Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1)

by Hogarth, M. C. A.

  The day—night?—wore on and her arms and hands throbbed from her labors, but the boxes filled until at last Bryer closed the last one. Reese tapped her ship telegem.

  “All right. We’re ready.”

  “On our way,” Kis’eh’t said to the intercom and set aside her cards. “She’s just in time to save me. You’re too good at this game.”

  “It’s luck,” Hirianthial said.

  The Glaseah snorted and gathered the brightly colored cards before sliding them into the box. “You never say that about playing Pantheon.”

  He laughed and stood. “Right. Iley might show up and laugh at you.”

  “Better the Tam-illee deities than the Harat-Shariin,” Kis’eh’t said, sealing her parka. “I notice there’s no Eldritch god or goddess in the deck.”

  “Of course not,” Hirianthial said, grinning at her. “That would be telling.”

  She laughed. “Let’s go take care of Reese’s boxes.”

  They suited up and trotted to the base of the cliff and squinted up into the dark. Kis’eh’t shone her lantern up the wall and spotted the bottom of the first box. “I’ve got the rope. You steady the box when it gets in reach. Your reach, not mine.”

  He chuckled.

  Inch by inch the box lowered into view until finally he could stretch up and tickle the corner with a gloved finger. A few moments later and he could flatten his palm against the bottom, so he did.

  The hair along his neck rose. He shivered.

  “Cold?” Kis’eh’t asked.

  “No,” Hirianthial said. “Just a reaction.” He steadied the box as Kis’eh’t position the sled under it, then guided it onto the bed. “I’ll just take this to the lock.”

  “All right.”

  He pushed the box back to the Earthrise, leaving it just outside the airlock, before going back for the second. By the time the third hove into view and settled onto the sled, he had dismissed the chill.

  “I’ll wait for Reese to get down,” Kis’eh’t said. “I know you want to get back to where it’s warm.”

  “I wouldn’t mind it,” Hirianthial said with a smile.

  All three boxes fit in the airlock, though there was little room to spare. Hirianthial sealed the external door and watched what little atmosphere existed on Selebra flush out and the Earthrise’s warm air fill it. The sigh of relief escaped him before he could stop it, and it was nice to be able to hear it properly with the mask off.

  He dragged all three boxes into the bay before stripping off his gloves, then crouched in front of the first to check the seal.

  The moment his fingers lit on the box’s edge the shivering returned. He observed the symptoms in himself with clinical interest—no fever, no dizziness, no doubled vision... nausea, though. And the shaking wouldn’t stop.

  He lifted his hand. The shivering stopped. He rested it on the top of the box again. The nausea re-doubled. He leaned on the dolly as a wave of sweat broke through his skin. Was it covered with some toxin? Surely not, but his medical equipment wasn’t distant. He could fetch it. Hirianthial turned and took a step, and the world spun. Looking back, the boxes doubled in his vision, and then rose into the air—no, that was himself, sliding to the ground.

  He fumbled for something to help him stand, and his hand caught on the box seals. The nausea nearly overpowered him. What could possibly be the problem? Something inside the boxes? He had to look. He had to know. The seal clicked open beneath his fingers and he looked inside.

  Corpses. The boxes were full of corpses—no, dying bodies. Their screams crowded out the world in his ears and smeared his vision with a kaleidoscope of ragged black and searing red.

  “Where are the boxes?” Reese asked as Bryer spiraled to the ground beside them.

  “Already inside,” Kis’eh’t said. “Hirianthial took care of them.”

  “Good. Inside sounds good, too.” Reese switched to the telegem. “Irine? We’re on our way back in.”

  “Yay! I’ll have hot chocolate for everyone when you get back.”

  They chatted companionably on the way to the airlock. The boxes were inside the bay as promised. Reese was still peeling out of her suit when Kis’eh’t stopped alongside one of them.

  “Aksivaht’h! Reese, help!”

  “Help what?” Reese said as Sascha darted past her to the Glaseah’s side. She joined them and stared at the body of the Eldritch, having a flashback to that moment she’d imagined him, graceless and vulnerable at the feet of a slaver. Of course, in reality he couldn’t even sprawl without grace. She managed to get angry with him for that.

