“Relax.” I reached out to touch his shoulder. “I’m kidding.”
He sputtered. “Good. Because I am a warrior. I am not … a bear.”
“Whatever you say, Andy.”
“I do say. Besides, I’m too exhausted to put effort into containing it at the moment.” A bit of color leaked into the air around his shoulders. “You keep calling me Andy,” he observed. “Why?”
“Oh.” I felt my cheeks flush. “Sorry. It slipped out. I won’t do it again.”
“No, don’t worry. I don’t…” He licked his lips. “I guess I don’t hate it as much as I did before. It almost makes me feel … nice. Like … how an orange lollipop makes me feel nice.” He pulled two of the candies out of his pocket and waved them tantalizingly in front of my nose. “Want one?”
“Sure.”
“Too bad.” He stuck both in his mouth. “I already touched them, so they’re mine now. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yes. It is a good feeling. I’m pretty sure. A feeling of belonging. It makes me … not want to think about dismembering bodies.”
I choked on a laugh. “So … happy?”
“Well, there’s always an element of satisfaction in a good dismemberment—”
“Anders.”
“Fine. Yes, Cora. I believe the term you’re looking for is happy.” Then something shifted in his eyes, like a frightened animal caught in the underbrush, and he jumped up. “We should put salve on your cuts.” He sifted through the mess of tubes and bottles on the floor. “You definitely need salve.”
“You’re definitely changing the subject, but okay.” I tried to make sense of his sudden refusal to look my way. Was he scared? Of me? No one was ever scared of me.
“I asked if everyone was alive and you said ‘barely.’ What’s that supposed to mean? How’s Elio?”
He tossed me a tube of salve. “No concern for Wren? I’ll make sure I tell her about that later. She’ll be disappointed.”
“I appreciate your newfound love of humor, but I’m starting to think I liked you better when you were predictable.”
“Really? I thought you didn’t like me at all.” His lips curled, as if he knew the stupid, infuriating truth.
“Shut up, Andy. How is everyone?”
He deflated with a sigh. “Wren is fine. She seems to have a concussion too. Nothing she can’t come back from.”
“And Elio?”
Another sigh. He started picking up the first aid supplies, arranging them by size along the counter. “Wren is fine,” he repeated.
“Anders.” Against my better judgment, I pushed myself up. My head spun, like someone was firing a blaster inside my skull. Anders rushed over to steady me, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like whatever game he was playing. “How. Is. Elio.”
Beep!
I jumped. “Elio!” He stood just inside the doorway, battered but whole. Not glitching. I couldn’t believe he had managed to snap himself out of it after all the damage Mieku had caused.
Pulling away from Anders, I flung myself at him, enveloping him in the galaxy’s largest hug. Elio’s little hands wrapped around me, squeezing back.
Beep!
“You’re okay! I mean, you are okay, aren’t you?” I looked him up and down, just to make sure that he really, truly was all there. Anders cleared his throat behind me.
“Cora? A moment, if you don’t mind?”
Beep-beep!
“Just a second. His bolts get knocked loose sometimes when he falls. With such a violent crash, I really should check…” I spun Elio around and pulled up the hem of his jacket to get a better look. Other than his usual wire patches, everything appeared normal.
Beep-bop!
“Where’s my comm link?” I asked Anders. “I need to run a diagnostic scan on him—oh! Careful, Elio!” He had attempted to start cleaning the med bay, but he quickly tripped over a roll of bandages and tumbled to the ground.
“Cora…” Anders stepped forward as I helped Elio up. His claws were out again, and he chewed on the end of one nervously, eyes roving the room. “There’s something you should know…”
“Andy, just spit it out already. Elio probably wants to go make a milkshake or some fudge or something. Right, Elio?”
Boop-beep!
At the edge of my vision, I noticed Anders wince.
Something was … not right. My brain was operating on half speed due to the concussion and the joy of reuniting with Elio, but it finally dawned on me that, for as chatty as Elio usually was, I was the only one doing any of the talking.
