His link beeped, and a light began to flash in the projected diagram of the level. This sector. He opened his mouth to call back the crew when a high-pitched, electronic screech swelled and bounced off the metal.
“Back!” he shouted. He grabbed the tech closest to him and pulled her behind him. “Get behind the lifts. It’s going to—”
And the generator exploded. Shards of metal careened through the air. Globs of molten ore sailed in fiery arcs to land on exposed Nhélanei skin, and the crew began to scream.
Jane looked up as the blast echoed through the lift. Then the power faltered, and the platform on which she stood trembled. The lights went out, and the metal lost its grip on her feet just as the disc tilted on its axis. Her boots slid down, and her knees jutted forward. The platform plummeted, and she thrust her arms out to the sides. The slide of her palms against the walls ripped through the first layer of skin, but she pressed harder.
Then the disc went vertical, and she slid off it and plunged into the deep, airless black.
Safeguards had been built into place in case of such an event, but they’d been long neglected under the care of the Meijhé, and they did nothing to prevent her fall. She flashed out her sedfai enough to feel the floor nearly four hundred feet below, and she grappled in vain for purchase on the smooth metal cylinder.
And she wondered if it had all been for nothing. She thought of Mikhél’s eyes, of Vhórodan, of the stone her mother had carved for her. Again of Mikhél.
Then she slammed into the floor, and every bone below her waist shattered. The disc landed on her shoulder, crushing her collarbone before it slid off to the side. She teetered, balanced awkwardly on her crushed pelvis and one hand.
Then the lift doors opened to the faint and lovely glow of the stars.
She fell forward, half in and half out of the lift, as consciousness gave way to the fire.
Flame poured over Mikhél. It consumed his legs and lit into his shoulder, and it took him a moment to realize the heat was only pain and not molten vinyatha. All around him the cries of the victims blended with the rhythmic whirl of the ship’s sirens in a cacophony punctuated by the hiss-pop-ping of cooling metal. He had to help, had to secure the area, but first he had to be able to move. He pushed up carefully and checked his legs, but they appeared unharmed. He touched his shoulder, but it was at worst wrenched in his fall. The degree of pain he felt made no sense, and then he realized it wasn’t his.
It was Seirsha’s.
As soon as he had the thought, he felt her. She was on the entertainment level. Injured, unconscious, vulnerable. He had to get to her, and by any means. He glanced around and dragged himself behind a generator and out of site. The others were busy with the wounded; they wouldn’t see him leave.
Then another explosion slammed through the level, and the ship lost gravity.
The agent swam through the air, sweat dripping from his face with each stroke. The wail of the sirens spurred him on, a reminder that he had little time to complete his mission. The light winked on the knife in his hand with each plunge of his arm, and he imagined the metal sinking into the Baanrí.
Then he saw her floating above the stars, her body half in and half out of the lift.
She wasn’t moving, and he let out a cry despite the need for silence. Was she already dead? Could such a moment have been stolen from him? She was his to claim. His sacrifice to give, his path to justice. He scrambled through the cold, stale air but moved no faster as the weightlessness mocked his haste. He needed to feel her heat spill onto his hands, needed to know that her end was his doing. And then he drew close enough, and he heard her blood move through her veins. His lips curved, but the expression could never be considered a smile.
This was right, he thought. This was just.
This was fate.
Jane’s lids fluttered as consciousness teased. Her injuries were icing over, the healing nearly complete. And the weakness was settling in. Her body wanted sleep, and her lids drifted again as the stars danced into dreams. And then she heard Mikhél’s deiamar. All he thought was her name, but it was enough to pull her back.
She bit down hard on her tongue to wake herself up, and a ball of blood rolled out into the air. She roused enough to realize she was floating, her body hovering between floor and ceiling. She closed her eyes against the dizzying view and pulled a protein stick from her pocket.
She sent to Mikhél, I’m well and then closed her eyes and let the food do its job. A quick scan with her sedfai showed her little. The panic attack was gone, but her senses still fogged and rolled eerily through the gravity-free ship.
