She’s fine, he said inside his head.
Of all the places she should be okay, the clinic was one. He just had to keep telling himself she was going to make it to the clinic just fine. No one was going to mess with her on the way there.
Nope, everything was going to be fine. They had all been through enough, they just had to make it to the planet.
But no matter how many times he repeated assurances in his head, he didn’t entirely believe it.
The only positive thing about the madness of the hallways, was that by the time he got to the starwalker office, his worries were pushed to the back of his brain by his overwhelming urge to punch people in the throat who had forgotten how to walk.
“Hey, how is she?” Parmita asked. He appreciated her not bothering with small talk and bullshit.
“I don’t know, Princess.” He raked a hand through his hair, trying to prepare himself for a day of work. “She seems like she’s dealing with it, but I don’t know what’s happening in her head and I don’t know what it looks like to deal with shit right, you know?”
She nodded, but he wasn’t sure she did know what he meant. No one onboard really knew what dealing with shit right looked like. Not even the medics did much beyond trying to help people keep moving forward because that’s all that mattered to everyone.
But he didn’t want Zellendine to get hard and angry like he did after his mom died. The problem was, he didn’t understand another way to respond when everyone around you pretended like your loss never happened after a little while.
“How are the repairs going?” he asked, shaking his head and trying to focus on what he was supposed to.
“Well, the outside is almost done. And then we’re all going to be trying to fix that section on the inside, and I have no idea where we’re going to get the parts, or how long that disaster is going to take.” She slumped, grabbing her suit and allowing him to help her into it.
“Do you want help out there?” he asked.
“Yeah, it would be good to have a dumbass out there with me. Imogene needs a break anyway.” She smiled at him as he helped her with her helmet.
“Imogene has been out there a lot, huh?” he asked, getting his own suit and waving down another starwalker to help him get into it.
“She’s been out there so much I’m not sure when she’s slept.” Parmita leaned against the wall while he finished getting in his suit.
The semi constant presence of Imogene made sense to him, but it didn’t surprise him that Parmita didn’t get it. He wondered how she managed to keep her ability a secret while she helped with the last of the fixes that they had left for the regular crew to work on.
Going through the airlock wasn’t as bad as it used to be, but he was looking forward to getting on the planet when the concept of outside didn’t include threat of death from breathing.
“Hey, Princess, have we heard anything about who is going to be on what spindle? And who is going to be auxiliary support crew for us?” Troylus asked, pulling himself along on the hand holds while she released her little air puffs beside him.
“No, we haven’t heard a thing. And, you know they just put things in the computer, and it tells them what to do. So I don’t know why they’re waiting so damn long.”
In the past, he would have agreed with her. But maybe this time, they were watching everything and they hadn’t made a decision about how to handle it all yet.
Maybe they were going to try and send all the silver eyed people down to the surface with the starwalkers. That made sense to him, but he hoped that somehow, he would be able to get Zellendine and Rullon assigned to his spindle. In a perfect universe he would be able to hand-pick all the people he was assigned to create a burgh with, but if he could only pick two, it was definitely her and his dad.
The question was, how to make that happen.
25
Zellendine
Few people were down that hallway. The one that she would always think of with an asterisk in her mind. The hallway where it happened. But she had to think about it as a place to find clues. She had to pay attention and put aside the visions that flashed in her head from just being near this place.
She had to keep her gaze off that spot.
The door to the room where she found him was no longer in place. Why it had been removed, she couldn’t fathom. She didn’t remember it being burnt, but it may have been.
Just inside, her step was uneven and she wobbled, but it looked like the room was a small meeting space with three chairs and a low table.
No wonder she didn’t know about this room, why would space like this be wasted on a small meeting room?
And, more importantly, who had her father been meeting?
Moving further inside, she looked under the chairs, the table, inspected the corners, and every nook and cranny she could find. But there was nothing to lead her toward an answer, nothing to give her even a next step in her search. Nothing.
She stood in the entryway to the room, looking back at the chairs, trying to imagine her father in there, talking to someone, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen to him.
Of all the possibilities of how it might have happened, the one where he didn’t know it was coming, the one where it happened so fast that he didn’t have time to even be afraid was the only one she could stomach.
Falling to the ground a second later, she thought maybe her legs had given out from grief. But no, someone had shoved her.
She landed, hard, on her hands and knees and looked behind her just as a foot connected with her stomach, lifting her off the ground with the force of the kick and knocking the breath from her lungs.
“You duplicitous bitch.” Briar’s voice was low and grinding. His silver eyes shone with more than hate, it was revulsion and disgust, rage, and self-righteousness.
Coughing, she tried to suck down enough air to ask him what the fuck he was talking about.
“Don’t come anywhere near my family again.” Briar leaned down close to her face while she gasped for breath and held an arm to the pain in her abdomen.
He didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with her beyond the kind of careful observation her dad got when he was studying something in the clinic.
There was no sign of their history in his eyes in that moment. The only thing present was the eerie examination like she was a sample he found only mildly interesting beyond what it could tell him about something else.
Finally, she got enough air.
“Briar.” She meant to say more, but her first words were drowned by her lungs ability to inflate. With more work to breathe and him leaning even closer, she tried again. “Fuck you, Briar. What the fuck is wrong with you?” She wanted to pick up the table and bash him in the head with it. She wanted to lash out at him like he had at her, only her attack would be in self-defense and not totally unprovoked. But she could barely get the words out and they were enough to leave her struggling again.
“Oh, nice. So, there’s something wrong with me, but you’re just a perfect person. Right, Zelle?” He reared back and balled his hands into fists.
She managed to sit up and tuck part of her body behind one of the chairs.
“Don’t call me that.” Her voice sounded close to yelling, but it was actually the only way to force her body to breathe without wheezing, with big, forceful inhales and exhales.
“I can’t call you a name I gave you? Why not? You just want to cut all ties with me?”
For a second he sounded almost normal, almost like the guy she had always known. For a second she thought the walls the silver had built around his memories were starting to fall like Troylus’s had.
But then he sneered and kicked the table at her.
It tumbled through the room and slammed into her side as she ducked her head. The metal of the table made a hollow bong sound, and pain shot up from her side and back to make her vision blurry.
“Stop, Briar,” she yelled, her body aching and her mind whirling, tryin
g to come up with a way out of this situation.
Her eyes couldn’t help themselves anymore, she looked at the place on the floor where her father’s body was.
A singed mark, at least not a clear outline of his body, was deep and dark on the floor. Her wobble from earlier made sense and her body let her know there was no more she could do to prevent meeting his same fate if Briar had flames as his ability.
She vomited down the side of the chair, the noxious chunks dripped down onto the floor.
“You’re not worth it. You’re disgusting. I’ll let leadership deal with you,” Briar said, his voice devoid of anything other than exhaustion, and he turned and left her there, with the smell of puke in her nostrils, and pain everywhere.
Hollower, in so many more ways than she was when she set out to find clues, and not any richer in that regard, she lifted a shaking hand to swipe at her mouth.
Fine, he didn’t want her to see Upton anymore, but it wasn’t up to him. It was up to his dads.
And she was going to do her duty by her little friend.
If she couldn’t help her father’s memory yet, she was going to do what he would have wanted.
26
Troylus
“This sealer isn’t going to be enough.” Parmita cocked her head to one side and then the other, studying her work on a seam of the cobbled together exterior of the blown-out part of the ship.
“What do you think? Will it hold?” She asked, turning toward where he was shoving at a panel, trying to force it back to flat.
“Sure, it will. Come over here and help me with this and then I’ll check your seal work,” Troylus said.
Yeah, he would check it and then he would ensure it did work no matter how much it wouldn’t have before.
“Fine.” She rolled her shoulders and slipped the container of sealant into a pocket on the side of her suit.
“How is it going out there?” Rullon’s voice came over his comm, sounding oddly chipper.
“Okay.” Troylus spoke carefully, it wasn’t like his dad to sound so… fake happy.
Parmita tapped the side of her helmet and pointed at Troylus so he did the same, cutting his comm.
“What the hell was that?” She asked.
So he wasn’t wrong. That was weird.
“No idea. Maybe we should check about coming in and finishing this later?” He tapped his comm again and bit his lip for a second while he tried to hear anything in the background that would explain it.
“Rullon, should we head in and make a plan, or keep at this?” There, that sounded reasonable and appropriate, no matter who was listening.
“Actually, that’s a good idea. We need to get more parts out there anyway, I think.” His voice still had that bizarre false quality to it, and the hairs on Troylus’s arms stood on end.
“Come on, Princess,” he said, and Parmita nodded, using the air bursts to push herself ahead of him toward the air lock.
Troylus tried not to imagine all manner of issues as the air lock cycled through. He failed.
Was he going to walk into another trial for someone? Was there another accident and more people were dead? Was Zellendine a screaming puddle of grief somewhere and he needed to go get her back to quarters? He had no idea, but his stomach had turned into a rock while he waited to find out.
Finally, the air lock opened on a shuffling crowd of starwalkers, they shot furtive glances toward the office and Imogene was the only one to step forward and help him out of his suit, moving on to Parmita once she was done with him. She didn’t say a word, but the hard look in her eye told Troylus that he wasn’t wrong. This was not a pleasant interruption.
In the office, the only starwalker present was Rullon. But he wasn’t alone in there.
Standing next to him, looming over his chair, was a member of leadership from another shift, whose name Troylus didn’t know.
On Rullon’s other side, Alara sat, leaning back in her seat, showing no sign that her visit was anything other than a cordial social call.
