by Jeff Seymour
Sal looks pretty proud of himself. “It was the Lord Secretary’s handwriting. The address was on the same street as a cafe in the Forge he wanted to meet Nic at one time, and the way he formed the letters matched up perfectly. I showed it to Nic, and he took us to one of the detectives he’d been working with, and she called up the Lord Mayor’s office, and half an hour later we were all on our way here to bust down Silvermask’s door.”
“Where’s Nic now?” I ask.
Tian Li adjusts my arm on her neck. “On his way to Gossner’s to tell you guys what was happening. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“I sorta took things into my own hands,” I mumble. “Pep and Tam came along to help.”
“And we lost Thom,” Pep says, throwing her arms up and glaring at me. She kicks the ground. “Nadya, we coulda just waited! You always do this! And now Thom’s got sixty years in the World Beyond!”
Sal’s jaw drops. Tian Li coughs. “What?” they ask in unison.
My gills burn. “I . . . I thought . . .”
“It might not be that long,” Tam says softly, “and I think it had to be this way.” He points at the mansion, where the police are moving through in teams. We can see their lights in the darkened windows, hear them call out from time to time. “How bad do you think this would’ve gotten if the police had come in here without Thom taking out Silvermask and his gang first? How many people woulda got hurt, or died?” A thick stew of emotions passes over his face—fear, pride, sadness, and a whole lot else I can’t quite catch. “Maybe Silvermask woulda won. He definitely woulda gotten away. I think maybe Thom was planning this all along.”
Pep takes deep breaths. She looks at Tam. She looks at me. And then she stomps off. She walks right past the police van we were headed toward and picks a different one to sit in, then puts her feet up on the bench across from her and stares at the wall.
I want to go after her, but I’m so tired I can’t see straight. And so’s she.
So instead I climb into the other van with everyone’s help and stretch out on one of the benches. We’re long past due for some rest.
CHAPTER 25
IN WHICH A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION OCCURS, AND NADYA THROWS UP.
I don’t get to talk to Pepper till the next day.
The rest of the night’s too hectic. The police come out with all the kids, who are starting to wake up scared and groggy, and we help Aaron get them settled down. They seem to trust me pretty well, since I freed them from Silvermask. Aaron finds his sister, and sure enough she’s the girl I saw on the Panpathia all those weeks ago out on the Cloud Sea. In all the hubbub of kids wailing and adults trying to calm them down and corral them into the vans, he flies to her like a rocket. The two of them don’t leave each other the whole rest of the night. Not at the police station where serious officers write down our stories one by one. Not on the trip back to the Orion over the bay on a police launch. Not on the long lift ride up the spire to our docking slip. And not once we’re back on the ship, trudging off to bed as dawn turns the sky gray. Sal sleeps on the floor in Tam’s room and lets the two of them have his.
I nab a little sleep, but it’s not very good. I keep remembering that fight with Silvermask on the Panpathia, and Thom with the fire spirit of Far Agondy burning him up from the inside. I wake up pretty often. The fourth time I open my eyes, the mid-morning sun’s creeping across the Orion’s deck and I figure it’s not worth trying to get back to sleep again.
So I pick up my old crutch, the same one I used right after my leg got hurt, and head for Pepper’s cabin.
I hesitate outside her door. I don’t want to wake her up if she’s sleeping. But she’s probably not. She was more upset than any of us last night. Gently, I knock.
For a few seconds, there’s no response, and I figure she’s still asleep. I’m about to head for the galley to make breakfast when her floorboards creak. A second later, the door opens.
Pep looks like she’s been up all night. Her eyes are puffy, her hair’s a rat’s nest, and her cheeks are red. She stares at me blankly, then sighs, “Come in.”
She closes the door behind me, then slumps toward her bed and waves at the chair by her desk. Her room’s still pretty dim, and the morning air is cool and damp. The sun won’t hit her side of the Orion for a while yet.
