“Thanks,” he muttered.
“Makayla said you wanted to talk to me, so talk.”
Lucky could hear the note of interest in the other boy’s voice, behind the sneer. Not that he had anything against a guy liking a guy or anything, but Dane would be disappointed if he thought that’s how Lucky played.
“Yeah. Yeah, it was cool of you to switch my work assignment before, and you said if I ever needed anything else—”
Pika came in, lugging a bucket of water for the antelopes and dribbling water all over the floor. Her face lit up. “Hi, Dane! You need a break? You want me to take over making the announcements? I wouldn’t mind. Really.”
Dane looked her up and down. “You? Onstage? The Kindred would probably mistake you for some sniveling little animal and try to shoot you. Too bad you don’t weigh enough for any kind of record.” He pulled out his yo-yo. “And keep your grubby hands off this. I know you’ve been trying to swipe it.”
Pika’s face fell. Her braid sagged over her shoulder, the tip slightly damp. Her eyes went bigger and bigger until she had to draw in a sharp sip of air to keep from crying.
Dane rolled his eyes. “I was kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” He reluctantly pulled out his pocket square and handed it to her. “Listen. Give the feed supply room an extra scrub, the insides of the cabinets and floors and everything, and maybe I’ll think about letting you play with the yo-yo tonight.”
Her face lit up. “Yes, sir!” She giggled and darted off to the feed room.
Dane turned back to Lucky. “Got to give them a little hope, you know?” His voice was low, like they were old confidants. “It keeps them distracted.”
“It keeps them miserable.”
Dane folded his arms, leaning back on the cabinets, appraising Lucky carefully. “You know, when you first showed up, I thought, here’s a guy like me, who understands the situation and can handle the truth. But I’m starting to think you’re just as blind as Pika, easily distracted by toys.”
Lucky fought the urge to tell Dane to screw off. It wasn’t easy.
Dane crouched down, reaching out a hand to pet the zebra, but his fingers went against the hair’s direction, and the zebra flinched. “So tell me what you need that’s so important.”
“It has to do with time.”
“You want a wristwatch? A clock?”
Lucky turned away abruptly before Dane could see how much he hated asking for another favor. He repacked the revival pods in the cabinet with his back to Dane. “Don’t ask how I know this, but my birthday is in three days. I’m turning nineteen. And I’m on their throw-down-the-drecktube list, I can promise you that. I tried to escape from an enclosure. And I punched a guard once.”
Dane appraised him with surprise. “I see. And you don’t want to be dragged away from your pretty little songbird.” Jealousy edged his words.
“It isn’t about Cora.” The zebra was almost revived now, and Lucky reached for the harness. “It’s about not wanting to end up like Chicago.”
“No one knows what happened to Chicago.”
Lucky shuddered, imagining the charred body Leon had described. His hands started shaking as he slipped the harness over the zebra’s head and led it to its cell.
Dane watched him work. “I’ll be nineteen in just a matter of weeks, too, though the others don’t know that.”
Lucky closed the zebra’s gate. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, I’m sure. The Kindred will probably make you a prince on Armstrong, given how much you cooperate.” He wiped his hands off and looked at Dane. There was a cryptic expression on the boy’s face.
“Converting human time to Kindred time isn’t a simple feat,” Dane explained. “It’s complicated even for the Kindred. They have timekeepers tasked with converting time on different stations and different planets. Roshian is one of the few timekeepers on this station. He doesn’t just convert it. He keeps all the records. I could ask him to change the birth date they have down for you. Just a little change, something believable—about to turn eighteen, instead of nineteen. He owes me a favor.”
Lucky eyed him cautiously. “What will it cost me?”
A smile flickered over Dane’s face. He jerked his head for Lucky to follow him into his cell, which he did, reluctantly. It was filled with trinkets and books, the nicest blankets, even a robe with monogrammed initials that weren’t Dane’s. Dane took down a cookie tin filled with pocket squares, and he pulled back the thick cloths and a few torn-out pieces of paper. Beneath were hundreds of tokens, carefully padded by the pocket squares to silence them.
“You didn’t get all of those from mixing drinks,” Lucky said.
Dane closed the tin, shaking his head. “The Kindred think of themselves as being above reproach, and most of them are—given their unique concept of morality. But every once in a while you find one who’s willing to bend the rules. One whose morality is a bit more tarnished. A bit more human, you could say.”
Lucky folded his arms. “You mean Roshian?”