Then she sensed him.
A man, familiar but unidentifiable. His body heat was fading in the rapidly cooling ship. His movement was silent, just a push of limbs against air. The sound of his heart was drowned in the sudden thudding of her own.
But the knife was clear, a flash of jumplight on metal.
Mikhél sent to Seirsha, Go back to your quarters. The explosion was not an accident. Then he pushed off the nearest generator to make his way toward the victims. He was in midair when the thump echoed through the level. He braced for the return of gravity and slammed into the cushioned floor in time with the crew. Through the sounds of their grunts and cries, he thought he heard Seirsha’s deiamar.
And then an image flashed in his mind’s eye: a skeletal face with dead blue eyes set over a jagged, gaping maw.
In his next breath, she was gone, and every cell in his body went hot.
Gravity returned to the ship with a loud, echoing thump. Jane dropped like a stone and pushed up to roll away, but he landed on her. One heavy thigh across her lower back, and she sensed him now in a rush of detail that flooded her sedfai.
The stench of his arousal.
The metallic odor of blood he’d already drawn.
His weight, his maleness, his pounding, unsteady heart.
He grunted with the landing, and the knife clanged against the floor and skittered away. His weight lifted, and she knew he was going for the blade. She scrambled toward it, and he pushed his knee into the back of her neck, pressing her throat into the glass. She heard the scrape of metal on glass, and she sent to Mikhél, Help.
He straddled her back, and she felt his erection press against her spine. She retched and bucked against him, but he grabbed her hair and yanked her head back. His reflection grinned up at her from the floor, distorted into planes of bone and great, gaping shadows. His teeth were viciously pointed, and her head swam at the familiarity of that terrifying glee.
She saw his eyes, a cool, pale blue that glinted with the descent of the knife.
She felt his breath, one hot push against the back of her neck, as the blade slid from one side of her throat to the other.
CHAPTER 32
She waited for the fire, but it didn’t come. Instead sensation seeped from her body until it seemed she existed only as thought without a corporeal home.
She was drifting, rising again, and she wondered if the gravity had faltered once more. Then she looked down, and her body was still on the floor. He’d turned her over, she thought, so he could see what he’d done to her before he ran away. The wound was a gaping maw where her neck should have been. Skin splayed open, tendons and arteries severed, her trachea split and widened as her head tilted back at an unnatural angle.
And everywhere blood, a broad, thick pool that spread rapidly around her. She watched the stars beneath it disappear, and the edges of her vision went black.
And then Mikhél was there. She didn’t know where he’d come from, didn’t see him arrive. He was simply there when he hadn’t been before, and she realized her mind must have drifted even further away.
She heard him roar as if through a fog, a low, vengeful sound that would have terrified anyone else. He knelt in her blood, and the anguish that wracked him swept through her. And then she felt his pain: a great, gaping hole clawing its way through his chest as if emptiness itself sought a home where h
is heart had been. And she realized she was dying. The nexus was wrenching itself free, leaving nothing in its place but loss. He cradled her face in his hands and lowered his forehead to hers, and she saw the nightmare that passed through his mind.
His mother’s head rolling toward his feet, her sightless eyes open and blackened.
She thought, Not like this.
And the burn ripped through her. Her chest heaved, sucking breath through the gash in her trachea, and the sound was horrific. Her eyes opened, and she saw both parts of herself, as if she was at once both within her body and above it, and then she was yanked back to the ground.
A rush of warmth slipped through Mikhél and into Seirsha, and beneath him her back arched. He pulled away to see the tendons in her neck align and begin to seal together.
She was still alive.
He let out a shuddering breath as her lungs convulsed and blood began to spurt through still-open arteries, and he willed her gift to work faster lest her heart pump out what little life she had left. Her temperature rose until her skin seared his trembling fingers, and still he could feel the race within her, could see it unfolding before him: the work of a traitor pitted against millennia of evolution.
