Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel

by Jacqueline Koyanagi

  “Well, you did something good on Gira,” I said, still smiling. “I can see why she trusts you.”

  “Speaking of medication,” Slip said, placing a hand on my knee and looking me dead in the eye. “How are you doing on yours?”

  I pictured the bottle nestled in my pocket, only thirteen days’ worth of pills still knocking around in the plastic container. And that Panacea sample. It seemed toxic now, knowing Transliminal—or at least an othersider—had something to do with my parents’ murders and our fugitive status. Still, I held onto it.

  If I confessed to being so close to running out of the Dexitek, what good could it do? If they helped me find more, we’d be caught. The symptoms wouldn’t get too bad until at least after we’d gotten Bell, and then we could worry about my issues when we helped Marre with hers. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t want to be a martyr and I definitely wasn’t looking forward to the possibility of watching my body deteriorate, but I shoved all that fear down as far as I could. There was nothing anyone could do. I could always take the sample if things got too bad. I’d deal with the consequences later.

  “I’m doing fine,” I finally said.

  A knock. Tev stood there, tapping the engine room wall with her knuckle, peeking around the corner. A flutter in my stomach.

  “Since when does everyone eat in here?” she said.

  I stood and tried brushing the crumbs off the platform, but just ended up tossing them—and several rings—around.

  “We’re just telling stories,” Slip said. Ovie kept working.

  I plucked at the crumbs, collecting them in one hand. “What can we do for you, Captain?”

  “Actually, I’d like you to come with me.” She seemed . . . nervous? A smile played on the edges of her lips, her eyes connecting with mine. “There’s something I want to show you.”

  Slip lowered her voice like a news-net narrator. “In a world where hard-assed captains patrol the corridors, many a stowaway heard those words before an untimely trip into the Big Quiet.” She wiggled her fingers at me as she got up off the bed, laughing. “I’m going to go make sure your sister isn’t knitting a hole into the side of the ship. Have fun.”

  Ovie got up after her, mumbling something I couldn’t quite catch. Tev and I lingered in the crowded engine room as he shifted his big body out between us, giving me a quick smile. Just then, I noticed his unusually sharp canines for the first time. How had I missed those?

  “What?” he said when I stared a little too long.

  I pointed to my own teeth and stammered something incoherent, but then gave up. “Nothing.”

  Tev waited until the other two were gone before guiding me out of the engine room and down the corridor toward her quarters, where we stopped at the door. Another stomach flutter. Was she inviting me in?

  Stop that. She has Slip, and Slip is your friend.

  “I wanted to thank you for cooperating with us. For helping with the device and trying to figure out what it is. Don’t think I haven’t seen you creeping around the cargo hold when you’re supposed to be sleeping.”

  I opened my mouth to apologize, but she held up a hand. “And for cooperating with the surgery. I wouldn’t have asked you to change your body if the circumstances were any less dire.” She lifted her hair and turned her head so that I could see an incision at the back of her own ear. I’d almost forgotten she’d had an implant too. “I wouldn’t ask anything of my crew I wouldn’t do myself. Regardless, you’re right about what you said to me; you let us cut into you and isolate you, and the sacrifice hasn’t gone unnoticed.”

  So she’d taken what I said to heart. I was sure I reddened at the memory of my drug-induced comments as I was coming out of the anesthesia. It was just coming back to me that I’d also grabbed her hand. What else had I done to embarrass myself? All those emotions came tumbling back in—attraction, shame, anxiety, grief, loss.

  Just pretend, I told myself. Pretend as if I didn’t still feel a phantom implant behind my ear. I still slept on one side to avoid hitting the transmit switch even though it wasn’t there anymore. I still reached for my neck when I wanted to talk to someone. I still had to remind myself that I now had to seek them out face-to-face. I’d lost a sense almost as integrated as my vision or hearing, and I didn’t know if I’d ever not feel a little incomplete. My body missed the metal I’d lost just as badly as if it had been blood or bone.