  “What the—?”

  “One of the boxes is open. Maybe he touched one. Are they poisonous?”

  “Of course not!” Reese said testily. “If they had been, my tome of instructions on completing this job would have mentioned something about that.”

  “He’s out cold,” Sascha said. “I mean, really cold.”

  Bryer scooped up the unconscious Eldritch, pausing as Sascha lifted the man’s hair and tucked it into Bryer’s arms so the Phoenix wouldn’t trip on it. He had just finished when Irine appeared in the door with a tray of steaming mugs. Her mouth gaped open at the sight.

  “Angels! What happened? Will he be okay?”

  “Of course he’ll be okay,” Reese said. “Since obviously his sole reason for being in my life is to be a victim we have to constantly rescue.”

  Irine set the tray down and hovered, blocking Bryer from carrying the Eldritch any further into the Earthrise. As she watched the Harat-Shar coo, Reese’s initial surge of anger faded. She looked, as Bryer had insisted. The Phoenix seemed comfortable with the Eldritch’s weight but Hirianthial was far too tall to be easily held that way. His legs and arms draped over Bryer’s feathered arms, and strands of his hair had fallen over his slack face and glided over Bryer’s wings. Irine was shifting from foot to foot, her hands a few inches away from Hirianthial’s body, as if she was desperate to touch him and afraid to. Did one touch an unconscious Eldritch? Was it okay because they weren’t awake to notice? Or worse because their minds weren’t on guard against you?

  The tableau was haunting because of its very wrongness. People didn’t carry Eldritch in their arms. Forcing normal people to fight between wanting to stroke them and not wanting to touch them was just as bad.

  “Irine,” Reese called. The Harat-Shar looked at her guiltily. “You and Bryer get him to the clinic, okay? Bundle him up in something.”

  The Harat-Shar nodded and pulled Bryer after her.

  She, Kis’eh’t and Sascha worked in grim silence. When every last crystal had been checked for damage and the final box secured to the cargo axle, Reese straightened and pressed her hands against her back.

  “Should we lift off now?” Sascha asked.

  “Check on Hirianthial first,” she said. “I need you to be able to concentrate in case those pirates come after us and I’m sure you want to know what’s wrong with him.”

  Kis’eh’t was already through the door. Sascha paused at it. “What about you, boss?”

  “I need to call to find out where we’re going,” Reese said. “Go on.”

  Sascha nodded and left her alone in the bay. Finally. Reese dropped onto the floor and pressed the base of her palms against her closed eyes. Her stomach no longer felt like it was being etched with acid when she was under stress, but it could still tie into uncomfortable knots. It wasn’t just the pirates. It was having someone be sick when they were so far from known space and its hospitals.

  Reese took a long breath through her nose and let it escape slowly through her lips. Then she picked up the tray of mugs Irine had forgotten and stopped by the galley to drop them off before heading for the nearest comm unit, in her quarters. After entering the code from her instructions and waiting, a thin, almost cadaverous man appeared on her screen.

  “I have the delivery,” Reese said.

  “I am sending you the drop-off coordinates in a coded packet. Use the encryption key attac
hed to the contract to unlock it,” the man said so brusquely she knew he was about to cut off contact.

  Before he could, she said, “There are pirates in this system. Are they after this stuff?”

  “Don’t bother us with your problems,” he said. “Just make the delivery.” The screen blanked.

  Reese stared at it, eyes unfocused, until the machine pinged and an encoded packet popped up in the corner.

  “Reese?”

  She leaned to the intercom. “Yes?”

  Kis’eh’t sounded fretful. “You’d better come down here.”

  Reese sighed. “All right.”

  As she stood, she caught movement in her peripheral vision: her hammock shifting where she’d left Allacazam to sleep. She detoured there and pulled him into her arms.

  A muzzy veil of lavender drifted past her eyes.

  “Not quite awake, are you?” she said. “You will by the time we get to where I’m going.”

  A bruised peach aroma: not quite a question, but close. “You’ll see.”

