Rilla's Inheritance Chapter 10

Chapter 10 Adri Adrin, and Adri Valdin both said that we urgently needed all the information we could get about this rogue Xydin. They asked me to revisit the places where I had been held captive.
“The places aren’t scary, Rilla – they’re all old science stations. Alkanet says that what he’s done to your collar might help unlock a few memories, especially if you go back. Adri Verdin will go with you, and the Valdin will keep you physically safe. Can you face it?”
For the sake of Zoe, Amaryllis and Yolande I could face a lot. But I still found it scary, going back. The first lab wasn’t so bad. It was completely empty, apart from a toy thrown into a corner. For some reason, I thought that the toy was important, but I couldn’t remember why. But when we drew near the second group of buildings, and I saw a tall water tower, I began to shake. Adri Verdin was with me, soothing me, encouraging me, and offering me the option to go away if I couldn’t cope at all. With his help, I managed to enter one of the buildings. This one was totally unfamiliar to me – I had no sense of ever having been in it before. Maybe Alkanet hadn’t managed to unlock my memories at all. Then we went into a second building – the old storehouse, Adri Verdin said. And as soon as I stepped inside, memories came flooding back. Four tall dark men, who menaced me, and were angry with me for not having enough children. Men who stared into my eyes and sent me down into a black darkness. Someone who dragged me from place to place, gloating. And showing me unhappy children. Lonely, unhappy children, being forced to do things. And not just children. There had been adults too, being forced to fight, to learn how to be aggressive. And then he had told me – what? That these were my children, but I’d never remember them. Only now I did. Adri Verdin listened to me, hugged me, held me, mopped up my tears and finally took me home. Then he told the other Adris what I had told him, and they met together in The Place. “There are four of them. Four mauval Xydin. That’s unheard of. I think I’m going to start running some tests on the three we have in captivity.” Adri Adrin was beginning to think that there might be some scientific reason behind all this.
“He was teaching the grown ones to fight. We all know Xydin can’t kill, except to protect another. But what about half-Xydin. When the other half isn’t from any of the clans?” “We need an Adrina for the Xydin. And Alkanet said that there were others who had survived the plague. We need to find them. He said he met up with Garender, and his son and grandson a while ago, and they were quite normal. But he hasn’t seen them for a while.”
“That’s true.” Adri Valdin scratched his head. “I came across Andolin, with his son and grandson as well – they were heading off east. There was still too much raw grief around, and they didn’t want the baby to grow up near it all: you know how sensitive some Xydin babies are to other people’s emotions? Well, this one was, and he just cried all the time. But they were going to come back when he was older, and they haven’t.” Adri Tallin sat down in the Tallin chair, and said “Right. I’m pronouncing. Step one: keep Amaryllis, Zoe and Yolande safe until they’ve grown up, which won’t be long now. Step two: when they’ve grown, help them see if one of them is able to be an Adrina or not. Step three: keep Rilla safe. Step four: find this mauval Xydin and deal with him. All we need is an Adrina, and the rest of the clan…”
“So we’ve no real problems then! But I agree with steps one, two and three. I think that’s all we can do at the moment.” My Adrin girls were old enough to move out and go and live with their father. Liot had built an extension to the bunkhouse he lived in, and, with some help from Jenny and Kirsty, furnished it very cheerfully. I would have gone for something a bit more flowery, and a little less geometrical, but then I wasn’t an Adrin. Kitabela, Jasmine and Laurel liked it very well. “I hope Amaryllis is somewhere as nice as this,” Kitabela said, checking out the bookshelf. “I do miss her so. And it must be even worse for Rilla.”
And where were Zoe, Amaryllis and Yolande? They had reached their destination at sunset after two days’ travel. Alkanet had handed them over to some Valdin for the journey, and they had travelled as fast as the girls could manage.
“But this doesn’t seem very far away,” Yolande said.
“Ah,” said Armiger Valdin, “There’s more than one way of getting away from people.” And he led them towards a small building. The building contained nothing much more than a set of stairs, going down. It was a mine! Yolande went down the stairs, apprehensive and curious both at the same time. Amaryllis and Zoe followed her, and down onto another level as well. The mine was clearly abandoned, but the air was still fresh in it, and Zoe could hear a faint hum.
