Honor Among Thieves

by Ann Aguirre

  I waited for Nadim to reassure me, but he didn’t. I wanted to comfort him, which was stupid as hell because they were coming to evaluate me too.

  Screw it. I wasn’t about to salute. I pictured all the judges I’d been in front of, usually by remote-view sentencing. Severe old farts who barely even looked at me before pronouncing my sentence and sending me off to another rehabbing opportunity.

  Somehow, I doubted there were a lot of Camp Kunas out here in the black.

  Something echoed through Nadim’s skin—a feeling, a shiver really, and then a quick pulse of shock mixed with anxiety. I didn’t know why he felt that way as he said, “Typhon’s Honors are here.”

  I exchanged another look with Beatriz, who still stood in a sort of awkward parade rest by the data console. I made myself comfortable on the couch, stretched out as lazily as I could with my hands behind my head.

  A stern voice said, “I told you she had no respect. Just look at her.”

  Zhang Chao-Xing stood in the arched doorway with Marko Dunajski. But they didn’t look the same. The familiar blue Honors uniform had been replaced by bloodred with black trim, lending them a foreboding air. There were no other details, no buttons or brightness, just sharp lines and ominous shades.

  But it wasn’t the clothing that made the difference. It was their eyes.

  Marko’s eyes . . . I’d seen kindness in them, humor and concern. Now his eyes were simply black, with pupil, iris, and sclera occluded. Chao-Xing’s were the same. My gut impulse was to bail; there was nothing human in the void gazing back at me. But I’d faced enough walking sharks to know it was fatal to show fear.

  “Marko,” I said. “Hey. You’re early.”

  He snapped, “Get up. Now.”

  I sat upright. Before I could think better of it, I blurted, “What happened to you?”

  His unnerving eyes just stared at me, through me. Like people on the streets in the Zone, I thought. High as satellites. Except this didn’t feel like chem.

  “Stand to attention!” Marko ordered.

  Bea and I both made a good attempt. A chill bit my skin, and for a moment I was back at that damn camp, trying not to show my fear. In less than a week, Typhon had transformed Nadim’s former Honors from human beings into automatons. Per various science fiction holos, I should check them over for neural implants or possibly a parasite that might be controlling the host. I’d never thought of those scary vids as instructional before.

  “We will review your records.” Chao-Xing stepped to the console and began calling up data with efficient, mechanical, nearly inhuman precision. Even her body language seemed totally different. This was way off. They’d told us we had a week to complete our second training phase, so why were they changing the timetable? Her dead eyes kept me from demanding answers.

  Funny thing. Chao-Xing was processing our info, but Marko was the one who stepped closer to me and said, “Honor Cole. You are dismissed.”

  “Wait a second! What did I do wrong? Come on, I checked off all your damn boxes, didn’t I?”

  You didn’t finish the work, a little voice said.

  They can’t fail me, they don’t know that.

  Before all this had started, before Derry’s betrayal, I might have felt a thrill at the idea of running wild back to the Zone. Now that I had some distance, that old relationship didn’t seem so much fated as sad. The Zone’s desperate freedom paled against the backdrop of red giants and white dwarves, of black holes, pulsars, and binary stars.

  “You are dismissed because you passed,” Marko said, and for a second there was a flicker of . . . something . . . in his expression. A ghost of personality. “Leave, Zara. We’re done with you.”

  To cover the enervating rush of relief, I crossed my arms and glared. It was tough, but I managed. “Yeah? Well, maybe I’m not done. I’ll wait.”

  Beside me, Bea stepped closer, pressing her arm against mine. Already she felt like somebody I needed to protect. As he registered our closeness, Marko’s aspect warmed further . . . and then that hint of the old Marko melted like ice in an oven as his dead stare locked on to Bea. Who flinched, but held her ground. She raised her chin a bit, in fact.

  Silence, as Chao-Xing scanned Bea’s records. Nadim kept quiet, though I could feel his anxiety running through me like a raw, twitching current. There was nothing he could do. If you don’t want anything, they can’t take it away, I considered telling him; it was wisdom I’d earned in a lot of hard places. But I was a hypocrite, because I couldn’t stop wanting, either.

