Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(42)

“But you like me. And Beatriz.”

“That’s my point!”

“You think I’m doing something to you,” he said. I didn’t deny it, and I felt that hurt again, distant and almost hidden. “I’m not. But still, you don’t trust me.”

“I don’t trust anybody.” Not true. I trusted Derry, once. But look where that got me.

“Then how can you live, so alone?”

The question hurt, because it sounded so bewildered. It made me want to fire back an angry justification, but I swallowed that and said, “Safe. I live safe.”

“But alone.”

“I thought Leviathan traveled alone most of their lives. So what?”

“We’re never isolated. Not completely. The stars sing. Even planets sing. And we sing to one another, across the long reaches, for comfort.” He fell silent for a few seconds, and then said, “If you want me to stay away from you, then I will. It’s difficult, because you are so—”

“Bright?” I said, a little bitterly.

“Loud,” he clarified, which made me smile a moment. I deserved that. “I’m not changing you, Zara. You were a seed, surrounded by hard shell and stony ground. Now you can grow any direction you wish. I will leave you alone until you see that.”

Alone suddenly didn’t have as much appeal. I imagined walking through this space and not feeling Nadim around me, not talking to him or having him talk to me. I wondered how Chao-Xing did that for a whole year. It would break me.

“I don’t want that either,” I said. “And I don’t know why.”

“I think there’s something in you like me,” Nadim said. His voice was quiet, and I felt he was looking at me. Seeing me. “Like tuned strings, we vibrate to the same frequency.”

Music, again. And it felt right to hear him say that. “Yeah, well, probably the biotech patch they put in my head when I was a kid. Right?”

“That’s possible.”

“It’s just that I need to stay myself. Make sure what I’m feeling is really me. You get that?”

“Yes, Zara. I do. I—” He hesitated, and I felt the uncertainty again. “I don’t know how much communication with you is too much. Is this?”

“No.” It felt a little too good, a light, gentle flicker of emotion, like light against my skin. I imagined him turning down a dimmer switch on his broadcast. “That’s okay. But when I say back off—”

“Then I will,” he said, and instantly, he left, and I was drowning in cold silence. I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d gotten to the sense of his presence. His absence was . . . shocking.

I pressed my hand on the wall. “Nadim? Come back?” He did, and it felt like some anxious knot in my chest eased. I didn’t invite him into my room again—it seemed wrong—so I went outside and sank down against the wall and sat there, legs out blocking the corridor. “How did your people ever learn to get along with us? Did they teach you in school?”

He sighed. Actually sighed. “Zara, we are not like you. We don’t have a homeworld. We don’t have buildings where we learn. This is my school. Here. With you. I learn by making mistakes. Don’t you?”

“So many,” I said, and leaned my head back against the wall. “And I’m going to make a hell of a lot more.”

“As am I,” he said. “But perhaps we can learn from them together.”

“When do we get a day off?” I asked on Day-I’d-Lost-Count of work. Working sucked. I’d discovered that in the Lower Eight, where I occasionally turned my hand to honest labor. It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that I’d rather lift a purse or a wallet than scrub toilets. Up here, though, there were no shortcuts.

There was, on this day, a seemingly endless list of repairs to make to the equipment of the human-built section of the ship.

“Days off are a human concept,” he said. “Careful of that part, please. It’s delicate.”

Putting the thin, breakable data module down, I cursed under my breath, and he asked me what the words meant. I told him. Somehow, it wasn’t as satisfying when you had to explain the mechanics of it, and all Nadim said about my definition was that it seemed strange. I guessed it would, to a being without sexual organs as humans understood them.

I was on my back inside a console, checking circuits to make sure everything was working properly, since Nadim had reported a glitch in the interface. Well, what he’d actually said was that one part of the console had gone deaf. But I interpreted that to mean something had burned out. It took me an hour of patient testing to find it, which was ratshit nonsense; diagnostics hadn’t caught it at all and should have. I was still cursing when I crawled out from the dark, cramped space and braced myself against the wall to stand up.

“You did that on purpose!” I didn’t think about the accusation—well, I hardly ever did—but more than that, I didn’t know why I said it. Just that it was true. “What was that, a test? Did you screw the diagnostics too?” Without thinking, I sent the question out like a wave, trying to find out.

I got a shock back. It felt like a thin electric zap, nothing to damage, only to surprise. I snatched my hand away from contact with the wall—with his skin—and Nadim said, “That was just a reminder that you wanted more distance between us.” He could hold a grudge. Interesting. “And I didn’t do anything to the diagnostics. Why would you think I had?”