Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(15)
But she winked, picked up an armload of sheets, and said, “Let’s get busy.”
After making sure Clarice understood that she wouldn’t get a second chance, I got a medical bot to see to my broken finger. Didn’t even hurt. I was coming out of therapy when the same guard who’d escorted me on arrival—the polite, muscular one—found me and pulled me aside. “Miss Cole,” she said. “Come with me.”
“Why?”
Wariness crawled over me. Clarice had gone after me in a blind spot, so nobody else had seen, but maybe she’d ratted about the fight. No, that didn’t make sense. She wasn’t the type, and she had more to lose.
“You’ll see,” the guard said with an inscrutable look.
There was something odd about all this. About her too. She was still polite, but there was something else going on. She stood farther away, almost . . . reverent in her regard. Maybe they did see the fight. Maybe this is how they treat badasses at Camp Kuna.
I spotted Clarice as we strode down the hall; she gave me a startled look, eyes widening, and I decided she had no idea what was going on, either. So, not about the attack. Something else.
As we approached the common room, the hot buzz of conversation swelled. Lots of voices, all of them excited. What the hell?
Everything went quiet as I walked in, and I felt disoriented, like a security hi-beam had hit me in the face. I wasn’t used to being stared at.
Belatedly I noticed that the common room was filled with prisoner neon, plus new arrivals in designer suits. I focused on a small woman with the fixed expression of someone who’d had too many cosmetic tweaks. Her platinum blond hair didn’t suit her; neither did the bloodred lipstick. While some might find her attractive, she scared the hell out of me. She wore a Camp Kuna ID tag that read KAMRYN KOSTLITZ, CEO.
The boss.
When she stepped forward and smiled, the rest of her face didn’t move. She extended her hand, and I ignored it. “What is all this?”
Kostlitz somehow turned the fact that I’d refused her greeting into a gesture of presentation to the people standing nearby. “Zara Cole, ladies and gentlemen!” As if I was some star coming onstage.
Then I realized that was exactly what was going down. The other inmates displayed a full range of emotional response: shock, anger, and delight. Drone cameras hovered all around, catching me from three different angles, and there were delegates in expensively tailored royal blue, with white patches on the breast. I knew that logo. Hell, everyone knew that logo. It was playing on every screen in the world right now: an elliptical shape that mirrored the Leviathan’s shape, etched in silver and gold, set on a stylized star, with a tricky H hidden in the design.
The man in the center of the group stepped forward, and some folks skipped a breath.
Marko Dunajski.
I didn’t follow the Honors, but hell if you could avoid knowing who he was. Pretty as a movie star. Tall. Dark haired. Fair skinned, with a Slavic point to his chin and broad, strong cheekbones. He looked like every hero fantasy come to life, right in the common room of Camp Kuna, and none of the kids here would ever forget it.
A year ago, he’d been plucked from university (Cambridge. I’d unwillingly watched his bio in hour forty-six of the Honors retrospective) and sent out to space. Now he was back to meet his successor.
“Zara Cole,” he said, and walked forward to extend his hand. “I’m Marko Dunajski. Welcome to the Honors.”
Interlude: Nadim
I am waiting.
Chastened.
Typhon calls me weak and easily swayed. Not only by the stars but by those we study, searching for the answer to a question the Elders do not allow us to ask. Compliance is required to pass the trials and continue on the Journey.
Many of my cousins have gone ahead. I should have proceeded already, but I . . . I cannot stop the questions. And I cannot deny that even in my failures, I find satisfaction.
Impossible to kill the spark of anticipation, because this waiting means everything begins anew, and the ones who come offer a chance for me to make it right. I have their names, but I cannot yet know their colors or why the Elders chose them until they arrive.
I tell myself that this time will be different.
This time I will succeed. I will complete the test and then, finally, I can follow the song that I am not supposed to hear, a song of pain, and loss, and death. It rings over me in ebbing waves, sad as parting, deep as gravity. These are secrets I am not meant to know, questions I am not supposed to ask. My cousins vanish into the black, and their songs go quiet. The stars sing on.
This time will be different.
Closing voiceover by Garry Moscowitz, director of the banned documentary Shadows in the Sky:
Since the arrival of the Leviathan on that fateful and historic day, we’ve gained so much perspective. Humanity is not alone in the universe. After generations of exposure to science fiction stories, that might not have come as a shock, but it still had a profound effect . . . but what effect? Did we feel less important, less special? In a way, that seems to be true. But there’s an argument that this was not a bad thing.
Humanity’s hubris had, by that time, led us into a mire that was slowly, steadily drowning us, and for all that we saw the signposts, we kept on walking right into the mud, the rising tide. Arguing over whether the mud was just temporary, whether the tide would continue to rise. Why did we do it? In part, because we thought that humanity was implicitly special. That we had been chosen.