  Tev seemed to search my face for a moment, green eyes capturing mine, gaze working on me in a way that made every part of me shiver. Again, the smell of rosemary lingered around us. Eventually she opened the door to her quarters, then placed a light hand on the small of my back to guide me inside. It was such a gentle gesture for someone who made herself seem rough around the edges. The touch warmed my skin beneath my shirt.

  It occurred to me then: why didn’t Slip share quarters with Tev?

  “After everything you’ve been through, I think you need this,” Tev said. “I only show this to people who feel like part of the crew.”

  She ushered me to the left just inside her quarters, toward a stairwell leading up. I only caught a brief glimpse of the space she called her own: a shifting imprint display of photos from what I assumed was her childhood, including one of her helping a woman drive cattle. Schematics of the Tangled Axon. A few plants in the far corner. A desk with a switched-off holographic projection pad. Magnetic containers haphazardly affixed to the walls. A repeating vid of some Wooleran landscape on the wall opposite her small, unmade bed. Scattered nutrient bar wrappers on the floor.

  Before I could take anything else in, she guided me up the stairs.

  We emerged into a room that was big for a Gartik transport—so large it had to be one of the mods I’d seen from outside. But there was nothing in it. Just cavernous emptiness surrounded by four black walls and an opening to the stairwell in the corner.

  “Do you know what this is?” she said, voice slightly echoing.

  We stood in darkness, but the dim glow from the lower deck illuminated her just enough for me to see her face. Her pale skin glowed like freshwater pearl. If we were anywhere else, and she were anyone else but a ship’s captain, I would have kissed her a week ago just to see if I could taste the Axon on her lips. As it was, all the longing, refraining, and suppressing . . . it burned in my gut like a pile of embers.

  I swallowed down my desire. “What, you mean you don’t show your quarters to every woman who wanders into your cargo bay?” I laughed, but it came out awkwardly.

  She smiled a little and depressed a button on the wall. “Marre.”

  “Yes, Captain.” The pilot’s hollow voice echoed in the empty space.

  “Open the observation deck window.”

  The wall opposite the stairwell flickered, along with part of the ceiling and floor, then disappeared.

  “Oh!” I clapped my hand over my mouth, not wanting to seem childish.

  The whole of the universe seemed to surge before us, around us, and burn right through me. When walking on the hull of the Tangled Axon, my vision had been obscured by the helmet’s visor, and I’d been under pressure—literally and figuratively. Even the bridge viewer was angled and narrow, affording only a small slice of the sky. But now, here, I stood in the emptiness with Tev, our feet floating above . . . nothing.

  “Here.” Tev took my wrist. The instant her hand touched me, I snapped my gaze toward it, but I could barely see anything in the pitch black. I was tempted to touch her too, but she pulled me toward the center of the high-temperature quartz glass barrier between us and the Big Quiet. “Look down. Good. Just keep looking at the floor.”

  Looking at the floor meant staring down into a vertigo of stars. My head spun.

  “But I saw already—”

  “No, love. You didn’t. Trust me.”

  I knew it was just a Wooleran thing, but every time she said “love,” my heart sped up. She moved behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders, nudging me toward a spot she seemed to have in mind. �
�Don’t look up yet.” She adjusted me by what seemed to be mere centimeters.

  “What—?”

  “Just wait.”

  The temptation was killing me, but I just focused on the pressure of her hands, the scent of her, the closeness. That, and the overwhelming sense that I would float away into the silence.

  “Okay. Go ahead.”

  I lifted my head.

  Nothing, nothing but a field of endless stars. Stars and us.

  She had moved me to a spot where the remaining matte surroundings had disappeared from view, and as long as I looked straight ahead, there seemed to be nothing between me and eternity. There was no edge between the worlds of inside and beyond. In the life I’d known before, there was always an edge—a doorway, a wall, a horizon—but not now.

  No limits, no borders.