  The silence stretched an unbearably long time, with Nadim’s distress coiling inside me. It seemed like her review took twice as long as mine.

  Marko finally said, “Honor Beatriz Teixeira. Your performance is unacceptable. You will be dismissed and returned to Earth. A replacement will be selected.”

  She let out a breath that was as clear as a cry. Her lips were parted, her eyes wide, and I braced her as she staggered. That expression . . . like a child watching her house burn. Or more accurately, her future.

  But she rallied. “If you’ll just tell me where I need to improve, I will make every effort—”

  “Waste of time,” Chao-Xing cut in. “Not fast enough. Not bright enough. Unmotivated.”

  I found that hard to believe. What the hell were they testing for? Bea had aced the modules that gave me the most trouble; she’d been able to plot courses in record time, when I’d labored over that for half a day before narrowing in on it. She had a grasp of math that I never would. Sure, she’d been nervous at first, but she’d adapted just fine.

  “That’s some bullshit,” I said. “Bea’s as clever as they come. And Nadim likes her. Don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he answered. I sensed how much it cost for him to say it. “I like Beatriz very much. I see no evidence she is unfit.”

  “I didn’t ask for your input.” Chao-Xing appeared to listen to something I couldn’t hear. Her voice changed too, like I was hearing her through electronic distortion . . . or like Elder Typhon was using her vocal cords. “Nadim has no discipline. He is weak and emotional. Therefore, his preferences are insignificant. Honor Teixeira, you are officially—”

  “Wait.”

  That wasn’t me or Nadim. It was Marko, and it shocked Chao-Xing enough to cock her head. It was the most human gesture I’d seen from her since she’d stepped in the room.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Wait,” he repeated, and again, I saw the old Marko in there, fighting to make himself heard. “We came early. A full two days early.”

  “And?”

  “Give her another solar day to finish her training,” he said. “She isn’t far off. If we had kept the schedule, she might have passed.”

  Chao-Xing was suddenly her old self again too; I recognized that annoyed glare, even with the weird eyes. “Honor Cole didn’t need such coddling.”

  “But I did,” Marko said. “And Typhon chose me for the Journey. So dismissing her abilities out of hand might be a mistake.”

  They both went silent, and I had the eerie feeling that there was a conversation I couldn’t hear going on. I wondered if Nadim could hear it. Or if it was put into words at all.

  Finally, Chao-Xing turned to Beatriz and said, “You have one more day.” She reached for an H2 sitting on a nearby table—next to a coffee cup I’d forgotten to clear away—and tapped it. It filled with a frighteningly long list, and she thrust it to Beatriz. “Begin.”

  Bea took it and glanced at me. I’d never forget that look—terrified, fragile, determined all at the same time. She nodded at me. “I won’t let you down,” she said, and I felt she was saying it to me and Nadim, not to Typhon and his Honors.

  Marko and Chao-Xing began to walk in lockstep back toward the door they’d entered from.

  “Wait!” I said. Chao-Xing didn’t. Marko did, but it seemed like he was resisting some unseen undertow. “Your eyes. What happened—”

  “It’s nothing for you to worry about,” Mar
ko told me. “For the Journey, Honors are matched to our Leviathan in a different way. It doesn’t hurt.”

  “But it does take away your free will. You can’t tell me that’s fine. What did Typhon do to you?”

  He looked away, eyes scanning as if he was reading invisible text. “I’m not obligated to provide information simply because you ask for it.”

  “You didn’t used to be such an asshole,” I muttered.

  “Word of advice, Zara: don’t try to help Beatriz. We’ll know.”

  His lack of emotion troubled me. I missed the old Marko. This grim stranger in his violently red uniform, with too-black eyes . . . I wouldn’t have recognized him. Or liked him.

  “Marko. Are you okay? Really?”

  His head tilted just a fraction to one side, and a corner of his mouth curled into what was almost a lopsided smile. “If I’m not, what can you do about it?”

