by Ann Aguirre
“Do you mind if I come in?”
“No, please.” She stepped back, and I came into a room that was nothing like mine.
Not only did her room feel warmer, it smelled better too, faint hints of dark chocolate and cinnamon. She’d brought some small, colorful pillows and a picture of the Rio skyline at night. Those touches made it . . . personal. “Nice.”
“Make yourself at home.”
I read that offer as sincere and collapsed on her bunk. “You can finish the log if you want. I won’t make any noise.”
“If you’re sure.”
She went back to the table, where she’d set up her H2, and resumed. Since she was speaking in Portuguese, I only caught the occasional word, not enough for a ballpark translation. Certain phrases echoed close to Spanish, which I’d heard a lot of in the Zone. That took me back to listening to old ladies haggle in the street market.
To entertain myself, I studied up on Nadim’s circulatory system. Being a human doctor wasn’t my dream, but Leviathan physiology was considerably more intriguing.
When Bea fell silent, I asked, “You done?”
“For now. I have a lot of thoughts.”
“Me too.” I decided on impulse to test the waters, see how she’d react to what Nadim had told me. It wasn’t like he’d sworn me to secrecy, and maybe if I enlisted Bea’s help, we could coax some more information out of him. There could be terabytes of forbidden knowledge taunting me from behind a firewall. “You remember how I flipped out that day on Firstworld?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, when I asked you to sweep, I spotted a second burn circle in the flora.” At her questioning look, I added, “Where another ship likely put down.”
Her eyes widened. Her mind went in the same direction mine had. “Did we cross paths with another Honor? Good thing you didn’t shoot them. Try explaining that in your personal log.”
I laughed. “That doesn’t make sense, though. If they were human, why run? Why not say hello?”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“I got Nadim to admit we weren’t alone down there, Bea.” She just stared at me. “Whoever was down there with us, they weren’t human.”
Since she was bright, it didn’t take her long to come to the right conclusion. But she didn’t take it well. She bounced to her feet and paced, rubbing her hands together in what psychologists liked to call a self-comforting gesture. Mumbling in Portuguese, she eventually settled on, “Are you serious?” in English.
“From what I gather, it wasn’t supposed to happen. Are you game to find out more?”
She was already shaking her head violently, which surprised me. “There have to be reasons we’re kept in the dark. It’s . . . security clearance, or on a need-to-know basis.”
“So? They didn’t hurt us, we didn’t hurt them. Help me talk Nadim into opening some of the files to show us what these aliens look like?”
“No. Leave it, Zara.” That was sharp, coming from Beatriz, and after a moment she said, “I’m sorry, but I just . . . I need to rest.”
Didn’t take a genius to figure out that she wanted me gone. It was possible she’d change her mind in time. Space travel hadn’t immediately enraptured her either, but she’d come around. With those silent reassurances, I said good night and headed for my room in low spirits.
“You’re upset,” Nadim observed.
He hadn’t spoken to us in Beatriz’s room, which made me think she hadn’t invited him in, and therefore, he hadn’t been listening to what we said. I’d counted on that. He did follow into my quarters, however; I felt him in a warming swirl, prickling over my skin. Normally I would have found that relaxing, comforting, more than a little thrilling.
Not just now. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m all right.”
“You told Beatriz about Firstworld.”
“So you did eavesdrop on us!”
“No. But it’s obvious you would want to involve her in trying to find out more, and I think from your mood that she rejected your offer.”
“Damn. Why are you so perceptive? But she’s happier just doing her job.”
“You aren’t.”
“What?”
“Happy.”
“Eh, I can be happy in some ways but not in others. I’m complicated like that.”
He seemed to consider that for a moment, and then said, almost hesitantly, “Would you let me share something else with you?”
“Always.” The response popped out before I could stop it.
“You should make yourself comfortable first.”
A little shivering breath gusted out, but I curled up on my bed. Hell, I even closed my eyes. Before Nadim, I never took instructions, but these days, it was hard for me to imagine him asking me to do anything that would hurt me.
