by K. Gorman
“This entire book is about the organization that raised me and the people that were involved in it,” she said, her tone low and quiet. “But it’s hard to read. Nomiki was older—she remembers more than I do—and she’s always had a better eye for things.”
Marc’s gaze flicked to her, holding hers for a few seconds, then went down to the book. “There aren’t many pages in that.”
“There’s more than I expected there to be,” she said. “These things aren’t even supposed to exist here.”
His eyes narrowed, brow furrowing as his mind worked. “What—oh, you said you were from the other side of the gate, right?”
“Yes.”
“Mars?”
“No.”
A low thrum came over the area. They both turned their attention to the Nemina as her auxiliary systems booted up and checked themselves. They’d used a cold-turkey approach when they’d taken her offline, and several of the life-support systems would need to cycle through before they could travel. The open door and light breeze would help with that, at least.
Marc was frowning. “Earth, then? But I thought—”
“It was somewhere near the Mediterranean. I don’t know more than that. We’d have to ask Nomiki.”
“Makos is a Greek name, isn’t it?”
“So is Karin, with this spelling. Nomiki, too.” She shook her head. “I don’t know much about the planet. You’re right. Once I got off, I heard all about the wars. I honestly don’t know anything about that. We never heard anything about it while we were there.”
According to this system’s history, most of Old Earth had been gutted by battle and the rest scorched by the planet’s warming—but she hadn’t heard anything about that when she’d been there. The place where she’d grown up had looked dry, sure, but nothing more than it was supposed to be, even in summer. It had looked exactly how it had been described in the history books and novels she’d read.
But maybe she’d been projecting too much into them, skewing their words to fit her world-view.
She’d spent a lot of nights trying to remember.
“Look,” she said. “So far as I knew, we’d left everything behind. So Nomiki either hid these when we escaped or somehow got them later. I don’t know. But—well, here. There’s something you need to see.” She flipped the book open, ignoring the sudden surge of adrenaline as she fingered through to the right page. “You know those ruins? The ones we dream about?”
Marc’s jaw worked, uneasy. “Yes?”
“Do the ones you see look anything like these?”
She found the page and folded it open, turning it for him to see.
But, even before he’d bent to take a closer look, she could tell that he recognized them. His face closed up like an engine hood, covering up and containing his inner workings.
“Yes. They’re exactly like those.”
A muscle in his neck tightened. He stared at the image hard, processing. She resisted the urge to glance down, instead watching his face. Her stomach turned in a tense knot.
After a few long seconds, his gaze flicked up to her. “You knew about them?”
They stared at each other across the short distance, and she could see him process more inside. She thought she saw a shift of emotion pass across his face, but it vanished before she could be sure.
“Look, Marc, I—”
“No. You don’t have to explain.” He straightened, hands crossing over his chest—and it felt like he’d just shut a door in her face. “I understand. I—”
Footsteps rang on the Nemina’s metal floor. A second later, Cookie’s voice cut across the clearing.
“Yo, cuz, you guys got a message. It’s for her.”
She perked up. Nomiki? Had her sister finally called in?
“Who’s it from?” she called.
“Some guy named Senton. Says he wants his debt repaid.”
Instantly, she felt her face shut down. Marc’s changed little, though the ghost of a grimace rippled across his upper lip.
He gave a longing glance toward the clearing, the beach, and the bright blue sea beyond, then let out a slow, drawn-out breath. “And so the dream ends.”
“Yes.” Karin pushed herself off the chair. “Let’s go see what he wants.”
Chapter Two
“Well, we do still have all of his shit.”
Soo-jin leaned against the back wall of the cabin, positioned between two of the manual panels so that her shoulders didn’t touch any of the switches. A wiry strength belied her small stature and, with her bare arms folded across her chest, they made rigid lines against the loose black mesh of her shirt. She flipped a couple of loose dreads back from her face and gave them a sidelong, cat-like smile as they walked in. “If he pisses us off, we could always toss them out into the septic park.”