  He was out the door, following Chao-Xing, before I could frame a response.

  “What happened to them?” No answer. “Nadim?”

  His eventual reply scared the crap out of me. “I don’t know.”

  Beatriz worked like a demon all day. I couldn’t help her and I’d be damned if I got in her way, so I called up every difficult, dirty maintenance task I could find, up to and including flushing out our biomechanical sewer system, which involved cramming myself into tight, claustrophobic tunnels and wading knee-deep in muck. Back when I was around fourteen or so, Derry and I had slept in a squat down a drainpipe. Took some crawling through awful to reach our hideaway, but that same filth kept us safe. People didn’t want to brave it to get at what little we had stashed, and on the street, the grime made me invisible.

  It gave me time to wonder why someone—Chao-Xing, especially—hadn’t discovered I’d lied about assembling that weapons array. I’d checked it off my list, but surely they had some kind of audit, right? Otherwise, what was keeping any of us from cheating our way right on through this bullshit test period?

  Oh, I realized. Nobody’s ever tried. And why would they? They’re stuck on an alien spaceship, isolated and unnerved, and until I showed up, they were all super achievers who’d never cheated a day in their life. It would never have occurred to them.

  And since the Leviathan’s experience of humanity got filtered through the Honors they interacted with, it probably never occurred to them, either.

  I wrote a note on a piece of scrap paper and passed it to Beatriz during her brief lunch break. She looked hunted and haunted, but when she read it, her eyes widened, and she looked up at me in shock. “You don’t mean this,” she whispered. Like Nadim couldn’t hear everything.

  “I do,” I said. “It works. Try it.”

  My advice was, simply, cheat.

  For an answer, Beatriz—a super achiever if ever there was one—crumpled up my note, dropped it in a flash bin that incinerated it, and said, “Thanks, but I’ll do it my way.”

  But she wanted to ask, I thought. She wanted to ask if I’d cheated my way through to get to this point. I hadn’t—well, except for that last thing, and that was a purely moral objection—but I could see it was easy for her to make that assumption. I’d just cracked her trust. Maybe even broken it.

  At least I knew Beatriz well enough to know that she didn’t tell tales. Even if she failed out, she wouldn’t rat on me.

  I’d done what I could. I went to the console and tried to pull up information on all the bins that were stored in the assembly room—where they’d come from (which turned out to be Earth, not a shock) and full instructions so I could see the final products. Most were things I’d already glimpsed on Elder Typhon, like flexible scaling that would protect Nadim’s skin.

  But there were also weapons. Definitely weapons. Like the one I’d refused to build.

  So I went back to my quarters and, with the door opened, said, “Nadim? I want to have a private talk. Inside.”

  I shut the door and locked it, and sat down on the bed.

  “Yes, Zara?” he said, in a tone so neutral I knew he expected the worst.

  “You have to know I didn’t do that last thing I marked off on the list.”

  “I expected you would ask me about it.”

  I stayed quiet for a moment, idly drawing patterns on the silky bedcover, before I said, “You should have told Marko and Chao-Xing I cheated.”

  “You had no intention of cheating,” he said, and he sounded sure about it. “This is part of the same objection to creating my alarm. You want to know how something is to be used before you build it. You don’t like being kept in the dark.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s what I hated about the whole world, back on Earth. All the rules you had to follow without knowing why, and if you asked, you got branded difficult and damaged. Well, I am difficult. I am damaged. And I’m going to ask why.”

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  I debated that. I looked down at the patterns I was drawing. They looked like stars. “I wasn’t sure you would tell me the truth, and I don’t want you to lie to me.”

  “I would not, Zara,” he said, and there was something in that voice that vibrated warm inside me. How had he put it? Strings tuned to the same frequency. I knew he meant it. “Please don’t lie to me. I know it’s something humans do naturally, but—”

  “I won’t,” I told him. I wasn’t sure it was a promise I could keep, but I wanted it to be true. “Why am I building you a weapon?”