“Alara,” Troylus said, nodding his head to recognize her presence and nodding to the unknown person as well. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen leadership down here.”
She smiled a sweet and soft smile that didn’t meet her eyes and tilted her head to the side. “You know, I think you might be right that we don’t connect often enough with the starwalkers. I think we spend more time in the way of all the other crews. To be fair, most of us are afraid of the thought of going into space with nothing but a suit.”
Her chuckle at her own attempt at self deprecation was alone, the sound of it not matching the silent trepidation hanging thick in the room.
“Well, what prompted this visit?” He smiled back at her, a lazy smile he hoped didn’t tell her much, and leaned against the wall. “Do you want an update on the repairs to the hole in the ship? Because that project is pretty big.”
“Oh, no. We trust you all are working very diligently to make that happen as soon as possible.” She waved her hand in the air, as if the accident and the horrible aftermath weren’t still being felt in more than just the closing of a section of hallway and massive hole blown in the ship.
He waited for her to say more. He wasn’t going to do what she wanted, which was start blabbering about nothing and get himself in trouble in the process. They were good at this, the game he thought all the leadership crew played. But he was going to be better. He had to be. He had too many secrets.
Finally, she blew out a pent-up breath and sighed,
“Troylus, I suppose I should just get to my questions.”
“You have questions for me?”
She cut her glance to Rullon and then back to him. He didn’t take the bait and look at his dad. Whatever she wanted to ask him, Rullon would have found a way to put her off until he was there. He knew his dad well enough to know he wouldn’t have screwed up and offered any information that would have set Troylus even further back in this conversation than he already was.
“More than a few.”
“Okay, go for it.”
“First, I wanted to check on Zellendine. How is she doing?” Alara looked sincere, but he didn’t trust anyone in her position.
“As well as can be expected. She wants to try and focus on moving forward, but at a time like this… it’s sometimes hard to make your brain do that.” There was more leeway for people just after a loss, and Alara had known Stephen, so when her face fell and she nodded, he thought he hadn’t hurt Zellendine by letting her know. Hopefully, it would buy Zellendine a little more time to process before leadership expected too much from her.
“Understandable, given the circumstances.” Alara shuffled her hands in her lap, a small adjustment that made it clear to Troylus how much she was a true believer in the Chapter motto. Only someone wholly indoctrinated would have been uncomfortable by their not really mention of something that had only happened a few days before.
“Second,” she said, looking back up from her hands to him, “I was wondering how you came to be in the area to find Zellendine and bring her back to your quarters?”
Huh? What the hell was she getting at?
“I was just walking the halls, trying to get used to how crammed everyone is, and saw her. She’s one of the only people I can easily pick out of the crowds.” It wasn’t a lie. But he was sure as hell not going to tell Alara about the conversation with Imogene and their abilities.
Alara’s eyes narrowed just a fraction.
Shit, he said something wrong. He didn’t know what it was, but her reaction couldn’t have been good.
“Third, do you enjoy having her be a part of your quarters?”
“It’s a little strange, it’s easier to ignore a stranger in a weird way than someone you’ve known all your life.” How was she expecting him to answer that? That he wanted to be with Zellendine all the time and that he didn’t trust anyone else not to turn silver and get angry with her for no damn reason like had? No. Alara was the last person he
wanted to know that.
“But do you enjoy her being there? I know you two have been struggling with your friendship, but then I hear about you coming to her aid and becoming roommates.”
“Well, Stephen was a good person. And anyone in her situation, seeing that, it couldn’t have been easy. Maybe I’m just not as much of a jerk as I thought I was. Rullon made the decision to move quarters, to help her out.”
Alara was dangerously close to looking back to last shift, her cagey language didn’t lessen the shock that ran through him knowing she wasn’t looking forward about this.
“Hmmm. That’s true. And I have never thought you were a jerk.”
Yeah, sure she hadn’t. Well, he wasn’t going to call her out on her thoughts about him, but he did raise an eyebrow.
“Last, I would like to know if you were the one that killed Stephen,” she said, her face betraying neither the fact that she was full on looking back now, nor the fact that she had just insinuated that he was a killer.
“No.” He wasn’t going to elaborate or let her think she was ever going to get him to admit to something he didn’t do. He curled his hands into fists and crossed his arms over his chest, the guy standing next to her stood up a little straighter and braced himself.
Asshole. That guy thought puffing himself up was going to intimidate him? He could go get bent.
“Good. Thank you for your time. I hope the repairs continue to go well.” She stood up from her seat and walked out of the room, the asshole on her tail.
He looked at Rullon, whose face was set in hard lines emphasized with every grind of his jaw.
“We need to talk,” his dad said, low and harsh, as soon as they were well beyond hearing.
Yes, they clearly did. And he needed to come up with a plan if leadership was aiming their inquiry into Stephen’s death at him.
The Spindle Page 9
