She ate quietly. The cube tasted slightly sweet and slightly chalky. Katherine was sound asleep with her head pillowed on Yi’s lap. Jason paced the room, his steps heavy. There were two other men doing the same, the three of them walking and walking with restless energy, whispering.
Four soulbots converged on the remaining humans from four hallways. Chrystal shook Katherine until she woke up, then whispered in her ear. “Stay down, and maybe they won’t take us.”
Katherine didn’t. She pushed herself to a seated position and then stood. She caught the eye of the closest soulbot and waved her arms.
“What are you doing?” Chrystal hissed.
“Finding out what happens next.”
“Are you crazy?”
Katherine looked directly at her. “No, I don’t think so.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHARLIE
A day and a half after the gleaners were murdered in Neville, Charlie stood next to Nona at the edge of the observation deck at the spaceport near Manna Springs. The grounds looked almost pastoral. There were only three ships at the moment, two of the five they used to go between Lym and the stations that orbited it, and a Transpo Line ship oddly named the Big Digger that was getting dry dock repairs. The noon sun faded the colors to summer hues.
A ground-ship from the Sultry Savior had already started down. Stupid name for a ship, Charlie thought. Arrogant. But then spacers were generally arrogant bastards, the same kind of humans who had almost destroyed Lym before they finally left it. He wondered if Nona had named the ship.
The glassed-in observation deck was nearly empty. A mother had her two small children here, faces pressed against the glass as if something exciting were about to happen. An artist stood in a corner, sketching the spaceport by hand with a light pen.
Charlie felt Nona’s presence acutely. She radiated heat; he felt her even when he wasn’t looking at her. Knowing the heat was mostly his imagination made it worse rather than better. There was nothing smart about feeling attraction to someone who was about to leave on a starship.
Nona had been so quiet it startled him when she spoke. “I want Satyana to see Neville.”
“How long will she be here? Manny needs to meet with her, and so does the rest of the Council.” Satyana had managed to pull off a diplomatic landing permit and Manny was home cleaning and fretting about what to wear.
“Promise to show her the pictures?”
“That’s all Manny. I’m the ranger and the guide and the worker all wrapped in one. No one gives me diplomatic tasks.”
“And guiding me around wasn’t a diplomatic task?”
“No.” He found the idea repulsive. “I chose to be your guide.”
“But between them, Satyana and Manny chose you.”
She had met Manny in his offices that morning, seen him surrounded by people demanding information he didn’t have, wanting actions that made no sense. The whole scene had made Charlie shudder, but Manny called everyone by name and stayed serene, his quiet confidence calming people. “Manny loves politics and government. I hate them both.”
“Isn’t being a ranger a government job?”
“I love the wild. I don’t want a job that takes me away from here.”
She looked at him for a long time before she nodded.
He pointed at the sky. “There it is.”
A moving dot at this point, barely more than that. Absurdly, he wanted Nona to take his hand again as they watched the dot resolve into a slender, pretty ship. It looked brand new and very expensive, the kind of ship that only landed here when the rich came down to play. It glided gently and expertly to a perfect stop. He led Nona out onto the tarmac and they jogged slowly toward the ship, arriving in time to greet Satyana as she came down a set of steps that had folded out from the side.
She and Nona hugged, the hug drawing a look of surprise briefly across Satyana’s features before she buried her face in Nona’s hair. The women stayed still, breathing together. Satyana stood even smaller than Nona, and also thinner. Smooth, night-black hair framed her face.
He had imagined someone with so much power would be bigger.
Nona turned to introduce them. He expected displeasure, but instead Satyana greeted him warmly, with a firm handshake. “Thank you for being Nona’s guide.” No rancor, no gloating. Just a simple thank you.
Maybe he wasn’t going to be able to hate this woman either. “You’re welcome.”
