Stitching Snow

by R. C. Lewis

  I didn’t get much time to think. A new, rhythmic vibration rang through the decking. Footsteps.

  Ignoring the lingering headache, I pulled myself to my feet and flattened my body against the wall by the door. Everything I knew from the cage about fighting someone bigger and stronger charged up in my head. That fire in my gut blazed into my limbs and made it hard to hold still, but I waited, unmoving.

  The door slid open and Dane strode in. I launched my fist at his head before he could turn my way.

  It hit empty air.

  Before I could process how he’d dodged me like that, he got a grip on one arm, twisting it behind my back. I swung my free arm. Nothing. A thrust elbow, a kick, twisting and struggling…even more nothing.

  He shoved me against the wall. One arm pressed against the back of my neck while the other pinned my hands, and he must have sprung extra limbs, because my legs were pinned as well.

  A perfect hold. Can’t slip it, completely helpless…

  My panic attack fueled a renewed struggle, but Dane still held me in place. I felt his breath on my ear and shuddered.

  “I’m not one of the half-drunk miners you’re used to fighting…Princess.”

  He knew.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  “I’m the ‘treasure’ you were looking for,” I whispered.

  “The treasure I got, the way I see it.”

  Get out now, Essie.

  I dug for the old instincts that had let me body-hop to Moray before, focusing on the physical contact between us, willing myself to see through Dane’s eyes, to see if I could find some way out of this.

  I hit an invisible wall, bouncing back to myself. A new spike of pain drilled through my skull.

  Dane’s breath caught briefly, but his grip didn’t loosen. When he spoke again, his voice was just as hard as before. “Not bad, but it won’t work on me unless I let it.”

  That could only mean one thing. This trouble was even bigger than I’d thought.

  Dane wasn’t a Garamite at all.

  He was an Exile.

  EVEN IF DANE HADN’T been pinning me, I couldn’t have moved. The part of my brain that ran my body had disengaged entirely. The part controlling my voice was a touch more stubborn.

  “What in blazes do you want with me?”

  “The truth, for starters.”

  “Truth? You’re a lying mass of worm dung, and you want to talk about the truth?”

  “You assumed I was a Garamite because my ship is,” he said. “I gave you a story that fit with your assumption.”

  “What about your name? Dane isn’t an Exile name, so who are you really?”

  He pressed me harder against the wall. I was starting to lose feeling in my hands. “None of your business. You’re going to tell me why you’re able to Transition.”

  “You’re dimmer than Dimwit, aren’t you? Everyone has two parents, and I obviously didn’t get it from my father.”

  “Matthias’s first wife…Alaina?”

  “My mother, yes. She was an Exile, only my father didn’t know it.”

  Dane finally released me and stepped away. I rubbed and flexed my hands, getting the blood flowing back to them. I knew better than to try to go at him again. He was far too skilled a fighter. Maybe I still had a chance to talk my way out of the situation, though.

  Maybe.

  “I didn’t know that,” he admitted. “Why did she do it, breaking the law, hiding what she was? Just to become queen?”

  No, I wasn’t giving him that much. “Go to her grave and ask her yourself.”

  “Maybe I will. We’re on our way there now.”

  Ice shot through the fire in my veins. Windsong. Home.

  No. I couldn’t go back.

  “Why?” I forced out of my frozen lips.

  His eyes ran over me from head to toe and back, forcing me to fold my arms tightly or risk trying to punch him again. “You’re the king’s only child. His efforts to find you have failed, so I think he’ll find you a fair exchange for the Candaran prisoners.”

  A trade. He was going to trade me back to my father for the release of Exiles—Candarans, as they called themselves—like I traded mining shares for data processors and spare circuit boards. The fire surged back a little, but the buzzing vibration in the deck distracted me.

  “I’d say I’d rather die, but you’ve already taken care of that.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The shuttle! It might as well be patched together with slug spit. Enough to get to Garam, but Windsong is on the far side of the system right now. We’ll never make it.”