He pulled her blood-drenched hair from her wounds and strained against the knowledge that the only way to help her was to let her body work. And as her tissues knit together in that slippery, stealthy slide toward life, the blood flow slowed. Her windpipe sealed, and he heard that first wheezing gasp of air. And something loosened inside of him.
When it was done, her skin iced and then warmed, pale but unharmed. Her lids drifted closed, and she slept, face in his hands. Healed. Unable to do anything else, he pressed his lips to hers and felt her, alive and well, within him. He pressed his cheek to hers and reveled in her pulse, reveled in her health.
But they couldn’t linger. He picked her up, and blood dripped from them both. He opened his sedfai to ensure their solitude, and then he took her to his quarters.
He half expected to find Bavoel waiting there with a contingent of security officers, weapons at the ready, but the room was empty. He laid Seirsha gently on the bed and then summoned Leima. When she arrived he was cleaning Seirsha’s face with a damp cloth, a pitiful defense against the gore.
Leima stopped just inside the door, her wide, pale eyes locked on Seirsha. Then she took a step forward, stumbled, and fell to her knees. “Seirsha.”
Her eyes filled, and he remembered she had no sedfai. She couldn’t hear Seirsha’s heartbeat. He cursed himself and then said, “She’s alive, Leima.”
But she didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes were locked on Seirsha and on the blood that had already soaked into his sheets. “What happened? Was it the explosion?”
“She was attacked.”
“She…on the generator level?”
She was in shock, and he had little time to pull her out of it. He had to get back to the explosion before anyone realized he was gone. He took two long strides to Leima’s side and grabbed her arm.
“Leima, she was attacked. It wasn’t the explosion. She’s alive.” She stared at him, so he shook her slightly. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Her eyes focused on his face, and she jumped as if just realizing he was there. “She was attacked,” she said slowly. Then she looked at Seirsha, and her voice grew breathless. “She’s alive.”
And she rushed to Seirsha’s side.
“I have to lock you in here,” Mikhél said. She looked at him, her hand tight on Seirsha’s, and her lucidity gave him some reassurance. “Once I seal the quarters, you won’t be able to leave. No one will be able to get in but me. Tell me if anyone tries to get in.” He thought of pale-blue eyes floating in darkness, and he added, “Even Valaer. Do you understand?”
She nodded. She had to be full of questions, but she held them back. For the first time, he was glad they’d brought her.
The generator level was in chaos. No one had noticed his absence, and no one noticed his return. He found Eithné tending to the wounded. The dead had been laid out along the floor, the pliable metal pooling around their corpses so the bodies were jostled each time someone walked by.
“Status?”
Eithné glanced up at the sound of his voice, and her shoulders sagged. The woman at her feet moaned, and she offered a soothing sound as she administered a sedative.
“Naiya,” she called, and her assistant hurried over, the front of her uniform soiled with the blood of her patients. “Prepare this woman for transport. She requires surgery.”
Naiya deployed a portable gurney and, with Eithné’s help, lifted the woman onto it. Mikhél didn’t see the shard of metal sticking out of the woman’s side until Naiya began to guide her away.
Eithné stood and wiped her hands on a cloth streaked with red and black. “Four seriously wounded, three dead. Two more with minor injuries. Three unharmed.” She looked at his uniform, still covered in Seirsha’s blood, and then her questioning eyes met his. “You are unharmed, Endeté?”
He opened his mouth to confirm, and then he closed it again. He’d been wrong, he realized. She’d noticed his absence. Uneasy, he glanced around and wondered who else had seen. No one looked at him, but that meant nothing.
“How much of your time will be required for medical services?”
“We’ll round the passes on immediate treatment. Days of aftercare.”
“When I send for you,” he said, touching the Saroyan bracelet under his sleeve, “come to my quarters. It won’t take long.”
Her irises lightened, but, like Leima, she knew when not to ask questions. He started to walk away, and then he turned back.