Dane nodded. “You might be aware of the fact that on occasion he hunts all the way to the kill. A real kill. I look the other way. He pays well. You were onto something when you mentioned Armstrong. Only I don’t want to be a prince.” Dane’s eyes gleamed. “I want to be king.”
Lucky tossed a look toward the cell block to make sure no one else was overhearing this nonsense. Pika was banging away in the feed room, and other than that, it was quiet.
“I overhear the hosts and hostesses talking, sometimes,” Dane continued. “They say that on Armstrong, money is everything. The more tokens you arrive with, the more power you have. And all of this”—he shook the tin—“is going to set me up well, but I need more than money to be a king.”
Lucky clenched his fist so hard that his knuckles turned white. “Let me guess. You need subjects.” Now the gift of the notebook was making sense—Dane was trying to ingratiate himself.
“Not subjects,” Dane said. “Associates. Even with money, it won’t be easy to set myself up as a leader right from the start, with no one watching my back. But if I had someone loyal, someone I could trust, someone others inherently trust too . . . Someone who could work his way into Armstrong’s society and spread the word about how fair-minded and powerful I am.”
Fair-minded? Powerful? Lucky had a hard time keeping a straight face.
In the cell opposite them, the zebra had lain down. It was unnatural for a hoofed animal to lie like that, unless it was sick. The whole place felt infected.
“I’m waiting for an answer,” Dane said.
Lucky cursed under his breath. “You promise you can get Roshian to change my birthday?”
“Yes.”
“Then do it,” Lucky said reluctantly. “And in return, if we’re shipped off to Armstrong, I promise to tell people there whatever you want me to tell them.” He told himself it was an empty promise. His mind went to the carving that Chicago had made in the safari truck’s dashboard: 30.1. Which meant there was an almost 70 percent chance Earth still existed. Not much to hold on to, but something.
He heard another giggle as Pika returned from the storerooms, and he started to go.
“Not just yet,” Dane said, keeping his voice low. “Roshian’s going to ask for a favor in return, and I can’t spare any of my tokens.”
Lucky dropped his voice even lower. “There’s not much I can do from back here.”
“Maybe,” Dane said. “Maybe not. I think it all comes down to one question.” His blue eyes darkened. “You said this wasn’t about Cora. So exactly how close are you to our little blond songbird?”
22
Cora
“GOOD,” CASSIAN SAID. “NOW raise them again, higher.”
Cora let out a heavy breath, and the pair of dice fell to the table. They had been training almost every other day, and she’d had no idea how physically demanding levitation would be. At the start of their training, when it had been an effort just to nudge a die an inch
across a table, she’d felt like her mind might rip in two. Now she yearned to go back to that simple dull headache.
Cassian reset the dice. The sounds of jazz music and clinking glasses filtered through the wooden screens of the alcove, distracting her, but not as much as her worries over Lucky. His birthday was in two days now.
She tried to put Lucky out of her mind and focus on Cassian’s dice. By her count, the Gauntlet was just days away from reaching the station. Then she would have three more days while the docking procedure happened. Six days in all—not much time. Were the other candidates, the Scoates and Conmarines and Temporals, desperately preparing like she was?
“Try it again,” Cassian repeated. “Higher. You must reach twelve inches and hold it there for thirty seconds before you will be ready.”
“I know. I just need to catch my breath.”
Cassian’s eyes flickered toward the screen. His hands kept flexing and unflexing.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer at first, but then he lowered his voice. “I have been debating whether I should tell you something.”
She raised an eyebrow.
He glanced in agitation toward the screen. “POD30.1. I have been looking into the algorithm’s prediction records. Usually they are stored in a database accessible to all Kindred with level-five and higher clearance. But the particular results regarding Earth have been flagged with a level-twenty clearance. I cannot access them. Only delegates can.”
“Fian’s a delegate.”
“Yes, and he has already reviewed the record at my request.” He blinked a few times too many. “There were . . . irregularities. The time stamp was off. Someone modified the results. It is possible—though not definitive—that Chicago could have overheard talk of this on a safari.”
“So it’s true?” She felt her eyes widening. “They lied about Earth being gone?”
“We know only that the record was tampered with. It proves nothing.”
But it could prove everything, she thought.
“Why would the Council tamper with it?”
“They fear humanity is at the precipice of evolution. The Council does not wish to compete with another intelligent species. But if Earth were gone, they would not have to deal with the future of humanity. Only with the handful of humans they currently have in captivity, such as yourself. Easily controllable—so they assume.”