  Dane moved toward the door. “A shame that I have more confidence in your repairs than you do. Dimwit, no more helping Essie. She needs to stay here, understood?”

  “Dimwit Essie stay Essie.”

  I glared at the glorified scrap-heap. “You little traitor!”

  “Dane Essie friend Essie.”

  “How do you even know that word?”

  “You’re very skilled, Essie,” Dane said. “But you’re not the only one who knows a thing or two about programming.”

  After everything—lying to me, knocking me out, kidnapping me—it was tampering with my drone that set my fury burning out of control.

  “You rotten, festering smear of snail-scum!”

  I launched myself at him—surely pure rage was enough to overcome his training—but I was too slow. He got through the door and closed it before I could reach him. My momentum carried me right into the solid metal, smacking my shoulder and knee.

  I pounded my fists against the door. When that failed to satisfy me, I punched it until my knuckles bled, screaming every obscenity I knew. Pain was a problem for people who had something left to lose.

  Dane had to hear me. My voice would carry through the ventilation system if nothing else.

  Ventilation…the oxygen cyclers. The patch I’d stitched would last eight days, maybe a bit more, but nowhere near the time it would take to get to Windsong. If I’d had access to better materials I wouldn’t have used a fuse that would burn out so quickly. But on Thanda, junk-tech was all I had to work with.

  Saying I’d rather die than go back home was one thing. Actually dying of suffocation in the cold vacuum of space was another.

  I stopped screaming. I stopped punching. I put one of the large crates between myself and the door, sank to the ground, and hugged my knees to my chest.

  If Dane came back in, he wouldn’t see me cry.

  When the footsteps returned, I didn’t move, but I did make sure my eyes were dry. I’d lost track of time, but it had to have been hours. All the time spent crying had served just one purpose. It brought me to a decision: I didn’t want to die. Not in the middle of space, at least. I hadn’t survived eight years on my own just to let a brainless boy get me killed. If I controlled myself around Dane instead of trying to dismantle him, maybe I could get him to believe me.

  Maybe I could stall him, trick him…do something to buy myself a chance to get away.

  “There you are,” he said, coming around to the back of the crate and dropping meal- and water-packs into my lap. When I glared up at him, he took something from his pocket. My little water-scanner. It turned green when he ran it.

  “See? Safe.” He glanced at the dried blood on my knuckles but didn’t comment. “Eat. You’re not worth anything if you starve to death.”

  I agreed that starving wouldn’t do me any good, so I silently opened the pack and started eating. If I looked at him too much, I feared my resolve to not kill him would fail.

  He lingered a moment before walking back to the door. I waited until he was nearly out of the compartment before speaking.

  “I mean it. The ship won’t last.”

  “It will. I’m getting you to Windsong, and I’m getting the prisoners back.”

  His voice had no give, no room for doubt. People so driven and committed wouldn’t listen to reason. I’d have to get creative.

  Good
thing creative was my specialty.

  I spent hours at a time in my head. The compartment that made up my prison had a small lavatory attached, and Dane brought food twice a day. A stack of my clothes lay in a corner, and Dimwit oh-so-helpfully informed me that it had retrieved them from my shack under Dane’s orders. I didn’t need anything else, just time to think. Sometimes I sat on the crates, sometimes I paced, but always I thought and calculated and planned.

  This was just another puzzle for me to solve.

  My gear and supplies weren’t anywhere in the compartment. Even the small multitool I kept in a hidden pocket of my jacket was missing.

  Dane must have searched me while I was unconscious. It took twenty minutes to calm the revived homicidal rage when I realized that.

  Focus, Essie.

  Dimwit had been told not to help me, and I didn’t have the equipment to access its programming matrix to override that order, but it was useful in other ways. I asked it for the date and time, and it told me. Assuming we’d left Thanda shortly after I’d been knocked out, assuming we were on a direct course to Windsong at the shuttle’s maximum speed…That was a lot of assuming, but it gave me an idea of our position.

