The Clouded Sky

by Megan Crewe

  It’s not the best-aimed blow. My knuckles glance off the bottom of his cheekbone. But I hit him hard enough that he flinches, and his fingers slip. I drag my arm away and bolt for the shuttle stop, praying he’ll be too shocked to follow.

  There’s a shuttle pulling up just as I reach the alcove. I halt, torn between rushing onto it and retreating from whoever’s arriving. Then the doors slide open to reveal Win standing on the other side. He’s about to dash out, but he catches himself when he sees me, lips parting in surprise.

  “W—” I start, and clamp my mouth shut. Davic took a moment to recover, but I can hear him thumping down the hall after me. I don’t want him hearing Win’s name. “Let’s go!”

  Win doesn’t question me, just leaps back and taps a location into the control panel as I dash onto the shuttle. It pulls away before Davic rounds the corner.

  For a second Win and I just stare at each other. Then, without a word, he pulls me into a hug so tight I lose my breath, so quick I hardly have time to return it before he’s letting me go.

  “We’d better get off this shuttle and pick up another, in case he gets the Enforcers to track it,” he says. His gaze drops to my hands, the red marks where Davic gripped my wrist, and his jaw clenches. “What happened?”

  “I— What are you doing here?” is the only response I manage to form.

  “Britta was worried,” he says. “Something you said to her—she started watching the network and saw you’d taken the shuttle over here, but she’s not well, Isis couldn’t get out of work, and they couldn’t get ahold of Jule. So Britta called me and asked me to make sure you were okay. You are okay, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I rub my wrist. I’m not sure what Davic thought he was going to do. Make me tell him my name so he’d have leverage? Hold on to me while he called the Enforcers? “That guy, he’s Silmeru’s source. I was trying to get something from him that would help us figure out who’s been passing him information—I didn’t expect him to turn . . . violent. But I got away from him.”

  Even if the shuttle hadn’t been right there, I’m pretty sure I could have outrun Davic in the halls. He didn’t look like he’s ever done cross-country practice, or much of any physical practice period. But then I would have had to watch out for Enforcers on patrol, other Kemyates . . . I’m glad it didn’t come to that.

  “Thanks for coming,” I say. I have the urge to reach for Win’s arm, as if I can better convey my gratitude through touch, but he’s stepped farther away since his earlier show of affection.

  “I’m still keeping my promise to keep you safe,” he says with a faint smile. The promise he made back on Earth, before that first leap to Paris, when all this really started. The promise he’s never broken, regardless of what else was going on between us.

  “Thanks,” I say again, softly. It’s not enough, but I don’t know how to express just how much I mean it.

  “So did you learn anything useful?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. Payments. There have to be records when credits are transferred. Records that will lead to the traitor. “I’ll have to talk to Isis. He gave away something that could be the connection we need.”

  26.

  When I get back to Jule’s apartment, I head straight into my room and type out a message to Isis and Britta’s apartment. They’ll want to know what I found out as soon as possible. I’m not sure whether this will require more of Britta’s conceptual skills or Isis’s tech knowledge, or how much Britta can even handle on her own right now. From what she said it sounded like Isis could be working the whole night, but maybe Britta can forward the information to her and Isis can start investigating from there.

  I step back into the main room, opening and closing cabinets in my distraction even though I’m not hungry, trying to calculate how I could have controlled the conversation with Davic better. Maybe I couldn’t have. Maybe that was the best I could have expected.

  I’m staring blankly into the third cabinet when Jule emerges from his bedroom. I startle. I hadn’t realized he was home.

  “You’re back,” he says, stopping partway across the room. There’s an odd tentativeness in his stance, not at all the cocky posturing I’m used to. His face looks drawn. My pulse trips.

  “Did something happen at work?” I ask.

  “No,” he says slowly.

  “You seem . . .” Off. Upset? He wouldn’t have known where I was. I open my mouth to explain, but he cuts me off.

