Bright Shards (The Vardeshi Saga Book 2)

by Meg Pechenick

  I nodded.

  “Will you attend it?”

  I didn’t want to commit myself, so I said, “I’ll try.”

  “Good. I hope you can get some rest tonight. The worst is over.”

  She turned to leave, but I called her back. “Reyna?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why . . .” I tried to meet her eyes, but my gaze faltered before the directness of hers. “Why did you say that? About the shower?”

  “What did I say?”

  “That I should take my time.”

  She looked faintly surprised. “Humans enjoy their cleansing rites, don’t they? I heard about your ritual bath on Arkhati. I thought you’d be glad to hear the water restriction had been removed. Everyone else was.”

  “Oh.”

  “What did you think I meant?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know.” Quickly I keyed in the code and stepped into the shower room, afraid that if I stood there any longer, my thin veneer of self-control might crack under her scrutiny.

  Safely inside the shower room, I turned on the water, methodically stripped off my uniform and underwear, and dropped them on the floor. I was shivering as I stepped under the cascade. Even with the water as hot as it would go, it was several minutes before the shivering stopped. I soaped my hair and rinsed it awkwardly, my right wrist stiff in the brace. I scrubbed my body until my skin was raw and pink. Your smell, he had said. Did I still smell like a human, standing here under the rush of water? When all the sweat and dust had been washed away, was the contamination still there? I pressed my forehead against the cool wall of the shower and finally, belatedly, let the tears come.

  When I had cried myself out, I turned the shower off, dried myself, and put on my pajamas. I went back to my quarters, glad to find the hallway once again deserted. I lay down on my bunk and turned off the lights, hoping for the oblivion of sleep.

  It had obliged me earlier. It eluded me now. It was as though Reyna’s harmless comment about the shower had broken a spell. I lay wide-eyed in the dark, racked by wave after wave of guilt and mortification. It suddenly became clear to me that everything that had happened over the last two days had been my fault. I had been the one who pushed for keeping the Pinion’s crew together. I had singlehandedly brought us all here, to the Ascendant, and to a place and a time where we could be exposed to the Flare. I was to blame for every injury my companions had suffered, from Ziral’s broken bones to Zey’s bruises and the more insidious damage to his trust in Saresh. Seen in hindsight, the choices I had made since the beginning of the Flare unspooled in a clear chain of errors. I had ignored Reyna’s directions, left my flexscreen active, trusted a message I should have known was false. With the most minimal cajoling, I had put myself squarely in Hathan’s path. I had placed myself in danger as surely as if I had loaded a gun and set it in his hand. He wasn’t to blame for what had happened in the conference room. He had been crazed, delirious, whereas I had been fully capable of thinking clearly. I just hadn’t done it.

  No wonder he despised me.

  There was no question in my mind that he did. I thought back to the morning months ago when I first questioned Daskar about the nature of the Flare. She had described it as temporary insanity, but that wasn’t right. It wasn’t madness. It was sheer uncompromising honesty. Hathan had turned on me yesterday, not in an explosion of spontaneous violence, but in an outpouring of pent-up rage and loathing. I had heard the venom in his words. What the disease did, I saw now, was strip away the inhibitions of those it infected until only the raw truth was left. It had shattered Hathan’s reserve like a hammer on glass. I cringed now at the thought of the fabricated courtesy he had shown me for so many months. He had feigned respect, even curiosity, so artfully that I might never have known it was all an act. Only once, on that horrible day when I had entreated his help against Vekesh and been flatly rejected, had I caught a glimpse of the contempt underlying his cool politeness. I had thought then that his behavior was an aberration. Now I knew the truth: he had been stung by anger and worry about Zey into disclosing his real feelings. He hated me. He had all along.

  In an odd way, I was almost grateful for the Flare. Without it, I might have gone on unwittingly inflicting my humanity on him for months. That wouldn’t happen now. I wouldn’t let it. I would board the first Echelon ship that would take me, on Vardesh Prime, if not before. The solitude that had seemed so repellent before seemed positively enticing now. I would welcome the frosty silence of an Echelon crew. If nothing else, it was honest.

