by Ann Aguirre
She hit the button, and the lights flickered from the additional power draw, but from the satisfaction that rippled through Nadim, I didn’t need Bea to interpret the readings. We had done it. Bea cheered wildly and I gave a weary thumbs-up. Hopefully they thought my weariness was from a week of nonstop hull crawling.
“We’re done,” I said.
“Not quite,” Nadim said. His tone sounded quiet and sober. And then I remembered what I’d been trying really hard to forget.
I still had to install the alarm.
Beatriz kept her head down as she worked the console, fingers flying. “Zara, EMITU wants you to check in. He was worried about the healing on your hands.”
“My hands are fine.”
“I’m just relaying the message. Five minutes, then you can relax.”
I did want to rest. Desperately. So I went down to the med bay, sat down on the treatment bed, and glared at EMITU as he powered up and wheeled over to me.
“Great,” I said, and held my hands out for inspection. “See? There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“No,” he agreed. “There is not. Which is why this will make you so angry. Please do not shoot the messenger.”
And before I could ask him what the hell he was going on about, one of his sneakier appendages jabbed me with a needle, and before I could yelp, I was falling backward onto the soft mattress. I felt him tut-tutting and dragging me into place and covering me up with a sheet and blanket. Fussing with my pillow. I wanted to ask why, but my lips were too heavy, the word was too heavy, and last thing I heard was Nadim saying, inside my head:
Forgive us, Zara.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Breaking Open
I WOKE UP pissed, with a drug hangover, and EMITU trundled out of my way when I staggered out of bed. “Thanks for staying with us, Honor Cole!” it said cheerfully with a little wave of all its attachments. “I hope your enforced rest was pleasant!”
“Screw you,” I snarled, and lunged for the corridor. I didn’t bother with the comm units. I just yelled. “Bea! Beatriz!”
She met me in the hub. She looked tired, paler than usual, and she had her hands clasped together like some little schoolgirl, but her gaze was steady and calm. “You’re mad,” she said.
“Hell yes I’m mad, what the hell? You sandbagged me?”
“Technically, I didn’t. . . .”
“You ordered EMITU to drug me.”
“Yes.” She bit her lip. A little bit of a tell that she felt guilty and anxious about more than just this. “I had to. Otherwise, you would have . . . insisted on doing it yourself.”
“Doing what—”
But I stopped, because I suddenly realized who was missing from this conversation. Nadim was very quiet, and though I could sense him, he was distant.
Still, I could feel the ragged red pulses of pain coming from him.
I glared at Bea. “What did you do?”
Nadim was the one who answered. “It’s not her fault. I asked her to do it,” he said. “You were too close to me for this to work, Zara. I couldn’t give you such pain.”
“I don’t feel it as much as you do,” Bea said. “So we put you out and I did the install on the, uh, alarm clock.”
“What did you use, a chain saw? Do you know how much he’s hurting?”
“Stop, Zara!” Nadim’s sharp tone caught me off guard, and I took a step back. I’d been looming over Bea, I realized. “She followed instructions. I will heal. We agreed that you didn’t need to be involved.”
“You should have asked me!”
“Told you,” Bea said. Not to me. To Nadim. “She’s not going to get over this any time soon.”
“Damn right,” I said. I took in a long breath and let it out. “Okay. So. What’s our situation?”
“Two Leviathan have come close. Neither have detected me.” The implied yet hung in the air. “They are singing my name. Searching for me.”
“I guess that’s the Leviathan version of a citizen alert,” I said. “All right. How long until you’re healed enough to move on?”
“A day,” he said. That sounded optimistic to me. “Zara—”
“Later,” I said. “Right now, I want to shoot something.”
Combat sim got the cobwebs out and blood moving and expended the anger that would have been pointless to level at Bea and Nadim. Afterward, I raided the weapons locker, because if we were really on the run, I damn sure planned to look the part.
Time to mend some fences.
