Chapter 893: I’ll Share! [Bonus - ]

Chapter 893: I’ll Share! [Bonus Chapter]

Da Silva stared at the bag, and Kara watched the slow understanding dawn across her face as she realized exactly what was sitting on the table in front of her.

…It was evidence of a Columbian state-backed operation running inside Amazonian borders, far bigger than a few poachers, with names and numbers and paper trails leading straight back to Vanderbilt’s boardroom, and with it, Da Silva could walk into the next World Council session and burn Columbia to the ground in front of every nation on Earth.

“I was going to give these to you anyway, of course,” Aki went on, softly and sweetly. “As a gift, because we’re friends.”

She folded her hands on the table and smiled up at Da Silva with her eyes wide and earnest.

“But if Amazon’s going to take twenty-five percent… well, I suppose Blessed Land would need to hold onto anything valuable we can find to make up the difference. I’m sure the World Council would be very interested in what’s on them, if we brought them in ourselves…”

Da Silva’s mouth slowly closed, Maya made a tiny strangled noise and stared at the table, and Leona set down her glass, put her face in her hand and let out a long admiring breath.

“…Of course,” Leona muttered into her palm. “Of course she did. I don’t know why any of us expected anything else at this point…”

Da Silva looked from the bag to Aki’s sweet, innocent smile and back again, and Kara watched every single counter-argument die behind her eyes, one after another.

If she pushed for twenty-five percent, she lost the evidence, and Aki would hand it to the Council herself, which meant Blessed Land, not Amazon, would be the one standing in front of the world exposing Columbia.

If she accepted ten percent, she walked away with the most damaging political weapon she’d held in years.

’Outplayed again,’ Da Silva thought, closing her eyes. ’By the same girl, at my own dinner table… I’m never living this down…’

She let out a long breath through her nose.

“…Ten percent,” she said.

“Oh, Valeria!” Aki beamed, and slid the bag across the table to her. “Thank you so much. I knew you’d understand…”

Da Silva took the bag and looked down at it in her hands, and then, despite herself, a dry, rough laugh escaped her.

“You’re terrifying, little bird,” she said. “You do know that, don’t you?”

“I learned from the best,” Aki said, and glanced sideways at Kara with a tiny smile.

Kara grinned back at her.

’Well well, that’s my princess… As long as I’m not on the receiving end of that of course.’

Then Da Silva pulled her tablet across the table, plugged the first of the drives into it and started scrolling, and the dry smile slowly faded from her face.

“Valeria?” Aki asked, leaning forward. “What is it? What did you find?”

Da Silva kept scrolling with her jaw tightening, and only after a long moment did she turn the tablet around so the others could see a single line buried in a list of payments, a transfer to an account with no name on it, only a string of numbers ending in a small cipher mark that every head of state in the world would recognize.

“That’s a World Council Elite seal,” Leona said quietly, and the warmth went out of the terrace like a candle being snuffed.

Lara set her glass down slowly.

“So it’s true, then,” She said with her voice sounding cold. “One of them really did sell my forest out…”

Nobody spoke for a long moment, and Kara leaned back in her chair with her arm folded behind her head and looked at the little cipher on the screen through half-lidded purple eyes.

’Someone on the Council’s been selling toys to Vanderbilt,’ she thought. ’And they were stupid enough to leave a receipt.’

She smiled slowly.

’Can’t wait to find out who…’

Later, when the jug was empty and Maya had fallen asleep in her chair with her head tipped back and her mouth open, Kara wandered out to the far end of the terrace where the railing hung right out over the water.

The river was black and wide and glittering below her, the lights of Nova Manaus shimmered across it in long golden streaks, and a warm wind drifted off the water, smelling of rain and flowers.

She heard boots on the wooden planks behind her and stayed facing the river until Da Silva stopped beside her at the railing, and for a while, the two of them just stood there side by side, looking out at the city with the soft murmur of the river beneath them.

“You let her do that,” Da Silva said finally. “At the table…”

“Do what, Valeria?” Kara asked, though the little curl at the corner of her mouth said she knew perfectly well.

“Take me apart.” Da Silva’s voice was dry, with no anger in it at all. “You knew exactly what she was going to do with that bag the moment I said twenty-five. I saw your face, and you just sat back and watched like it was a movie…”

“She didn’t need my help,” Kara said simply. “She never does, really. She just likes having me there when she does it…”

Da Silva was quiet for a moment.

“She’s changed,” she said. “Two years I’ve known her, and for two years, I watched her get crushed by that court and answered her messages at three in the morning when she couldn’t stop crying… and now look at her. She’s a Lord, she’s strong and she takes me apart at my own table and smiles while she does it.”