  My decision made, I rearranged my position in the blankets and sank into a fitful sleep. An hour or two later, my alarm jarred me awake. I had been dreaming I was locked in the conference room with Hathan again. I rose to prepare for the meeting with his caustic words still echoing in my ears. In the sanitation room I splashed cold water on my face, then attempted to neaten my sleep-tousled hair, hampered as before by the wrist brace. I tried not to look at the bruising around my eye. Ahnir had been right. It was worse. When I had made myself as presentable as I could, I went to my closet and stood staring at the clean uniform hanging inside for five excruciating minutes. Then I struggled out of my pajamas and into jeans and a sweatshirt.

  I was among the last to arrive at the mess hall. As the door opened, I cast a quick look around, located Zey, then fixed my eyes on the floor again. I couldn’t bring myself to look into my crewmates’ faces. I was reasonably sure I knew what I would see there—shock, pity, revulsion—and I wanted no part of it. I particularly avoided looking toward Hathan, though I knew he was there, standing absolutely still beside the higher-ranking table. I could imagine, without having to look at it, the perfectly calibrated mix of remorse and concern in his expression. He could have saved himself the trouble. I’d seen behind the mask now, and I knew it for what it was.

  I made my way over to Zey. He was sitting as far away from the higher-ranking table as he could get, at the end of an empty table, with a wall at his back. His arms were folded across his chest, his expression mutinous. On the table in front of him was a small ceramic pot, of the type used to brew senek for one or two people, and a single cup. That was an act of rebellion, I thought, albeit a small one. After what had happened the last time he’d made senek for the entire crew, I couldn’t blame him for letting them fend for themselves this morning.

  I sat down next to him and leaned my elbows on the table. Neither of us spoke for a little while. Then I asked, “How are you feeling?”

  “Like a three-day-old khanat carcass,” he said hoarsely. “But at least I don’t look like one. Which is more than I can say for you.”

  I studied the dark bruises on his throat. “I don’t know, I think we’re kind of a matched set right now.”

  “We would be, if you were wearing your uniform. What happened, are yours all in the laundry or something?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Eyvri?”

  I stared down at the tabletop. I couldn’t look at him.

  “You’re leaving, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I think I might have to,” I said.

  “Have you even—” he broke off as Reyna raised her voice to call the crew to attention. I was glad of the interruption. I didn’t want to discuss my decision with Zey until it was official. I was afraid he’d find some way to talk me out of it.

  Reyna commenced with a brief, dry summary of the events of the preceding three days. Eschewing a list of those afflicted by the Flare, presumably because no one needed reminding, she catalogued the injuries suffered by the crew. Almost no one had escaped unharmed. Saresh, Hathan, Khiva, and Ziral were all on the list, as was Vethna, who must have been hurt while attempting to subdue the others. I wondered who had taken Hathan down. Reyna, probably. I wasn’t sure anyone else could have done it. Reduced to bare facts, our casualties sounded relatively minor: bruises, a few broken ribs, a sprained wrist. At the mention of my wrist, I flexed my hand in the brace, then stopped when I saw Zey looking
at it.

  As Reyna was speaking, I gathered my courage and lifted my eyes to examine each of my crewmates in turn. I had never seen them so visibly demoralized, not even after the revelation of Vekesh’s treachery, although of course I had been unconscious in the clinic during the immediate aftermath of that incident. The mood in the room was one of mingled weariness and tension. Ahnir was resting his head on his hand. Ziral’s fingers clenched her water cup so tightly her knuckles were white. I looked at Reyna and was comforted by her air of cool assurance. She might have been running a perfectly routine morning briefing for all the evidence she gave of stress or fatigue. Another point to the Echelon, I thought: their officers were tough. My eyes strayed to Saresh, beside her, who was staring down at his interlaced fingers. As if he felt my glance, he lifted his eyes to meet mine. Instantly I recoiled, unable to hold his gaze, stunned by the depth of pain and sorrow I saw there.

