“Access code,” red-and-blue said.
He couldn’t talk. Couldn’t get the wind. There was pain, and his mind went white-out.
“You’ll kill him!” someone screamed. Lungs wouldn’t work. He was going out.
An arm caught him around the ribs. Hauled him up, took his weight off the arms.
“Access,” the voice said. He fought to get a breath.
“Give it to him again,” someone said, and his mind whited out with panic. He was still gasping for air when they let him swing, and somebody was shouting, screaming that he couldn’t breathe.
Arm caught him again. Wood scraped, chair hit the floor. Something else did. Squeezed him hard around the chest and eased up. He got a breath.
Who gave you the gun, nand’ paidhi?
Say it was Tabini.
“Access,” the relentless voice said.
He fought for air against the arm crushing his chest. The shoulder was a dull, bone-deep pain. He didn’t remember what they wanted. “No,” he said, universal answer. No to everything.
They shoved him off and hit him while he swung free, two and three times. He convulsed, tore the shoulder, couldn’t stop it, couldn’t breathe.
“Access,” someone said, and someone held him so air could get to his lungs, while the shoulder grated and sent pain through his ribs and through his gut.
The gun, he thought. Shouldn’t have had it.
“Access,” the man said. And hit him in the face. A hand came under his chin, then, and an atevi face wavered in his swimming vision. “Give me the access code.”
“Access,” he repeated stupidly. Couldn’t think where he was. Couldn’t think if this was the one he was going to answer or the one he wasn’t.
Second blow across the face.
“The code, paidhi!”
“Code…” Please, God, the code. He was going to be sick with the pain. He couldn’t think how to explain to a fool. “At the prompt…”
“The prompt’s up,” the voice said. “Now what?”
“Type…” He remembered the real access. Kept seeing white when he shut his eyes, and if he drifted off into that blizzard they’d go on hitting him. “Code…” The code for meddlers. For thieves. “Input date.”
“Which?”
“Today’s.” Fool. He heard the rattle of the keyboard. Red-and-blue was still with him, someone else holding his head up, by a fist in his hair.
“It says ‘Time,’” someone said.
“Don’t. Don’t give it. Type numeric keys… 1024.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s the code, dammit!”
Red-and-blue looked away. “Do it.”
Keys rattled.
“What have you got?” red-and-blue asked.
‘The prompt’s back again.“
“Is that it?” red-and-blue asked.
“You’re in,” he said, and just breathed, listening to the keys, the operator, skillful typist, at least, querying the computer.
Which was going to lie, now. The overlay was engaged. It would lie about its memory, its file names, its configuration… it’d tell anyone who asked that things existed, tell you their file sizes and then bring up various machine code and gibberish, that said, to a computer expert, that the files did exist, protected under separate passcodes.
The level of their questions said it would get him out of Wigairiin. Red-and-blue was out of his depth.
“What’s this garbage?” red-and-blue demanded, and Bren caught a breath, eyes shut, and asked, in crazed delight:
“Strange symbols?”
“Yes.”
“You’re into addressing. What did you do to it?”
They hit him again.
“I asked the damned file names!”
“Human language.”
Long silence, then. He didn’t like the silence. Red-and-blue was a fool. A fool might do something else foolish, like beat him to death trying to learn computer programming. He hung there, fighting for his breaths, trying to get his feet under him, while red-and-blue thought about his options.
“We’ve got what we need,” red-and-blue said. “Let’s pack them up. Take them down to Negiran.”
Rebel city. Provincial capital. Rebel territory. It was the answer he wanted. He was going somewhere, out of the cold and the mud and the rain, where he could deal with someone of more intelligence, somebody of ambition, somebody with strings the paidhi might figure how to pull, on the paidhi’s own agenda…
“Bring them, too?”
He wasn’t sure who they meant. He turned his head while they were getting him loose from the pipes, and saw Cenedi’s bloodied face. Cenedi didn’t have any expression. Ilisidi didn’t.