She stared back at me, eyes darting over my face. I wanted to kiss her more than ever, sitting on opposite sides of that bench. I didn’t even care that I smelled like sweat and probably tasted like it too, or that Slip was on the other side of the Axon, unsuspecting. My hands ached to feel Tev’s skin, a type of longing I usually reserved for metal women with plasma hearts. More than that, I wanted to know the rest of her. All of her. I felt like I could live a lifetime listening to her talk and still have so much left to learn.
I wanted to tell her that. To admit to my craving for her, my words coming in short gasps between tasting her mouth and burying my face into her hair, and I really did think about it. I thought about closing the gap between us, even if only with a small gesture—a pinky over hers, a thigh brushed with light fingertips. Something, anything to initiate contact.
But thoughts of Slip held me back. I did nothing, and Tev resumed stretching. The tenuous thread between us snapped once again, winding back inside my chest.
“I think it’s your shift in engineering,” she said, then picked up one of the free weights and started her bicep curls.
When I realized I was staring at her arm, at the way her muscles flexed down the side of her body, I colored and grabbed my towel.
“Right. Of course.”
On my way out, I almost turned back around to look at her, to see if her eyes followed me. I decided it would be too disappointing if they didn’t. So I let all those possibilities linger between us, and made for engineering without sparing her a glance.
For the rest of the afternoon, the Tangled Axon and her captain competed for my attention. While the ship’s plasma pulsed above my head and Mel’s crept in along my muscle fibers with tiny claws, I thought of the childhood Tev had described. A young version of her, radiant in the sun, dirt dusting her cheeks and boots. I wondered how many times she’d looked heavenward, how much of her youth she’d spent craving the sky, how often she imagined Orpim was an enormous ship instead of a planet, just to feel closer to her dream.
Those were my memories, my childhood, but I’d heard the same yearning in her voice that I’d felt all my life. Every time Tev spoke to me, she plunged roots into my core and split open the rock she found there. She was inside me, growing, and I cradled that seedling as if it were the only green left in the universe.
Chapter Eleven
Thanks to our collective criminal status, we couldn’t dock at one of Spin’s legal ports. Marre kept the ship a safe distance from the planet until we located an abandoned orbital shipyard just far enough away to avoid being detected.
Tev decided to leave Marre, Ovie, Nova, and the powered-down Tangled Axon to drift in the shipyard in silence, safely hidden by the surrounding dead vessels; a Gartik would have been flagged for screening immediately. The rest of us would take a shuttle and, we hoped, not be noticed in the usual heavy incoming traffic. At least the device wouldn’t give us away for another hour, hour and a half tops at Marre’s best guess.
“Bell Fisher,” Tev said to me as we were on our way to the surface with Slip. “That’s the name you want to pass around. You’re looking for a Heliodoran woman, average in height—well, maybe a little on the tall side, but just barely—darker than you, short hair, definitely carrying some kind of sidearm.”
Spin glittered beneath us, as if the lust and ecstatic release of so many bodies had ignited a million tiny fires across its twisting coastlines. Even at night, the albacite roofs and domes seemed naturally illuminated, pale and bright as white flames.
“How did you meet her?” I asked. “Bell, I mean.”
Tev pressed the activation button on her biter a couple of times, testing its charge. Snaps of electricity arced across its teeth as she quirked her mouth in a half-smile. “You really want to know?”
The shuttle actually made me motion sick, bringing on more Mel’s pain than I’d expected. Shit. This could complicate things. I did my best to hide my discomfort and just hoped I hadn’t added a tinge of green to my usual brown.
“People are allowed to have weapons on Spin?” I said, trying to distract myself.
“No.” She smiled fully this time. “Anyway, finding Bell is going to be tough, so even though I want you two to keep your eyes peeled just in case you happen to see her in passing, you’re just going to have to ask around. Problem is, with system enforcers looking for us, you can’t mention me or the Tangled Axon. If anyone asks who’s looking for Bell, tell them ‘Alia.’ Should be enough.”