  “It’s nothing,” he says, rubbing his face. “I just had to deal with idiots all afternoon.”

  He crosses the distance between us to rest his hand on my arm. I lean into his touch automatically. He holds my gaze for a long moment, and then reaches up to trail his fingers down my cheek, across my jaw and into my hair, along the curve of my neck and collarbone. As if he’s charting the planes of my body. My heart thumps in a much more pleasant way, but something still feels strange about the gravity in his expression.

  “Come with me?” he says, and clarifies, “To the bedroom?”

  “Oh, is that what you’re after?” I ask, keeping my tone light. For the first time since he saw me, he cracks a smile. Mischief lights in those dark brown eyes.

  “We’ve got the whole evening to kill,” he says. “Might as well pass the time enjoyably.”

  If everything goes according to plan, it’s our last evening in the privacy of his apartment. I don’t know what to expect from Tabzi’s ship. Maybe that’s what has caused his odd mood.

  “I can agree to that,” I say, smiling back. I could use a diversion from this afternoon’s events.

  But when we’re lying together on his wide bunk, Jule turns serious again. He keeps a few inches between us, continuing his charting over my clothes. His hand slips along the bend of my shoulder, the crook of my elbow, the underside of my wrist. The arc of my rib cage, the dip of my waist. Setting off sparks through my nerves. I reach for him, and he clasps my hand.

  “I want to tell you something,” he says.

  “Okay,” I reply, not sure whether to expect some dark confession or the punch line to a deadpan joke.

  He props himself up on one arm, and I tip my head to match the angle of his gaze. “I want you to know I mean it,” he says. “I haven’t told anyone this before. I don’t think I could have honestly said it before.”

  “Okay,” I say again.

  “I don’t want you to say anything back,” he goes on. “Just . . . take it, as it is.”

  Before I can reply, he leans in and kisses me, so hard my skin tingles all the way down to my toes. I kiss him back, pulling myself to him, and he slides his lips across my cheek.

  “I love you,” he murmurs, like a breath by my ear. Before the words have sunk in, he’s captured my mouth again, his hands tracing bare skin now, and my own capacity for words starts to fragment.

  He told me not to answer. He told me just to take it. And he’s not letting me do anything else. But as our bodies press closer and everything in the universe but him falls away, a little glow of happiness lights up inside me.

  Love. I hadn’t put that label on this feeling, hadn’t let myself consider it. But in that moment, I can’t think of another that could possibly be right. So I try to offer it back, in the only way he’ll allow: with each kiss, each caress.

  I try not to think about how hard it’s going to be, to lose this. Because it doesn’t matter what I call it, what he calls it. There are people I love back home too. The idea of leaving them for good, of never seeing them again, of letting them worry and wonder for the rest of their lives so I can keep this one selfish thing—I know without question I couldn’t do it. So I focus on the moment, for as long as it will last.

  Sometime during the night, the real world creeps back into my head. I sleep in fits and starts, my mind never quite settling. My restlessness gets me out of bed four times to check the terminal in my bedroom for an answer to my message. Jule stirs but doesn’t wake. The fourth time, early in the morning,
there’s a reply from Isis waiting. All it says is “Call me.” I sink onto my bunk and ping her apartment.

  Isis answers almost immediately. “Hey,” she says, and then, without preamble, “Tell me everything that happened. Everything he said.”

  I repeat my conversation with Davic in all the detail I remember. When I’ve finished, Isis twists a curl around her finger, her brow knit.

  “Is there some way you can track the payments he’s been making, to whoever is leaking the information?” I ask.

  “It’s not easy,” Isis says. “The financial network has several layers of protection . . . Except for the Treasury council, no one can access those records without the person’s pass code, and then only from the person’s private terminals or the Treasury division’s. We couldn’t even start to look at Davic’s or anyone else’s from here.”

  “So we need people’s pass codes, and access to their apartments,” I say.