Charlie drove. Satyana and Nona both sat in the front, and a hulking woman named Britta massed uncomfortably in the back. Probably a bodyguard. Nona quietly filled them both in on her adventures on Lym. Charlie expected Satyana to stop liking him as soon as she heard about the trip to Neville. To his surprise, she didn’t seem to hold him at all responsible for Nona’s double near-death experiences and seemed more worried than he was about the robots in the pictures.
He slowed the skimmer. “We’re almost to Manny’s office. Shall I drop all three of you off?”
“Just me and Britta. You two can have another afternoon of touristing. Come back for me at the end of the day.”
That wasn’t the answer he expected. From the look on Nona’s face, she hadn’t expected it either. As they pulled away, Nona asked, “Can we go get Cricket? And then maybe hike? I want to see another waterfall before I leave.”
Charlie chose a flat, gentle hike along a well-kept trail by a stream with multiple waterfalls. Huge trees towered over them, and a gentle rain cooled them without making the path too muddy to manage.
As they flew back, Nona looked tired. Even now she didn’t complain, but just watched Lym go by in the window, with one hand on Cricket’s enormous head and a pensive look on her face. The tongat had clearly adopted Nona. She’d stuck closer to her heels than to Charlie’s on the hike. Charlie had tried to tell himself Nona needed protection more than he did.
He stopped to drop Cricket off at Manny’s and found a sign on Cricket’s door. “Stay for dinner. Both of you.”
He’d left Nona in the skimmer.
“I should have changed,” she said.
“You’re beautiful enough.” He hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Maybe he was tired, too. She blushed, and he expected his cheeks were pink, too.
He led her in, watching her smile and shake hands and look pleased to meet everyone. He was going to miss her.
As usual, they ate with the children and talked of ordinary things. Chairs sat close together so elbows bumped and someone balanced a plate on every corner. After dinner, Pi, Bonnie, and Amara all disappeared with pressing business related to parenting, leaving Manny, Charlie, Nona, Satyana, and Britta at the table.
Manny brought them all wine and cookies, being very formal about the whole affair. Even though it could surely be attributed to Satyana’s status, the not-Manny behavior disturbed Charlie. Everyone around the table looked awkward, except maybe Britta, who just looked stoic.
“Have you heard today’s news?” Manny asked him and Nona.
“We were hiking,” he said, feeling slightly guilty for it.
“What news?” Nona asked. “Did you hear any more about the High Sweet Home?”
Manny shook his head.
Satyana said, “The Next are massing on at the Ring’s borders.”
Charlie tried to picture that. The Ring was a circle in reality, and way out beyond the orbit of the stations in the Glittering. It was too big to “mass” at the edge of; space wasn’t an island or a continent. “What do you mean?”
Satyana sipped daintily at her wine. “There are hundreds of Next ships stopping just short of violating the treaty.”
“Have they said what they want?” Nona asked.
“No,” Manny said. “No, they haven’t. But it sure looks like they plan to come in as a group.”
Satyana added, “We caught a few Next on the Deep, once we started looking.”
“How do you tell a regular robot from a Next?” Charlie asked.
Satyana pursed her lips. “Carefully. By watchi
ng how they act, what they do. A regular robot doesn’t make autonomous decisions. We sent some AI algorithms through the security data and found some robots that were clearly thinking for themselves. I’m more worried about the ones we surely missed.”
Charlie said, “So maybe the robots in Neville were from the Edge?”
“No,” Manny answered him. “Well, we don’t think so. We’re going to try and catch one.”
“I’ll get one for you,” Charlie replied.
“I have a better idea.”
Charlie sat back, puzzled.
“You’re going with Nona,” Manny said.
Charlie blinked and bit his tongue before a curse came out. He looked at Satyana. “No. No, I’m not. I don’t work for you.”
She smiled. “No.”
Manny’s voice called his attention back. “You’re doing this at my request. For Lym.”
“Send someone else.” He felt trapped. “Someone who likes politics. Someone who wants to go to space.” He drank some of his wine. No one answered him. Nona looked hurt. “Surely a spacer would be better. I have no idea how to fly anything more complex than a skimmer.”
