Empress of a Thousand Skies(55)

Pavel’s eyelights flashed blue.

“Should I escort them, Fiona?” the Tasinn asked, and Aly’s heart stopped.

“No, you idiot,” the girl said, in a tone of deep condescension. “Your mandate is to protect Nero, not play escort. And you”—she pointed to Pavel—“tell those choirtois to update your software.”

That was that: They were free to go. Alyosha nearly lost it. He wanted to roll around on the floor laughing until it hurt, until his sides split and he cried. But he was still shaking.

The woman and the guard both glared at them before turning and retreating into the conference room. They’d escaped an execution, practically, and gotten step-by-step directions to the place they wanted to go.

They moved in silence. He knew they were all too scared to speak—like they might break a spell and everything would shatter. Finally, they got to a door that was made of a thick, shiny metal that looked different from all the others. Kara swiped her security card, and they pushed their way inside.

They faced a long hallway lined with a row of shelves filled with scrubs neatly stacked and a wardrobe full of hanging lab coats. In the cabinets were boxes of latex gloves and hair caps. Kara ran her palm absently over them, as if she were petting an animal.

Aly shouldered through a set of swinging double doors. He expected to find a lab, but the capsule was flooded with light. It was made almost entirely of glass and reminded him, weirdly, of a tree house that he had played in when he was little. It was full of dark, scattered booths and benches.

Here people sketched, wrote, rearranged puzzles, or played instruments. Some even slept, resting their heads on propped-up elbows—and in one case, their tentacles. All the passengers were dressed in the same green patient scrubs.

A fragile man who looked to be in his seventies nodded to them as he strummed a small stringed instrument that reminded Aly of a vitola. Another man twisting a multicolored cube in his hands didn’t acknowledge them as they passed, and neither did a Yersian woman with matted fur who wrote down music notes furiously across a grid of paper. Even the man who had his head down, cradled in his arms, looked like he was having a fitful sleep, like his mind was working through an important problem.

It was peaceful. Pretty, even.

So why were all the hairs on Aly’s neck standing up?

He turned around and looked through the glass, to the medical cars visible beneath them. “What is this place?” he asked in a whisper.

It was the lab below them—a long one, at least five car lengths, with a narrow aisle down the middle. Men and women in identical white coats and green scrubs worked quietly along the high counters mounted on either wall. It seemed tense, like the pressure in the lab had been cranked up. Bent over petri dishes, peering through microscopes, the scientists were completely engrossed . . . Aly backed away from the glass. He knew that if one of them looked up, he was in trouble.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Kara told him. She sounded uneasy, and he knew she was feeling that same bad juju, a dark undercurrent humming beneath the vision of peacefulness. Then she turned back around and surveyed the room they were in. “This doesn’t look like any patient bay I’ve ever seen.”

“You’re new,” an Optsirh woman said behind them, making Alyosha jump. When she blinked he could see her blue eyes under transparent eyelids. She was sketching a large triangle on a sheet of paper. “Come have a sit-down. Look at a drawing. This is my son.” She pointed to the empty space of her triangle. “He has the most beautiful eyes, doesn’t he?”

Aly tried to catch Kara’s eye. But she was transfixed by the woman, or her drawing, or both.

“And this is my hometown of Anheles,” the woman said, shifting her drawing to the side to reveal another paper underneath. Another wobbly drawing of a triangle. “The canals here freeze over in the winter, but it’s so beautiful to sit and drink tarnitana tea.”

“May I?” Kara asked the woman, and feigned a closer look.

Fine. He’d let Kara deal with the crazies while he and Pavel found a way off this thing—before they went too deep into Bazorl Quadrant and ended up a million astro units away.

At the end of the car was a locked metal door. He pressed his face to the window, but could make out nothing but darkness.

“P, take a look?” The droid extended his camera attachment two feet above him and angled it against the window, giving a decent impression of a human hand splayed against the glass. A flash went off and made Aly wince.

“It’s a cargo bay.” Pavel might have learned to lie, but he hadn’t learned to whisper, and Aly shushed him hard. “There are two crafts. Series Aero and Gency.”

The Aero was a mini freighter, probably for dropping off and picking up medical supplies. The other was a Gency ambulance, which meant it had good lines and lots of speed. A perfect getaway vehicle.

“Aly!” Kara whisper-shouted to him. She was still standing by the crazy lady and her stack of weird drawings. He thought the goal was to make an exit, not a friend.

He turned to tell her to hurry up, but when he saw the look on her face, the words died in his throat. All her color was gone. She looked horrified.

No. She looked terrified.

“Work on the door,” he told Pavel, which seemed to have the most rudimentary security system of all: an ancient lock-and-key mechanism.