  “For the present, you should continue directing your medical inquiries to Rhevi Ahnir,” Reyna was saying. “Rhevi Daskar has yet to regain consciousness. She appears to have self-administered a sedative at the start of the outbreak, and it’s possible she may have misjudged the dose. Rhevi Ahnir is monitoring her condition.”

  I scanned the room for Sohra and realized that she was missing. “How’s Sohra doing?” I whispered.

  Zey shook his head. “She hasn’t the left the clinic since the quarantine ended.”

  I felt a stab of guilt at my own self-absorption. I had spent the last two days utterly blinded by my own problems while a friend’s mother hovered between life and death. For the first time it struck me how uniquely devastating the Flare must be for a spacefaring culture that preferentially shipped families out together. And then that thought was gone, scattered with all the others like leaves before the wind, because Reyna had fallen silent, and Hathan was speaking.

  Still unwilling to look at his face, I inspected a frayed spot on my sweatshirt cuff while I listened. I hadn’t known what I would feel upon hearing his voice. My first reaction was relief. He was himself again. There could be no mistaking it. I thought I could detect a certain brittle quality to his composure, but the icy derision of two days ago was gone without a trace. This was the man who had sat beside me in the lounge last week and talked about losing a glove on a midwinter survival exercise and spending three days with a sock taped to his hand. He had made me laugh. Why had he done that? At once the relief gave way to anger. Why had he done any of it? Why had he put his hand on my shoulder at the farewell dinner on Arkhati? Why had he sung me an apology song on our last night on the Pinion? It was all meaningless. I clenched my fists so tightly my fingernails dug into my palms.

  “First,” he said, “I’d like to commend Suvi Ekhran for her courageous efforts to preserve the safety and sanity of this crew. She executed her duty perfectly. It was through no fault of hers that the quarantine failed.”

  “Why did it fail?” The question was Ahnir’s.

  Hathan said, “I compromised it by opening every door on the ship.”

  The muted stirring of surprise that followed this announcement was the equivalent of a shocked outcry from a human crew. I felt numb. I think someone’s trying to force the door. He had sent me that message from Zey’s flexscreen only moments before he opened the doors himself. How could I have been so gullible?

  “How?” Vethna asked.

  “Just after we launched from Arkhati, I programmed in an override protocol. It was intended to help me maintain control of the ship should anyone else attempt a takeover.” He paused. “Please don’t think the irony is lost on me.” At those words, which betrayed a little of the strain he had been working to conceal, I forced myself to look at him. Outwardly he looked much the same as ever, possibly a bit paler than usual. I couldn’t see any obvious bruises. His posture was relaxed, and I thought he must be trying to project the same air of aloof confidence as Reyna. To my eyes he didn’t do it quite as well as she did. He was studying his flexscreen. I wondered if he was doing it to avoid everyone’s gaze, or just mine.

  “Was that sanctioned by the Fleet?” Ziral said. There was a note of challenge in her voice.

  “No. I was acting on my own initiative.” Hathan stopped and cleared his throat. “It was an error in judgment, and I take full responsibility for the consequences.”

  “I’m not sure you can take personal credit for the Flare,” Reyna said, “much as the Echelon would love to pin it on the Fleet.” She spoke in a lightly ironic tone perfectly pitched to cut through the mounting tension in the room. I looked at her again, wondering if her equanimity was as complete as it seemed.

  “She’s so calm,” I said in an undertone to Zey.

  “Yeah, well, I’d be a lot calmer if I’d gotten to punch him a couple of times,” he said darkly, confirming my suspicion that it was Reyna who had come to my rescue in the corridor. I marveled that she could step so neatly into the subordinate role again mere hours after coming to blows with her commander. What must their first post-quarantine meeting have been like? And did it mean anything that she had been willing to relinquish control to him? Or was she merely awaiting her inevitable promotion to khavi once the Echelon had had time to process our transmissions?

  “So what happens now?” Ziral asked.

  Hathan nodded at Reyna, who said, “Given our position, I expect we’ll be diverted to Elteni for processing.”

  “More debriefing,” Zey said in a low voice.