When I found Bea in the lounge, I struck an action pose in my jacked-up skinsuit. I’d added multiple belts, two nicely lethal guns, a couple of knives, and something that Nadim had assured me was a sonic weapon, nonfatal to any species. I looked like a damn space pirate. I loved it.
“Well?” I asked.
Bea cocked her head. “Don’t you think it’s a bit—”
“Fantastic?”
“Frightening?”
“That’s the point, Bea. We’re not Honors anymore. We’re—I don’t know. Rogues.”
“I don’t have any idea how to be a rogue.”
“First rule: more belts. Second rule: no more rules. Except one: we don’t let Nadim get caught.” I reached out to her, and she took my hand. “Deal?”
“Yes,” she said. More lip biting. “Zara, I’m sorry. About—”
She was cut off as a strong electric pulse zipped through Nadim’s body, followed by six more, then a pause before starting again.
“What is that?” I asked. No immediate answer, and I didn’t think it was because he was still irked at me. “Nadim?”
“It’s a distress signal.” He sounded distracted. “A long way off.”
“From?”
“From a Leviathan,” he said. “I can’t make out which one. The song is . . . confused.”
Bea shook her head. “Trap.”
“Trap,” I confirmed. “Nope. Thanks for playing, Elder.”
“But—” Nadim seemed surprised. “If it’s genuine—”
“Nadim. Typhon wants to destroy you. Don’t you think he’d fake a distress signal and hope you come running? Because I’m betting that would be your first impulse.”
“Of course,” he said. A yellow wave of anxiety fluttered in him like a trapped butterfly. “This doesn’t feel like Typhon. I think one of my kin needs help. Right now.”
“Well, there’s a Gathering, right? Plenty of Leviathan out there to help. Including Typhon. We’re fugitives. That means no helping unless we practically trip over someone in our path, okay? We’re trying to find a place to hide, and we aren’t running some intergalactic hero service!”
“Zara.” Mournful green disappointment crashed over me. “We can’t be so selfish. Didn’t one of my cousins come to help when I was drifting in dark sleep?”
That was an accurate little guilt missile. He was getting to know me too well. “Yeah, but—well, I screwed that one up. What do you call the guys with all the tentacles?”
“You mean, the race of people? We can’t fully pronounce what they call themselves; we don’t have the vocal range. The closest is Abyin Dommas. That is a description from another language. It means—”
“Singers in the deep,” Beatriz said, which shut me up. How did she know? From the look on her face, she wasn’t exactly sure. “They—they are purely musicians. It’s their entire life. They’re born singing.”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to hear them,” she said wistfully. “It must be—”
“Amazing, sure thing, but let’s stay on target. Music appreciation later. So, I kind of stunned one of the Abyin Dommas and we broke all those rules and I’m not so sure your Leviathan cousins are all yay Team Zadim even if you do a good deed now. You understand? It’s a risk. A big one.”
He did, of course; he didn’t need all my spoken words to do that. It just made me feel better.
I hadn’t changed his mind, though. “Risk or not, someone calls, and I have to answer. I have to. It might be deception
, but if it is, we can still run. If it isn’t—what if that Leviathan is drifting? What if his crew is calling for help, as you did? They could die.”
I thought about it, all my instincts telling me screw those people. Nadim couldn’t turn away. He couldn’t put himself ahead of the needs of his helpless kin.
I put my hand against the wall. Bursts of gold formed around it, and then streaked away down, then back. Exploded out in a silent flash.
Beatriz put her coffee down and did the same thing. Purple fireworks behind his skin.
We were saying yes without saying a word. His relief was tangible as he changed course, looping sinuously to intercept the beacon and then accelerating, a sense of urgency driving him.
“Come on,” I said, pulling Beatriz by the wrist.
“Where’re we going?” she asked.
“Weapons locker,” I said.
“You don’t have enough?”
“I think you don’t.”
When we got there, I kitted out Bea with dual stunners and something with lethal kick to it. I wasn’t about to let Typhon hook Nadim again. If he wanted a fight, he’d get one. We’d lose, probably, but I intended to give him some new scars in very tender areas.
We sped on, driven by starsong, to find the Leviathan calling for help.