“Thank you, Ms. Dokgo. We’ll keep that under advisement.”
Marc leaned in, bending at an awkward angle over the back of the pilot’s chair where Karin normally sat. Cookie was the only one sitting, one hand on the dash and the other on a compact computer balanced on his lap.
Karin narrowed her eyes at the innocuous-looking bundle of cords that trailed from the seat and vanished under the dash. They narrowed further when she caught sight of the mess he’d made underneath.
It looked like he’d been trying to jump-start the Nemina’s engine the same way people in old movies hot-wired cars.
If he's messed with my nav system… She mentally tamped the thought back down, refocusing on the screen as Cookie switched it to the call log. The message was far more important.
“Right,” Marc said. “Let’s hear it.”
A video comm. Given how jammed the satellites had been lately, it was surprising he hadn’t just texted, but perhaps he’d felt that a smaller message would go ignored. And maybe, when she located the netlink she’d given him the number for, she’d find messages on there, too. When the Nemina had gone dark, the rest of them had, too. Only Cookie had maintained his connection, trusting in whatever hacker abilities he had to hide his presence.
Actually, hiding himself probably didn't pose that big of a problem. She remembered some of her college roommates fooling around with anonymizers and VPNs, mostly to circumvent the school network’s censored websites.
But, given that she and Soo-jin were the most wanted people in the system, they’d decided to err on the side of caution.
She didn’t need her feeds that badly.
The audio crackled—was it coming out of a different set of speakers? She couldn’t tell, but it sounded off, somehow—then Senton’s voice came on, clear and strong. The screen flickered to show a close-up of his face. Several buildings hedged the background, their sides turned yellow by the night-time security lights. A slip of dark-blue sky shifted in and out of range as the video moved and dipped.
“This is to the crew of the Nemina. I think you know what I am calling about. I won’t mention names, considering what I’ve seen on the feeds, but I want what is owed to me. Please get back to me when you are able. If not, I will tell the authorities all that I know, including the ship ident scans and numbers that I copied before disembarking. Talk to you soon.”
Senton’s face froze on the screen as the message ended, caught in an awkward shift with his eyes not quite meeting the camera and a line of light correction going through his mouth. It stayed that way across the display as a tepid silence filled the bridge.
Karin’s jaw went stiff.
“It’s from a few days ago over, Hegir-Nuna district,” Cookie said. “He attached a read check tracker, so he’ll know we didn’t open it until now.”
“That’s good, at least,” Marc said. “He won’t have gone to the authorities yet.”
Against the wall, Soo-jin gave a derisive snort. Her lips curled back from her teeth as she stared at the screen.
“Don’t bet on it. Dude’s an unreserved guen sucker. ‘I want what I am owed’—who even says that?” She made a tsk-ing noise and dr
opped her gaze with a huff. “At least he didn’t mention the luggage.”
“He probably thinks we’ll bring it with us when we fulfill our end of the bargain.” Marc straightened, arching his back to stretch it.
“He’s not wrong,” Karin said. “We would bring it.”
Soo-jin looked up sharply at her. “Sol, you’re not actually thinking of going, are you?”
Karin opened her mouth. Had she missed something? That was what they’d been discussing, right? Maybe she’d misread.
Before she could answer, Cookie swiveled his chair around, taking some of the wires with him.
“Just what does this guy have on you? What is this ‘bargain’ he’s talking about?”
Right. He hadn’t been there, and she guessed they’d kind of glossed over the incident with Senton, what with the ship’s idents and potential Alliance trackers taking priority.
It wasn’t as though they’d forgotten about him, but…
“He’s a self-possessed asshole we picked up from Caishen,” Soo-jin said.
Er. Karin’s eyes shot up as she switched her gaze to Soo-jin. That wasn’t quite accurate, but Soo-jin had a way with labeling people—especially rich people.