  She headed for the makeshift clinic-lab and found it crowded with everyone else. The bunk had been folded out of sight and Hirianthial swaddled with blankets and then tucked into a nest of comforters on the ground; he was covered in so many of them she couldn’t see his face. When Reese stopped at the door, Irine said, “He was too long for the bunk.”

  Kis’eh’t was the closest, tucked into a tight loaf-shape with her hands pressed onto her ankles. “I ran the diagnostic from the first aid kit over him, but it doesn’t come up with anything. He’s barely breathing.”

  “And I loosened his collar, but it hasn’t seemed to help,” Irine added, wringing her hands.

  Reese joined them at the Eldritch’s side and set Allacazam down on the ground before leaning over and folding an edge of fabric down. Her breath hissed through her teeth.

  “Is that—he’s crying,” Irine said, eyes wide.

  “While unconscious,” Sascha said from the stool, sounding uneasy.

  “He looks awful,” Kis’eh’t said.

  Allacazam rolled past Reese and attempted to scale the ziggurat of blankets. When she noticed him trying, she picked him up and set him on top near Hirianthial’s chest. The Flitzbe rolled over it and nestled against Hirianthial’s ribcage, tucked against the armpit like a second heart. The Flitzbe’s colors flared through orange and yellow to a dull, ugly maroon.

  “What does that mean?” Irine whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’s still not breathing well,” Kis’eh’t said, “And he’s too cold. What do we do, Reese?”

  “How do I know?” Reese replied, her irritation erupting out of nowhere. “I’m not the doctor... he’s the doctor! The doctor’s not supposed to be the unconscious one!”

  They stared at her with wide eyes and she sighed. “Sorry.”

  She reached to the Flitzbe instead, rested her hands on the soft fur of neural fibers. She swallowed and composed herself. Allacazam?

  The faintest sense of reassurance.

  What’s wrong?

  Her eyes opened and settled on Hirianthial, saw a gaping wound the size of her joined hands over his breastbone pulsing the same dull maroon as Allacazam’s fur. She snatched her hand back.

  “Reese?” Sascha said from behind her.

  “I... I don’t know. Kis’eh’t, you and Irine can watch over him while the rest of us get out of this system.”

  “This isn’t the time to be thinking about business!” Irine said.

  “I’m not thinking about business,” Reese said, balling her fists. “I’m thinking about the fact that there are pirates crawling around this system and we’re a weaponless freighter. I’m also thinking that the faster we get out from under their guns, the faster we’ll get to the Core and a real hospital and a real doctor.”

  Irine’s ears fell. “I’m sorry. It’s just... how can you fix something when you don’t know what’s wrong?”

  “I wish I knew,” Reese said. “Sascha, Bryer, come on. Let’s get the bleeding soil out of here.”

  Anxiety. Fear. Sickening fear, bright as acid, pulling breath after breath until—

  Anger. Confusion, no concentrating, taste and smell twining.

  Will I ever live to have my children?

  Pirates—I had forgotten about the pirates—have to focus—

  —lived so long, nothing that lives so long should die—

  So many “I”s. So many selves. Surely there was a single one in the middle, something to hold onto in the wave. But every “I” turned out to be the wrong one. Sorrow, gray as too many days without sunlight. Worry as corrosive as centuries of water wearing at stone. Flashes of panic like memories of knives parting flesh. Hirianthial shredded like wet paper and vanished into the maelstrom.

  A sight now of a body. Familiar, even concealed by covers. That ankle still had twinges after he’d fallen on it poorly, dismounting a horse. Those twin aches were his knees, a whine that had grown so gradually he’d never realized how stressed the joints had become. That scar: a visceral memory of the armsmaster catching him on the side, cutting a divot of flesh from between the two ribs. Those scars, thin ridges crossing his back and stomach, perfidy’s mementos. His chest, which no longer flexed with the ease of youth; his wrists, broadened by the House swords.

  His body. And Allacazam on top of it, building shields around his mind to replace the ones he had no energy to lift. When he tried, his faculties failed him entirely, and he almost lost touch with his own body.

