Song of Scarabaeus
Page 37
“Wait a minute. Look what happened on Scarabaeus. I don’t want anything like that happening in my brain.”
Edie dropped her hand away from his head. “That won’t happen. It doesn’t have the machinery of a BRAT. It just breaks biocyph locks. That’s all.”
Finn nodded his head slowly, but then his eyes narrowed. “You said my splinter was the decrypter?”
“Yes. Lock and key in the same strand of biocyph. When the lock is broken, the biocyph will be destroyed.”
“So you’d lose the cryptoglyph.”
And she’d lose him.
“You’ll be free!” Edie insisted. “You won’t die if you go out of range. You won’t get this interference from my brain waves. No one will be able to jolt you.”
Finn looked uneasy. It wasn’t the reaction she’d expected.
“It’s what we wanted, Finn.”
“What about your grand revolution?”
“Our plan was to cut the leash. That’s why we cooperated with the rovers, isn’t it? Achaiah told me even he didn’t know how to cut it. We may never get another chance.”
Her words sounded hollow. This was not what she wanted, not anymore, and it was hard to admit that to herself. Keep ing the leash intact meant she won on two counts—she had a tool to help the Fringers, and she had Finn by her side. She wanted him near, even enslaved. Her own selfish desires appalled her. She felt compelled to act, to overcome them.
She moved her hand to reconnect the softlink. “It’ll only take a second—”
He grabbed her wrist. For a few moments she pushed futilely as she tried to touch his temple, a struggle she couldn’t win.
“What about those people?” he insisted.
The Fringers. Little Olga and her pitiful family.
“Finn, you deserve freedom.”
“So do they.”
“You said it wasn’t our fight. You were right—I can’t start a revolution. I can’t do it alone.” Her throat tightened as she tried to talk him into making the decision that was best for him, regardless of the cost to her. She swayed forward, pressed her forehead to his, tears flowing freely. “You wanted freedom. I want you to be free.”
His thumb grazed her cheekbone where Haller had struck her, days ago, in this very room. Blinking to clear her vision, she looked into the eyes of a man she still barely understood, but did not want to lose.
“Tell me what to do,” she whispered.
“You freed me from slavery. You freed my voice. You’ve made me remember why I strapped on a spur in the first place.” He slowly shook his head against hers. “I was never fighting for politics and governments, those bastards who betrayed us. I was fighting for that poor kid on the Drakkar. I want my freedom, but not at the expense of hers.”
She had no response that could measure up to his sacrifice.
He tilted his face and kissed her. To comfort her, perhaps, but his lips lingered too long for that. Pushing his hand into her tangled wet hair, he stood, holding the kiss, drawing her close. Her body responded with a deep rush of desire.
Finn pulled back with a groan, his fist tightening in her hair and making her gasp. He released her quickly, turned his face away, but not before she saw the fleeting pain in his eyes. With the leash flaring in his head whenever her emotions were aroused, intimacy would never be possible.
“I’m sorry—” she began.
“Don’t be. I made my choice.” He recovered quickly, and then that playful look she’d glimpsed once before came to his eyes. “Weren’t you going to do something about that?”
She wiped her wet cheeks and smiled, savoring the dissipating rush and the surge of hope that replaced it.
“I will.”
First she had to survive the disintegration of her neural metabolism.
Hugging her knees, Edie sat on the couch on deck one and traced the fading ink on the tops of her bare feet. She wanted to scrub it all off and have Cat start again, this time painting the patterns from Scarabaeus. The latticed vines, the glossy slater threads, the dappled mosaics of refracted light…
Finn touched her shoulder with such gentle concern it brought a lump to her throat. “Lie down.”
Edie obeyed, struggling to keep her eyes open as Finn gave her another spike of the amino acid cocktail that they hoped would slow the progress of her neuroshock symptoms.
Finn turned to the viewport to stare at the stars. They were camping out on deck one. On a nearby couch, Gia fussed with Yasuo’s bedding as he slurped down stew and watched toons on the holoviz with the sound turned low. Corky slumped in the corner, contrite, too embarrassed to join the group. Cat was on the bridge enjoying her new favorite seat—the captain’s chair—and familiarizing herself with her new identity.
“No sign of the Laoch,” Cat reported via the shipwide comm. “Listen to this: Caterina Carmel. My new name—
like it? Sounds like a movie star.”
The Hoi jumped into nodespace and the stars evaporated. Finn’s hands tightened on the railing as the view shifted abruptly to become a churning avalanche of glowing colorless ribbons.
After a while, Edie said, “Is the universe still bewildering you?”
In the viewport reflection, she saw Finn smile. “Some things are starting to make sense.”
What made sense to Edie was the chance, at last, to choose her future. To throw off the Crib’s chains, to undermine its stranglehold using the very thing it had helped her create: the song of Scarabaeus.
What made sense was the knowledge that it wasn’t only the leash that compelled Finn to stay with her. He’d chosen her instead of freedom, staking his life on her getting through the next few days.
He rubbed at the back of his neck in that unconscious gesture that was so familiar and unsettling, signifying their bond. It was, perhaps, a ridiculous time to be admiring the flex of his muscles sliding under olive-brown skin, but that’s what she did. If she was about to die, there wasn’t much else she’d rather be looking at.
She shivered and curled up on her side. Closed her eyes to the universe.
“Finn?”
“Edie.”
“Don’t let me out of your sight.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to my agent, Kristin Nelson, for working with me on improving the manuscript; to Diana Gill and everyone else at Eos Books involved in the book’s production; to Olga Lorenzo at RMIT, Melbourne, for her enthusiastic encouragement; to David Bardos, Liz Burrage, Jenny Creasy, Laurie McLean, and Keith Stevenson, for commenting on early drafts; to my wonderful critique group partners Alison Hentges, Suzanne Moore, and Cindy Somerville, for their invaluable input; and to MCP, with love, for making it all worthwhile.
Credits
Cover art by Christian McGrath
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
SONG OF SCARABAEUS. Copyright © 2010 by Sara Creasy. All rights reserved under International and PanAmerican Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © March 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199136-3
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