She cleared her throat and shifted her arms around where they crossed over her chest. “He knows I healed Soo-jin. Our deal was that I heal his wife and daughter in exchange for his silence.”
Cookie’s eyebrows twitched as he processed that. “So… Blackmail?”
“Basically,” Marc said.
His eyes once again found Senton’s face on the screen, fixing him with the same gaze he reserved for discovering splattered insects on the Nemina’s front windows once they’d left orbit.
After a few seconds, he switched his gaze to Karin and gave her a small, appraising look. “Though I’m not sure how much it really matters anymore, considering how the situation has changed. What do you think?”
I think that I don’t want to go anywhere near the city. I think I want to get off this planet as soon as possible.
It had become clear that Nomiki was nowhere close. If she had been, she would have answered by now. Unless, of course, she had been taken by a Shadow. But Karin had a hard time believing that her sister, who had slaughtered her way through a secured compound at age twenty-two, could have fallen so easily to one, even as tough as the Shadows were.
Plus, there had been no government tape across her apartment door when Karin and Marc had visited. And all her bags and weapons cases had been packed.
Definitely off planet.
Nomiki aside, there was also the whole thing with Ethan’s father and the rest of the crew on the Ozark. As the thought came into her mind, she caught sight of him sitting unnoticed on one of the bridge's crash seats, and her throat tightened. She'd promised to help him. He hadn't said much about it since the incident, but his silence came with a kind of low, baseline strain that tainted his every move. Sometimes, in the quiet of night, he got this haunted, stressed look on his face.
She'd promised to help him.
Of course, she’d promised to help Senton, too. Blackmail or no, that was still a promise—but Marc did have a point. If she didn’t follow through with it, there wasn’t a whole lot more he could tell the authorities than what they already knew. And she had a feeling that any ship ident he'd copied before leaving the Nemina had been nulled by the work Cookie had done. She frowned down, considering.
“Can he actually track us with the information he copied? You’re changing the identity tags, right? Is that a sure thing for us?”
Cookie sat back. “Well, normally, it wouldn’t be so easy. A ship’s registry is hard-lined into a system, so hacking the ID requires hacking system-secure servers—which is a huge pain in the ass because there are copies everywhere. The Nemina, though, since she’s from Fallon, she’s got hers in a built-in transmitter. The way hers work is the records are only stored on board, built to ping back requests automatically.” His teeth flashed in a smile. “It’s much easier to modify something if you can get your hands on it.”
She stared at him, fighting to keep a blank expression off her face. As a pilot, she’d learned the basics of ship codes and identification security, but her knowledge remained superficial. She’d heard of hacking ident tags, but, since she hadn’t expected to become a smuggler or a pirate, she hadn’t paid too much attention. “So… is that a yes or a no?”
Cookie’s smile flashed larger. “No, his information won’t do shit.”
“What if he’s already blabbed?” Soo-jin made a gesture toward the still picture on the screen. “I mean, he was kind of a slimy-mouthed bastard to begin with. He could have just told them already and set you up to walk into a trap.”
“There is that,” Marc said. He glanced to the frozen feed. “It’s hard to get a read on him, either way.”
“It’s a crappy message for reading,” Soo-jin agreed.
“Plus we hadn’t spent much time with him. We don’t know him that well.”
“The next passenger we get, I’m instituting a ship-wide poker tournament just so we can find out tells,” Soo-jin grumbled.
Marc folded his arms across his chest, his expression stern. He studied Senton’s face for several minutes longer, his brow furrowing deeper.
“It could be a trap,” he concluded.
“Would he risk that?” Karin asked. “He’d have to know that I wouldn’t heal his people if he turned me in.”
“Maybe he’ll get the healing beforehand, and then turn you in. Or maybe this is all an ambush, and his people don’t need to be healed at all.”
Cookie snorted. “Guess the chances are fifty-fifty on that.”