Dead silence.
He felt the request in his gut, like a ball of something he wanted to expel. He even coughed.
More silence. “What good could I possibly do? I’ve never even been off of Lym.”
Manny spoke to him as if he were speaking to one of his children. “You’re a ranger. That means you protect Lym. You know what matters.”
“What about you?” Charlie asked him. “You’re far better at negotiations than me. You have more credibility; you’re part of the government.”
“Exactly. Which means I need to stay here. You’re founding family, and you have a great reputation. I’m appointing you as our formal ambassador to the Next.”
Charlie felt a trap closing.
Manny smiled at him, as if to show he was sympathetic. But nothing indicated any willingness to back down. “And you’re the only person from Lym that I happen to know is being offered a ride on a fast ship to the Ring. A free ride.”
Nona had been staying out of the conversation, looking somewhat surprised herself. But now she added, “I’d never been to a planet before I came here.”
Charlie glanced at Satyana, certain that this was her doing. “What do you want in trade for the free ride?”
“Someone to help Nona.”
He glanced at the big woman next to her, who had been entirely silent. “Surely Britta is a better guard than I could be.”
“Maybe. But I need her, and Lym does need an ambassador.”
“I hate politics. I don’t have the patience for it.” He truly didn’t want to go. He belonged here, amid the trees and the animals and the wildness and the open space. Cricket needed him. He hadn’t gone back to find the rakuls, and he still wanted a good video of them.
Nona suggested, “You can bring Cricket.”
“She’d hate it on a spaceship. She needs the wild.”
Satyana nodded approvingly. “But you’re a human, and surely you can understand putting your needs aside for the sake of others. Lym needs a voice, a protector.”
Bitch. He held his glass out. “Pour me another drink.” He was going to need it.
PART TWO
THE DEEP AND SPACE
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHRYSTAL
The soulbots led them all into a large galley. Freshly fabbed metal seats and sinks and countertops made the room look like a gleaming product advertisement. A kitchen where no one had ever so much as heated water. The survivors of the High Sweet Home huddled close around a long, rectangular metal table. People held hands, and a couple took turns rubbing each other’s shoulders. Chrystal managed to count the survivors. Twenty-seven people, all healthy, all adults.
Stilted conversations started and then stopped.
Chrystal’s belly rumbled.
The same two soulbots that had taken them from the warehouse came in with trays of drinking bulbs filled with liquid. It was clear, but ever-so-slightly sparklier than water. It didn’t look like anything she had ever tasted.
“Don’t drink it,” Yi said, loud enough for everyone to hear.
The first person the soulbot handed a glass to, a woman with long red hair named Juliette, sniffed it. “Smells like vitamin water.”
“It’s food for your brain,” the soulbot said. “It will make your chances of survival far better.”
Juliette sipped at it. “Tastes okay.”
Yi the emotionally unflappable raised his voice. “Chance of surviving what?”
The robot’s eyes were almost as expressive as human eyes, and Chrystal felt certain there was a struggle of some kind going on inside the machine. However it resolved, the answer sounded true. “Because you have no choice.”
“It’s good,” Juliette said. “I feel better.”
Chrystal glanced from Katherine to Jason. They looked panicked, as frightened as she felt. Yi’s jaw was clenched in anger. That’s what she should be—angry. She was, but the fear inside her swamped everything else and made her hand shake so she almost dropped the bulb. She felt light-headed, almost like she might fall from her metal chair and land on the metal floor in the land of scary robots.
A hand reached down and cupped hers, stilling her shaking. The robot’s hand was surprisingly warm. “I’ll help you,” she said, lifting her hand and Chrystal’s to bring the bulb to Chrystal’s mouth. “Don’t spill,” the robot said.
Chrystal tried to move the robot’s arm away. She might as well have been trying to force a mountain. She drank. It tasted like water with a slight minty tang, and it felt thicker than water.
