Dragon's Promise

by Natalie Grey

  “Mala!” Nyx’s yell was a command.

  Mala ignored her. Wedging her way into the corner, she ripped the front of the control panel—this was hardly a moment for finesse—and set to work, hot-wiring the thing shut. The door came open and inch and gunfire burst through, and Mala swore. She could hear them on the other side, yelling to get it open, and she knew she did not have time for an elegant solution. It wouldn’t be long before they figured out her trick, but maybe it would be long enough. She twisted two of the wires together and the doors slammed closed.

  “We have a few minutes.” She met Nyx’s gaze, or at least hoped she did, and swallowed as the mask of the helmet stared at her.

  “Fine.” Nyx’s nod was infinitesimal. “Come on.” She took off at a run, blood streaming down the side of her armor, and Mala was dragged along in the group. They were a hundred yards from the shuttle when Nyx stumbled and went down. Two of the Dragons hauled her up and they kept running, the Dragon with the singed armor now draped over another’s shoulders in a fireman carry. As they tumbled into the shuttle, Nyx gave a gasp of pain, hand at her side.

  “Are you—” Mala reached out.

  “I’ll be fine.” Nyx batted away Mala’s hand, and the helmet turned to the view screens. Alone in the silence, Mala looked away from the accusing stares of the other Dragons, hunched her knees up to her chest, and tried not to cry.

  36

  “Boss.”

  “What?” Nyx did not look around. She had given up her pacing—the way she hobbled was making the process more frustrating than soothing—and had dragged her chair over to the one part of the room no one could see from the door.

  “Can I come in?” Tersi did not move from the doorway.

  “Why are you here?” She knew her tone was curt and she did not care. She was not up for a lecture on forgiveness and youthful mistakes.

  “I brought a med kit.”

  “Oh, go away.” That was even worse than a lecture.

  “I know you hate doctors, boss, but even you can’t take a bullet without a bandage.”

  “Fine,” she said finally.

  “It must still be bleeding, or you wouldn’t have let me in.” Tersi was trying to joke, but she saw worry in his face as he came over to the bed. He was careful not to look at the wound, crouching down to lay out supplies before he went to wash his hands. When he came back, it was to pick up one of the decontamination wipes that Nyx knew from experience hurt like hell. He smiled sympathetically. “All right, let’s just get this over with.”

  “Right.” She might hate the sterile smell of the med bay, the distracted contempt she always felt from doctors, and the discomfort of stitches and staples and glue, but she knew if she didn’t let someone tend to this now, she’d only end up on one of the operating tables.

  And Tersi wasn’t like most doctors. He actually cared.

  She forced herself to sit still. “It’s mostly bruised, I think.”

  “Well, you’re not wrong about the bruise. It’s going to be very impressive.” Tersi examined the wound carefully, and then placed a hand on her arm to steady her as he used the decontamination wipe, moving quickly and surely while she hissed through her teeth. “One more second…and done. Thanks for not punching me.”

  “I don’t see why everyone gives me so much crap for this,” Nyx said grumpily. “It only happened once.”

  “Let’s say it left a lasting impression.”

  “But I’ve never done it again.”

  “Fair enough.” Tersi studied the broken skin critically. “I actually think we can get away without any stitches. You’ll just need to be a little careful for a few days while it starts healing on its own.”

  “We don’t have a few days to be careful.”

  “We might. And if not, well, you’ll bleed a lot into your suit. Hold still for a second.”

  There was the blessed coolness of the glue they used, its topical anesthetic dulling the pain as it adhered to cover the wound. Nyx knew from experience that it would itch like crazy within a few hours, but for now, at least, the skin didn’t hurt all that badly. The muscles, of course, were another matter. She pulled her shirt down with a grimace and tried to settle back into her chair.

  “Thanks for patching me up.”

  He smiled over at her from where he was repacking the med kit, and she saw the momentary contentment in his eyes. His hurt, both in body and spirit, was beyond her to fix, and so they had not spoken of it. But she knew how much it had taxed him to see his team go out every time without him. It helped, she thought now, for him to feel useful.