The quiet comment sobered them in an instant.
Fifty percent. Roughly how many the Shadows had taken since the attack had started. Without someone to heal the Lost, that number would only grow. Enlil had one-hundred-forty million people between its two cities, and another eight-hundred million scattered across its continents. System-wide, the population varied between fifteen and seventeen billion, depending on which reports you believed. It was a bit hard to do an accurate census with so many loosely-organized planets, stations, and moons—especially since Fallon had pulled out of the Alliance.
Karin couldn’t stick around to heal the 470 million Lost on Enlil. As much as it killed her to not help, that many people would take her several lifetimes that she didn’t have. She had to find her sister. If the notebook was anything to go by, Nomiki had answers. But…
“I did promise to heal his people,” she said.
“Promises made under blackmail do not count. Especially when we can all be captured by the Alliance.” A notification chimed from a netlink down the hall, and Soo-jin pushed herself from the wall, giving the room a flippant gesture as she passed. “I vote we cut our anchors and get out. Every day under a sky with my wanted poster hanging in the feeds makes me antsy.”
Marc shifted to let her by, gave a brief glance down the hall, then turned his attention back to Karin. He lowered his voice as he leaned in. “You want to heal his people?”
She shrugged. “If they’re Lost, I’m the only one who can do it.”
“What about your sister?”
“She can wait for another few hours.”
He grunted, then switched his gaze back to the front, his eyes narrowing on Senton’s picture. They were quiet for a few moments. “I don’t like the feel of this.”
“You’d have to be crazy to like the feel of this.” Cookie gestured upward at the screen from where he sat. “This guy looks dodgy as shit.”
Marc snorted. “You think all whities look dodgy as shit.”
“That’s because they are. In my humble experience.”
“Your experiences are with hackers. They’re dodgy in any skin color.”
“Hey, this hacker’s saving your ass from being groped by the cops. You should be thanking me.”
“The only reason I’m bringing you on board is so you don’t get tak
en in for association. Or taken in again in general. It was hard enough getting you out the first time.”
While they bickered, Karin’s eyes went back to the screen. Senton had called from one of Bau’s central districts. She recognized some of the chain shops in the background behind him, along with the underlit palm trees. Cookie had said Hegir-Nuna. Generally, only the wealthy moved around there.
Hard to tell whether he’d hand them over to the authorities. It was possible he had some real nationalistic citizenship tendencies, especially with the current crisis on the planet, but he’d given off a somewhat self-centered air. She could definitely see him wanting her healing just for himself.
But, as both Soo-jin and Marc had said, there was no way to tell.
They either had to trust him, or not.
“What would happen if we just jetted, then?” she asked. “I mean, what would change? The identity tags aren’t an issue, so it’s just what he knows about us, right?”
And how much could he possibly know about them? Even in the few weeks they’d traveled together, she, Marc, and Soo-jin had been private, close-lipped individuals. Hell, it hadn’t been until after the Shadows had attacked that she had started finding out more about Soo-jin and Marc—and they’d been together for three scrounging missions at that point.
Senton had definitely not gotten that treatment. Plus, he hadn’t really asked personal questions.
Probably didn’t give a shit about us until he found out what I could do.
“Well,” Marc said. “They’d know for sure if that was you. Not sure they’d change the bulletin much, but Soo-jin might become a little less wanted.” His jaw worked, as if he were chewing his tongue. He paused for a few seconds, his eyes looking on some middle distance as if he could picture it in his head. “They’d have confirmation that you could do what you do. Right now, all they have is you and her and a few former-Lost in a temple.”
Right. Well, that wouldn’t change a whole lot. Although the Alliance had sent out a system-wide bulletin about them, they hadn’t specified why they were wanted. They hadn’t heard anything from Songbird since they’d left. Karin assumed the temple had been on lockdown, but the people there seemed like a wily bunch, and the whole situation had been rather chaotic.