels nobody gave a shit about. Not even X-class.
“If she had leverage on one of the main power-players of the IAW, then that would make obtaining the raw materials for her little project that much easier. Nobody would question the Defence Secretary accessing sif-mines, or even ordering the transportation of ores for processing and stuff.”
“And he would do all of that and more, if Hiya’s life was on the line,” Ruban finished softly.
A few minutes passed without either of them saying a word. The clock chimed eleven. Finally, Ruban said: “You know, all of this is still only a hypothesis. We still have no concrete proof that Tauheen did what we think she did. If we could get it, though; if we could prove that she attacked, murdered and abducted the family members of key government functionaries in order to get them to do her bidding under duress. Well, if we could prove that, we could have central forces deployed against her – every military and paramilitary organisation in the country would be deployed to help apprehend Tauheen, not just the Hunter Corps. It would become a national priority, the first priority. We’d even get international help. After all, Vandran officials couldn’t have been the only ones that Tauheen and her followers targeted.”