“Elio?” I knelt down in front of him. “Say something.”
The sensors in his eyes widened. He clamped his ears over his face, and his hands over that. He shook his head and—no no NO! Every time he glitched, he forgot something, but never like this. I never thought it could be this bad.
I felt Anders kneel down beside us, his hand on my back. I shook him off.
“He hasn’t said a word since we landed.”
I nodded, holding back tears while Elio continued to beep. Mechanical, nonsensical sounds from my little robot who had once been so human.
“That’s because he doesn’t remember how to talk.”
* * *
I wanted to run through the desert and bury myself inside one of the millions of sand dunes rolling outside the Starchaser’s doors.
Rebrone was full of them. Hills and valleys, broken up by the odd village. Looking out the porthole in the rec room, I watched heat sizzle off the sand. If I shifted my head the right way, I could see a lake two dunes away. But then I moved, and it vanished like the joke it was.
The inside of the ship was almost too hot to breathe in. The air circulation unit was still operational, but it didn’t work well enough to combat the planet’s extreme temperatures, and I’d need more than a few rolls of tape to fix it. My shirt stuck to my back in a puddle of sweat. My lips were dry and cracking.
But I had to stay for Elio. Maybe his faith in my abilities was misguided, but I still believed that if I could just get my hands on a fresh robotic body with a fresh memory core, I could put him back the way he was. I had to at least try.
And a repaired Elio couldn’t come soon enough, because his new efficiency was weirding me out. Since the glitch he seemed determined to scrub and tidy up the ship, and as far as I could tell he hadn’t even tried smelling the food in the galley once. When he wasn’t attempting to be productive, he stood idly by, silent except for the occasional beep, observant. The humanity that Cruz and Evelina had tried to desperately rewire from his body had nearly dwindled away. He was the perfect servant robot.
“You do remember me, don’t you?” I’d asked him almost immediately after we left the med bay. Elio had hurried to find my comm link and wrote out on the touch screen: C (although he accidentally drew it backward). Then O-R-A.
“At least you know that much,” I said as he proudly held the comm above his head. “Hang on a little longer, okay? This is just a bump in the road. Maybe a big bump…” A really big bump, considering our engines were shot, but I put on a brave face for him. “We can still fix this. Nothing is going to change, all right?”
He tilted his head, as if he could see right through my pathetic attempt at a pep talk. Then he beeped and, upon spotting the mess of overturned chairs and couches in the rec room, busied himself with trying to heave them back into their upright positions.
“Is there a reason you haven’t stolen him a new memory core?” Wren asked me. We were meeting in the rec room to discuss the clue in the cube Mieku had given us. We were just waiting for Anders, who was stuck in a comm call with his father. My fists clenched, nails biting into my palms, just thinking about that man. When Elio had given me my comm back, I’d noticed the warden had sent me a message. One word: Better.
It was so pleasing to know that surviving multiple explosions on Tunerth, a chase through two wormholes, and a fiery crash hadn’t bored him to tears. Impressing him was as strenuous as impressing Evelina.
“I can’t just steal a new memory core,” I told Wren. “They’re manufactured on demand. It takes weeks to build a new android, longer for advanced models, and I plan on getting him the highest quality memory core and body possible so that this doesn’t happen again.”
“Well, fine.” She lounged upside down on the chair beside me. Elio beeped in the corner, too preoccupied with picking up shards of glass from the broken net screen to notice we were talking about him. “Put in an order, then. Or I will, if you want.”
“With what money?”
She scoffed. “What money? I can get us money. Between the two of us, we can get us money.”
Of course, getting the money was all part of my plan, but I couldn’t tell her that.
“Even if we get the money, any order we put in is going to be tracked directly to this ship. In case you’re too concussed to remember, the entire universe has seen our faces. They’ve seen Elio’s face. And we can’t even run from them.” I pressed my face to the porthole, watching waves of heat rise off the sand. It was going to take me ages to walk to the nearest village and search for materials to repair our engines. Until then, we were grounded.