“Alia?”
“My middle name.”
Tev landed the shuttle in an abandoned lot near a repair shop that had long since closed, hiding it between two tall mounds of scrap. We’d have to hope scavengers wouldn’t find the shuttle and pick it clean while we were gone. There were no other whole ships there. Just skeletons that once knew the sky, probably replaced by othersider vessels issued from Transliminal. Parts rusted over, useless to all but the most desperate machinists and copper-mongers. Pilot seats torn apart by rain and rodents. Engines with coil and wire pouring from their bellies like spilled entrails. As we left the lot, sticking to shadows and unlit paths, the emptiness of all those lost ships tugged at my chest.
“Come on,” Slip said, urging me forward with her hands. “We need to get to the crowds.”
I struggled to match the quick pace of the others, my feet unsteady beneath me as the every-growing symptoms of Mel’s Disorder threw off my equilibrium. The shuttle ride seemed to have accelerated my symptoms. Please don’t let this get in the way of our mission.
“Why is this here?” I said.
“What?” Tev looked irritated as she concentrated on choosing the best path through the rubble.
“The shop. The yard. I thought this was a resort planet.”
Slip shrugged. “People live here. Someone has to run the place. Patrons travel in ships. So there you go.”
“But these are all dead ships.”
“Yeah, and we’ll add our own to the lot if we don’t hurry up,” Tev said. “You two, cover the west block. I’ll go east and we’ll meet back here, at this corner, in an hour.”
Okay. An hour. I should be good to go for that long before the Mel’s gets bad enough to interfere, at least.
“What if they find us?” I said.
“Don’t let it happen.”
“But what if—”
“One hour.” Tev touched Slip’s waist and briefly pressed her forehead against hers. I forced myself not to look away. Maybe my guilt, attraction, and envy would burn off if I pushed myself hard enough.
Tev let go and started to leave, then hesitated as she passed me. Her posture was stiff and awkward, but she touched my shoulder and smiled a little. “I know this is your first ground assignment, but try not to worry. You can only do your best. We’ll find her and we’ll leave. Got it?”
“Okay.” I swallowed. “Yes, Captain.”
She patted my arm. “Good. Remember: one hour.”
On our way into the first of the clubs—the name of which immediately escaped me, considering they all sounded the same—Slip linked her arm with mine. Guilt over my feelings for Tev made her every gesture of friendship unbearable.
“We already look a little out of place because of our clothes,” she said, leaning close, “and we sure as hell don’t have any money or time to buy new outfits. Act like we stopped in at the last minute. A tired crew who had to let off some steam. Happens enough not to throw folks off too badly if we just look like we’re trying to relax.”
As the door swung open, I squinted at the flickering lights. “Right.”
Bass throbbed in my chest, amplifying the Mel’s pain. We weren’t even five steps into the place before the press of bodies crushed us, carrying us along like a human river. I fought every instinct to shove people back and tell them to get the hell off of me.
Nails glittered in moving lights, brushing delicately across the painted skin of titillated dance partners. A few high-end body mods stood out from
the crowd—fresh fangs and tentacle-limbs caught the light, reminding me of my conversation with Dr. Shrike a lifetime ago. Bestial bodies pulsed with the music. Vast membranous wings brushed my arms. Arachnid legs sprouted from backs and bumped the shimmering décor. When we passed a woman with an actual third eye, blinking with her originals, part of me shuddered to think of the time it must have taken to recover from the neurological upgrades involved with a new sensory organ. What happened to people whose bodies rejected the upgrades? We never heard about them. Unless othersider tech didn’t make mistakes. I wished I knew how it worked, how Transliminal could so effortlessly bend matter and space to their will. Seeing what they’d done to the bodies around us, I felt conflicted between my desire for them to help Marre, and my desire for revenge. What would Nova think of this place?
