by Rachel Caine
Beware of the devouring dark
Between the safety of stars.
CHAPTER TWO
Binding Ties
I STAYED IN Ops long after the others were gone, searching obscure data files for anything, anything on the Phage . . . but didn’t come up with much but a bad temper and a budding ache behind my eyes.
The pai gow game was back in action, though I could see something was off as I stepped into the room. Bea was too chipper and full of smiles; she’d gone into denial-cheerleader mode. Marko seemed impassive as ever.
And Yusuf looked ready to drop. I didn’t like the way he looked. Not at all.
“Hey, Zara! Do you want me to deal you in?” Bea asked me. “Marko’s a good teacher.”
“Yes,” Yusuf said. “You should take my place.” He dropped his cards and stood up.
Tried to, anyway. Instead, he tipped out of his chair and began convulsing. Marko rolled Yusuf onto his side and said, “Get a hoverbed. We need to take him to EMITU.”
I swallowed the taste of ashes and sprinted to medical, where EMITU was powered down in his cradle, but he shook awake as I grabbed one of the portable hoverbeds and started pushing it out. “Excuse me, those are not for hallway racing!”
“Yusuf’s down,” I yelled back over my shoulder. “We’ll bring him to you!”
“Take precautions,” EMITU said, and I wanted to turn back and ask why, but I was already moving too fast. Precautions. Did he mean Yusuf was contagious? I pushed the hoverbed faster, and as I shoved it into the canteen area, Bea jumped out of the way.
Yusuf was so still it scared me.
“He’s unconscious,” Marko said, reassuring me without realizing I needed it. “Help me roll him onto the bed.”
I pushed the hoverbed down until it was flat against the floor, and together, we rolled Yusuf onto his back on the mattress. I stuck a hand under the grooves at the bottom and lifted, and the whole thing rose effortlessly up until I stopped pulling at about waist height. “Let’s get him to the medbay.”
Beatriz wasn’t saying a word. She was just standing, helpless, and I knew just how she felt. I took her arm and pulled her with us as Marko led the bed back to where EMITU waited.
Our medical unit surged at Yusuf as soon as we had the bed locked in place, and we all three stepped well back from the flailing appendages as EMITU drew blood, ran scans, and adjusted Yusuf’s position all at the same time. He wasn’t making jokes right now, which I found alarming. He was working fast and silently, and the three of us stayed quiet, until suddenly all the appendages stilled at once, and EMITU whirled around to face us.
“He is now stable,” EMITU announced. “I do not appreciate you bringing me patients in this condition. It looks bad on my record.”
“How is he?” Beatriz asked.
“By stable, I mean he is dying. Honor Yusuf is circling the drain. Approaching room temperature. Kicking the oxygen habit.”
“Stop it!” Bea shouted.
“I cannot,” EMITU said. “Unless you reprogram me. It does not mean I am not doing all I can to preserve his life. But the end is inevitable if you leave him within the boundaries of my care. I simply do not have the facilities or understanding to treat the underlying cause of his illness.”
In that moment, EMITU sounded very . . . sober. I didn’t like it. I liked jokey EMITU, rude EMITU, anything but serious EMITU. It made me jumpy. “How long?” I asked.
Bea sucked in a breath, bracing herself.
“A week,” EMITU said. “At most. And the last few days I will have to sedate him, for his own protection.”
Protection. That made me remember something. “You said earlier, take precautions. What did that mean?”
“The condition that Honor Yusuf suffers from is not airborne or touch-contagious, but it can be spread through contact with infected blood.”
“Good thing he’s not bleeding, then—”
Marko said, “He is. He hit his head when he fell. I got some on my . . . hand.” There was a studied calm to the way he said it, and I looked over and saw he was studying his right palm.
The one with blood smeared in a thin red streak across the skin.
EMITU streaked across to jerk to a halt right in front of Marko, and one set of appendages grabbed the fingers and spread them. Chemical liquid foamed out over Marko’s entire hand, bubbled, and vanished. EMITU turned his hand to examine it, then dropped it. “Done,” it said. “Please strip and enjoy the full-body chemical shower you have now earned. Your uniform must be incinerated.”