  “So.” He zipped the kit up and sat back on his heels. “How are you doing?”

  “How do you think?” Nyx gestured to the bed, offering him a seat, and her eyes followed him as he settled down. “I don’t have the first idea what to do with all of this.”

  He nodded silently.

  “What possessed her?” Nyx asked finally. The anger had been building, and she felt her voice start to rise. She leaned forward, heedless of the pain in her side, to press the heels of her hands against her eyes. “What in the goddamned hell possessed her to do something like that?”

  “You know why.”

  “Do I?” Nyx picked her head up to look at him.

  “Yes. You do. She was young when she went to Seneca. She had nothing. Seneca chews people like that up and spits them out.”

  “Then she could have gone home! Or better yet, not ever left at all.” Nyx settled back in her chair. “I mean…am I missing something? Why could she not just have gone home?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “What does that mean?” She looked over at him sharply.

  “It means….” He considered, tilting his head as he stared into the middle distance. “What was she running from, that going to Seneca with no degree, no money, was better to her than staying at home? It’s not like she took that persona and ran with it; she lives simply. The money she has, she earned—I know, I know, built on Eve’s reputation, but if she’s the one who built Orion’s Algorithm, she’s doing some good stuff on her own.”

  “Why couldn’t she have—” Nyx broke off. She knew why Mala couldn’t just have built that career on her own. There was no way a kid from Dobrevi could have gotten Mala’s job. And Nyx should have known that, rather than being impressed by it.

  “Pissed you didn’t guess?” Tersi’s voice was wry.

  “Bingo.” Nyx acknowledged the hit with a wince.

  “Eh, I wouldn’t be.” He lay back on the bed, head pillowed on his hands. “It’s so far outside the standard that you have to wonder what would make you see the truth.”

  “Yeah, but all of this has been so far outside the standard,” Nyx pointed out. “It was right there, the first time I said Grose thought she was someone else. She looked like she was going to throw up. That reaction should have told me all I needed to know. She was being secretive as hell. I knew she had something to tell me and I didn’t….” Her hand clenched into a fist. “I didn’t push it.”

  “Don’t go down the road of holding yourself accountable for her lie,” Tersi advised. “I’ll defend her up to a point, but her not telling you is only her fault.”

  “Is it? Why didn’t I push it?” Nyx stared at him, letting the silence hang until he met her eyes. He grimaced, and she nodded. “Exactly.”

  “I think it’s time for whiskey.” Tersi sat up with a groan and went over to one of the side cabinets, popping it open to reveal a decanter and two glasses.

  “That’s Talon’s,” Nyx objected.

  “My dear commander, you’re a Dragon who’s just found out you’re sleeping with the enemy.” Tersi sat back down and splashed a generous two shots into one of the glasses before passing it over. “I think Talon, of all people, would entirely understand.” He poured a somewhat more reserved amount into his own glass and lifted it. “Cheers.”

  Nyx smiled and took a sip, savoring the burn of it as it slid down her thr
oat.

  “You know, I think you’d be angry even if she wasn’t all tangled up in this.” Tersi studied the whiskey, tipping his glass this way and that.

  “Oh?”

  “You’re afraid what this means for her. I saw you when you brought her back from that torture chair. Your mind is trying to do anything it can not to think about the fact that this all could have killed her, and it’s only luck that helped you stop it.”

  Nyx swallowed. Her fingers had gripped around the glass so tightly that she could feel them aching. She loosened them with an effort. Her implants could take over if she wasn’t careful, and a lap full of broken glass wasn’t going to improve anything.

  “But she is all tangled up in this,” she said finally.

  “And now you’re scared it’s all going to come around to bite her, and you’re not sure if you should stand in the way or not.” Tersi lifted his glass. “And that’s not the sort of thing logic’s going to help you with, so you might as well drink up.”

  Nyx laughed, almost savoring the ache in her side. She took a long drink and leaned her head back. “God. What the hell am I going to do with her?”

