Numenera - The Poison Eater by Shanna Germain

Author:Shanna Germain [Germain, Shanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857666369
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

In the silence, bees hummed nearer, enticed by the table laden with sweets. One, striped gold and blue, fat and fuzzy, landed on the edge of the taf pot, whipping its wings. A brown and silver spider dropped down on an invisible thread, plucked the bee tight against its abdomen, and lifted itself back into the air.

Talia was too stunned to lie. So she did the very thing she’d planned to do, even if she hadn’t planned to do it quite this way. She told the truth.

“Since the very first one.” The words had no taste on her tongue, and she was surprised at the ease of them.

The orness sipped her tea. She barely moved, and yet gave every indication that she had just leaned in. “How?”

“Because I saw nothing.” Talia shook her head. Put the glass carefully on the table. It was so cold the water had beaded up all along it, making it slippery to the touch. “Nothing about Enthait anyway. Just my own memories.”

“And yet you survived.”

“Yet,” Talia said. She hadn’t known just what she would find here, with the orness. An adversary, likely. A full-out enemy perhaps. Not a friend. And yet, she was falling somewhere in between. Like someone who thought to be all of those things, but didn’t quite know what any of them meant.

“And you continue to survive.”

It was not a question, but it was spoken like one. A single word rippling beneath it. Why?

Talia found herself answering as if it had been asked out loud. “I don’t know.”

Liar.

Not Khee’s voice in her chest, from so far away. But one she knew just the same. The vordcha’s mech had changed her – something residual, something lasting. Even after she’d removed it all from her body, her body knew what it had carried. Had adapted, altered, reshaped itself into something more, or less, than human.

The orness raised her cup, but didn’t drink from it. “Are you so sure?”

For this, Talia had no answer she wanted to give. It seemed the longer they sat there, the more the orness’ face was changing. Her eyes were not as crimson as Talia had first thought. More reddish-brown, the color of sun-burnished wood. Her skin was more lined than it had seemed at first glance, echoes of lives etched at the sides of her mouth, the corners of her eyes, the center of her brow. A trick of the light. But a dazzling one.

“Do you know how this all works?” the orness asked. She waved a single hand around her, enveloping the garden, the table, the city above, even Talia. One of the zaffre stepped forward at the gesture, and she stopped him with a stay of her finger. He settled back to his post near the doorway, unmoving.

“Yes,” Talia said, even though she wasn’t sure what this the orness meant.

“You’re a bad liar.” Talia felt her brow lift involuntarily at that. Just how much did the orness know, or suspect? “I am surprised that Greyes Isera has not seen through you.

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