“Don’t go anywhere alone with Valaer.”
Her eyes paled, and the look on her face reminded him of the last time he’d warned her about Valaer. She seemed crestfallen but unsurprised, and it was the lack of shock that troubled him. If Eithné believed Valaer was capable of such wrongs, then Mikhél had little hope they would find the man innocent.
The first explosion had been set with Kalhóreian seed. Relatively stable and remotely detonated, the device could have been placed anytime over the last twelve weeks. It would have been undetectable had they not found a section of seedpod blown clear of the blast. The seed should not have been available to any Nhélanei on this ship, but the oppressed had ways of getting what they needed.
As did the Watchers.
The second explosion had been caused by a piece of shrapnel. It appeared to be an accident and, despite its negative impact on the ship’s gravity, had actually caused the least damage of the two. The three crew members who’d died—two men and one woman—had been killed in that first and more vicious blast.
All of them had been called to the generator level as a distraction. That had required the attacker’s presence, as the call had come from a wall station, most likely to avoid tracking. But unlike placement of the Kalhóreian seed, which would have required time and precision, the summons would have taken but a moment. Mikhél would examine link records, but the attacker almost certainly left his link in his quarters before sending the summons. There would be no record of his presence here on this cycle.
Mikhél was in the process of assigning investigative duties when they were notified of two other bodies. He looked at Bavoel, and he had a bad moment when he met the pale-blue eyes of his second-in-command. Beyond him a blue-eyed medical assistant tended to the wounded, and nearby a blue-eyed victim with minimal injuries answered a soldier’s questions. And his gut churned greasily as he realized their suspects numbered far greater than one.
“Where were they?” Bavoel asked. “We’ve searched each sector surrounding the explosions.”
“They were not on this level, Endíetté.” The man who’d brought them the news glanced at Mikhél. “They were by the living quarters, sector three-five, in one of the ring halls.”
That was the sector that held Valaer’s quarters.
Mikhél asked, though he kne
w what the man would say, “How did they die?”
“One was shot, Endeté. The other’s throat was cut. “
Eithné was securing the last of her patients for transport when she received Mikhél’s summons. She waited until the transport was underway, and then she hurried to his quarters.
She found him sitting on his bed, bent over a figure bloodied and still. Long strands of maroon hair trailed over the pillow, and one small hand hung over the side of the bed. At first she didn’t understand what she was seeing. Then Leima came out of the bathroom, a cloth in her hands, and Mikhél shifted to take it from her. The movement jostled the lifeless arm so it flipped over, and the long, dark scar on the wrist gleamed dully in the blue of the ship’s lights.
“Seirsha.” Eithné’s knees went weak, and she had to lean against the wall to keep upright. “Mikhél, what happened?”
“She was assaulted on the entertainment level. Someone slit her throat down to the bone.”
She let out a sound she barely heard, and she pressed a fluttering hand to her mouth. “No. No,” she repeated. “Is she…”
And then she realized Mikhél wouldn’t be sitting there so calmly if his mate was gone. She finally found the strength to open her sedfai, and she closed her eyes when she felt the movement of Seirsha’s blood.
“She’s alive,” Mikhél said. “Unconscious, but healed. The explosion was a distraction. Someone set it so they could get to her.”
“Who would do this to her?”
“Any of them.” But his eyes said something different, and she remembered his warning about Valaer.
She crossed the room and took Seirsha’s wrist in her hand. She tried to use her gift to see what had happened, but she saw only the dark of the entertainment level and the glow of the stars. She felt only the disorientation of weightlessness.
“She remembers nothing. Or she didn’t understand. She must have been completely unprepared. But how…” As the shock wore thin, she sank onto the edge of the bed. “She wouldn’t have been surprised by just anyone. She would have sensed them coming before they even knew she was there. If she’d felt threatened, she would have called for you. Did she call for you?”
Spyridon (The Spyridon Trilogy Book 1) Page 29