“Solar powered air system," Armiger explained, when she asked him about it. “The ship was taken apart, bit by bit. And because the systems were all designed to stand up to the rigours of space flight, they’ve no problems coping with a mere mine!” The next floor down had a bed in one corner. “Mine,” Armiger said. “You ladies are another floor down yet.”
It was pretty gloomy, all the girls had to agree. And chilly too – but there were clothes waiting for them to change into. “I feel like a Valdin,” Zoe complained, as she tested out the bed in the little room she was sharing with Zoe. “Yes, but you look like a warm Valdin, instead of a chilly Xydin.”
Of the three of them, Yolande was finding this the easiest to adjust to. It was almost like an adventure, and she had always loved adventure stories. Despite the horrible surroundings, her spirits were light in a way she couldn’t explain. Amaryllis too was feeling inexplicably easier. She no longer felt as if someone was circling round the edges of her mind, trying to find her, looking for a way in. And although the place was incredibly ugly, it has a certain quiet about it. The other Valdin left, but Armiger stayed.
“I’m your personal bodyguard,” he explained. “You can’t stay down here alone. And I’m your tutor – we can’t have you falling behind with your school work, can we?” He grinned at them.
“It won’t be for much longer now,” Yolande said smartly. “Then what will you do?”
Armiger’s grin spread even more widely over his face. “Get you fit,” he said. “We can’t have you getting no exercise at all, can we?” And he was as good as his word.
“The man’s a sadist,” Yolande gasped, as she fought with the machine.
“I think you might be right,” Zoe agreed.
But they didn’t really mind. And though they missed their families hugely, and found their setting incredibly dreary and depressing, yet there was an enjoyment about it they couldn’t define until Armiger explained it to them.
“You’re not among so many people. You’re not constantly aware, in the back of your minds, of their presence. The background noise has been turned off.”
Three faces lit up with sudden understanding and relief.
“Now go get back on that treadmill, Amaryllis! And Yolande, that last lot of maths you gave me is suffering from a fatal flaw – since when was the integral of one over x squared, lnx squared?” Meanwhile, I was pregnant again. Terrin Tallin was going to become a father, and the Tallin clan were going to grow again. Terrin’s hands were huge and tender on the bump that would one day be his child – or children, we were rather hoping. And Alkanet managed to do something to that collar; I could feel the difference in myself. I hadn’t realised that there had always been a slight background tension to my mind, until I got pregnant, and it vanished completely. Alkanet came to visit me, and I thanked him for what he had done. He shrugged it off, but I was truly grateful.
“I feel like myself again. I was just putting it down to what I’d been through, but it wasn’t – it was this collar.” Alkanet nodded.
“Yes. I don’t like the way this Xydin has used this collar. He’s taken its natural properties and twisted them, made it do something else. These were designed to give relief – some Xydin are very sensitive to others, and the collars could be worn to dull the edge of your perceptions, and make everything more manageable, less overwhelming. Xydin women who lived among a lot of people would wear one, but not Xydin women who lived with just a few people. Xydin men didn’t need them – they weren’t sensitive in the same way. He seems to have made this one dull your awareness of who you are, and that’s not what it was meant for at all.”
This was scaring me again a little. My next visitor was another welcome sight – Gabriella came round. Since we had both lost Zoe, Yolande and Amaryllis to an unknown destination, we had grown even closer. She admired my bump a little wistfully – though Yolande and Zoe were her sisters, she had felt like a mother to them. After all, she had brought them up.
“Gabriella – why don’t you and Yan try for a child yourselves?”
She looked up.
“Oh! Do you know, I hadn’t thought of that – I know it sounds silly, but those two felt like our family. Maybe we might. I’ll talk to Yan. In a little while, when we’re not missing them quite so much.” Gabriella might not be quite ready yet for another huge change in her life, but her sister Eloise was. Despite the sack she was wearing, Haden Caldin had managed to notice how lovely she was, and had told her so as well. Everyone had pulled together, and built another new house. Again, it was very simple and basic, but that was all they needed for a beginning. The bedroom was literally that – a bed-room and no more, but they didn’t care. And they weren’t the only ones thinking about the future of the colony. Someone else who’d managed to see past the sack clothes was Tyo Adrin, who had rather surprisingly fallen for Jenny Tallin. Jenny had put her own mark on the furniture that had been built for them. I was still waiting for her to do something about the clothes, but that was slow in coming! They had an orchard in their garden – making everyone as self-sufficient in food as possible was really important – and it was big enough to feed more than just themselves. Their garden backed on to Haden and Eloise’s garden – which boasted a well-stocked fish pond! And the third house nearby was getting a large vegetable patch, so that all three households could share their produce with each other.