  She nods. “Which we might be able to accomplish. If we come up with an excuse to get the others to open their accounts, I have a device we could use to capture the code, and then we could contrive an excuse to make them leave the apartment so we’d have a chance to look for ourselves. It would just take a little time.”

  “We have to do it,” I say. “We can’t jump into a ship we’ve never seen without confirming who’s on our side—and who isn’t.”

  “I know,” Isis says. “I’ll contact Thlo and tell her we need to delay the jump for as long as possible. We should be able to hold off until the end of the day. And then we’ll prioritize.”

  “Start with Tabzi,” I say.

  “I agree,” she says, “but only because the plan depends on her. If we can’t confirm the others’ loyalty, we may have to leave without saying anything to them. But knowing what we do now, I doubt it was her, Skylar. She’s the last person who’d need extra credits. Her family’s one of the wealthiest on the station, and they’ve never hidden the fact that they give all their kids a substantial . . . what you would call a ‘trust.’ ”

  “You think Pavel or Mako or Emmer might have been struggling?”

  “I don’t know,” Isis says. “They could be. It wouldn’t be hard for them to hide it, if the situation wasn’t dire yet.”

  I still find it hard to imagine someone who’s devoted years of their life to a cause suddenly throwing the rest of us over to make some cash. “Maybe it isn’t really about the money,” I suggest. “Maybe that was just so Davic didn’t get suspicious about why they were offering the information.”

  “It’s possible. We’ll figure it out, one way or another.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t find out more.”

  “Forget that,” Isis says, her voice softening. “It was crazy, what you did, running over there on your own. You had no idea what he’d do. Britta was terrified when she realized where you were going, you know.”

  Guilt prickles through my gut. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Can you thank her for looking out for me?”

  “I will,” Isis says. “Just stay put from now on, all right? It was brave as well as crazy, and I’m glad you learned what you did, but . . . If there’s another way we think you can help, I’ll let you know. I promise.”

  “Okay,” I say, but I can’t help thinking that if I’d kept waiting for her or Thlo or anyone else to tell me how to pitch in, we wouldn’t be anywhere near identifying the traitor.

  I go back to Jule’s room and lie down beside him, but my mind and my nerves are still buzzing. I close my eyes and manage to drift for a little while. Jule rolls onto his side, his shoulder brushing mine, nudging me back awake.

  There’s something else. Not just wondering how we’ll be able to check those financial records, or what’s really motivated someone in the group to betray us. A niggling tremor that’s worming through my thoughts, twitching under my skin, the way the wrongness used to whisper at me. Something’s not quite right.

  I go over the conversation with Isis, each comment and question. Remembering her last remarks, about how upset Britta was, I frown. But I still can’t put my finger on it.

  I cycle back to earlier in the day: the call to Britta, the visit to Davic, the trip back here with Win, the message I sent, Jule coming out to confront me—

  My breath catches in my throat. He didn’t really confront me, did he? You’re back, he said, and that’s it. He knew I’d gone out. I’d gone out even though the station is in lockdown and an Enforcer who’d kill me on sight is assigned to this sector, and he didn’t even ask where I’d been.

  I sit up, careful not to disturb him. Why wouldn’t he have asked? It was like he already knew. Win said Britta had tried to contact Jule, but that she hadn’t been able to reach him. I hadn’t talked to him about any plans to leave the apartment.

  My gaze falls on a glint of silver in the corner of the room. The bracelet Jule slid off my wrist and tossed there last evening. I’ll be able to find you wherever, he told me when he gave it to me. I assumed it sent a signal when I pressed the button. But it wouldn’t have worked that way.

  My arm feels very heavy as I lift it to turn on his bedroom terminal. I don’t let myself second-guess. I’ll just look, see if I’m being paranoid, and then I can go to sleep.

  The display blinks on, offering a layout similar to the one in my room, except naturally all in Kemyate. I hesitate, and then open up a personal network search, sketching in the Kemyate characters that spell out my name.