  A twinkle of stars and a gentle wind blew past him, as if to counsel patience. As he grappled with that, it also offered him the image of a patient convalescing.

  That was before he examined the extent of the damage. His entire mental apparatus, that part of him that sensed the unseen energies and shaped them, was in tatters.

  A fluting curiosity asked while holding him apart from the wound.

  “I’ve never seen the like,” Hirianthial said to the Flitzbe’s presence. “I’ve heard that we can be hurt in these areas, but I’ve never...” He stopped, sinking into a blank despair.

  The crystals.

  The screams.

  The star-sprinkled sky returned and dropped around him, sealing it away. He wanted to protest that the screams were important, but Allacazam was adamant. There would be time for the screams after the wound had closed a little further. Healing came first.

  “You have got to be crazy,” Sascha said. “This is a joke, isn’t it?”

  Reese stared at the opened packet, then leaned forward and checked the encryption key. Twice. Then the packet. Twice.

  “Angels on the battlefields,” Sascha said. “It’s not a joke. Our drop-off point is in Sector Andeka, the place we’re supposed to be avoiding.”

  “It’s not the same solar system,” Reese said in a small voice.

  “Yeah, well, let me tell you, Boss, a couple of solar systems is not enough distance between me and slavers.”

  “Fleet cleaned out that nest,” Reese said.

  “Fleet also told you to stay far-clear of it for a year!” Sascha said.

  “So what are we supposed to do, renege on the contract?” Reese snapped. “We’re supposed to drop off the shipment. We’re expected. We’ll just sneak in, deliver and leave.”

  Sascha’s reluctantly slid into the pilot’s seat and took the controls. “I think this is crazy.”

  “I think this is the last time I’m signing a contract this mysterious,” Reese said. “But we can’t just break off because we think someone might be left to shoot at us. Come on, Sascha. You got past slavers in that system, and now pirates in this one on the way in.”

  The engines woke beneath the Harat-Shar’s touch. “We’re not out of this yet.”

  Reese ignored him and sat at Kis’eh’t station, belting herself in. “It’s going to work out. It can’t not work out, because I’m not planning to die here.”

  The Earthrise shuddered, then vaulted upward, bursting l
oose from the ice that had formed over its landing feet. Reese lapsed into the silence of her checklists as Sascha pulled them out of the thin atmosphere and out into the dark, the dark that was supposed to be so vast the chances of being found in it were laughable. The dark that was supposed to be safe.

  The dark that wasn’t. Two red triangles popped up on her sensors the moment they spiraled out from behind Selebra’s shadow.

  “Sascha—”

  “I see them,” Sascha said, voice tight.

  Reese hunted for something to hide behind. The nearest asteroid belt was too far. The planet itself—no, they’d be target practice if they landed. The red blots were no longer ignoring them... they were approaching. “We’re going to have to out-run them.”

  “We’re going to have to try,” Sascha said, and something about the word “try” made the muscles in Reese’s gut clench.

  She tapped the intercom. “Bryer, pet the engines. We’re going to haul tail. Even if it means leaving some tail behind.”

  “Understood.”

  The pirates coasted closer. They weren’t even burning their engines, from the sensor data. Were they so certain of themselves that they were being careless?

  “Hang on,” Sascha said, and for once Reese gripped the chair’s battered plastic edges in time to save herself from being thrown across the bridge as the ship twisted back on its own course and flung itself in the opposite direction. The safety belt kept her in her chair, but it bit into her neck so hard she smelled blood. When she blinked the spots out of her eyes, Reese found them lengthening the intercept cone. If the pirates had the kind of engines the slavers in Andeka had mounted, Sascha’s strategy wouldn’t work....

  But the pirates didn’t accelerate. They didn’t even fire their in-systems.

  “What the—?”

  One of the ships flickered on her screen and Sascha yelled, “Evading!”

  The Earthrise jerked to port, flinging Reese forward so hard she gagged on the safety harness. She rubbed her throat and checked the instruments for damage. “They missed?”

  Sascha was scowling. “I’m not even sure they fired!”