The floor shook as Anders stomped down the ramp into the rec room. His comm had a web of cracks across the glass, most of which hadn’t come from the crash, if I had to take a guess.
“I hate him.” His claws were out, looking thicker and darker than I’d ever seen them. “He just spent twenty minutes bragging about the number of civilian ships scouring the galaxy around Tunerth, looking for us. As if we’d actually head back. As if there’s anything to head back to.”
Guilt clawed down my throat and made a home in the pit of my stomach. Those people on the outpost hadn’t deserved what had happened there.
Wren flipped right side up in her chair. “Does he know where we landed?”
“Not yet.” Anders briefly touched his neck where the tracking chip was embedded. “But he will soon. We need to move fast. Don’t waste your breath talking about my father. Let’s talk about that cursed cube.” He flopped down on the couch—directly next to me. So close that the toe of his boot nudged mine while he settled himself.
Wren pulled the cube out of her pants pocket. She ran her finger over a groove on the top, and all the sides unfolded with a click, forming a sheet of metal covered in embossed lines of rich, gilded script.
“Anders, why don’t you read it?” she said. “You enjoy poetry, don’t you?”
He frowned. “No.”
I nudged his shoulder. “He does have quite the gentle soul.”
Beep! Elio said from across the room.
“See?” I said. “Elio agrees.”
Anders hunched his shoulders and leaned close enough to me to mutter, “I thought the gentle soul thing was just between the two of us.”
Wren cleared her throat, raising an eyebrow. “Sharing is caring, Andykins. Here, Cora, you read it. You haven’t seen it yet.” She flung the metal sheet like a saucer, and it spun and landed in my lap.
The edges were sharp enough to slice through my skin. I picked it up gingerly, pinching it between my index fingers and thumbs, and then read aloud the clue that Mieku had given us:
Find me near the thick of gasses.
You’ll See me where the water passes.
Look Within a source of heat.
I am a place to rest Your feet.
Spirals, cliffs, the Darkness brings.
I come only when the full moon sings.
“Huh,” I said once I had read it through twice. “You know, I don’t think I’m a fan of poetry either.”
Beep-beep! Elio took the sheet from me, twisting it this way and that. I hoped he was running some kind of net search on it—if he was still capable of that sort of thing. After a minute, he shrugged, handed the poem back to me, and returned to tidying up the rec room.
“Random words are capitalized.” Anders read them aloud. “See Within Your Darkness. Could that be significant?”
“Who knows.” I studied the poem. “It could be trying to distract us.” The best cons made you look in one direction when something important was really happening in the other. And what had this entire hunt been, if not a big con organized by the warden to imprison us once again?
“Let’s go line by line,” said Wren. “‘Find me near the thick of gasses.’ So to me, that’s a hint that Teolia had a serious issue with lactose intolerance.”
Anders wrinkled his nose. “I highly doubt that’s it.”
“Excuse me, were you alive hundreds of years ago? Were you her best buddy? I don’t think so.”
“Were you?” he retorted.
“Okay, okay.” I held up a hand to quiet them. “Mieku said this was a clue to find the keys, not Teolia’s corpse. So we would find a key near the thick of gasses. We would see another key where the water passes. Or maybe not another key. There are only four keys, but there are more than four lines of clues.”
Wren leaned forward in her seat. “So which clues go with which key? We already found a key in the water on Cadrolla. That’s one down.”
“The warden said the first key came from Jupiter’s moon,” said Anders. “That satisfies the gaseous line.”
“The next line is a heat source.” I scanned the poem again. “A … sun?” Maybe it was too simple a suggestion. But weren’t the simplest things the most effective?
Wren scowled. “I am not flying this ship into a sun.”
Anders rolled his eyes, a shockingly Earthan gesture. “You’re not flying this ship anywhere. We’re stuck here.” He drummed his fingers across his chin. “But hypothetically, if we were to fly into a sun, which one would we choose? Any are fair game.”