  No results. I start to relax. Just to be sure, I enter the joined characters for “bracelet.”

  A couple of documents and a program icon appear. I gesture open the program.

  At first all I make out is a tiny ring of light surrounded by a few seemingly random lines. I prod the image, and it contracts. My fingers recoil.

  It’s a layout of an apartment, set in a hall with dozens of other shadowy outlines around it, the sector and ward numbers hovering above the map. At another prod, the image contracts again, giving me a view of half this entire floor of the station. The little glowing ring hasn’t moved from its original position.

  In Jule’s apartment. Over there by my feet.

  I close my eyes, and open them again. It’s not that bad, is it? The idea of him following my movements without my knowing gives me the creeps, but maybe he saw it as a reasonable precaution, like the health monitor in my bedroom. So if I was in a position where I couldn’t activate the signal but he knew something was wrong, he could still find me.

  Only . . . that means he knew I went to some random sector today. He didn’t ask why, or what I’d done there, even though he couldn’t have known.

  Or could he?

  I shake the question away as soon as it pricks at me, but it won’t let go. Swiveling on the edge of the bunk, I look down at Jule’s sleeping form. He’s turned away from me, one leg pulled up and the other stretched straight, his arms curled around his head. His face is soft with sleep.

  I remember how that face looked when I came in. The tentativeness . . . almost nervousness. His intensity afterward. Why now?

  It feels like betraying him to even wonder. An ache closes around my heart. I dismiss the tracking program with a wave and get up, ducking into the main room as if my thoughts are becoming so loud they’ll wake him up.

  Jule’s friends talked about how rich he is. Isis said his family is respected, at least the older generations.

  But the people in the club joked about his father dragging the family under, about how they’d have expected the accounts to have run dry by now. His father seemed concerned about how Jule spent his money—Jule made that retort about throwing credits around.

  Tabzi gets her money from her parents. If Jule’s father really runs through credits like that . . . where’s Jule getting his? He’s working the same job as Win, and Win’s certainly not rich.

  I press my hands against my forehead.

  There’s an easy way to get rid of the questions. I watched Jule tap a code into his safe the other day. I’d
bet he uses the same one for his records. It’ll be like practice, in case Isis needs me to help investigate the others.

  I keep that interpretation of my actions at the front of my mind as I turn on the screen in the main room. It takes me a few minutes to locate the financial section, because my anxious fingers keep scattering the interface. When I flick open the program that holds Jule’s account records, a pass code request appears.

  He trusted me enough not to hide this from me. Now I’m using that trust against him.

  Nothing I’m going to see here will hurt him unless he’s been hurting all of us all along.

  I tap in the numbers. The request vanishes. A complex spreadsheet of labels and numerical characters flows across the screen. I ease through the records, gradually picking out deposits and withdrawals and dates and sources. Then my hand drops to my side, and I just stare.

  Heat pools behind my eyes. I have to blink it away to double-check what I think I’m seeing. And to check again. And again.

  It’s still there. Twice in the last month, transfers into Jule’s account several times larger than any of the ones from Earth Travel, from a source that’s just a scrambled series of characters.

  27.

  When Jule ambles out of his bedroom at a more reasonable hour of the morning, I’m in the kitchen/dining area. Seeing me, he smiles with a hint of the shyness I’ve caught glimpses of before. It reminds me of his supposed confession last night. A sliver of pain cuts through my chest, but I make myself smile back.

  I worked out the dates of the first tip-off at the tech bay and the interruption of Britta’s flight down to the planet to the best of my memory, and his mysterious influxes of credits arrived exactly two days after each, which would make perfect sense if he’s using some complicated routing system to make sure the money can’t be traced between Davic and him. I scanned back through the records and confirmed those influxes only started about a year ago. After Jule joined the group. I even know where the money went. Because after most of the influxes, there are regular transfers out to an account labeled R. Adka. His father, no doubt.