  I shrank inside myself before the enormity of our galaxy. More than ever I felt the reality of space travel welling in the deepest part of me, in the same way I occasionally became aware of my own mortality. We entrusted the Tangled Axon with our fragile bodies out here in the void. Even the strongest metal was still a thin film of hope stretched over us. I imagined the ship’s acoustic signature echoing out from herself, surging between each node of light, braiding together with the song of all stars below and above us, racing outward, forever.

  “To me, the universe is a mother.” Tev’s breath grazed my neck. Aching, agonizing desire pulled at me with her every word. “The black is full of her creation. We can’t see her face because we live inside her. We just catch glimpses of her in bursts. Light peeks in where her skin grows thin from the pressure of all that creation waiting to burst through.”

  My eyes burned, as if stinging from the brilliance of so many suns, so many worlds. I couldn’t bring myself to speak, and I didn’t know if I was more touched by what the captain had shown me, the fact that she was showing it, or what she believed about the universe. Behind all that brittleness and self-control, Tev Helix contained worlds of myth and wonder. Why did she hide it?

  I turned to her and, forgetting myself, placed my hands on her cheeks and tilted her forehead down to meet mine, closing my eyes. She stiffened, but I didn’t care. This woman—this blond, rosemary-laden captain—gave me everything I’d ever wanted just by letting me be there.

  “Thank you, Tev,” I whispered, savoring the shape of her name in my mouth. “Thank you.”

  She relaxed and placed her hands on my arms.

  “I haven’t done you any favors,” she said, breath tickling my mouth. “I’ve kept you around because that’s what’s best for my ship and my crew, so don’t thank me. Just be a good engineer.”

  She was so warm. Her breath had quickened, and she hadn’t pulled away. I couldn’t believe that my engineering skills were all she had in mind when she brought me here. Everything was all mixed up in a haze of confusion and need.

  “You can come here anytime, if you ask,” she said, pulling back to look at me. “I know captains who would say this place was a waste of resources, a pointless addition at a time of scarcity, but they’re blind to what a crew needs.”

  “And what’s that?”

  She lifted my hand to the invisible barrier separating us from the void, and pressed my palm against its cold surface, leaving her hand on mine. Again her voice was low and close to my ear in the darkness, her body brushing against my back. “Sometimes they need to wipe the grease from their hands and touch the face of God.”

  Something in me broke. All I’d been trying to suppress came rushing in.

  I was falling in love.

  Chapter Nine

  Days later, I stood in the cargo bay, staring down at the device’s green eye in challenge. This damn piece of othersider tech not only killed my family, but now watched us, beaming our movements back to the system authorities, helping them chase us for a crime we didn’t commit. A foreign body in the belly of our metal lady. Hatred for it rose in my throat.

  I will ruin this thing.

  And when we made it to Transliminal Solutions, I’d expose what they’d done.

  When I had detached it from the hull with Ovie, I’d felt exuberant. Limitless. As if I’d accomplished the first task of my real career as a sky surgeon. I tried conjuring the memory of it—the way I’d felt when it clicked, releasing the ship and floating into our hands. When we returned inside, I felt like a hero.

  I wanted to feel that way again. To remember I wasn’t a dirtheel anymore, and that there was still hope left in the world. To believe that maybe we might not end up rotting in some penal colony, with the whole system’s hatred aimed at our heads.

  I entangled my hand in the thing’s entrails. The silvery web of light was cold around my fingers, slick like oil. Every burst of electricity sent a tiny shock through my nervous system, but it was nothing I couldn’t endure. Nothing I wasn’t used to; by now, pure plasma coursed through my veins, I was sure of it.

  I paused to roll my neck, trying to pop it to relieve the tension that had built from the base of my skull to my shoulder blades. Mel’s Disorder and physically grueling work made terrible bedfellows. Still, I pushed through it and folded myself into a knot of pure muscle and mind.

  I could feel waveguides between the light-tangle and the heart of the thing, whatever it was made of, which I couldn’t quite see but could feel with my fingertips. Occasionally they’d graze something hot and metallic.