“And if this works well,” Adri Verdin said, “we’ll repeat it with other houses. We can only try things and see if they work.”
What wasn’t working so well was Cat and Kel’s life with W. Like all the households, they too were growing as much of their own food as they could – but W refused to help with anything. She was still rude, angry and aggressive nearly all the time. Oddly enough, seeing her sisters become happier and more settled seemed to have made W less happy and more unsure of herself. Her constant theme was still “When I’m Adrina, you’re going to have to obey me and do exactly what I tell you. He said so.”
But to the other Adris, watching her as she got older, it was painfully obvious that W would never be an Adrina. When Kel suggested to her that there were other things to do in life besides become the Adrina for the Xydin, she was furious. “I was warned about people like you! He told me that there would be people who would be so jealous of the chances I’ve got that they would try to take them away from me! But I’m not going to let you do that. I’m going to be Adrina, and I’m going to be the most powerful one there ever was!”
Kel thought of Yolande, Amaryllis and Zoe, and was quite pleased that they were well out of the way of W. She had never met them, refusing to mix with the other children as she did, and he was quite pleased; both for their sakes and for W’s own sake. He wasn’t sure how she’d cope with meeting older Xydin girls. Adri Adrin meanwhile was running tests on the three Xydin they had in captivity. And observing them closely as well. A mauval Xydin was a rare event; they cropped up maybe once every hundred years, and normally the community dealt with them. Four at once was too much of a coincidence. The more he watched their behaviour, and the more tests he ran, the more he became convinced that there was something more going on. His last resort was to do a brain scan: as the medical equipment had all come off the ship, it was far more sophisticated than their general lifestyle as a colony would suggest! The results were disturbing – and so was the other discovery that he made. Adri Adrin had run all sorts of tests on the three Xydin they had in captivity. They had seemed to be tireless – until he had taken them out of their black suits and put them in standard hospital wear. They had been uniformly aggressive as well, until he had changed their clothes. And the brain scans had been alarming.
“It seems likely that these alterations in brain chemistry and structure are a side-effect of the plague,” Adri Adrin wrote in his notes. “However, it should be noted that these effects have been heightened and intensified by the intra-venal administration of certain drugs, via the normal ports in a ship-suit.”
And he wondered what was happening to the remaining Xydin, if he was continuing to use these drugs in that way. Someone who could have told him the answer to that question was Pertin. Still trapped in the Adrina’s garden, he could only watch what Four was doing – and it filled him with a deep unease. Four’s latest activity was to build a series of cages along one fence – and somehow Pertin didn’t think they were for growing fruit.
The three girls – or were they grown women? It was hard to tell – were constantly being encouraged by Four to fight, train and fight again. Pertin felt really sorry for one of the girls – unlike the other two, her face was black, and she seemed to be the underdog all the time. The other two showed her no mercy when they fought together, and she seemed to be afraid of them. Four too was constantly picking on her. Any little thing she did wrong, he would shove her into one of the cages he had built, and leave her there for as long as it pleased him. Pertin wondered why she never made the least push to escape, or to fight back. It was as though she had no will of her own – or as though Four controlled her will. Pertin wasn’t the only one worrying about Four and what he might be up to. Adri Adrin’s discoveries had made all the Adris decide that they needed to improve my security. Terrin Tallin was the one who got to break the news to me – Poppy and Quinoa were peacefully playing in the garden, and I was thinking how pleasant everything was, when he told me that my garden just wasn’t secure enough any more. A team of willing builders turned up, and two days later, when I looked out of my front door what met my eye, beyond the small strip of garden they had left me, was a series of walls. All with gates in – this wasn’t a prison – linked to my biosignature, so that I could get in and out, and so could my daughters, but anyone else now had a long wait, and a long, maze-like walk. And my lovely, productive garden had shrunk to a couple of little beds against the fence.
“It won’t be forever, Rilla, I promise. We’re going to find him, and then we will all be safe again – but just for now…” And Adri Valdin had looked at me so appealingly, that I had to agree to their precautions.