“Okay, I’m good.”
“I don’t know what you did that day at the pool, but do it again. If you can. Or this might not work.” He hesitated. “Call this . . . an apology. I want you to see what I see.”
I didn’t even ask what he intended to do. Before, I’d closed the door on him; this time, I threw it wide, and it was like having my mind drawn into a breathlessly fast whirlpool. Silent currents carried me straight to him, and as we had before, we clicked in, two missing pieces, and then there was no I, as everything of him became me. The new thing, the sweetness of we, moved with growing confidence. My mind opened like a flower so we could feel the cool, distant starlight streaming in an incandescent glow. Everything expanded. I was enormous and minuscule at the same time. Joined.
Bonded.
A flutter of fingertips, and we leapt forward. But it wasn’t enough. There were no words anymore, just the endless loop of emotion—joy, excitement, euphoria—and it echoed until we couldn’t contain it. Notes that I (the smaller I) only sensed before they burst into starsong, humming along our hull-skin, glittershot, thrumming, hopeful, all cadences in light and sound, simultaneous and eternal and exquisite. Roaring repeat, call and icy chorus of distant stars—
Pop.
I tumbled into my skin, and I felt like I was choking, trapped in a small dark place, alone. I felt myself flailing and couldn’t control it, and then I was sickly falling off the bed. Laying on the floor, I panted, hard. My head hurt like it hadn’t since I was a little kid. “N-Nadim . . . ?”
“I’m here, Zara.” He spoke warmly, quickly, and I heard the deep concern. “You’re showing elevated heart rate and respiratory distress.” Such a scattershot voice, pinging me with the pink of his panic. “Do you require medical intervention?”
“No. Just . . . give me a minute. That was hard-core.”
“Hard . . . core?”
“Being you. I heard the stars. Tasted them. Or . . .” I had no words.
“And I felt your heart beating, your blood rushing, the flicker of your nerves and skin. It was . . .” Apparently, this was new territory for Nadim too. “That was my fault. I only meant to show you a little of what I see. Not everything. Not yet. I didn’t mean—”
“To do what?” Put that way, he made it sound like we were doing something forbidden, and for me, that was like a catnip mouse on a string.
“Deep bond.”
Why did that sound so alluring? Despite my exhaustion, I immediately wanted to do it again. I ached to feel that freedom, to explode out of my tiny, fragile skin into the exultation of starsong. “That was amazing. Would we get in trouble if anyone found out?”
“Yes. It isn’t meant to be done on the Tour. I think it happens on the Journey.”
“Then it has to be our secret.” Right then I made up my mind, I wouldn’t even tell Bea. From general conversation, I’d gleaned that her impressions from Nadim were superficial at best, only glimmers of what I felt. She was more hesitant about connecting with him and she didn’t have a boost of Leviathan DNA, either.
“I just . . . I wanted to make it up to you.” He didn’t even need to explain what he meant. I could tell that
Nadim didn’t like holding out on me. It chafed like a sliver of glass beneath his skin. I twisted onto my back and flattened my palms on the floor, then bent my knees so I could use the soles of my feet too. Not only did it ground me after that wild ride, it also offered four points of contact. It occurred to me I might prefer sleeping on the floor in contact with him to sleeping on the bed, as it carried the same emotional resonance as snuggling in somebody’s arms.
Where we touched, warmth blossomed. With my eyes closed, I could feel what he felt, the energy flow back and forth as we adjusted as separate things once more, falling away from the we. Before I realized it, he had me tracing patterns with my hands and feet, following the subtle trail of pulses. The sleek, hot delight of it spiraled in secret art that only we could see, only we could create. Nadim’s peace washed over me as if I’d survived a shipwreck.
I finally said, “If you ever bullshit me again, you’ll see some Lower Eight wrath.”
“Consider me forewarned.” I sensed what I would have called a smile. His voice dropped to a slightly lower pitch, and the floor beneath me warmed. I could see the tendrils of color pulsing beneath me, like an aura. “Then . . . I should be more candid. The first time, at the pool . . . that was accidental. This was not. I wanted to share with you.”