  Focus on the familiar, Alana. If I could manipulate the tech I understood—the tech from our universe—I hoped it would be enough to disengage the rest. Copper and metal were my home, even when contaminated by whatever this othersider stuff was. Surely I could do this.

  My fingers slid along one wire to its point of contact on the waveguides. Something snagged the wire, and before I could assess what I’d done, a thin arc shot out from the open electrical panel and destroyed three cargo crates in an ear-shattering explosion.

  “Shit!”

  I didn’t even know what had happened, only that something caught the wire, and—

  Another electric arc snapped across the cargo hold and blasted a hole into the left side of the stairwell leading to the upper deck. A wave of fear rolled through me and I knew the emotion wasn’t mine—it was the ship’s. Searing pain lacerated my stomach. I was wrecking the Tangled Axon’s cargo bay, and she was screaming.

  I fumbled with the wire and waveguides, trying to keep my hands from shaking. Sharp twinges pulsed up from my hips, along my sides, down my neck. At this point I couldn’t tell which sensations originated in myself versus the ship.

  It doesn’t matter. Pain isn’t real. Pain is electrical signals. Ignore it.

  There was something else inside the thing near the waveguides that had grabbed the wire and wouldn’t let go. What was it? Gently but quickly, I tried to disentangle that something from the wire without being able to see it, and I almost had it—almost—but the wire slipped from my fingers. Panic tightened around my throat as I fished around, stretching too-short fingers in a desperate attempt to reach that which I couldn’t even see.

  Another plasma burst nearly seared my hair off, missing me by less than a meter. My relief was short-lived; it destroyed the door to Tev’s private room, and a fire billowed out from inside, flames licking the ceiling and wall, creeping outward. The ship’s torment ripped through my body. Every ligament and muscle felt like it was being rent from my bones, and all the while her voice bellowed in my mind like a feral creature.

  “No no no no . . . ” I had to find that damned wire. I kept glancing at the inferno eating away at the room, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I’d started some kind of awful chain reaction that was going to end up setting off this thing’s detonator. I would destroy the ship, or at least severely damage her. There would be no way we’d evade the enforcers and—oh, thank the black, the Axon doused Tev’s room in flame retardant. Maybe whatever was in there could be salvaged. Or some of it. Shit shit shit. I’ve really screwed this up. I’ve turned the Axon i
nto a pyre. Please, please hold on, Lady, I pleaded with the ship. Please.

  “What the hell is happening down here!” Tev ran down the stairwell, voice carried away by the roaring flames and detonations firing off from the device. I could only spare her a glance as I worked feverishly to stop the reaction. I had to find the—

  There! My fingertips pinched the wire; I just had to disconnect it. Don’t drop it. Don’t let it slip. Don’t destroy the damned vessel.

  Ovie barked, his voice frantic as he banged down the stairs behind Tev, and I thought I could hear Nova shrieking, Slip shouting about ruining our chances of getting out of this alive. I closed my eyes and quieted my mind until I could feel nothing but the Tangled Axon’s pain instead of mine, think of nothing but the task at hand.

  Nothing but me and the ship.

  Reality slowed. One breath.

  And another.

  Slow.

  Exhale.

  I used my thumb and forefinger to pinch the wire. My right hand slid around the inside panel near an old magnetic-mirror chamber surrounding the object’s core, but what was inside it? The only thing I could figure was they used it to confine plasma, but that’s not what those undulating lights were. It had to have something to do with what was making this thing lose its shit.

  I’m going to fry myself and everyone else along with me. I have no idea what I’m doing.

  “No,” I muttered, then calmed myself down again with a series of slow breaths, listening to the vessel’s pulse beneath my body. Sweat dripped down my forehead and into my eye, burning. I shook my head and carefully bent it to the side to wipe my face against my sleeve, all while maintaining my tenuous grip on the wire. Wild voices and flames stirred into chaos around me.