Katherine drank with no help, and no protest, but with panic lacing her eyes.
Yi dropped his and it rolled across the room.
Jason stood up as if to get Yi’s, leaving his drink on the table.
One soulbot put a hand on Jason’s shoulder and pinned him back in his seat. She—it—didn’t even breathe hard. She simply stood there quietly, until he drank. The other one picked Yi’s drink up and forced him to consume it. His eyes were wide and he tried to spit it out but the bot held his head so he had to drink or drown.
By the time Yi had been forced, Chrystal started to feel muzzy-headed. Warmth radiated up from her stomach and hit her chin and rolled up her forehead. A tingly warmth. She felt downright strange. Floating. A disconnected part of her repeated over and over that Yi had been right and she shouldn’t have had that drink.
One of the soulbots stood in front of them. “Who’s first?”
No one answered.
The robot looked at Yi. A shiver ripped through the warm glow in Chrystal’s limbs. She pushed herself up and stood, intending to protest. The floor rocked under her feet; she almost fell. Jason’s hand went to her arm and Katherine encircled her in both of her arms. “Not you. Somebody else.”
“We can take all three of you.”
Yi stood up. “Take me, too.”
“Take Yi, too,” Chrystal slurred. “We’re a family.”
With some difficulty, the four of them extracted themselves from the seats and the table, although Katherine tripped and had to be helped up. Chrystal found that very funny and giggled.
Before they went through the door, she looked back at the table of victims all lined up on each side of the table. Katherine waved. “We’re going to be a robot family together.”
Chrystal hugged her close and kissed her on the cheek, and then they were through the door and it closed behind them.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NONA
Nona stared at one of the view screens in Satyana’s private meeting room near the command center. The steadily shrinking planet mesmerized her. Now she understood why her father had wanted to see a sky so badly. She should have come years ago, and brought Marcelle.
Her fingers were wrapped tight around a cup of warm, chocolate stim. She remembered how good the same ritual had felt in th
e brisk morning air on Lym the day she decided to try and rescue Chrystal. That cup had smelled of spices from Lym, sweet things that flavored the drink so lightly it tasted like magic.
Satyana seemed to read her mind. “Maybe someday you can come back.”
“I hope so.” She sipped at the chocolate, finding it too sweet. “Maybe after I save the world.”
Satyana raised an eyebrow. “I still don’t understand why I should let you do this. I know I promised, but that was before we knew the Next might be coming here.”
Nona leaned forward. “I have to. Everyone I met down there,” she gestured toward the receding planet, now a ball of blue swathed in clouds, “Everyone had a mission. A shared one. That wasn’t true on the Deep.”
Satyana looked slightly miffed. “We have plenty of shared goals on the Deep.”
“Sorry. The rich get richer, the powerful get more powerful, and the popular more popular. Isn’t that how the Deep works? It’s hot with politics.”
“And a rescue mission won’t be?” Satyana asked. “That’s politics above your head!”
Nona tensed. “Maybe someone who isn’t as political as you will do better.”
“By the time you get there, the story will have played out.” Satyana’s expression softened. “Your friend is almost certainly dead.”
“It’s not like this is a warship. It’ll be clear we aren’t trying to attack anyone. If we know what happened to the High Sweet Home before I get out there, I’ll still get information. I’ll be safe enough.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t you have spies everywhere? I’ll just be one more spy for you.”
“Stay on this side of the Ring,” Satyana snapped.
Nona took a deep, centering breath. “I need to fly toward the pirates.”
“The people from the Edge! The Next.”
“Whatever you want to call them,” Nona snapped. “Mom built this ship for me, surely she intended me to use it. Ruby would have.”
You’re not Ruby! She saw the words in Satyana’s eyes.
Even unsaid, they made her cold and angry. Always before, she’d known they were true, felt the gulf between what people expected of her and what she could do.
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