I sit in her chair and lean my crutch against her desk. My stomach churns and swirls, and my arms tingle. I’ve had all night to think about what I’m gonna say, but I’m still not sure it’s right. “I’m sorry, Pep,” I say. “For everything. I’m sorry for Tam and I’m sorry for Thom and I’m sorry for being a jerk.” My eyes tear up. My jaw aches. “I wish I was a better friend,” I whisper.
There’s silence. A long silence. The tears break free and run down my face. I was so sure she was gonna forgive me.
But she doesn’t.
“Yeah, well . . . ,” Pepper says. “Me too.”
I look up. Her eyes are bloodshot. Her chin quivers. She’s holding her arms so hard her fingers are going white.
“Why are we fighting like this?” I ask. It shouldn’t be this way. Not between us.
Pep looks at her feet, then up at the net full of stuffed animals on her ceiling. “It didn’t used to bother me that everybody thought you were so great. I did too.” Did. I feel like puking. “But, Nadya, you’re taking everything I want. Tam. Thom. What would you do if I told you I wanted to be captain?”
I blink. “You were gonna be the engineer . . .” On the ship we’d run together someday, I mean. The one we’ve always dreamed about.
Pep snorts. “Well, maybe I don’t wanna be anymore. You move so fast, you talk about everything, you think about everything, and you act before I even get a chance to open my mouth. Everybody just stares right past me at you, and then you do stupid stuff and people get hurt, but nobody cares. They just go, ‘Oh, poor Nadya,’ and help you out and then you do the same thing over and over again!”
I look down at my leg. “That’s not true,” I say automatically. “They . . . I mean . . .” But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe it is true. I do think and act fast, and people have gotten hurt because of me. Thom’s gone, and that feels like a boot stomp to the stomach. My head spins.
“I’ll be better,” I say miserably.
Silence again. Pep sits on her bed and starts to cry. I look up, and she’s got her head in her hands.
“Pep . . .”
“Just go,” she says. “I want to be alone.”
“Pep, I—”
“Go!” she screams. “Why don’t you ever listen?” She picks up a shoe and throws it at the wall above my head.
My fingers shake. My leg shakes. But I get up and crutch my way out, because what else am I going to do? I have to lean against the wall in the hallway to pull her door shut. I feel like I might throw up any second, so I slide to the floor and sit there, shivering, my hands and foot cold, my missing leg aching, thinking about everything Pepper said. I wonder if it’s true, whether I’m really that bad a friend, that bad a crewmate, that bad at everything. And as my head goes farther and farther down that path, my stomach finally does lose it, and I barf all over the hallway.
I’m still sitting there, waiting for my head to stop spinning long enough to crutch into the galley for a mop and some rags, when I hear footsteps. My gills burn, and I look up.
Alé’s standing next to me, hands on her hips. She looks a lot less surprised than I’d be if our situations were reversed. “Hey,” she says. “Need a hand?”
Shakily, I nod. She helps me into the galley and sits me down on one of the benches. “This is the kitchen, right?” she asks, nodding at the door that leads there.
“Yeah,” I mumble.
She limps in—I guess she’s off crutches now—and comes back a second later with a wet cloth for my face. “I’m making tea,” she says decisively. “What kind y
ou like?”
“Chamomile,” I mumble. Alé disappears into the galley, and a second later I hear the kettle heating up. She takes a bucket and some rags into the hallway and spends a few minutes there while I try to make my hands stop shaking. We don’t talk again until she plunks two cups of tea down in front of me. Hers smells like chai.
“Fighting with your best friend?” she asks.
I nod.
“I figured,” she says. “Her window was open. We could hear you guys as we came on the ship.”
My gills burn even hotter, and I thump my forehead against the table. “Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me, Gossner, Rash, and Raj. Raj is here for help from Aaron and his sister, and the Goss brought your prosthesis. It’s finished.”
I stare at my tea, blinking. I should be excited about that. Raj is going to be okay. The prosthesis means walking again, maybe running.
But all I can think about is the look on Pepper’s face when she was screaming at me to get out, and her talking about how people get hurt because of me.