  “I’d lay out a pros and cons list—you know, send her back and hope she does the right thing, send her back and expose her—but really? You don’t have to decide yet.”

  “Thank God.” She took another sip and peered at him. “I really don’t?”

  “You really don’t. Go after the senator, bring her back to stand trial. At the end of the day, what’s your job? Making sure people like that can’t hurt anyone else. Mala’s not a hardened criminal, she’s not going around executing people who found out her secret. You don’t need to worry about her yet.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it like that.”

  “And anyway, no matter what I tell you to do, you’re just like Talon.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She picked her head up to narrow her eyes at him.

  “It means you’re going to research the hell out of this and then just go with your gut anyway.” Tersi raised his eyebrows. “Oh, come on, you saw the Major do that plenty of times.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t trust my gut now.” Nyx smiled bitterly. She was still furious, wanting to storm down to the crew quarters and demand that Mala explain what the hell she had been thinking, wanting to read her the riot act on how goddamned stupid it had been to think she could get away with this without it coming back to haunt her. And at the same time, Tersi was right: she wanted to protect Mala from all of this. She wanted to go to sleep in the same bed and wake up next to her. She wanted to believe that the kind smile, the shyness, was genuine.

  “Can’t you?” Tersi asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “I said, can’t you? Can’t you trust your gut on this one?”

  “What does that mean?” She was getting tired of that question.

  He only set the glass and decanter on a side table and stood, a smile on his lips. “Get some sleep, boss.”

  And he was gone, Nyx frowning as she stared after him. She was still frowning, now-empty glass cradled to her chest, as she drifted off to sleep a few minutes later.

  37

  Dragons. Orion had a whole goddamned team of Dragons, who—worse luck—were just as hard to kill as they’d been made out to be. Two times they should have been wiped out now, and they were still alive.

  And her with them.

  At least—a smile touched Maryam Samuels’ lips—there would be a hell of a fight going on aboard that ship right now. Whatever Orion had tried to do, she couldn’t run from who she was anymore.

  Mala. Picking a new name, trying to outrun everything. What, so she could indulge a crush? …Or was there more to it?

  It didn’t matter. It really didn’t. What mattered was that the woman had quite a talent for turning people: Grose, Fenty … Dragons. What Samuels needed to do with her now, was eliminate her. It was that simple.

  She looked down at her arm dispassionately. It lay open, a framework of metal struts interlaced with human tissue that stung and ached in the cold air. She hated tune-ups. Nothing reminded her of how far she still had to go. Before she was no longer as weak as the rest of them.

  She was already more than any of them dreamed. She was less a human enhanced with implants now, and more a supercomputer still hobbled by flesh.

  When she had finished with this part of the plan, she would stop pretending. She had never wanted to be frail, to have breakable bones and skin that bled. Let other people celebrate their limitations as if they were somehow praiseworthy. Samuels knew better.

  She looked away as the skin was flipped closed and a sealant spray misted over the skin. She hated that it hurt. She hated that it bled. She hated that they had to use this healing spray at all.

  Her hand clenched, and—as always—she had to keep herself from clenching the metal bones so tightly that the skin shredded.

  Soon. She would be complete soon.

  Jessica made her way quickly across the Uther. It didn’t take long. The Uther, a rickety collection of metal plates Satomi generously called a ship, had only three decks, and one of them was just Satomi’s quarters, where Jessica was now sleeping on the floor.

  Satomi was pacing by the computers when Jessica arrived.

  “This is risky,” she said with her trademark bluntness. Not much of a one for small talk, Satomi. “You run this for too long and we get spotted … we’re both going to be in little pieces within a few weeks. And Ghost is going to make it take a few weeks.”

  Jessica ignored her. She’d gotten used to Satomi’s type of conversation within a few days, and she didn’t let it worry her anymore. She’d realized she was probably going to die no matter what she did.

  So she was at least going to try to do the right thing.

  “What are you even doing?” Satomi asked finally.

  “Trying to find Ghost. Find anything on Ghost that I can. Find … I don’t even know. Find Eve.”

