Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Read Online Free

explained why Simon would have told this man that I was made from Jarl’s genes, assembled in a lab by a complex process that defeated the ability to recombine Mule DNA and make female Mules.
    If few people on Earth would be able to believe I was a darkship thief, anyone who did believe I was Jarl’s clone was likely to try to kill me.
    “He…Why?”
    “He trusted me. Trusts me. With what he is, too, with being descended…no, created from the Mules who were left behind. He told me that the same Mule has been succeeding himself as the ruler of Liberte for centuries, having his brain transplanted to that of his putative son, so he could inherit from himself.”
    “Why did he tell you? When?”
    “Oh, years ago, when he hired me as head of his security,” Alexis said. “There were reasons. In the way I became his head of security, I mean. I can’t explain now. We need to get as far away from the palace as we can.”
    My tongue felt like cork in my mouth. I realized I had been gasping through an open mouth, and closed it with a snap, and swallowed. “You don’t care?”
    “I wouldn’t have believed him—about you—if I didn’t know that the Mules left behind had managed to create a female. I saw no reason they wouldn’t have created one on the darkship world, where I understand they’re more advanced.”
    “I mean, you don’t care that the Mules survived the Turmoils and eventually became the Good Men?”
    “What is there to care about?” he asked. “It happened.”
    “But…aren’t you afraid of Mules?” I’d read the history books on Earth. Though I suspected the Good Men, who were after all the same people, were just as ruthless as the Mules had been, the history books made the Mules much worse. “Don’t you want to stop them?”
    I swear his lips trembled upward. “Aren’t we?” he said. “Didn’t the Patrician declare the Glorious Revolution?” He seemed to suddenly remember how the Glorious Revolution had evolved. He shrugged. “I mean you no harm, at least. On the contrary. The Patrician said to get you to a safe place, and I intend to, even though it’s going to be harder than I’d imagined.”
    “I don’t need to be gotten to a safe place,” I said. “If you know what I am, you know I’m as strong as the Patrician, and as capable of defending myself.”
    He rolled his eyes. “And as full of yourself. Don’t either of you see virtue in planning? Are you in the habit of throwing yourself into danger with no thought?”
    I’d come to Earth with very little thought, except to escape bad memories and certain social obligations. I didn’t think I was full of myself. I certainly wasn’t like Simon. On the other hand, I’d been telling Alexis that I could fight a mob singlehanded. Which seemed foolhardy if not stupid. So I shut up and let him lead—stumbling and skulking through the palace grounds. At an outer building, almost at the edge of the grounds, he made me wait, and came back moments later wearing coveralls of the sort that manual laborers wore, and carrying what looked like a green sheet, which he folded around me as a cloak, that covered me from head to the hem of my dress.
    After that, he led me out of the grounds to what looked like a ramshackle stairway which led us into a labyrinth of derelict alleys and thus, eventually, to a cheap rented room, in a not so good section of Liberte, the area that was the domain of servants and less reputable avocations. We had chosen the cheapest of automated motels and paid for it with an anonymous credgem.
    In the dingy rented room, Alexis ditched the coveralls to appear again in the splendor of white satin and gold braid. It went badly with his appearance. He was a middle-aged man, at least ten years older than my twenty-five, with short dark hair and a square face that only a mother could love, and which, indefinably, put one in mind of a bulldog. Seeing me look, he gave me a feral grin and said, “Alexis Brisbois, at your