  We had to get onto a planet. Once we had an atmosphere around us instead of a vacuum, I’d have more options. Any logical course to Windsong would take us right by Garam before skimming past the sun.…

  The sun. I definitely had not patched the radiation shields well enough to handle the onslaught that came with a solar near-pass.

  I had a single plan with any chance of working, and it wasn’t a great chance. If my calculations were right, though, I only had a small window to try, and no time to come up with anything better.

  In rummaging through the storage crates, I’d found a sturdy metal brace with a thin edge…thin enough to pry the cover plate off an electrical junction on one side of the room.

  “Dimwit Dane help Dane.”

  “Shh!” The drone had all but ignored me for ages, but it must have recognized I was up to something. “Dimwit, your new directive is to help Dane. I get it. If I don’t do this, Dane and I will both be killed. The ship won’t hold together all the way to Windsong. Do you understand?”

  “Essie right way Essie.”

  A vote of confidence if I’d ever heard one. Dane had underestimated Dimwit’s tricky logic algorithms.

  Behind the cover plate, I found far too many conduits, and I didn’t have anything I needed. I needed Ticktock to tell me exactly which conduit went to what. Even Cusser would’ve been helpful, but at best it was still powered down in the engine compartment. I hadn’t bothered downloading the full schematics to Dimwit. All I wanted to do was send an overload to the oxygen cyclers and force the fuse to burn out a little early.

  A precision job with imprecise gear.

  Better than sitting here doing nothing.

  I wrapped my hand with a thin piece of rubber sheeting, took my best guess at which conduits would do the job, and used the metal brace to cross-connect them.

  Sparks exploded out of the junction, and the shuttle lurched, throwing me against one of the crates before righting itself. An alarm blared and lights flashed as the deck continued to heave and shudder under my feet.

  I’d definitely damaged more than the fuse in the oxygen cycler.

  The door to the compartment was open. Either an emergency measure or I’d shorted it out, too. I didn’t really care which. I dove through the opening, out into the corridor, and staggered up to the command compartment.

  Dane sat at the main console, madly working to get the shuttle back under control. Through the viewer, I saw my timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The tan globe of Garam hovered just off to one side. My aim, however, was several sniffs shy. Flashing lights on the console told me the oxygen cyclers were fine. The stabilizers and thrusters weren’t so fine, and right when Garam’s gravity well had a hold on us.

  “You did this, didn’t you?” Dane shouted over the alarm.

  “Of course I did! Set it down on Garam or we’ll both die.”

  “With the thrusters misfiring like this? We’ll never make it.”

  I glanced at the readout on his panel. He was right. I’d sabotaged myself right into a corner and had about five minutes to get both of us out of it.

  “Where’s my gear?”

  He shot a glare over his shoulder. “How bent do you think I am?”

  “Dane, I did this because I don’t want to die! Where is my gear?”

  One more pause, one more violent lurch of the misfiring thrusters, and he gave in.

  “Engine compartment, storage cabinet.”

  I was already halfway there. “And tell Dimwit to help me! Cusser, emergency protocol. Wake up.”

  My gear was in its case, right where he’d said, but working on systems midflight was not something I had a baby’s first gasp about. Unlike when I’d done the other repairs, the entire ship had power running and parts moving. Every attempt could get me burned, electrocuted, or worse. Doing nothing, however, had more certain consequences.

  Cusser powered up and swore. “Shuttle trajectory inconsistent. Danger to human occupants. Correction necessary, and blazing soon.”

  “No kidding,” I muttered. Midflight repairs were an even worse idea for the drones. Metal-on-metal contact in a live electrical system was a bad combination. I’d have to do it myself, but Cusser could help. “Pull up the shuttle schematics, tie into the monitoring systems, and tell me what to do.”

  I stitched faster than ever, rerouting power and cross-connecting hardlines, ignoring the burns when sparks flew at my fingertips and the cuts when the ship bucked just as I reached my hand between components. Cusser rattled off a steady stream of instructions, and Dimwit handed me gear before the words were halfway from my mouth. It didn’t wander off once.