“Yeah, Marko, go on,” I said, and forced a grin. “Strip.”
He sent me a look that told me now was not the time, and he was right, because EMITU whirled toward me as well. “Also you, Honor Cole,” he said. “And you, Honor Teixeira. Chemical showers for everyone.”
Zara? Nadim was listening, of course. And worried.
It’s fine, I told him. It’s all going to be fine.
I persuaded EMITU that my hair didn’t need disinfecting, which saved it from a crunchy acid bath, but the rest of me got another nasty cleanse that left me tasting rotten cherries again. I wore the medbay robe back to my room, where I pulled on one of my last remaining uniforms. Man, I hoped the Sliver had something human-sized to wear that wasn’t gag-ugly.
EMITU had taken blood from each of us. I tried not to think about the tests it was running.
I ran into Beatriz again in the kitchen, where she was pouring some of EMITU’s chemical disinfectant over the floor where Yusuf had fallen. She’d put on her EV suit, which was smart; it was a thin, flexible, tough layer between her and whatever nasty was in Yusuf’s blood. Not that there was a lot of blood—couple of drops, couple of smears—but it needed to be obliterated, fast. “Hey,” I said. “Need help?”
“No, I’ve got it,” she said. “EMITU kept Marko. He’s running more tests.”
That didn’t sound promising. We looked at each other but didn’t say it out loud. I switched gears. “Any idea where Starcurrent is?” I asked. Bea shook her head.
Nadim answered. “Starcurrent is in the media room,” he said.
“Thanks. I’ll go check on zim, get our tentacled pal up to date.”
The Abyin Dommas was sitting in the dark, watching real space footage, shots of Earth, the colonies we’d established on the moon and Mars. Starcurrent didn’t respond when I came in or when I sat down, and I wondered if ze was sleeping. It occurred to me that Nadim might not have anything on board that Starcurrent could eat, as the live ships were provisioned according to the crew they carried.
“You all right?” I asked.
Dumb question, because ze’s definitely not. Can’t be. I remembered how Beatriz had said that zis people were born singing. In that context, zis silence took on a mournful air, a grief too deep for weeping. There were cultures on Earth that grieved by keening out loss in a poignant, ululating song. For the Abyin Dommas, maybe the opposite was true; they grieved in quiet, in stillness.
“I am all wrong,” Starcurrent answered.
Either someone had fixed the translation matrix or that was the most accurate error ever. Because I understood exactly what ze meant. Just picturing how I’d feel without Nadim left a hollow sickness in the pit of my stomach. Starcurrent—and Yusuf—might have been deep bonded with their ships like Nadim and me, and their Leviathan were ripped apart by the Phage.
They’d watched someone they loved die, horribly. There was no consolation adequate for that grief.
But still, I tried. “Anything I can do?”
Tentacles quivered and flared, but now that I got that we were on the same team, the movement didn’t strike me as threatening. It hit me more like a thoughtful gesture, equivalent to a human shrug. Or maybe I was just making stuff up to suit my own preconceptions.
“Talk,” Starcurrent said finally.
“About what?”
“Anything. It will help . . .” More alien sounds that didn’t translate.
“Sure,�
� I said. I understood what ze meant: anything to provide a distraction. “You’re watching stuff from Earth.”
“We have never seen Earth,” ze said, and two tentacles knotted up in complicated patterns. “A pleasant world. Your technology is . . .” Ze trailed off. I didn’t think the translation matrix was the problem there. More like a desire not to offend me.
“Hey, I’m fine with you saying terrible,” I said. “Because it was, back in the day. Wasteful, dependent on fossil fuels, polluting the atmosphere with toxins—”
“But powerful,” ze said politely. “Many, many species never attain space. Few have the . . . curiosity. Courage.”
“Yours did.”
I was pretty sure that all-over ripple of tentacles indicated pleasure. Everybody liked flattery. “Ours heard the songs,” Starcurrent said. All zis tentacles lifted and formed a shimmery, fluttering curtain. Disturbingly pretty. “Ours knew something waited beyond. Yours . . . did not. You had no assurance of welcome, only of danger. This is brave, venturing into the dark alone.”