Part of me shivered under the thrill of their abilities. Flesh was almost limitless now. And here I was, falling apart, trying not to bend over in agony as pain radiated out in invisible spirals from my hands and back, louder than any bassline. The first stage of the disease came on so quickly.
Most of the patrons crushing in on us probably weren’t wealthy enough for othersider mods, and they already enjoyed more luxury in a day than I’d know in a lifetime. Surely some of these people had been stuck with blood and meat upgrades from our side of the breach—grown, grafted, and integrated the old-fashioned way. Everyone knew that wasn’t how the othersiders accomplished their body mods. How did it work? How did they manipulate reality so easily?
Either way, I’d have loved for my biggest problem to be whether my suit matched my tentacles or not.
Pain shot into my left palm and I grabbed it, pushing at a trigger point that was supposed to ease the agony some when the Mel’s flared up. A trick I’d learned from Dr. Shrike that helped a little.
Slip glanced at me and gave me an exaggerated smile, and an encouraging expression that said, Look happy.
Right. Look excited, Alana. Drunk. High. Look anything but pained and anxious.
I ground my teeth to steel myself against the ache in my hand and smiled appreciatively at the other patrons as we wove our way through the thronging monsterfolk of Spin.
We identified people who seemed moderately sober and asked about “Bell Fisher,” but most were either intoxicated or annoyed by the question. So we left and tried the next bar, the next club. And the next. Every new establishment was another assault on my senses, grinding against the Mel’s symptoms, digging those familiar claws deep into my nerves and muscles.
Every place looked and sounded the same to me. Different color schemes, different overproduced music, but the same nevertheless. Forty-five minutes later, we still hadn’t found Bell. For a moment we’d thought we’d found a lead when a man seemed to recognize the name, and although it turned out he did know Bell, he hadn’t talked to her in two months.
We were in the fifth club of the night when the end of the hour loomed over us.
Slip turned away from a woman with live fish in her anemone-hair and leaned on the bar. “This is hopeless.”
“What do we do if we can’t find her?”
She shrugged, then slammed back a shot she’d been cradling. “No idea. Maybe your sister can figure something out.”
“She has contacts in a lot of places, but not the kind we need. She hates Transliminal, remember?”
“Tev!” Slip looked past my shoulder and waved, her voice carried away by the rhymes coming in over the speakers.
I turned to see Tev hurrying toward us, tossing irritated glances at people who bumped her, tried to dance with her, spilled their drinks on her. We didn’t have time to talk before she shouted: “We need to go!”
Slip’s eyes widened at something behind me. I couldn’t hear her, but I could read her lips: “Too late.”
Three system enforcers entered the building, holding their palms up to random patrons to scan their eyes.
They knew we were here.
“Go,” Tev hissed into my ear, pressing her hand into the small of my back to urge me forward. “Now.”
Slip was already on the move, dodging dancers as she wove her way toward the back of the building. Every time Tev and I tried to make progress behind her, we were cut off by couples, triads, groups, drinks, arms, wings that could have been real or faux—it was hard to distinguish my own limbs from anyone else’s, between the music and chaos and increasing pain, and the solicitors tossing advertising microchips at us like confetti.
I grabbed Tev’s shoulder and pulled her down a couple of inches so I could reach her ear. “People are looking at us. They can see our anxiety.”
“Shit.” She ran a hand through her hair, then covered her mouth and nose with her hands while she thought.
“What about the Tangled Axon?” I said. “What if they’ve found it?”
“Marre knows what she’s doing. I trust her.”
The song switched and the crowd roared. More people poured onto the dance floor from booths and bar seats, dancing against each other and us, bobbing their heads and hands, pumping fists, and popping their limbs in time with the occasionally-shuffling rhythm. Neon drinks spilled, splashing onto chests and shoes, painting folks with luminescent liquid. Bass thundered inside me, wobbling, whomping, and grinding against my organs. It was the kind of music Aunt Lai said sounded like “a robot frog with indigestion.”
