I felt a trickle of something. He might have meant it as reassurance, but it wasn't that at all. It was so fragile, and it made me think of a long-ago friend in the Zone, beaten to death but still flashing me a bloody grin through broken teeth before he'd breathed his last. The memory terrified me. I pressed hard against the floor. Pressed my cheek to it. Reached for him.
"All right," Nadim whispered. Even the synthesized voice sounded raw, hardly even understandable. Something groaned deep inside him, and I felt another bright hot-pink spike of pain stab through me. I winced and stumbled, bracing against the console. "Marko stopped him--"
Marko had intervened, somehow. Not quite the human doll after all, which was what I'd so desperately hoped. "Nadim, can you move?"
"No." I read the desperation in it. "If I try and fail, he will hit me again. It might hurt you."
"Screw that. Run! Do it!"
I turned my head in surprise, because that was Beatriz saying it, not me. Her hair had broken loose to riot around her face, and her eyes were ferocious. I'd have stayed out of her way if I'd crossed her path in the Zone.
I held up my hand, and she clasped it, our fingers knitting together tightly. "Yeah," I said. "Nadim--you said you could go into stealth mode?"
If he'd been human, he might have drawn in an audible breath. He'd forgotten that. He'd never even tried it yet. "Yes," he said. "Yes."
"Do it!"
"I can't. I'm not strong enough."
"I am," I said. "We are."
I felt the wild surge in him, and his mind reached and opened to me, and I fell, and it wasn't I anymore, it was we, spinning in a vortex of black fear and red pain and stars, stars, the pulsing beat of Typhon's rage pummeling our body, vital fluids streaming into the dark, so much hurt, so much, but we clicked together in pieces made to fit and there, there it was, a shimmering pearl of power greater than either of us could ever be separately.
We disappeared. Typhon's surprise flared like a dying star. We dove, stiff and awkward with the pain, the damage, and skimmed barely past the stabbing thrust of his barbed tail, drinking thick starlight and whispering by, not even a shadow, not even a ripple. Turning now, gliding, the sun so hot it hissed and burned the wound on our dorsal surface black, turned the blood to ashes drifting on solar clouds, and we ran, racing up and out into the dark.
Escaping.
Behind us, Typhon's rage exploded with the heat of a supernova, and I felt something grab at us, yank, like a hand around a trembling heart.
Nadim spun, caught like a fish on a line, and I fell out of the bond, slamming back into my body with suffocating force. I tried to get out of my skin, back into us, but he wouldn't let me in as he twisted and struggled against the pull. He was doing it to protect me.
I clung to the wall and cried for him as he fought, and fought, and lost.
Interlude: Nadim
We come apart. It feels like cutting, like the bleeding holes that the Elder has gouged in me, and though I reach for her, I am now just I, and she is just Zara. There is no we now, no protection, and I am glad for that small favor because in this I am alone, must be alone. She should not suffer for me, though I know she would. There is a bright hot star in Zara, a heat I orbit and drink and wish with all my instincts to share. It is a fierce kind of bravery, a kind I do not possess. I am not made for battle. And like Zara, I am not made for rules, though I know they exist for a reason.
The Elder teaches me this error again, with cold fury and colder precision. In blood and pain, I learn I am not fit, not strong, not ready. I have failed. I will never take the Journey. I will be forced to surrender my Honors. I will be cast out, alone.
These are the threats he beats into my body. But I endure.
I feel Zara, distant starlight on my skin, feeding me her strength. I shut out everything but the faraway warmth, the tiny crack in the wall between us that spills her light into me.
It keeps me alive, but more, it keeps me alert, and under Typhon's red waves of rage, I sense something else. Something I do not expect to find.
I sense that he is afraid.
He knows I sense it. His fear grows. He inflicts more pain to hide it, but I see. Zara and Beatriz have given me the understanding of these things, and as I drift and fight his hold and lose, lose, always lose, I know one pure thing.
I will find out why he is afraid.
I will find out what he is hiding from me, and I will survive to hurt him in turn. Not for myself.
I will hurt him because he has hurt my Beatriz. My Zara.