She glanced sideways at Kara. “That’s you, isn’t it? You did that to her…”

“She did that,” Kara said. “I just stood next to her while she did it.”

Da Silva looked at her for a long moment, then back out at the river, and the corner of her scarred mouth twitched.

“You slammed a door in my face, you know,” she said. “I’m still pissed off about it…”

“I did,” Kara said, without the slightest trace of regret, watching a water-taxi slide across the glittering river below.

“Why?” Da Silva asked, and this time there was no edge in her voice at all, only honest curiosity. “I’ve been wondering for weeks. I’ve gone over it a hundred times in my head, and I still don’t understand it.”

Kara thought about it honestly before she answered.

“You were going to use her,” she said. “You came to that door to use your friendship with her to tie Amazonia to Blessed Land, and I didn’t like it, so I shut the door.”

She shrugged her one shoulder.

“And honestly, your face when it closed was really, really funny. I still think about it sometimes when I’m bored…”

Da Silva let out a short, startled laugh.

“Nobody’s ever done that to me,” she said. “Well nobody at all, not even the members of the world council but you just shut it on me like I was some salesman knocking on your door… Where do you get this audacity?”

“You were a salesman, Valeria,” Kara said. “A very pretty one in a very nice coat, but still a salesman… As for where I get this audacity from, I was born with pretty big balls.”

Da Silva laughed again, longer this time, and when it faded, she went quiet with her fingers curling around the railing.

“Do you know what the worst part is?” she said softly. “I’ve spent fifteen years at the top of this country surrounded by men who were either afraid of me or trying to use me… generals, politicians, rich men with soft hands, and not one of them ever had the nerve to tell me no.”

She turned her head and met Kara’s eyes looking a little rueful.

“And the one person who finally does slam a door in my face… is you.”

The wind lifted a loose strand of black hair across Da Silva’s scarred cheek, and the golden lights from the city caught the sharp line of her jaw, and for a moment, she looked less like a High Marshal and more like a tired very beautiful woman standing on a balcony at night.

’Ah… are all these Amazonia women trying to seduce me with their looks or what?’

Silas wouldn’t be swayed by their looks but their personalities… well that was a different situation.

“Is that a problem, Valeria?” Kara asked quietly.

Da Silva held her gaze.

“I haven’t decided yet…”

The space between them seemed to grow smaller.

“There you are, handsome…”

Lara appeared out of nowhere at Kara’s other side, draped in her oversized black shirt with a mango in one hand, slid her arm around Kara’s waist without asking, pressed her cheek against the top of Kara’s head and smiled sweetly across at Da Silva.

“Valeria,” she said. “It’s very late. Old women need their sleep, don’t they?”

Da Silva’s eye twitched violently.

“I’m forty-two, Lara, you don’t need to rub it in…”

“Exactly,” Lara said, and took a bite of her mango.

Da Silva looked at Lara’s arm around Kara’s waist, then at Kara, who looked back at her with an apologetic amused expression, and she pushed off the railing with a short sharp breath.

“Goodnight, Lord Vespera,” she said stiffly, and walked back inside.

Kara watched her go, then tilted her head up at the woman wrapped around her.

“You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

“Of course I did,” Lara purred into her hair. “She was getting too close… I waited three hundred years for something interesting to walk into my forest, handsome, and Valeria’s had thirty years to find her own. I’m not sharing…”

“If you want me, you’re going to have to share me with a lot of people actually…”

“I don’t mind sharing!”

’E-eh… but you just sai—?’ Kara looked into Lara’s eyes and flinched. ’I need to get away from this woman!’

…

Later, Kara found Aki on the roof.

There was a narrow ladder at the side of the house that led up onto the flat stone roof, and Aki was sitting at the very edge of it with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, looking out over the river and the glittering towers of the city beyond.

Kara climbed up and sat down beside her without a word, and the night around them was warm and soft and full of the sounds of the river, the slow lap of water against the stone below, the distant hum of boats and the deep echoing call of a bird somewhere far off.

“I saw Lara hug you…” Aki said quietly, without looking at her.

“You saw that, huh?” Kara said, wincing a little. “I was kind of hoping you were already asleep…”

“I see everything,” Aki said, with a tiny trace of a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “You said so yourself at the Insectarium. You always see me looking… well, I always see you too, Kara.”

Kara laughed softly, and they sat in silence for a while until Aki spoke again quietly.

“Kara… can I ask you something?”

“Always, princess,” Kara said, leaning back on her hand and tilting her head toward her. “You never have to ask if you can ask.”

“Lara knows,” Aki said. “About you, and what you really are… She saw you in the Domain.”

She picked at a loose thread on the hem of her dress.