  “I’m telling you, no one’s heard from her in years.”

  “And I’m telling you, I worked with her.”

  “You worked with someone, I’m sure, but if she’s about your age, she’s not Eve Orion.” Satomi gave a snort. “Unless she was pulling jobs when she was a toddler, anyway.”

  Jessica did not deign to answer.

  “You’re going to piss Ghost off,” Satomi said finally. “You’re going to lose.”

  “All right, that’s enough.” Jessica swung around in the office chair, wincing at the shriek of old metal. “Who’d you piss off?”

  “What?”

  “You said you knew how to disappear. Why’d you have to? Who did you piss off?”

  There was a pause, and then Satomi said, almost sulkily, “The Warlord of Ymir.”

  “Oh, interesting. And was that, I don’t know, a mistake of some sort? An accident?”

  Satomi sighed. “I was trying to smuggle weapons to the resistance.”

  “I see. So what you’re saying is….” Jessica considered. “You have zero right to judge what I’m doing right now.”

  “You’re on my ship,” Satomi pointed out.

  “And I doubt the first job you ever pulled was smuggling weapons to the Ymiri resistance. Let’s not do this.” Jessica gave her a look. “Now shut up. I’m trying to help my friend.”

  38

  The night passed slowly and miserably. Mala did not go to dinner, too ashamed to face the Dragons she had put in danger, and whoever left a tray of food by her door didn’t stay to talk. She slept, but only the strange half-sleep of a mind wholly preoccupied by a problem; even in her dreams, she lay awake thinking about what to say to Nyx. When the ship’s morning arrived at last, after the slow countdown of minutes on the digital clock, she faced the cold knowledge that the time meant nothing. There was no solution, and Nyx had not come to speak to her.

  The Dragon waited until midmorning. Ships, being small and with no wasted space, tended to be rather loud places. Consequent
ly, Mala heard the footsteps long before Nyx rounded the corner. She steeled herself, trying not to imagine what was about to happen and fighting the certainty that this was going to be worse—much worse—than any of her imaginings. For one thing, in her imaginings, Nyx had not had blood seeping through her shirt on one side.

  Guilt stabbed, and Mala turned her face away.

  “So.” Nyx sat and rested her elbows on her knees, managing to make that the post of an interrogator. She did not look at Mala. “You managed quite an impressive heist, convincing the ship’s captain not to report Eve’s death.”

  Mala swallowed. “That wasn’t me.”

  “Oh?”

  “She wasn’t traveling under that name, and she’d made them promise to say nothing about her to anyone. She had enough money for that.”

  “Money you took.”

  “Money she gave me.” Mala felt her temper flare at last.

  That, at least, stopped Nyx in her tracks. “…What?”

  “She got sick. I don’t know what it was, but she seemed to. She told me she was dying. We’d spent a lot of time together—it was a cargo flight, so it took four weeks. It was all I could afford and I think she thought no one would look for her there.” Mala looked down at her hands and shrugged. “She took an interest in me.”

  “As her protégé?” Nyx asked bitterly.

  “Will you stop?” Mala looked over at her. “I’m not who she was. I don’t even know why she told me to take her place, with all she was caught up in. I wasn’t even going to, you know. I made the promise when I thought she’d get better, and I thought, ‘well, she’ll never know if I do or I don’t.’”

  “Forgive me, but that’s a little hard to believe.” Nyx’s voice was flat. “Why would someone do that?”

  “She didn’t have anyone.” That, Mala remembered all too well. She swallowed hard and shook her head. “She was so lonely. That was why I started talking to her in the first place, she always looked sad and eventually she got out of me who I was—she could get anything out of anyone—and she started telling me about her life. How she had a family and it all fell apart, how she tried being a pilot and did these incredible things. She saw Old Earth, she just took a ship and went, all alone. She never wanted anyone around her, couldn’t really bring herself to like people—but in the end, she just wanted someone to tell it all to.” Mala paused. “Sometimes I think … she knew she was dying when she got on the ship.”