  “Elteni is a month away,” Khiva pointed out. “Farther than Prime at this point. Why the change of course?”

  “Typically, in clear instances of the Flare, the Echelon will process the survivors at a starhaven before sending them soilside,” Reyna said. “It’s an extra measure of safety in case of lingering contagion. Elteni is the closest starhaven with a substantial Echelon presence.” She turned to Saresh. “Hadazi, any communications updates?”

  “Nothing beyond acknowledgments of messages received. I’ve been updating the Echelon, the Fleet, and Earth every few hours since I . . . recovered.” I wondered if I would have noted the hesitation if I didn’t know Saresh so well. To Vardeshi ears it must have been conspicuous. He went on, “We should be receiving orders within the next day or two.”

  “Good,” Hathan said. “For now, our priorities are to heal ourselves and try to return to normal operations. Anyone in need of counseling should see Rhevi Ahnir or the hadazi. If you’re not prepared to resume your duties, please speak to Suvi Ekhran or myself. We’ll be as flexible as we can.”

  “That’s everything for now,” Reyna said. “Evening briefing will be in the axis chamber.”

  There was a rising murmur as people resumed their meals and private conversations. I got up and threaded my way through the tables to the galley. My head was pounding, and I was desperate for a cup of coffee. The preparation took longer than usual, and I idled in the galley afterward, trying to extend my isolation for a few more minutes. It didn’t work. Khiva came in presently to deposit her breakfast dishes, followed by Reyna, who was looking for me. “Khavi Takheri would like a word with you in his office,” she said.

  “Alone?” My voice sounded high and thin. I was aware of Khiva, quietly stacking dishes in the cleansing machine, listening for all she was worth.

  “I can accompany you, if you like.”

  “Would you? I don’t think I’m ready . . .”

  “It’s fine,” she said briskly. “Shall we go?”

  I looked down at my half-empty cup. Reyna said, “Bring it.”

  Still undecided, I said, “You guys hate the smell of coffee, don’t you?”

  “Eyvri, after what you just lived through, what do you care?” She took the cup and sniffed it. “I wouldn’t drink it, but no one’s asking me to. And as for Hathan, he should be grateful you’re not throwing it at him.”

  “No promises,” I said, and had the satisfaction of seeing her smile.

  I followed her into Hathan’s office. As I stepped over the threshold, the
smallness of the room forced itself on my attention. The hiss of the door closing made me start. I stood frozen just across the threshold while Reyna seated herself on one of the stools in front of the table and took out her flexscreen. Hathan was sitting on the other side of the table. His hands were flat on the tabletop, and I knew he was trying to present a nonthreatening image. As if that were possible. I wanted to laugh. I had seen him lift a table just like that one and throw it into the wall with one hand as if it weighed no more than a sheet of paper. I looked up to find that he was watching me, his gray eyes as serious as I had ever seen them. I held the look for only a moment before a wave of inexplicable shame forced my gaze down.

  He gestured to the empty stool beside Reyna. “Please sit down, novi.”

  “Avery,” I said. “Just Avery.”

  “Do you mean—”

  I cut him off. “Look, you don’t have to pretend anymore, okay? I know how you feel. You want me off your ship. It’s fine. I’ll go.” I looked at Reyna, who had given up the pretense of absorption in her work and was looking at me, her expression one of mild perplexity. “Tell the Echelon I’ll give them what they want. I’ll transfer to one of their ships. As soon as we get to Elteni or Vardesh Prime or wherever we’re going. I’d do it sooner if I could.”

  Hathan said, “Avery, I’m not sure you understand—”

  Once again I interrupted him. “Believe it or not, you made yourself clear enough that even I got the point. I’m just sorry it took me so long. Better late than never, though, isn’t that how you’d put it? Although I have to say, I would have figured it out a hell of a lot faster if you’d just told me the truth. And I’m not sure why you volunteered for this mission in the first place, if you hate humans so much. It’s a big universe. It seems to me you could go pretty much anywhere to get away from us. But if you won’t leave, I will. Right now, actually.” I took a step toward the door.