“I can’t believe Sefi didn’t trust me,” I say, genuinely upset. They laugh like I’m joking. “Where…” I forget what I was going to say. “Agea?”
“We’re not going back to the Republic,” Pax replies. “They’ll just make us wait in the Citadel. That will not do.” Atta boy. He looks like a man sitting there in the cockpit. Not that he’s grown. But he’s definitely changed. The surety in his eyes, the set of his jaw—when did it happen, when he stopped letting others choose for him?
I admire the change even as I feel it’s a loss to the world that he’s no longer a boy. The world has enough men. But maybe he can be a different kind of man. Probably not. But maybe is enough.
Dammit, my chest hurts. There’s a tube in my arm. I pull on it until I see I’ve been trailing a blood bag. Oh. I reel it in as he continues. “If Aunt Victra managed to get to an escape pod, she’ll have fallen in the northern hemisphere.”
“Very specific,” Electra mutters.
“Shut up. With all the debris, the telemetry was—”
“You shut up. You almost didn’t wear your harness.”
Pax looks back at me. “That’s not true. I had to twist her ear to get her to wear hers.”
“Teacher’s pet.”
“Troglodyte.”
“Omniprick.”
“Hatchetface.”
Electra gasps. They pout at each other in silence. I chuckle. “I knew that got under your skin.”
“Shut up,” they say in unison.
I just grin.
“If they’re alive, we’re going to find them,” Pax says after a long silence.
“Them?”
“Our people, and yours, Tinman. Like it or not, you’re with us now. And we’re done watching everyone else slag everything up. It’s our turn.”
Electra gives me the fakest smile I’ve ever seen and sneaks me the crux when Pax isn’t looking. I close my eyes, feeling a weird warmth in my chest as I sigh. “What could go wrong?”
AFTER MY MOTHER THREW HERSELF off the cliffs of our Martian estate, my father came to me. It was one of the few audiences with him in which I was not summoned to stand sweaty-palmed before his desk next to that bloodstain in the carpet. He found me in the stables sitting in the sawdust. He was a giant to me in those days. He stroked the muzzle of my favorite horse and said:
“Self-pity is the plebeian’s luxury. All that occurs is either endurable or unendurable. If it is endurable, endure it. If it is unendurable, follow your mother.”
For once, I am thankful for the lesson.
“Kavax au Telemanus.”
A thousand reveries dance in the air. Memories drawn from the activity of my brain’s neurons by means of the Pandemonium Chair. Free associations for the Vox to pick apart and glean and use to hunt down the remnants of my family. The Greens on the other side of the shaded glass catch these images in a net and move along to the next, cataloguing and sifting.
Hiding place.
Secret base.
Fleet orders.
Active Howlers: Locations. Orders. Rendezvous coordinates. Rescue routes.
Sevro au Barca.
Black Cathedral. What is Black Cathedral?