He will never hurt them again.
So I endure in the twisting, bitter net of agony, and I listen to their ragged, sobbing songs, and I hold.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Breaking Loose
NADIM'S ANGUISH WAS a river, draining into me as water returned to the sea, but I wasn't infinite. It spilled the banks of my mind. He wasn't trying to hurt me, I knew that, but deep bonding had cracked something open between us that could never be sealed off. Not pair-bonded, like Marko and Chao-Xing; we weren't quite Zadim. We were still two, but a nebulous umbilical tethered us, and we both hurt, too much to bond again.
The punishment that Typhon inflicted on Nadim was precise and personal. I'd never known rage like this before; this was a whole new spectrum of violence that Typhon had introduced, a kind of calculated cruelty that steeled my resolve to make this bastard pay. Nadim couldn't hate like this.
But I could. I did. I would.
That hatred, I hoarded it at the core of me like the pit of a bitter fruit. With each lash, I remembered my father, every supervisor, warden, and rehab officer with a cruel streak. My father even said, once, that something about me made people want to force me to show respect. Bow your head, girl. Don't give me that insolent glare. But nobody had ever been able to command my regard; it couldn't be taken. It could only be earned. By treating me like a person, by listening when I spoke.
A lifetime in the Zone had taught me that pain always passed. I only had to ride it out. The worst came from knowing that Nadim lacked my experience. He was good. Gentle, even. I'd stake my soul on that. His bewildered anguish pared me to the bone, so that it felt as if I was all raw meat and exposed tangles of nerve. He kept trying to push me away, to shield me from those sensations. How long the punishment lasted, I didn't know; Beatriz held me as I screamed. She, at least, was spared most of it.
"Zara, you have to stop!"
It was all I could do to keep from biting my tongue. Despite the suffering, I didn't want to disengage. "Worth it," I gritted out through clenched teeth.
And he heard--Nadim heard--so his surprised joy diffused the despair for one beat, two, not quite enough to shield him. If there were tricks or techniques in the deep bond, I hadn't learned them yet, so we only held together for a sparkling heartbeat and then we both plummeted, back into the red-black depths, a bloodstain of an eternity.
My head went fuzzy and I heard Beatriz shouting. "Stop it! Typhon, stop! Marko, Chao-Xing, you have to make him stop! If you don't, I'll kill you!"
Bea's fear had metastasized into a rage that made her incandescent. Through foggy eyes, I admired the avenging fury Beatriz had become. She loves me? Us? Us. The fire of vengeance burned in her now too. Typhon was trying to shatter us, but we wouldn't let Nadim go.
Zara . . . The faintness of Nadim's call tasted of the ocean, of bittersweet farewell, and I locked on to my denial like a rope. Trembling from head to toe, I held on with bloodied, slippery hands to keep him with me. I sang to him in a wordless, broken melody. Bea harmonized with me. Together, we sailed down the river that bisected the banks of hell.
Hell froze.
Our torment ended.
He'd almost drifted away, but for us, Nadim came back. Tired. Beaten. But present. Still caught on the end of Typhon's line, trapped and terrified, but present.
I collapsed and felt the misty presence of him form around me. It was the closest we could come to an embrace. I wasn't going to let go. If h
e died, I died. We'd both spiral into the dark.
There was a sudden tug, a sense of motion. We were moving. No, Typhon was moving. We were pulled along like a toy on a string.
"Where are we going?" Bea was working on the console, trying to bring it back up.
"Gathering," Nadim murmured.
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"He is summoning the others. They will judge." Nadim seemed too tired to volunteer information, but we couldn't wait for him to recover fully, so I pressed on.
"Judge what exactly?"
"My crimes."
I was struck silent. Me, Zara, the smart-mouth, the one who flipped off enforcement agents and laughed in the face of courts--because Leviathan laws were different. I knew they were. The worst I'd ever get was rehab, maybe in a for-real prison if I tried hard enough back home, but even those were humane.
Somehow, I didn't think the Leviathan scale of justice tilted that kindly.
"What can you have possibly done?" Beatriz asked, and I wished she hadn't. Because I didn't want to face it.