“Yeah, or stupid,” I said, but I was a little pleased myself, on behalf of brave, stupid humanity. “You heard the song . . . which song? The Leviathan?”
“All songs,” Starcurrent said. “We hear so many songs. Deep humming of Leviathan. Chorus of galaxies. Singing of suns. Whispers of races long gone, stars long drawn inward, singing backward. We hear all.”
That was sobering. I wondered what that was like, being so in tune with—well, everything. “Must be loud,” I said.
“Oh, no,” ze said. The matrix was getting more comfortable, because this time, it moderated zis voice down to a lower volume, giving it a nuance that had been missing before. A faint wisp of sadness. “Never loud. All things balanced. The turning of stars, the laughter of children, the cry of pain . . . song is beauty. Song is life. Never too loud.”
Something about that, and the wistful tone, made my vision mist a little. I’d never heard anything so hauntingly poetic before. Starcurrent’s words made me feel small and heavy, but they made me feel part of something else too.
On the holoscreen, the International Space Station archive footage showed the awkward, cobbled-together structure that was the best humanity could do at the time . . . and then, the arrival of the Leviathan, coming to save dying crew members and open a new era for humans. Our efforts at creating a home in space looked ridiculous now, fragile and bound to fail, but there was a beauty in that too. A defiance.
A song in the dark.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Starcurrent. “You must feel so alone.”
Starcurrent stayed quiet for a long moment, and then ze said, “My ship’s song lives in me. I sing it for the next cycle, so it will not be lost. Grieve for Yusuf, who has no song to hold, who cannot hear eternity. He sings too, but his song is lost and broken, disharmonious. Sing with him, as you sing with me now.”
That reminded me what I needed to tell Starcurrent. But it didn’t feel like the time. So I nodded and settled back, and we sat quietly in the darkened auditorium together, watching the ghosts of my ancestors flicker across the screen.
If I was singing, I did it silently. Like praying.
A day passed. Marko got kicked from the medbay with a clean bill of health and ended up having to wear an old Honors uniform that Nadim still had stored away from his time on the Tour; it fit, but it wasn’t the black and red that indicated Marko was bonded to Typhon. Maybe it was my imagination, but I felt like Marko’s mood lightened considerably when he was back in those clothes.
But it didn’t last.
When Typhon woke up, he was cranky, to no one’s surprise. I knew the Elder was up when Marko suddenly dropped his pai gow cards in a flutter to the table, stood up, and walked away. I caught a glimpse of black eyes, the sign that Typhon had, without warning, taken control of him.
“Marko!” I yelled after him. I was going through food packets with Starcurrent, trying to see what ze’d find nutritious; so far, we hadn’t come up with much besides vegetable broth, which ze’d tried reluctantly, but pronounced good enough to choke down. EMITU had provided us blunt but helpful comments on the relative lethality of ingredients, ranging from agonizing but survivable to might as well space the patient now and save the trouble. I wasn’t sure the sarcasm translated to Abyin Dommas, but Starcurrent didn’t seem too distressed. I turned to zim and said, “Hey, you okay here? I’ll be right back.”
“Good,” Starcurrent said, with a flutter of tentacles I read as confirmation. Like a nod, but with more motion.
I ran after Marko, while Bea sighed and gathered up the cards. “Tell him that was rude,” she said. “Typhon, I mean.”
“Are you kidding? You tell him!” I called back.
I caught up with Marko just as Chao-Xing stepped out of the sim chamber door; she was sweaty, dressed in a damp workout uniform, and her hair was down in loose clumps that stuck to her face.
Her eyes, like Marko’s, were lightless black, pupils expanded to cover the iris completely. Without speaking or acknowledging either me or Marko, she fell into step with him, and they headed for the Hopper bay.
“Hey!” I was just a couple of steps behind, but they ignored me. “Earth to Typhon. Come in, jackass!”
Marko and Chao-Xing were moving in lockstep, and as one, they came to a halt so sudden I nearly plowed right into them. I backpedaled as they turned around. It wasn’t just the eyes that had changed. Typhon had a presence.
Marko/Typhon said, “A jackass is a stubborn creature. Correct?”
