Yes, I was eating before I’d had my turn in the shower; yes, I was still grime- and gore-encrusted from the fighting and the chaos and the crazy back on Kandriad. No, I didn’t care, and Sho didn’t seem to mind either. For me, well, it wasn’t the first time I’d sat down to a meal looking like I’d just come from a pitched firefight; it wasn’t even the first time I’d sat down to a meal when having actually just come from a pitched firefight. For Sho, I assumed he’d seen plenty of the like as well, with the front lines of his war so close to his home.
We dug into our food while it was still hot, tearing into the victuals like they might disappear if we let them cool. Even so, Jane finished her shower before we were done, and frowned when she saw we were eating without her. “Thanks,” she said, somewhat indignantly.
“You want we should have waited?” I said—or tried to say, though the words came out somewhat garbled, given that they were forced around a large mouthful of potatoes.
Jane sighed. “I’ll fix something for myself, thanks. For now: your turn.”
I pushed my plate away from me, mostly finished—though I made sure to push it toward Sho, who had absolutely cleaned his and was staring at the remains of mine like I’d just given him the greatest gift he could imagine—and started toward the shower. I turned, though, before I opened the door. “Hey, Sho?” I said quietly.
He turned, looking up at me with those big gold eyes. “Yes, Esa?” he asked, pronouncing my name like he was trying out the feel of it on his tongue.
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “For your mother.”
He nodded, and then I shut the shower door behind me.
CHAPTER 5
For a moment after I closed the door, I just stared at my face in the mirror: I looked terrible. The traces of camo paint that still clung to my dark brown skin gave me a patchy, mottled look, one that came off as incredibly unhealthy, not aided by the shadows blooming underneath my wide hazel eyes. Adding to my general “death’s door chic” appearance was the fact that I’d picked up a few minor contusions and bruises during the course of our little outing, which was, admittedly, more or less par for the course.
I shook out of my stupor and turned the water pressure over to “high.” Let the recyclers work overtime; I needed the soak.
I stood under the spray and leaned against the cool wall, let the water pound against me, and closed my eyes against the pressure. That was the thing about showering after you got out of a combat zone—you tended to decompress in a rush, the warm water telling your body you were safe, it was okay, you could let go of the tension you’d been holding, you could actually start to process what you’d been through.
Problem was, I didn’t really want to process what I’d been through on Kandriad—didn’t want to think about the men I’d killed, the expressions on their faces, the feeling and the force behind my arm as I rammed my knife home. I didn’t want to think about Sho’s mother, standing on the subway platform as the gas approached. I especially didn’t want to think about the rising ball of nuclear fire, or the thing in armor, the thing with wings, that had soared out of that rising column of flame, the thing we were still chasing. Mostly, I didn’t want to think about how often I’d felt my pulse racing beneath my skin, the bitter taste of fear in my mouth, or the horrifying, vicious joy I’d felt as I’d watched an enemy fall.
Those thoughts came unbidden to my mind anyway, drawn up from the depths by the comforting warmth and pressure of the water.
I didn’t know which was worse: that after three years of this kind of work—and no, it hadn’t all been this kind of work; moments like the peaceable contact we’d made with Sho’s sect still outweighed all the scary violence, by a good margin—I was still so bothered by all of it, or the fact that, after three years, I still wasn’t as bothered by it as I felt like I should be.
I’d killed, what, a dozen soldiers today? At least. A dozen thinking, breathing, aware beings, people with their own hopes and dreams and fears, and all that really mattered to me was that they were dead and I wasn’t. I got to keep on breathing. They didn’t. So fuck them. Those were the stakes.
I was taught early on—well before I met Jane—that the moment you put on a gun you were making a choice to take your survival into your own hands. But that was still better than leaving it in the hands of someone else, someone who might not hesitate to cut down unarmed women or children. People without a fight in them could still die to someone else’s. That was another one of Jane’s sayings. I still don’t know if I agreed with it, but I was starting to see that it might not matter if I did, or if I didn’t. It was true either way.