Nadim didn't answer her, but she'd keep at it until she got the intel, so I told her--everything. About the deep bond that had triggered his dark sleep. How that was against the rules.
She didn't seem surprised. In fact, she waved it off. "Oh, that. I could tell you two connect in a different way. It's not better, not worse. Just different. Right, Nadim?"
"Yes," he said, and sounded faintly cheered. "You and I are music together."
"And you and Zara are something else." Bea raised her perfect eyebrows at me. "How is that a crime?"
"I should have waited for the Journey," he said. "There are rules."
"Rules." Bea rolled her eyes. "Since when does that merit this?"
"Multiple rules," Nadim told her. "The first was the deep bond. The second was failing to recognize within myself that I was slipping into dark sleep. The third was allowing humans contact with other races--"
"You didn't allow shit," I said. "That's on us. Besides, what else were we supposed to do, let you die?"
"None of it was intentional," Bea protested. "What's the worst that can happen at this Gathering? They'll tell you never to do it again?"
Please say yes, Nadim. Please.
"It's already been decided," he said in a lightless voice that held no hint of hope. "I am unfit to continue. The Gathering will silence my voice. I will be driven out. I will be alone."
I felt cold, colder than when our life support was beginning to fail. What he was talking about . . . for a Leviathan, it meant being mute. Never speaking again, never joining the lonely songs across the dark. Listening, but apart.
Silence, to a Leviathan, was worse than death.
"No, you--you won't be alone," Beatriz said. "We'll be with you, Nadim!" Even to me, that sounded weak. She might not get the full picture yet, but she was glimpsing the edges.
And I wasn't surprised when Nadim said, "No. You won't." I still heard that extraordinary compassion in his voice. As if he was trying to shield us from the worst. "They will send you home, to Earth. Back to your people."
"No! No, they can't do that. We'll tell everyone what--"
"They'll do something to us," I said flatly. "The way they did to Gregory Valenzuela. They wiped his memories and sent him home half-crazy. But that's the point, right? Even if we remember something, nobody believes us."
Nadim didn't answer that. But I knew I was right. Most probably Valenzuela's Leviathan had been exiled, the way Nadim would be, and he'd not only been damaged but grieving. Suddenly I wished I had been kinder to that stranger. It seemed to me that Nadim must be a lot like me, knowing that shit could go disastrously wrong yet unable to comply with rules he didn't agree with or understand.
The silence was profound, broken only by a faint hiss of the static interference from the stars . . . starsong, even here. I tried to think of something to say. Something that didn't contain a scream or a sob.
Finally, it was Beatriz who came up with just the right thing.
"Then we don't play," she said. "We get away before we arrive at the Gathering. And we avoid Typhon until you're strong enough to stop him."
Of course, that was a great goal, but it wasn't exactly what I'd call a plan. Plans had steps, and we had to start from scratch. First: How could we help Nadim heal faster from his injuries?
I looked up at the curving ceiling. "Nadim. How long until we reach the Gathering?"
"A few days at most, in your time."
"And . . . how long until you heal from your damage?"
"Five days," he said. "At least."
"Can't we speed it up? With EMITU, maybe?"
"Your robot can't help me," he said. "But perhaps you can."
That, it turned out, involved music. We started blasting recordings through the ship, loud enough to vibrate; according to Nadim, the songs helped accelerate his healing process. At least six times a day, Bea sang. When she slept, we played a recording of it back on a loop and kept earplugs jammed firmly into our ears to avoid going crazy from the repetition.
I felt the damage to him slowly knitting together. It would have been faster if we'd stayed in orbit around the white dwarf, but Typhon towed us away into the black, and even with his fins spread wide, Nadim's energy levels began to slip.
He sacrificed nonessential systems, closed up spaces we didn't need, cut his power outputs to nearly nothing. And he healed.
Whatever it cost, we would make sure Nadim didn't go out like this.
Three long days into the trip to the Gathering, I remembered to ask Nadim about Typhon's barbed tail as I got ready for bed. Turned out, that was aftermarket, grafted by another alien race humans had never met. It wasn't the Elder's only body modification, either.