“That’s not helpful,” I said. Although he wasn’t necessarily incorrect. If the warden was to be believed, the keys had been shipped to four different galaxies, the chest to a fifth. We already knocked out Milky Way and Whirlpool, which left … way too many to even think about.
I looked at the poem again. “All right, let’s come back to that. Next line. Place to rest your feet. A chair?” I counted out the options on my fingertips. “A couch? A bed?”
Wren looked at me skeptically. “Who puts a bed on the sun?”
“I don’t know! Give me a better option.”
“Maybe it’s not such a specific place,” said Anders, pursing his lips. “Maybe it could be found anywhere. Like…” I didn’t think he knew he was doing it, but he started tracing the tattoos on his forehead with his thumb, massaging circles into his skin. I despised myself a little for thinking of his hands rubbing the same circles along my fingers in the med bay only a few hours ago. “What about … a bed of sunshine?”
Wren snorted. “That’s way too peppy. Aren’t you the violent one?”
“Of course I am.” And to prove it, he dug ten holes into his seat cushion with his claws. “I’m trying to help.”
“Well, then maybe you can work a bit harder to decipher these clues. You know, since you have such a gentle soul when it comes to poetry.”
“Can everyone stop talking about my soul? My soul would eat your soul for breakfast any day of the week!”
“Yeah, sure.” Wren flashed him a good-natured grin. “Bring it, Andy.”
I left them to bicker, approaching Elio still cleaning in the corner. He had managed to collect most of the glass shards, and he was using them to build a miniature fort, complete with a few small pieces of stuffing from the couch cushions for flags and doors. That gave me a tiny glimmer of hope. No respectable servant bot would ever be caught playing in a pile of clutter.
Elio may have been unable to talk, but a part of him was still tucked away in there. Somewhere.
“Have you been listening?” I asked. He nodded. “Any suggestions?”
Elio’s eyes flickered, and then he mot
ioned for me to hand him my comm. He started typing a message, which took quite a while in his new deficient state, while Wren and Anders continued to toss ideas around.
“Molecules of material being pulled into a black hole collide with enough intensity to heat up to hundreds of millions of degrees,” said Anders. “Heat source. There you go.”
“Yeah, and the next clue,” replied Wren, “is a place to rest your feet. Because if we fly into a black hole we’ll all be dead, genius. It’s an eternal resting place.”
“I thought you wanted to fly into a black hole. Didn’t you say you have the perfect outfit for it?”
“Aw, Andy!” Wren squealed. “You do listen to me!”
Next to me, Elio poked at my comm, typing one slow letter at a time. Anders’s and Wren’s brainstorming session was reaching new levels of ridiculous.
“Andilly!” Wren jumped up on her seat. “That’s one of the hottest planets I’ve ever set foot on.”
“Why yes.” Anders swept his long hair behind his shoulders. “I am familiar with that Earthan slang. We are rather attractive.”
“Not you, Big Red. The temperature. Do you know how many gallons of perspiration I secreted while I was stuck there? I’ll give you a hint, it wasn’t as many as you did, because you stank up the entire cell!”
I looked over Elio’s shoulder. “Are you done yet? I have a feeling they’re going to start throwing things next.”
Elio nodded and, with a beep, handed me back my comm. He’d typed out two sentences, riddled with misspellings. The first: Look owut the windoe. The second: Whut wood u do withowut me?
The answer was probably get thrown back into Ironside for all eternity, because when I looked out the porthole, taking in the dunes rising and falling like steps across the desert, I was filled with a sudden desire to demand the warden lock me back up on the grounds of pure dumbass-ery. It couldn’t really be that simple, could it?
But the simplest things are the most effective, I thought again.
“Wren. Anders.” I headed back to the couch, dragging Elio with me. “Elio would like us all to take a good, long look outside and then slap ourselves for being complete idiots.”
The Good for Nothings Page 22