My mouth went dry, and I closed my eyes, listening to him. He was nervous, I thought, waves of yellow and cool green and little spikes of orange like goose bumps.
“Share what?” I asked.
“Everything.” The word came like a fall of light, warm as summer. “Being with you is different, no awkward words, the way others flinch when I touch. You aren’t afraid of me. Of this. I know it isn’t time, Zara. Our rules say a deep bond is only for the Journey; not every Leviathan can find such a partner. But—”
“You didn’t want to wait,” I cut in. “I’m not good at rules either. Maybe that’s why you picked me.”
“I didn’t. Typhon did,” he reminded me.
Disquiet prickled to life. From what I knew, Typhon was a bastard, and maybe Nadim was grown in his image, only smoother, capable of making me forget my anger with a single glimpse of the stars. I didn’t like feeling like I’d been . . . handled, and I was still uneasy when I drifted off to sleep.
Biggest mistake of my life.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Breaking Laws
I WOKE TO sunlight and birds twittering in trees, which was the most annoying way to wake up. The only birds I’d seen in the Zone had been seagulls, loud scavengers that would sooner shit on you than not. Birds didn’t make me think of open meadows and forests—more of trash piles.
“Hey,” I said, sitting up and running my fingers through my uneven hair. “Could you make the alarm do, um, water instead? Rain? Or maybe the ocean? Birds aren’t my thing.”
No answer. I flopped back down. “Nadim?” The floor beneath me was still warm—he’d increased the temperature to keep me comfortable while I slept—and I stayed huddled there beneath the thin blanket for a moment before I said his name again. Worried, this time. “Nadim? Are you there?”
No answer, again. I jumped up, didn’t bother with niceties like showers and deodorizers and hell, even uniforms. I was still in my thin, silky underwear when I left my room at a run, heading for the data console. “Nadim!” I shouted. “Answer me, dammit!”
Only silence came back, even when I stopped and pressed both hands flat against his skin because physical contact boosted our basic connection. He was there, I could feel him, but he was . . . drifting. Barely there, distant as the stars. Imagining my thoughts as silver tendrils, I reached for him, reached and opened my mind until the effort hurt; he was too far. Despair and fear curled through me in gray and bloodred waves. I yelled his name again into the darkness.
Nothing.
Beatriz stumbled out of her quarters, equally disheveled. “Something’s wrong!”
I stepped back from the wall and almost fell. She grabbed and shook me. Hard. “Zara! What should we do?”
Suddenly a shudder went through Nadim’s body, an ominous shiver that brought with it a low, silvery flash of what felt like pain. Please, Nadim. . . . I remembered the video I’d found, the one he hadn’t wanted me to see, of the grim third voyage where he’d lost his Honors and nearly his own life.
Oh God. He’s gone dark.
This is why I built the alarm, I realized, and felt immediately better. Quickly I ran diagnostics; it had all looked good before, and still did; shouldn’t it have buzzed him awake by now? I checked it again. Diagnostics said it was fine, but it wasn’t responding.
I tried inputting the backdoor code I’d created but it only turned the alarm off, when it was allegedly on already. The shock part wasn’t working. . . . What the hell did I do wrong?
It came to me with a rush of horror what Nadim had so off-handedly said: that it would be installed before he went on the Journey. But we weren’t on the Journey yet. Right now, the thing worked, but it wasn’t installed. And it wasn’t doing a damn bit of good sitting in the assembly bay.
He was supposed to be safe on the Tour without it.
I grabbed Bea’s hands. “Manual controls! Go!”
Her lips parted, but she didn’t waste time asking questions; she turned and ran down the corridor, around the curve. I followed on shaky legs, feeling more strikes and shivers in his body, like needles driven into my own skin.
