Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(43)

“Such a jerk.”

“I’ve made you angry,” he said. “You burn so . . . warm.” There was something about the way he said that word that made my breath hitch. It was something I noticed about him . . . the tone in his voice, the heat of the walls within him. You’re reading into it, I told myself. But I remembered the dream that had so unsettled me—Nadim’s nightmare of being sealed alone in the cold, a lonely and desolate scream in the night.

No wonder he longed for warmth. No wonder I did too. All those long nights out in the Zone, running from my own nightmares and believing I was free. Weird, to come all the way out here into the black and find someone who understood me so well. Who wasn’t even human.

Without even thinking about it, I blurted the next thing that occurred to me. “You did mess with the console.”

There it was, an unmistakable pulse of surprise. And guilt. “How do you know that?”

“It’s not my fault you’re thinking so hard you’re leaking into my head!”

“Zara, I wasn’t thinking about it at all,” he said. “That’s the problem. You are . . . difficult to keep out. And I’m trying.”

My mouth went dry, suddenly, and I rubbed my palm against the nu-silk of my uniform. “But—”

“It’s difficult for me to keep things from you. I don’t know why. I’ve never had this problem before.”

“So I’m a problem.”

“It’s not the same thing, Zara.”

Sure. Like I hadn’t heard that one a million times.

I put the handheld tester back into the toolbox and had the satisfaction of slamming the lid shut. Not very many things around here I could slam. The sound echoed through the chamber, and I kicked the metal housing of the data console for good measure.

His voice flattened. “If you’re finished with the repairs, there are other tasks on your list.”

“I’m ahead of schedule,” I pointed out.

I’d learned something from this exchange, at least. Nadim could lie. And I could tell when he did. Since I was good and pissed about that reveal, I headed to the VR room to burn some anger. I scrolled through a lot of the standard game stuff, quests, and puzzles, and stopped on the combat sims.

I tapped that, fast, and got a dizzying array of options, from standard martial arts to cage fighting to guns and knives and half a dozen more weapons. I hadn’t looked at all the choices before. Damn. Somebody knew how to party. I suspected it was Chao-Xing. I started out on the midlevel, just to get warmed up, on the cage match, and ended up in a startlingly realistic VR sim that gave me convincing biofeedback on punches, chokes, and throws. No bruises or broken bones, and Nadim’s spongy floor came in handy for a fall mat.

It felt madly great. I dialed up the level to expert and went at it. Then, when I’d won two and lost the third, I swapped for an opponent with a knife. Then one with a gun in a realistic street setting. The bullets, I learned, hurt. But I didn’t get killed. Not once.

Sim was just what I needed to clear the cobwebs and confusion, get me back in my own skin again.

Nadim didn’t tell me to get to work; I showered and returned to task myself. While I was kicking ass and taking names, more orders had appeared on my H2, sending me back to the same workroom where I’d assembled the shock device. Without a word, I went there and checked until I found the project number. Another huge rolling bin, and it was subnumbered.

Since Nadim can’t work with components like this, humans brought this tech on board at some point. Maybe Marko or Chao-Xing?

I stepped back and looked at the rows of enormous bins. This one was number ten of a series that stretched all the way to fifteen. When I pulled the tabs, the sides fell away to reveal another enormous, mysterious device—larger than the last, towering over me by a good two meters at its highest point. It reminded me of something I’d seen before, at a distance, but completely outsized. Is it an engine? No, that wasn’t right, though it had some aerodynamic sweep to it.

Took me a few moments to figure out it was a weapon. Laser cannon, missile delivery, I didn’t know, but whatever it was, it was militant. And from the size of this thing—it wasn’t meant for any drone.

There are weapons here, and they’re having us assemble them. No. They were having me assemble them. Beatriz hadn’t set foot in here at all. Maybe this was the kind of shit that Gregory Valenzuela couldn’t adapt to, and I wasn’t down with it either. In the Zone, I had been great at crafting new gear out of parts I scavenged, so a picture of why they needed me was starting to form.

This time, I didn’t ask Nadim about what I found. I just sealed up the device, rolled it back into place, and checked the task off on my list. I’d find out what this was about. Nadim wasn’t the one with the answers. I wasn’t sure who was; maybe I was going to have to beat it out of Marko or Chao-Xing. But someone, somewhere was going to tell the truth.

Because I wasn’t going to put thing A into slot B until someone told me why Nadim needed to be armed.

As I finished up, a loud, shrieking signal rang through the whole ship. It reminded me of the lockdown warning that pealed through the Zone when the cops stormed in to arrest someone really dangerous. Shit. Maybe by refusing that job, I’d set off something.

“Nadim! What’s happening?” I ran out of the assembly room, only to pause in the hallway because there were no guiding lights to tell me where to go. “Nadim?”