Alé nudges my tea toward me. “Drink,” she says. “You’re not gonna feel any better just staring at it.”
I do like she says. It’s warm and sweet. It reminds me of Mrs. T, but she’s gone too, just like Thom, and it’s all I can do to hold my heart together because it feels like everything’s cracking in half right now.
Alé takes a deep breath. “Look,” she says. “I don’t know you that well. I don’t know your crew that well either. But the Goss told us some things about Thom, and I don’t think you should be beating yourself up like this.”
I look up. Alé stares at me across her tea, sipping it slowly.
“You’re not giving him any credit. You’re not giving Tam any credit. And you’re not giving anybody else any credit either.”
I thump my skull on the table again. “That’s what Pep was accusing me of,” I mutter.
Alé shakes her head. “No, it’s not. She’s not giving them any credit either. Look,” she says. “How do you think Thom knew what to do in that mansion? How’d he know he needed to summon that particular fire creature in order to beat Silvermask?”
I never really thought about that.
“Because he’d been preparing for it. Because he knew he might have to and he thought it was the right thing to do. He and the Goss spent hours reading through her library, trying to find information on the Malumbra and how to beat it.” She leans back. “He didn’t do that because he wanted no part of fighting Silvermask. He did it because he wanted to be ready. You ask me, he did it because he wanted to be the hero. When he left the Goss’s tower last night, he didn’t look surprised, didn’t look upset. She was with Rash and me, asking what was going on, and he just came in and said, ‘They’re gone. I’m ready. I’m going,’ like they’d discussed the whole thing already.”
I wipe some tears from my eyes. That sounds like Thom, I guess. Maybe that’s what he was doing when I saw him staring at the boilers. Getting ready. “I never thought about him wanting to be a hero,” I mumble. “I never thought about him wanting anything. He was just . . . a grown-up, you know?”
Alé nods. “Believe me, I know. I made the same mistake about the Goss once, and she gave me a lecture that just about burned my hair off. So lemme tell you something: Grown-ups have dreams. They want things. And mostly when they do something it’s because of what they want, not because of what we do.”
I think of Thom as he hugged us all and got ready to head to the World Beyond. Maybe he does have dreams I don’t know about. Maybe he’s making some of them come true.
“As for Tam,” Alé says, and I want to crawl under the table and hide because I really don’t want to think about Pep liking Tam and Tam only paying attention to me, and I still feel terrible about that hug at Gossner’s tower. “Tam’s gonna like who he likes, or not. He’s his own boss. And if Pepper really wants his attention, she should be talking to him, not to you.”
“It’s not that easy,” I say. “She—”
Alé waves me off. “I know it’s not easy. You think with all those kids crammed together at the Goss’s we don’t have fights over who likes who? It happens all the time, and the Goss has some strict rules about it to keep things from getting out of hand.” She counts down on her fingers. “Rule number one: If you like somebody, you talk to that person about it, not to their friends or your friends or the person you think they like or whatever. Rule two’s that everybody gets to make up their own mind about who they like, no begging or arguing or manipulating. Rule three’s not really a rule, but it’s still important. The Goss says crushes come and go, but the best friendships last forever.” She pauses, then shrugs. “The rest of the rules are all just, like, logistics and who sleeps where and stuff.”
I was kinda wondering about that. “So,” I say delicately. “Are you and Rash . . . ?”
Alé snorts. “Ha! Not even. He’s not into anybody and I like girls. We’re just best friends, like I said before.”
“Oh,” I mumble, and my gills burn again. I’m not exactly at my sharpest lately.
Alé slurps down her tea, then listens to someone stomping around above our heads. “And that’s it for your pep talk.” She grins, then rolls her eyes. “Get it? ‘Pep talk’?” She shakes her head and offers me her arm. “The Goss is probably done talking with Nic by now, so let’s go get your prosthesis, okay?”
CHAPTER 26
IN WHICH NADYA GETS A PROSTHETIC LEG, AND A RECONCILIATION OCCURS.