“We have to get out of here,” Tev said next to my ear, pulling me back, but I immediately panicked a little. Slip was nowhere in sight, and we were still so far away from the door.
“Tev.” My voice shook as I watched the enforcers scan their way through the room. “They’re getting closer.”
An officer scanned a green-haired woman with shining, quicksilver eyes. The scanner light flashed and the green-haired woman laughed, grabbing at the enforcer’s reflective black body armor. He took the woman by the wrist and shoved her aside, into another dancer, who caught her. They collapsed into a pile of drunk laughter as the enforcer shook out his own wrist and moved on.
Sweat poured down my neck under the heat and movement and growing stress. “Fuck, Tev. What are we going to do?”
The crowd jumped in time with a particularly intense part of the song, hair and limbs thrashing around their heads. After a few nervous glances around the room, Tev grabbed my hand and lifted it a few times to show me—we needed to jump, to blend in, to appear to be having a good time. I felt ridiculous and I could tell Tev did too, but we followed the crowd’s lead, each of us looking past the other to keep our eyes surreptitiously on the enforcers winding their way toward us.
The song ended, twisting into the next bone-grinding beat, so we stopped jumping. “They’re not scanning everyone,” Tev said, pulling me to her and dancing against me, encouraging me to do the same to stay blended with the crowd. “Maybe they won’t pick us.”
“Look at us. We can dance all we want, but we stick out no matter what. No offense, but you look as uncomfortable as me. And our clothes! There’s no way. We have to get out of here.” I tried nudging her toward the back door, but then I saw we were just a handful of bodies away from one of the enforcers in that direction, and another one blocked us in from the other side.
“We’re trapped,” she said. “We have to try harder to fit in and pray luck is on our side.” She stopped dancing but kept her hand on my waist as she guided me back over to the bar, then slid onto the edge of a seat and pulled me toward her so that I stood between her legs.
“Tev—”
“Shh. Don’t say my name.” She leaned close and spoke quietly. “They have amplifiers.”
Heat bloomed beneath her hands on my waist. I couldn’t look her in the eye; I focused on anything else. Her neck. Her arms. Her thighs, on either side of me. I had to put my hands somewhere, so I placed them on her knees. Instantly, a fire flared in my chest and I slid them higher, moving closer to her. Half of me tried to forget about Slip, while the other half fought to keep her at the forefront of my mind.
&
nbsp; Tev’s eyes flicked to mine, her stare so fixed and intense it almost hurt. I didn’t want this to end. I reveled in it, hanging onto her gaze, letting it work on me until I felt weak. Our hands grew heavier on each other as we lingered there, hiding from the authorities in a bubble of desire. In that moment, I didn’t have to try to blend in. I was as lust-ridden as the rest of them.
“What are we doing?” Her voice rolled into me like the music, deep and rich. Real. I was full with the sound of her. The smell of her. Sweat and heat, and a touch of alcohol from her attempts at getting information at the bar. To say nothing of the sight of her—the tight lines of her waist, the curve of her neck. Trailing my eyes over her skin and body, over the hair plastered against her forehead by her sweat, over the lips that breathed so close to me, I felt my need for her unfurling.
“Alana.” There was urgency in Tev’s voice. “I want—”
My hands tightened. “They’re right behind you.”
I could almost feel the electromagnetic pull of the enforcers’ bodies. Tev placed her hand on my cheek, bringing my mouth close to hers, pulling me against her. Her breath lingered over my lips, hot and sweet.
“We just have to hide,” I said, voice shaking with desire. “Just don’t make eye contact with them.”
“Stop talking.”
My breath came heavy, as did hers, her chest rising and falling against mine. Fear and need collided between us, making me so dizzy I was afraid I’d pass out. I licked my lips and grazed her thigh with my thumb, unable to help myself.
Her breath caught. She slid a hand toward the back of my neck and entwined her hands in my locs, almost possessively. Just as I was about to kiss her, Tev’s eyes flicked to the left and she released me.
Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel Page 17
