Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(33)



Beatriz suddenly yawned, and I caught it too, and we both laughed. “Is it night?” she asked. “I don’t even know what time it is. But it feels like I’ve been up too long.”

That was an excellent question. How did time zones even work out here? That was something nobody had asked in our informative sessions, but to keep a schedule, we had to operate on a clock. I led the way back toward the data hub, which seemed like the central point of our useful space.

Nadim, I noticed, didn’t light our way for us in helpful pulses on the walls. Maybe he was still offended. In training, the instructors had explained how the Leviathan kept track of us, and essentially, it was like we were always on his alien GPS. Ghosts inside his skin he could feel moving, breathing, existing.

The interface obligingly told us the time, and Bea was right. It was late. Somehow, time had slipped by, and I hadn’t even noticed. After skimming some historical facts about how near-Earth space used to be set on Texas time, but now was international, I realized we were living on Icelandic time. Until we decided mutually what sleep/wake schedule to use.

It dawned on me with a rush that we could soon be so far away that time would have no real meaning, no sunrises and sunsets to regulate our days. Just schedules. We weren’t going to be bound to even those ancient rules. We could make our own.

Maybe hours would have more than sixty minutes. A week could be ten days. It was like all the rules that bit at me like barbed wire, my whole life, might soon drop away, and I wanted to stomp my feet and shout in exultation.

No limits.

“That’s a happy look,” Beatriz said. “Why?”

There was no point in trying to explain. She seemed like someone who had colored inside the lines in school while I was out back spraying my incomprehensible art all over the walls. Maybe that’s why they paired us up, checks and balances. More to the point, I could at least answer her other question.

“That’s because I can tell you, it’s ten thirty at night in Rio right now. Twelve thirty in the morning, ship time.”

“You should rest,” Nadim said then. “Your alarms will sound in six hours.”

Nadim wasn’t kidding about the wake-up call. It started as a quiet, respectful chime. When I rolled over, groaned, and pulled a pillow over my head, it got louder. Louder. Became a gong, relentless and metallically pounding next to my head.

I yanked myself away from the wall and off the bed. They’d walked us through mock-ups of the crew quarters during our orientation week in New York, and I knew where to find the pull-out toilet, the slide-open shower.

Clean, uniformed, and still cranky at the early start, I headed straight for the canteen, where I found Beatriz finishing up her breakfast. She gave me a cheery smile.

“So what the hell did we have to get up for?” I meant the ask for her or Nadim, whoever wanted to answer. Beatriz’s smile pulled a cute dimple in her cheek this time.

“You didn’t check your H2?”

“I don’t have one.”

“It’s in your quarters,” Nadim said. “It contains your assignments for the day, and you must track and enter progress. Please get it.”

I gave Beatriz a pleading look, and she shook her head, but she got up, left at a run, and came back with the device. She handed it to me, and I opened it with a tap. “Oh, seriously, come on.”

Beatriz turned her device on, and we turned them side by side. We had exactly two things in common today: lunch and dinner. Apart from that, we’d be working on our own until nearly seven Iceland time. Twelve hours, minus two for meal times. From my uninformed, quick view of her schedule, it looked like Beatriz was going to be doing some programming work, database updates, and various math-y tasks. A few things in the lab.

I checked mine. “You’re kidding me,” I muttered.

“You will be assisting with assembly of upgrade equipment,” Nadim said.

Beatriz finished her coffee and carried her plate and cup to the small disinfecting unit, then came back to pluck her H2 out of my hand. “See you at lunch, Zara.”

I glared at the handheld left to me, put it down, and defiantly drank a cup of coffee before I got to work.

I ended up in a room I hadn’t been in before, a space built out as some kind of storage and workroom; I wondered which of the former two Honors had been in here using the tools, which ranged from blunt sledgehammers to fine-pointed, delicate circuitry points. I knew my way around most of them—time in the Zone would do that—but I’d never seen so many together or in such careful order.

The handheld showed a bin to pull, and I walked down a long row of closed storage containers; the one they wanted me to access was enormous. It was also on wheels. When I touched it, it glided out and followed me like a pet back to the workbench, then obligingly opened to reveal . . . something. My first impression was that it was an engine of some kind, but it was massive. Not a design that looked totally human-inspired, either, though it had some familiar aspects. I looked through the notes. Lots of information about putting thing A into slot B, but nothing much about what it was supposed to actually do.

And that bothered me. A lot. The knowledge the Leviathan had shared with humanity was mostly biological or biotech in nature—including genetic cures, like the DNA patch that had ultimately fixed the headaches I’d endured through my childhood. I had a tiny little piece of Leviathan DNA in there, fixing what was broken. Everything they’d given us had an organic root to it, a grown kind of technology.

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