Page 73 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

“Even assuming that you could persuade the Council to send any here,” Pritkin said, “and that their magic worked well enough to help us, and that the fey wouldn’t rebel harder at a demon army than one made up of their slaves, we would have to take the chance that they weren’t working for our enemies.”

“But they’re on the damned menu! The gods want them more than us. It would be like a cow working for a butcher!”

“Yes, but most aren’t very fat cows and wouldn’t make much of a meal for their new overlords. But they might be useful in rounding up others who would.”

“God.”

“That’s how the world works, Cassie, every world. Including this one.”

And yes, it was.

And that didn’t change a damned thing.

“I’m still not going,” I told him flatly.

“I know.”

He kissed me again, and I didn’t have to ask the obvious question because it was all there. He wouldn’t go without me. He wouldn’t leave me here.

Which meant that my blind faith in an alien goddess might get both of us killed.

It had already gotten Mircea lost in another world, and I wasn’t sure I could get him back. Yet I’d sent his daughter there after him. Had I sent her to her death, too?

I didn’t know, just like I never knew anything anymore. Gertie, what if you were wrong about me? I thought desperately. What if we were both horribly wrong?

“Don’t do that,” Pritkin said, pulling back. I guessed that what I was feeling was in my kiss, too.

And then it was in more than that. A chill shot down my body, making my hands shake, my teeth want to chatter, and tears leap to my eyes when I couldn’t afford them, when I couldn’t be this weak! Not now, maybe not ever, but it never seemed to end, not just the war but the pressure. The doubt. The ever-present and all-consuming fear that I was getting this wrong.

What if Pritkin was right?

“Maybe we can win without the army,” I whispered.

And without warning, the world fell away.

I assumed an attack because, of course, I did. That was all we’d had here! But this didn’t feel like one.

It took me another moment to say what it felt like and to realize what was going on, even though I’d been on this ride before. But if this was the Common, the collective consciousness that Faerie shared with her children, it was more chaotic than last time. A lot more.

Usually, most fey experienced it as a flashback: they’d be at a centuries-old tavern and suddenly recall what the local wine tasted like or how bad the stew was, even though they’d never passed that way.

But an ancestor had, and had accidentally “uploaded” the memory to the Common, the hive mind that all fey participated in whether they liked it or not. From what I understood of their religion, they believed that all of them were pieces of Faerie’s soul that had been broken off and given bodies to go out and experience life. And that, after death, they would return to her with the knowledge they had gained.

In the meantime, they were still attached to her on some level and communicated back what they were feeling, seeing, and hearing. And, sometimes, it went both ways, with individual fey getting flashes of memory that wasn’t theirs. They would suddenly know directions to a place they’d never been, recognize someone they had never met, or taste that wine their ancestor had drunk a millennium ago. For them, such flashbacks usually lasted a few seconds or less, but Faerie was like the mainframe of this particular computer, and she got it all.

And was now showing some of it to us, as she had a few times before.

Only this wasn’t the crystal clear version I’d seen on those occasions, which had felt almost like being there. This . . . I didn’t know what this was. Other than dizzying, since we were rocketing through the palace, tearing down misty corridors and passing through indistinct walls and ceilings like they weren’t even there.

And then through the kitchens again, along that same suffocating corridor cut through solid rock, and now scarred with spell-blackened patches on the walls and what looked like drying blood splatter on the floor. And finally, down a dizzying staircase, through a warded wall that I could swear I felt on my skin, rough-hewn and rock-hard with a biting electric veneer, even as we were dragged through the middle of it. And out into—

I wasn’t sure. But it looked like another of those rock-cut storerooms that had been turned into a triage center. Some of Rhosier’s people were on cots groaning by the walls; others were getting bandaged up by some of the bread bakers from earlier, stoic-looking women with nimble fingers who wrapped bandages as quickly as they’d kneaded dough; and some were in a corner with sheets covering their faces, being sobbed over by what I guessed were family members, who must have just been told what had happened.

I saw one woman launch herself onto a soot-covered man, screaming and beating on him, trying to force him to wake up when he never would, and having to be dragged back by others while yelling and clawing at them—

“He’s fine, he’s fine, I know he’s fine—”

It was horrible everywhere I looked, not least because the visual wasn’t the only part of this feed having problems. The voices echoed oddly, with parts weirdly loud and others almost silent. I saw a woman screaming but could barely hear her while a man’s body being dragged over to the pile of corpses scraped deafeningly loud on the floor.

---