I stayed in the shower for a while before I actually started to put effort into cleaning myself, feeding the recyclers with the grit and dust and dried blood Kandriad had left behind. Once I had the remains of the war scrubbed off me, I felt marginally better. I always did. Again—not sure if that was good or bad. Not sure if I should really be able to just . . . leave behind the things I’d done, the lives I’d taken, drawn down the drain just like the gray-and-pink-stained water running off my body. But fuck it. We still had other problems.
At least we had time for showers, and dinners, time to decompress. That was the one good thing about the hyperspace voyages: the long travel time meant you got moments to breathe, in between the places you had to be.
When I finally emerged, Sho was still sitting at the table, finishing off what looked like the remains of Jane’s meal—and he smiled bashfully at me around another forkful of his food. “I ate the rest of your dinner,” he told me, as though that weren’t patently obvious.
“Share and share alike, brother; that’s my motto,” I told him. “Plus, we have more.” I fished some more fruit from the cooling unit; wasn’t really in the mood for hot food anymore anyway, not after so long in the piping-hot shower.
He swallowed his massive bite of dinner, then went for another package. “Jane told me she wanted to check something out in the cargo hold,” he said. “Said she might have a ‘gift’ for me down there.” That was interesting—as far as I knew, all we had hidden away in the space beneath our feet were more guns, more munitions. “She also told me that the other children at Sanctum—that they all have gifts, like yours, and mine.”
I nodded, taking a seat across from him after I’d tossed my marsh flower peel in the recycler. “Like ours, but different, just like our gifts are different,” I said.
“And that most of them stay at Sanctum, to train their gifts. She wouldn’t say what that meant, exactly, or how, or why. There are many things that she won’t tell me. She thinks she’s being clever in how she avoids answering those questions—”
“But she’s really not.” I smiled, faintly. “Yeah, I remember that, too.”
“So she . . . discovered you. Rescued you. Like you two rescued me.”
“She did, yeah. Three years ago.” It felt like a lifetime.
“And did you train? At Sanctum?”
“For a little while,” I nodded. “Long enough to grasp the fundamentals of my power, and to brush up on all the stuff I missed growing up on a pulsed world; stuff about the galaxy at large, I mean. After that, I figured I was good to go. Most of the other kids—they stay there, find work, find uses for their talents. I didn’t figure that I’d been dragged halfway across the galaxy just to sit around that one little corner of it: I wanted to see all the other parts, too. The places in between.”
“So that’s why you work with Jane? To explore?”
I shook my head. “If I just wanted to explore, I’d work with our friend Javier—he’s the cartographer. He goes to the edges of our maps, fills in the blank spaces. Visits worlds we only know a little about, or those we haven’t been to in a long time, makes sure what we thought we knew still holds true, or to correct what was wrong if it doesn’t.”
Sho was watching me intently, like I was a riddle he was trying to figure out; I pretended not to notice as I popped another bite of the fruit into my mouth. “
So why not do that?” he asked finally.
“Why work with Jane?”
He nodded.
“Because she was there when I needed her. Because my world went to hell in a handbasket, and I would have ended up in a very, very bad place if she hadn’t found me.”
“Like . . . like I would have been caught in that blast, if you hadn’t come for me.” He was still having trouble talking about it—probably even thinking about it—but at least he was trying; that counted for something.
“Exactly,” I nodded. “Even worse for me, though, because you would have just been dead; I would have been . . . something else, made into something else by the people looking for me.” The Pax had wanted to brainwash me, to make me use my gifts to wage their war. I would have still been in there, somewhere, screaming, but gone, as well. I still had nightmares about it, from time to time—what might have been.
“So you were hunted, just like maybe the thing in the armor was hunting for me.”