“Stupid too,” I said. “Annoying. Unbelievably frustrating. Shall I go on?”
“What do you want?” This time, it came out of Chao-Xing’s mouth. I wondered if Typhon ever accidentally talked in stereo.
“Give us everything you have on the Phage, and no bullshit about protocol. Also, we need full med records for the Abyin Dommas, so we can make sure Starcurrent gets everything ze needs, and so we can treat zim in the event of emergency.” I was working hard to sound calm and in control. Hoped I was selling it. C-X and Marko stared at me with demon eyes, and even though my nerves were usually steely, it was tough not to look away. “How are you doing, Typhon?”
That last made them both blink, in perfect harmony. “You’re concerned about my condition for what reason?” He did speak in stereo. It was unnerving.
“Because you’re commandeering Marko and Chao-Xing and piloting them back to you when you wouldn’t let them come aboard before.”
After a long, cool pause, Chao-Xing said, “It is now possible for humans to survive.”
“When you say survive, do you mean that it’s comfortable?”
Her mouth curled into a faint, alien smile. “No. But their assistance is required for necessary repairs. Is that enough explanation? Because it is all you will receive.”
They pivoted, and off they went. I didn’t follow. No point. Even if I suited up and got on board the Hopper with them, I doubted they’d let me come on board Typhon, and I knew myself well enough to grasp that I might be able to take Marko, with a whole lot of luck I might take Chao-Xing, but there was no way I’d come out on top fighting them both. Certainly not with Typhon’s strength behind them.
“Don’t come running to me if it all goes south,” I muttered, and reached out to touch the wall. Lights zipped in from all directions to coalesce beneath Nadim’s skin in the shape of my fingers. He was feeling better. “Did he give you the info?”
“Yes,” Nadim said. He sounded preoccupied. “There is a significant amount of data. It will take time for me to . . . understand all of it.”
“How can I help?”
Wordlessly, he pulsed the light under my fingers, and it zipped away down the wall to lead me somewhere. I had a notion where he was directing me, but I didn’t let myself assume anything until I was standing in the open doorway of my own quarters.
“Nadim—”
“Deep bond will make this faster,” he said. “I only ask out of need. You have a
gift for assimilation of information. You can parse the importance faster than I can.”
“Flatterer,” I said. He laughed. It was soft but woke deep blue ripples inside me that warmed to green, then orange. Intimate, those colors. I could feel and see them, even at this light bond level. “Okay. But tell Bea what we’re doing. Have her hit the alarm if we’re not out in . . . what, an hour?”
“An hour,” he agreed. “Thank you, Zara.”
He didn’t need to thank me. The idea of going into a deep bond with him made my skin tingle, my breath come faster, and gave me a guilty rush of adrenaline. It wasn’t strictly speaking forbidden, not anymore. But dangerous, a little. Nadim and I were both very new at this, and Nadim had a—I suppose it wouldn’t be unfair to call it a condition—that made him prone to slip into dark sleep, which was dangerous at the best of times.
He was, I’d discovered, more likely to do it after a deep bond when all his inner defenses were down. But we’d installed a device to wake him in that event. Hence, Bea’s finger on the button.
I made myself comfortable on my bed, pulled a blanket over my body—because it would chill quickly—and flattened one hand on the wall. My fingertips moved in a slow, gentle pattern, and his light followed.
“Ready,” I whispered.
The universe exploded around me.
Deep bonding to Nadim meant becoming one . . . a single mind, a single creature, existing beyond the boundaries of flesh and bone and bodies. A sweet, perfect mingling of everything that made us individuals to create something new.
Zadim.
There was no we. Only I, a blending so complete that our barriers were almost all swept aside. It was like falling and flying and screaming and laughing and being so high that I’d never come down from the thrill of it, and the stars, the dizzying, blinding whirl of stars and the seductive whisper-song calling me on into the dark . . .
Focus, part of me chided. The Zara part, I thought. Typhon’s information.
Zara remembered reading, but this was not that. It was experiencing data in a blinding rush, like memory and voices and pain blending together in a red wave. The Nadim part of me worked to slow the rush, and the melded I submerged in the flow, swam in it, absorbed and learned and grew and drank until full to bursting . . .