Halfway there, hours into our quest, the beacon went silent. No pulses, no responses when Nadim sent back his own signals. I pulled up a starmap and looked it over; Nadim wasn’t in any mood to do handy YOU ARE HERE graphics, but I could tell where we were and that we were heading for Cosmos Redshift 7.
I ran the timeline back, so I could see the historical track; in reverse, Nadim headed farther toward the nearby galaxy, and then curved on a different path, moving backward. I overlaid the two maps and analyzed the course patterns.
We were headed back in the same direction.
It was a trap. Our first instincts had been right.
“Nadim!” I said sharply, and reached for our bond. He blocked me. “Nadim, you need to stop!”
“Trust me, Zara.”
“He’s going to kill you! Don’t you get that? You can’t go running headlong in there!”
“Typhon would not lure me with a distress call. No Leviathan would. I know this puts you in danger, and I am sorry for it. I will do everything I can to protect you. But we must try to help.”
“I disagree,” I said flatly.
“I don’t,” Bea said. She was standing in the hub now, looking half a pirate, tying her hair back. “We have to go. If Nadim’s sure, we have to do it.”
“But—”
“Zara.” Her eyes locked on mine, and what I saw there made me shut up. “We’re going.”
The pings came again. Both of us turned to look at the console. Nadim said, “It’s not Typhon.”
“What?”
“I analyzed the harmonics. It isn’t Typhon sending that signal; he’s an Elder, their range is different. It’s a ship younger than I am. One carrying Honors on a Tour, not a bonded ship. Otherwise there would have been a bond-name. . . .” He sounded anxious and distracted, and he wouldn’t let me in. Maybe because he was afraid I’d try to make him do something he didn’t want to do, like turn around.
“I won’t stop you,” I said. “But you have to be prepared, Nadim. Stay alert!”
“I am,” he said. “You and Beatriz need to be at stations, in case something happens.”
There was a new and resonant timbre in his voice, a determination that hadn’t been there before.
In the end, this was Nadim’s decision. His people, calling for help. In the Zone, the “honor among thieves” code might be bullshit, but out here, maybe we needed some code to live by. Even if we weren’t Honors anymore.
I let Beatriz know what was up, and together, we stood watch in the console room, staring at our steady progress in the 3D star charts. We’d already passed the point where we’d broken free of Typhon, and Beatriz was keeping a sharp lookout for any sign of the Elder’s presence, but it was ghostly empty out here. A binary star system hung on the outer edges, with a cluster of planets frying in their orbits; if anything had evolved there, it had to be fireproof. I speculated what they might look like. Asbestos bunnies? Snakes made of shimmering steel scales? Maybe they were liquid and ran in rivulets down channels on the planet, built vast lakes for cities and fountains for towers.
I was afraid, I realized. My healed hands were cold, and when I flexed them, the joints felt stiff. Get centered, Zara. You are badass. I was rocking heavy armament, tight pants, and a glorious crown of curls that would have killed in the Zone.
Ready as I would ever be for whatever was coming.
Beatriz said, quietly, “Contact.”
Nadim slowed. I felt the shift, though it wasn’t hard enough to throw us around; I still braced myself on the console and stared hard at the charts as they magnified, zeroing in on Nadim’s position.
Debris field. Not again. I remembered the sweaty fear of being caught in that last one, of dodging rocks the size of buildings and trying not to get squashed between them. Bea had saved us on that one. Now, she looked both alert and deeply wary. She touched controls, a graceful dance of fingers, without looking away from her screen. Then she grabbed the screen image and threw it up for a 3D visual so I could see it.
It still looked like a debris field to me, but Bea was trying to tell me something.
Nadim got it before I did. A wave of dull gray shock shot through him, streaked with the scarlet of anguish. I pressed my hand quickly to his skin, and the power of his emotion nearly knocked me off my feet. No. No. I couldn’t make sense of what he was feeling. Why would a debris field make him so—
Beatriz tapped the image screen and zoomed, and finally, I understood.