I'd been angry over making a weapon for Nadim. Come to find out, Typhon already had them. Lots of them.
"He has weapons that fire sublight projectiles at very high velocities," Nadim clarified. "Telling you this is another crime, by the way."
"I'll add it to the list. So, we call those rail guns. How many?"
"Six, I think."
I whistled. That was an impressive armament system. The Mars colony only had one, meant to take out incoming asteroids. I'd seen the vids of rail guns firing and it was terrifying how accurate and destructive they could be. "Where are they on his body? I can't see them."
"The dark patches," Nadim said. "They are grafted beneath his skin, into special chambers. He has many modifications. Do you remember asking me about space lasers?"
"Oh, crap, Nadim, he has those?"
"I was truthful in telling you that I didn't."
"Well, points for that. But shit." Our chances of breaking loose from Typhon couldn't have looked worse. Out here in the black emptiness, there weren't even stars or nebulas to use for cover. This was a wasteland. "Why didn't he use any of it before?"
"He didn't need to," Nadim said. "Physical force is enough to subdue me. Also, we do not use weapons on one another."
I thought about that. My fingers tingled, and light pulsed around the outline of them in his skin. It was a healthy gold, which meant he was feeling far better now.
"One more question?" I asked it very quietly. I felt the silent pulse of his assent. "If the Leviathan don't use those weapons on each other, then who are they meant for?"
He went still. Very still. And his answer was more ominous than anything I could have predicted.
"We're only told they are necessary for the Journey."
What was truly chilling was that I knew, through the link we shared, that he was telling me the absolute truth.
I rolled onto my side, but sleep was impossible. My thoughts churned in a single direction--escape. If there were aliens, there should be a space equivalent to the Zone, where refugees could elude the authorities. If there was a civilization, there had to be those who wanted out of it or didn't fit in; that was just part of natural selection, wasn't it, that nature was always pushing out to the edges
? It was critical that we get free before the Gathering.
Eluding Typhon presented a monumental challenge, but evading a whole pod of Leviathan? Impossible. We'd be obliterated.
I dozed fitfully and dreamed. Nightmared, really, about being strapped down in a shadow-blurred church by an angel in white, of my father's hands holding me down for the knife. Of running, always running. Of suddenly stumbling into Derry--thinner, eyes dark-ringed and dull. His fingers jittered like he was shooing invisible insects. He gave me a hollow grin that didn't strike me as handsome or charming anymore.
"You'll be back soon, Z. You can't quit me. You know that, right? The Zone is the only place you'll ever call home." With no transition, we were standing in Conde's shop, and he was holding me, and I heard the whirr of the drone overhead, and then everything was burning. Derry was burning, his face peeling away to become a bloody skull. But he was still holding me, no matter how I screamed and fought to get free.
A cold sweat bathed me when I woke, like the Lower Eight had spectral fingers wrapped about my ankles and could tow me back down. But it was Nadim caught on Typhon's hook. My head felt scrambled, like somebody had stirred my brain with a stick.
"Who is Derry?" Nadim asked.
Shit. My mental shields came up with a decisive, instinctive slam while I tried to figure out how to respond.
"In our time together, you've asked many things that I couldn't answer . . . or didn't want to. You've never refused to answer me before." He sounded . . . puzzled. Not hurt.
"Why are you asking about Derry?"
"You were speaking to him."
"Well, he was important to me. For a while."
"Not anymore?" Nadim asked.
"No." I'd let go of Derry for good when he sold out to Deluca; for old times' sake, I'd saved his life, but that was all. Forgiveness wasn't my strong suit in the first place, and he sure didn't deserve any, after how he'd played me.
"Ah." That sounded . . . neutral.
I decided not to follow up. With a groan, I checked our status--still tethered and unable to flee. After a quick shower, I had some food and did a few rounds in the combat sim. My inability to impact our dilemma made me especially ferocious; I beat a new level of difficulty by dislocating my shoulder during a particularly brutal hold, and I was still sore from putting it back in place when I went looking for Beatriz.