  The stitches weren’t elegant and neat. They were fast and sloppy…and temporary. They only had to hold long enough.

  I jammed the last connector in place. The shuttle settled to a rumbling vibration. Not perfect, but better. Steady enough that I could get back to the command compartment. Garam loomed before me, much larger already.

  “Will it hold?” Dane asked.

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  He glanced back at me and started. I followed his eyes. My hands and forearms were a bloody, burnt mess. They shook, and I couldn’t stop them. My cheek stung. Another burn.

  “Dimwit, get her strapped in,” he said, nodding to the other command seat.

  I willingly collapsed into the chair, and the drone fastened the safety straps around me. Once I was in, I told Dimwit and Cusser to go back to the corridor and mag-lock themselves to the wall.

  As we entered the atmosphere of Garam, the vibrations grew, but the shuttle held a steady line.

  Then we hit turbulence.

  I really hoped Dane was as good a pilot as he was a liar. We both had to survive the landing.

  It was the only way I’d get a chance to kill him.

  DANE MANAGED A SOLID LANDING near a Garamite colony. Hardly a scratch on the exterior, I would guess. By the time we were on the ground, though, I didn’t really care. My adrenaline had faded, and all I knew was pain. My hands felt like they’d been held under a tack laser, like they had no skin left to protect them from anything. They throbbed with every heartbeat, pulsing with pain from the inside out. Every breath was an effort not to scream or cry.

  “Here, let me see,” Dane said. He had a medical kit out on his lap, ready to go.

  I didn’t want him touching me.

  I wanted the pain to stop.

  I couldn’t do it myself.

  Tank it. I held my hands toward him, still shaking madly.

  His medical supplies were different from what I was used to, more like what I remembered from Windsong when I was little. He cleaned off the blood and sprayed something onto the worst cuts to seal them, better and faster than a smart-plaster. Then he smoothed a cooling gel over the burn
s, including the one on my cheek. I fought not to flinch, keeping my eyes locked on the desert landscape on the viewer.

  “If you just hadn’t started any trouble—”

  “You kidnapped me, Dane. Kidnapped me and stole two of my drones. If you hadn’t done that, you could’ve gone home to Candara. It’s only a little farther than Garam. My patches could’ve managed that much, but there’s no way we were getting to Windsong.”

  “It’s not like I’m the first.”

  My gaze turned sharply to him. “What?”

  “The people who kidnapped you eight years ago. Who were they? How did you escape from them? That’s why you were hiding in Forty-Two, right? Or was Petey one of them, got you on his side so he didn’t have to lock you up?”

  That was enough, and I looked away again, my breath hitching in my chest. But it had nothing to do with my injuries. “Oh, you know so much. You don’t need me to tell you anything.”

  He grabbed my chin and turned my face back toward him. I couldn’t use my hands yet, and I was at the wrong angle to kick him.

  “I know that when you were taken, my people were blamed, and your father arrested all the Candarans on Windsong, people living legally in the embassy. People like…People who hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  I froze. If he was telling the truth—and it seemed likely he was—I hadn’t known. I knew the war with the Exiles had started just after I left Windsong, but I didn’t know about the embassy. Still, he didn’t understand the situation, why I couldn’t go back, and I had no desire to explain it to him.

  “I hope you didn’t steal this shuttle,” I said softly.

  “Of course I didn’t.” He finally released me and moved away. “Why?”

  “Because the locals have sent someone to greet us.”

  Dane turned to the viewer to confirm my claim. A sand-skimmer large enough to carry several Garamites was making a straight line for us. With the vehicle’s speed, they’d arrive within minutes.

  “I aimed for this colony because I have contacts here,” he said. “It’ll be fine.”

  Fine for him, maybe. “Are you going to tell them who I am?”

  His pause told me he hadn’t thought about it yet, but he found an answer quick enough. “I think it’s better if they don’t know.”