We were looking at shredded pieces of silver flesh, floating limp in space. Blackened at the edges.
Pieces of Leviathan.
Nadim hung silent in space, grieving, horror stricken, and I couldn’t move. Finally, I wet my lips and asked, “How many—” I couldn’t finish the question. This was a slaughterhouse.
Bea didn’t answer. I glanced at her and saw she was silently crying, shaking with the force of it. Like me, she was battered by Nadim’s grief, but it was more than that. “The Honors,” she whispered. “Nobody could survive this.”
The scale of it silenced me, still. I thought about that beautiful silvery display of ships around Earth, glittering and shimmering in our yellow sun, welcoming young humans to the stars. I thought of the handsome, well-dressed Honors dancing at the ball. Then I thought about Tenty, an Honor too, a singer in the deep far from his home. A thousand civilizations, Nadim had said. Thousands of Honors, traveling the universe, hopeful and determined. Leviathan carrying them on.
How many lives had been snuffed out here? I couldn’t calculate. I couldn’t bear it.
Nadim was wailing. It was a low, discordant sound of anger, grief, and devastation. I felt it vibrating inside me until tears fell, when I hardly ever cried for anything that wasn’t my own pain. But there was so much here. Grief wasn’t a big enough word for this.
“Typhon,” I whispered, and turned my head toward Beatriz. “Is he dead too?”
Something flashed in the corner of my eye—not on the screen, but in the transparent window. I whipped around and saw an Elder, dark as an extinguished star, block out the distant binary suns an instant before his guns began to fire.
On us.
How the hell did he hide?
Even linked lightly with me, Nadim saw and reacted faster than I could have imagined. He twisted, flipped, and sped away, dodging pieces of dead ships with a precision that was born of desperation. We had one gun, but it would be suicidal to square off with such limited weaponry.
“Zara!” he shouted. “Dark run!”
I dropped into we, and together, we became the dark, drew it around us, vanished from the attacker’s senses. Zara fell away, and Zadim went deep, deeper than before, crushing depths of power
and motion and senses and starsong cacophonous around us like a chorus of mourners at a funeral, screaming stars, everything warping at this speed into smears and moans because the other ship was fast, so fast, and though he couldn’t see us he fired in mercilessly accurate patterns at places we might be next.
We twisted again, curled, flashed like a speeding shark between the corpses of the ships. We were using them for cover, though the disrespect of it woke a sick, gray, discordant wave of horror in us . . . and, at the same time, we began to see flashes of thought from our attacker. Flashes of cold and hunger and blood raining silver in the dark.
Could this be Typhon? Has he gone mad? We both thought it, but the Elder was difficult to even glimpse. His song was all discordance and ruin and screams. We slipped and twisted through a blown-open corpse’s ribs, out another wound, reversed and glided under, then raced for the shelter of another dead body as the one where we hid shuddered under a wave of hits.
We had one single glimpse of the Elder, silhouetted clearly against a distant star.
It wasn’t Typhon.
Dead Leviathan shattered as the attacker’s guns fired on us. The dark run wasn’t working against whoever this Elder was; he was still tracking us somehow, and it was only the dead Leviathan shields that kept us alive. We darted behind a rolling, twisted tangle of skin and organs, something so purely horrific that even a glimpse of it made us both flinch, and gathered ourselves in one shimmering second. We have to fight.
We slammed against the next corpse and pushed it ahead, keeping it between us and the other Leviathan’s massive bulk. More fire poured down on us. Some got through as it chewed up soft tissue and spilled fragments in silvery waves.
Our bond suddenly tightened, drew the two of us together, and forged us into one bright, burning spark. Greater than both. Now.
We felt one shot graze our flank in a deep, ugly, ripping gouge. Felt the cooling rush of blood whispering out into the dark. We called to Beatriz, and she opened in frequencies and song, showing the way. Twist, rise, fall, twist, spin . . . We held on to the shelter of the dead Leviathan as long as we could and came up fast underneath the Elder’s lightly protected ventral side, the side that our starsinger showed to us.