“Valeria likes you, I can tell. Lara likes you. Maya looks at you like you hung the moon… and they’re all so strong and tall and beautiful, and they’ve all known you for, what, a day?” She swallowed. “And I’m…”

She stopped, and Kara turned her head to look at her.

“You’re what?” she asked gently, and waited, because she could tell Aki needed to say it out loud.

“I’m just me…” Aki whispered.

Kara stayed quiet for a moment, then reached over with her one hand, gently turned Aki’s chin toward her and looked her straight in the eyes.

“Aki,” she said. “You turned down your father’s name in front of the whole World Council. You knocked out your sister after she yielded and told the magistrate your hand slipped… You cut a dome of solid stone in half with a sword you secretly learned to make out of starlight, and an hour ago, you took the High Marshal of Amazonia apart at her own dinner table with a bag of hard drives and a smile and that’s just all the things you did in a day or two, I haven’t even began listing the things you’ve been doing since I met you.”

Her thumb brushed lightly along Aki’s jaw. “There’s no ’just’ about you, Aki… There never has been.”

Aki’s eyes went very bright.

“And besides,” Kara added, her voice dropping into that low, lazy tease that always made Aki’s heart stumble, “none of them have ever gone to war over a beetle for me…”

Aki let out a startled wet little laugh and pressed her forehead against Kara’s shoulder.

“You’re wicked, you know that?” she mumbled into the wool. “You’re the worst person I know…”

“I know, princess,” Kara said, smiling into her hair. “And you love it anyway…”

Aki stayed there for a long time, breathing slowly with her hand curled into the black wool of Kara’s sleeve, then lifted her head and looked at Kara’s face in the dim golden light from the city, the sharp line of her jaw and the purple eyes watching her.

She leaned in slowly and pressed a soft shy kiss against the corner of Kara’s cheek, barely a touch that lasted half a heartbeat, and when she pulled back, her whole face was burning crimson and her eyes were enormous.

Kara looked at her for a long quiet moment, then slid her arm around Aki’s waist, pulled her in close against her side and rested her chin on top of Aki’s head.

“Better,” she murmured. “But you missed…”

Aki made a tiny strangled noise into Kara’s coat, Kara laughed softly into her hair, and neither of them moved for a very long time while the river flowed on below them and the lights of Nova Manaus shimmered across the water until, one by one, they began to go out.

…

At dawn, on the airfield at the far end of the garrison, the first engine roared to life, then another, and another, until the whole peninsula shook with the deep rolling thunder of four hundred heavy machines and two hundred freighters waking up all at once, and the convoy began to move north.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

The convoy rose into the sky over Nova Manaus like a migrating flock of steel birds.

Two hundred heavy cargo freighters lifted off the airfield of the Rio Negro Garrison one after another in a long thundering procession, their bellies loaded with drilling rigs, extraction platforms, prefabricated barracks, fuel cells and machinery, and they climbed in wide spirals over the river before falling into formation high above the city… a vast grey armada stretching for miles across the morning sky and flanked on every side by sleek Amazonian escort fighters with their wingtips glinting in the sun.

Below them, thirty million people stopped and looked up.

At the head of the formation flew the command freighter, a massive armored transport with Amazonia’s green and gold painted across its tail, and inside, in a wide observation lounge lined with windows, Aki pressed her face to the glass and watched Nova Manaus shrink beneath them.

“It’s even bigger from up here,” she breathed. “Kara, come look, you can see the whole river…”

“Everything’s bigger from up here,” Kara said from the couch behind her, stretched out lazily with her boots up on the armrest. “Except Valeria’s patience, that stays exactly the same size…”

“I heard that,” Da Silva said from the command console at the far end of the lounge, without looking up.

“You were meant to, Valeria,” Kara said.

Da Silva kept her back to them, but the back of her neck went faintly pink, and Leona, standing beside her at the console, became very interested in the navigation screen.

Across the lounge, Lara sat stiffly in one of the padded seats by the far window with both hands gripping the armrests so hard that her knuckles had gone pale, her jade eyes fixed rigidly on the floor, and she hadn’t said a single word since the freighter left the ground.

Aki noticed first. She turned from the window and tilted her head curiously.

“Lara…? Are you all right over there?”

“I’m fine,” Lara said through her teeth, still staring at a single spot on the floor as if it were the only solid thing left in the world.

“You look a bit pale, though,” Aki said gently, leaning closer to peer at her face. “And you haven’t touched the snacks. You always touch the snacks. You ate four whole fish at the market yesterday…”

“I’m fine, little thing,” Lara said again, more firmly, and her knuckles went even paler on the armrests.

The freighter hit a pocket of turbulence and dipped half a foot, and Lara’s fingernails sank into the armrests.

CRUNCH!

Kara sat up slowly on the couch and stared at her.

“…Lara,” she said. “Are you afraid of flying?”