A few minutes later, Alé leads me into Nic’s cabin. It looks a little different than usual—the table and most of its chairs have been pushed against the couch by the windows, so there’s a big open space in the middle. Gossner, Nic, Tam, and Rash are there. They’ve set up two metal bars at waist height with a little path between them and a chair at one end.
“Is that for me?” I ask.
“Yes,” Gossner says. “Are you ready?”
I nod, but I also swallow. I still feel queasy after what happened with Pep, and I’m kinda nervous about trying out my prosthetic leg. I’m just getting used to my crutches, and now I’m gonna have to learn something completely new. I know eventually it’ll let me do a lot of my favorite things again, but now that the moment to start using it’s here, I’m having second thoughts.
Gossner clears her throat. “How much or how little you use the prosthesis is completely up to you, Nadya,” she says. “In fact, I’d suggest taking it slow for a while. Just an hour at a time, maybe less if you feel uncomfortable or sore.” Slowly, she takes the prosthesis out of a bag at her feet.
My heart thumps. The leg is still stainless steel and iron, a big cylinder for my residual limb up top with a rod leaving it and going down to that ankle mechanism of springs and hinges, then a little scoop for a foot. I can’t really tell what Gossner changed—the length, something in the ankle maybe?—except for a molded piece of plasticose that she fits around the scoop so it looks even more like a foot. “For socks and shoes,” she explains, “in case you want them.”
Once it’s all together, she beckons me over to the chair at the end of the metal bars. “Here,” she says. “Sit down and get to know it for a few minutes.”
I crutch over and sit, my heart fluttering. Rash, Tam, and Alé beam at me though, and their enthusiasm’s kinda catching. I turn the leg in my hands, feel its weight, check out all the springs and gears in the ankle.
“Push on the foot,” Gossner suggests. “Watch it flex. See how it moves.”
I wiggle the foot around a little, watch the mechanism. I don’t think just looking at it’s gonna help me that much, but it does make it feel more real.
When I’m done with the foot, Gossner walks over. “Ready to put it on?” she asks, and I nod.
Again, she shows me how to roll the sleeve on, fit the metal leg to my residual limb, and use the little valve to let air out.
It feels really good today—I dunno if she just got the measurements that much better or whether my leg’s healed up or is just the right size at this moment or maybe all three, but it’s real comfortable, like putting on a perfectly broken-in shoe.
“Ready to stand?” Gossner asks. I nod, and she beckons to Tam and Alé, who stand on either side of me and hold my hands. Slowly I get up and let the leg take my weight.
Gossner steps away. “How’s it feel?”
“Good,” I say. It’s not like having my old leg back, but it is like having the world’s best crutch—one made just for me, that takes my weight exactly where I need it. Just being able to use the muscles in my thigh and back and knee to hold my weight again brings up a whole flood of memories I’d forgotten—of running, of jumping, of climbing. I grin.
“Start off by grabbing the bars,” Gossner says, “and just rock back and forth on the foot.”
I spend the next hour practicing walking. It takes a little bit of doing, and Gossner stops and adjusts the length of the sleeve and the gears and springs in the ankle. I feel like a bird who’s just gotten out of the nest. I can imagine my whole life opening up, all the stuff I needed so much help to do after losing my leg getting easier again. The world’s not built for people with crutches, although now that I’ve spent so long on them I think maybe it should be. But it is built for people with legs, and while this thing’s not quite the same as my old leg, it’s close enough that it’s gonna make a lot of stuff a whole lot more convenient.
Just before she goes, Gossner shows me a little lever on the ankle. “This,” she says, “is for running. It changes the way the ankle mechanism works. With the lever up, like it is now, it’s set for walking. If you try to run, you’ll probably fall, because the ankle won’t flex right. Flick it down”—she demonstrates—“and you’ll be able to run, but walking will feel very awkward.” She puts it back in the walking position. “Don’t try running anytime soon. You’ve got to master walking first.”