Shit. How had he figured that out? “That’s only a possibility, Sho,” I cautioned him. “We don’t know it for sure.” But I’d just reinforced the notion that it might be, by telling him it was also what had driven me from my home. Goddammit. I shook my head, wrenched the conversation back on track. “Point is, I’m not—I’m not doing this because I owe Jane, somehow, and I don’t want you to think you owe us, either. If you want to stay in Sanctum—once we finally make it back there—you should stay in Sanctum; if you want to tell us all to fuck off and go explore the rest of the universe on your own, you should do that instead. Once they fix your spinal bits.” I waved another piece of marsh flower in the vague direction of his waist.
“So if you don’t do it because you owe her, why do it?” He seemed very intent on getting an answer.
“Because she saved me, Sho. And because I can’t imagine anything more rewarding out of life than getting to save you.” There it was, a bold-faced statement answering the question that had eluded me in the shower: why was I willing to go through all the violence, all the pain, all the fear? Because it was worth it; that was why. Simple math. “Your talents might make a great deal of difference for thousands of lives in Sanctum, might even help save us from the return of the pulse, and that’s one hell of a reward. My talents—and the training Jane’s given me—make me uniquely suited to go back out into the galaxy that tried to grind me to paste, and to pull other kids out of the path of that same thresher.”
He swallowed another bite of protein-something, and nodded. “And her?” he asked.
“Jane, you mean?”
He nodded again. I shrugged. “Jane doesn’t talk about the past much,” I told him. “If she did, I wouldn’t bug her about it the way I do. I think she feels like she owes something; I’m just not sure what it is, or who she owes it to. The galaxy, maybe. Or herself. Maybe both.”
“She saves people—children—because there was someone she didn’t save once. Someone she couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.” He said the words with the simple gravity of insight; a guess, sure, but still a pretty damned good one.
I blinked at him for a moment. That was not a possibility I’d ever actually considered. Truth be told, I’d never really asked the question of why Jane did this work at all—oh, I’d asked why she’d joined up with the Justified, and gotten evasive answers in return, but I’d never asked why this work, why, with her talents, she wasn’t in Seamus’s security outfit instead, the front lines against an attack on Sanctum. Whatever she’d been before she joined the Justified, it had been something a hell of a lot closer to a soldier than a nursemaid.
He grinned at me slightly, taking in my expression. “Did I say something clever?” he asked.
“Not too bad,” I told him, pushing the rest of my marsh flower across the table as a reward. “Not too bad at all.” He finished it off in one bite.
CHAPTER 6
Jane eventually emerged from the cargo hold with a goddamned wheelchair in tow, huffing and grunting as she lifted it up the ladder from the cargo area belowdecks. Where the hell had she found that thing? It was collapsible, motorized—Sho’s eyes absolutely lit when he saw what it was.
“I know we promised you your legs back, and that will happen, Sho,” Jane told him, pulling the thing apart. “But obviously, we’re not going to be able to take a direct route to Sanctum—”
“Hunting down the thing in the armor comes first.” He nodded. “Absolutely.”
“Right.” She smiled, just a little, liked the steel she heard in his voice. “So until we can get your legs fixed up, I wanted you to at least be able to get around Scheherazade on your own. Esa?”
I nodded, and moved to help him into the chair as Jane held it open. Sho treated the metal contraption—a thing you’d be able to find in most hospitals on every non-pulsed world, and even on a fair bit of them that had received only light doses of pulse rads—like it was an absolute wonder; I hadn’t seen a wheelchair in his train car back on Kandriad, either because that sort of thing was too far up the tech tree for his people to fabricate it, or simply because he and his mother had simply been too poor.
He zoomed around in the thing like he was a natural. Thankfully, Scheherazade’s interior only had one actual cabin, and all its furniture was modular, meant to be fitted up inside the walls when we weren’t using it, so there was plenty of open space for him to get around.