  The silence felt like forever, stretching and pulling and, finally, ripping when he said, “Because not everything in the universe is kind.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” I raised my head and looked at a space on the wall like I was staring at him, even though there was no focus point. “Meaning you have enemies?”

  “I—” He started, faltered, and started again. “I don’t know everything about the universe, Zara. I’m still learning, just as you are. But I know one thing, from all these years of interacting with humans.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Even the kindest of creatures has predators.”

  That rang so true that I felt it inside me. “So you don’t know why I’m building it, either. They haven’t told you, have they?”

  “Elder Typhon required us all to be provisioned with protective armor and at least one weapon,” Nadim said immediately. “I did ask why. He didn’t answer me.”

  “They never do.”

  “Are you going to build it?”

  I leaned back against the bulkhead wall. Put my hand flat against the warm surface of his skin. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t want weapons,” Nadim said. “But I want to protect you and Beatriz. So would you please assemble it? As a favor to me?”

  “I’m all for a good defense. And since you asked, yes. But if I find out you’re hiding something from me, Nadim—”

  “I’m not,” he said. “If—if you want to look inside my mind and make certain of that, you can.”

  I thought about it for a moment. That felt like a cliff I wasn’t ready to plunge off, not yet at least. I said, “Just don’t let me down.”

  I went to assembly and worked for a few hours—good, detailed, sweaty work that took my mind off what Beatriz might be doing, or failing to do. I had a hundred asks for Marko, which was probably why he’d retreated to Typhon. He must know I’d never shuttle over to grill him, even if the giant Leviathan Elder would allow me to come aboard. Marko’s parting rhetorical question burned a circle in the center of my brain. It made me think he was going through something, not entirely of his volition, and that heralded bad shit down the line. For me and maybe for everybody.

  In frustration, I finally slammed into the combat simulation room. Each punch, each kick carried weight, and I experienced the visceral satisfaction of smashing somebody’s nose. Even the crunch of cartilage and blood spray seemed right. I went straight up to expert-level street fighting, no rules. There were ranks. I started at one. Too easy, so I scaled up. Six opponents
this time, a mix of bare-knuckle and melee weapons. If you could get a degree in street fighting, I’d have a PhD. I’m with you, Bea. I’m fighting too. The VR learned my style, adapted, and eventually, I got my ass handed to me at rank five. Not bad, considering I was up against fifteen foes.

  When I emerged at last, drenched and exhausted, the view on Nadim’s transparent wall revealed that we’d arrived back home. The sight of the giant blue-green ball of Earth came as a shock. I’d gotten used to seeing Mars, and Saturn, and Jupiter, and Venus as Nadim cruised by them, but now we were home. Ready, I realized, to kick any unsuitable crew back down to the surface and take on an alternate. There were a few silvery, sleek Leviathan orbiting too . . . young ones, like Nadim, each escorted by what must have been Elders twice their size. Adults. All of those bigger ships looked scarred, their skin dull and rough where it wasn’t plated in metal.

  I’d rather give myself a lobotomy with a rehab shiv than travel on a ship like Typhon. I tried to imagine touching the Elder’s emotions up close, and a cold shudder rolled over me so that my skin prickled with goose bumps.

  I leaned closer to the clear skin of the viewscreen and put my palms flat on his skin on either side to brace myself. Ahhh. That felt better. We snapped together like magnets, and I breathed a long sigh of relief. I preferred it when we weren’t at odds.

  “How’s Beatriz doing?”

  “I can’t tell you, Zara.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m not interfering!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Fine, let’s talk about where we go from here. The Tour. Will we get to meet any little green men?” Maybe that ancient SF turnip hadn’t made it up here, so I tried, “I mean, alien life forms? Besides you.”

  “You’re alien to me too, you know.”

  “True.”

  “No,” he said. “You will not meet any little green men. Not on the Tour.”

  “Is that why I’m really building the weapon for you?”

  “No,” he said, quickly and decisively.

  “What about after the Tour?” I hadn’t missed his qualifier. “Any little green men then?”