Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(34)

Was this what they were getting from us? Human labor and mechanical ingenuity? Somehow, the PR had all been about “cultural exchange” and such. Like the Leviathan delighted in learning things—which might actually be true. But this machine . . . this was something else entirely.

“Nadim,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he said as if he was standing right next to me. “How can I help you?”

I jumped a little. That, I thought, was going to take some getting used to. “What is this thing?”

“An upgrade,” he said. “For me.”

“I mean, what does it do?”

“Its purpose is classified.”

I dropped the handheld onto the workbench with a bang. “Not doing it.”

“Zara, if you don’t do your work—”

“What, you’ll fire me? Bounce me back to Earth?” I didn’t want that, I really didn’t, but I wasn’t about to let him know it. I was careful to keep my anger up front. “Look, I don’t like secrets. I want to know what this is, or I don’t touch it. Understood?”

Silence. A lot of it. I could feel something rippling through the air, but I couldn’t tell what it was, and though I was tempted to put my hand on his wall and try to figure it out, that seemed . . . intrusive. So I crossed my arms and waited.

Finally, Nadim said, “You’re being difficult.”

“Is that a disqualification?”

“Not doing the work will disqualify you,” he said. “Zara, please. I don’t want you to be expelled from the program. Can’t you—”

“Take somebody’s word for it that what I’m doing is a good thing? No way in hell. That’s why I hated Paradise—I mean, New Detroit. It was twenty-four-seven rules for our own good and nobody could tell me why. And this?” I gestured around the workroom. At him too. “This is all secrets too.”

“Secrets are necessary sometimes,” he said. “You must have a few.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not asking you to work on mine, am I?”

More silence. I was aware that there were time limits, progress reports to be filed; I was aware that I was flunking out, again, on what might be the biggest test of my lifetime.

“Screw this, I’d rather—”

“All right,” Nadim cut in. “I’ll tell you what I can. Is that acceptable?”

“Depends on what you say.”

“That is part of an alarm clock.”

I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud, a burst of shock that turned into genuine amusement. “I’m sorry? An alarm clock?” Nadim, I realized, wasn’t laughing. At all. I didn’t get any sense of amusement from him, and his silence was telling. “Okay, apparently I’m wrong, it isn’t funny. Explain?”

“I shouldn’t,” he said. “I could get in trouble.”

“With who, exactly?” Because everything I’d ever seen about the Leviathan, on all the holo documentaries and in the orientation classes, had classed them as loners . . . born in space, separated almost immediately from their parents to travel the universe and grow as sentient beings on their own. They learned by doing and listening. They weren’t social, exactly, and I didn’t think they had a reporting structure—at least, none that anyone had ever talked about. But he’d referred to an elder. Maybe that was who he was worried about.

Nadim didn’t shed any light on it. Instead, he brought up a vid that shimmered in the air a meter in front of me.

I didn’t recognize the face of the young woman. She spoke in what sounded like Russian, but in the next second, it switched to English. Nadim automatically translating it, maybe.

The woman—the Honor—looked sick and scared half to death. “I don’t know what happened,” she said, and glanced over her shoulder. What was in view appeared to be the data console room, though there was something wrong with the color of Nadim’s wall-skin; it seemed purplish, bruised, wrong. I thought the picture was out of focus. Then I realized what I was seeing was smoke, or at least some kind of visible fog obscuring it. The Honor tried to wave it away, coughed, and then bent off to the side to spit out a thin trail of blood. “We should have followed the course that was recommended, but he said the alternate route was fine when we proposed it. Now we can’t wake him up, we can’t—”

“Another one’s coming!” someone shouted, this time in Mandarin, offscreen. I recognized two words of it from chatter in the Zone, and the translation provided the grammar. The Russian girl looked down at the data console and frantically tried to do something. It must not have worked, because she let out a helpless cry. A blur, a shudder, and she fell away.

Then the wall behind her shattered open, a sucking, gaping hole into space, and the smoke that had been hanging in the air vented out in a thick, twisting rope that snaked out and left nothing behind.

The air, I thought, and gripped the edges of the workbench tight enough I felt a sting. The air just got sucked out. And though I hadn’t seen her disappear, she must have been pulled out with it. There was no movement, no sound. The hole slowly closed up. It took long, silent minutes.

The vid stopped. I felt hollow and sick.

Nadim finally said, “I fell asleep.”