While Sho was busy testing out his new wheels, Jane and I crowded around the kitchen table, Jane reaching to activate the holoprojector, bringing up the star maps of this sector of space. Tracking a ship through hyperspace was relatively easy, provided you had a visual record of their jump—which we did: all you did was calculate the exact trajectory they’d exited the system, then plotted that course out and out and out through the surrounding emptiness between the stars until you hit something of note; there was no such thing as “turning” in the middle of a hyperspace jump.
The problem was, since we didn’t know what the hell the armored thing’s ship was capable of, we didn’t know what its range was, or how fast it was moving—Scheherazade was capable of staying in hyperspace for a week or more, but if he could keep going past that, we’d have to drop out, cool the engines, and hope we could catch up.
“There.” Jane reached out, tapped a green dot on the holoprojected map, just inside the red line on his projected course: where we’d have to break off the chase, at least momentarily.
I squinted at the map, opening up the text box of Schaz’s database to read what sort of information the Justified had collected on the system. “Not much there,” I said doubtfully. “Gas giants, an asteroid belt, a weird nebula at the edge of the system—”
“And that weird nebula’s where he’ll be headed,” Jane said, her voice still confident—whatever it was she knew, it wasn’t in the Justified’s general archives. I swear, sometimes she kept secrets just for the hell of it. “There’s a station inside, a former mining asteroid, hollowed out, repurposed.”
“And you think he’s going there because . . .”
She shrugged. “Process of elimination. There’s nothing else on his course but that system, and in that system, that’s the only one thing with any kind of population.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “You said this asteroid had been ‘repurposed,’ ” I said. “Repurposed for what? And does it even have a name?”
She nodded at that. “General sustainability—don’t worry, it’s not like they’re building war AI, or anything like that. And the name of the station is Valkyrie Rock.”
“What’s a valkyrie?” I asked. Even in our shit situation, she smiled at that; my general curiosity always amused her.
“A valkyrie is . . .” She paused, trying to stare at the map and answer my question simultaneously. “It’s a thing from an old human myth; a sort of spirit creature that roams battlefields, and takes the honored dead to the afterlife. Only those who fought, and died, as warriors, though; those as strong, or stronger, than the valkyries themselves. A
nd that’s the thing about Valkyrie Rock; the inhabitants are . . . they have kind of a thing. About death. Hence the name.”
“What kind of a thing?” I asked. That didn’t sound good. In point of fact, it sounded bad. Very bad. Having “a thing about death” was up there with “a thing about feeding outsiders to superpredators” in terms of unsavory habits various cultures could develop that might have a direct impact on our sanity and well-being.
“They think it’s already happened.”
“What?”
“They think they’re dead; that everybody’s dead. They think we’re . . . ‘living,’ for lack of a better term . . . in the afterlife. That this, all of it”—she waved her hand, I guess to indicate, you know, existence, though really she was just gesturing at Schaz—“they think it’s all a kind of purgatory, a place of testing and punishment. I’m not sure which afterlife exactly, but . . . yeah. Valkyrie Rock is a gathering place for those who think they’ve already died.” She turned, slightly; caught my expression, which must not have been pleasant. “It’s a big galaxy, Esa,” she said, almost defensively. “People believe a lot of strange shit.”
“So . . . what does that mean?”
Jane shrugged. “So long as we obey their rules, we should be fine. Just—no mentioning the outside universe; as far as they’re concerned, Valkyrie Rock is the only ‘real’ thing in existence, and everything else is just the shadows and fog of the afterlife, there to test them, to trick them. To draw them from the true path.”
“And their other rules?”
“I’ll go over them before we dock.”
“So do you think he’s . . . one of them? The armored guy, I mean—is he one of these . . . ‘thinks he’s dead’ people? Cultists? Types?”
She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “I doubt it,” she replied, taking a sip of her coffee. “The locals aren’t unfriendly, per se. For a bunch of theoretically dead people. Plus, they don’t really give a damn about the outside galaxy, because, again, they think it doesn’t exist. So sending out a . . . terrorist, or an assassin, or whatever the hell he was—it’s not exactly something they’d do.”
A Chain Across the Dawn Page 9