As I got to the hub, Bea was cursing under her breath in rapid-fire Portuguese, staring at the data readouts as her fingers flew, touching controls, swiping, spinning. I headed for an adjacent data station to check on Nadim’s condition, but a speck of darkness caught my eye on the viewport, occluding a cluster of stars. Then it was larger, huge, and I involuntarily ducked as it slammed brutally into the wall a few meters over my head with an enormous, shuddering impact. I expected glass to crack and expel me into space, but the thing bounced off and rolled away into the dark.
Another sharp, silvery pain beneath my skin. Nadim’s nerves firing warnings to a brain that was no longer receiving.
“Bea!” I shouted.
“I know!” she called back, and finally, finally, something she did worked. I felt a lurch inside, and a tugging, drawing sense of deceleration.
We were slowing down, here in the darkness between stars, and as we did, I saw we were in the orbiting graveyard of a pulverized planet or moon—debris everywhere, from dust to pebble-sized fragments to enormous islands of rock. If we’d gone farther into it and hit one of those floating mountains . . . The one on the port side had to be the size of the entire city of New Detroit. Maybe an Elder could have survived the impact, but I didn’t like to even think what would have happened to Nadim.
We slowed, still bumping into fragments, creating an open wake behind us until the collisions bled enough of our momentum that we hung silent and still, trapped in the middle of this dead debris field. It was moving too, driven by whatever long-ago forces had acted on it to blow it to pieces. As I joined Bea at the console, I realized she was manually controlling our position and speed relative to it. We were moving. Just matching our speed to the cloud.
“Can you get us out of here?” I asked. She took her hands off the controls long enough to wrap her hair into an untidy knot at the back of her head.
“Not until I make sure I have all the other pieces’ vectors mapped,” she said. “I might be able to, a little at a time. But it’s dangerous.”
“So, we stay here?”
“Just as dangerous. Everything’s moving, Z, at different speeds, different angles. He’ll keep getting hit, I can’t avoid everything. Sooner or later, one of the big ones that are moving around out there will crash into us.” She looked up at me, dark eyes fierce. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I think he’s asleep.” I hesitated for about two seconds, then nudged her aside and started the vid of Voyage Three on the console screen.
She flinched and covered her mouth by the end, and gave me a horrified look as I shu
t it down. “What is this?”
“Nadim lost his Honors,” I said. “Early on. He’s got a kind of condition—a very deep sleep, like a coma. He only does it when he expends too much energy and is too far from stars to recharge properly. It wasn’t supposed to happen on the Tour. Part of my checklist was building him a kind of alarm clock to wake him up if it ever happened again. But there weren’t any directions to install it, just to build it.”
“But he was fine yesterday!” Somebody else might waste energy getting pissed over being out of the loop, but Bea was all business during a crisis, checking our position on the star charts. “How close does he need to be to a star to refuel?”
“Closer than this, or he wouldn’t be drifting,” I said. “What’s our nearest option?”
“There.” A star chart flickered to life all around us, glorious 3D. She pointed. “This is a red giant. So we shouldn’t have to go more than half a day at his normal speed to reach a significant amount of light and radiation coming from it.”
I had a terrible suspicion as to why Nadim was hibernating. For all my contempt toward rules, I was starting to think that the Elders’ restrictions about deep bonding might have been in place for a reason. Maybe he’d used too much of his strength last night. Guilt tapped at the edges of my brain, but falling into a pit of remorse wouldn’t help. Only action could.
I swallowed hard and said, “How can I help?”
Beatriz switched back to the screens that showed the dizzily moving field of debris around us. “Take the biggest pieces,” she said. “Calculate their speeds and trajectories. Be careful, we need to know exactly where they’ll be to chart our path. I’ll take the medium-sized ones.”
“I should have said something, Bea,” I said as I took my place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would happen.”
“We should have both been told,” she said. I heard the grim tone of it. “Never mind. First we have to get out of this. All of us.”
We both started in on the calculations, the same kind of exercises that the checklists had been drilling us in since we’d started. I was grateful for the hard training now, under pressure, with our lives on the line. This was what we had going for us that his long-dead Honors hadn’t on that fatal voyage. We weren’t necessarily smarter or better, but at least we had training.
