Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(46)

“But I did,” Marko said. “And Typhon chose me for the Journey. So dismissing her abilities out of hand might be a mistake.”

They both went silent, and I had the eerie feeling that there was a conversation I couldn’t hear going on. I wondered if Nadim could hear it. Or if it was put into words at all.

Finally, Chao-Xing turned to Beatriz and said, “You have one more day.” She reached for an H2 sitting on a nearby table—next to a coffee cup I’d forgotten to clear away—and tapped it. It filled with a frighteningly long list, and she thrust it to Beatriz. “Begin.”

Bea took it and glanced at me. I’d never forget that look—terrified, fragile, determined all at the same time. She nodded at me. “I won’t let you down,” she said, and I felt she was saying it to me and Nadim, not to Typhon and his Honors.

Marko and Chao-Xing began to walk in lockstep back toward the door they’d entered from.

“Wait!” I said. Chao-Xing didn’t. Marko did, but it seemed like he was resisting some unseen undertow. “Your eyes. What happened—”

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” Marko told me. “For the Journey, Honors are matched to our Leviathan in a different way. It doesn’t hurt.”

“But it does take away your free will. You can’t tell me that’s fine. What did Typhon do to you?”

He looked away, eyes scanning as if he was reading invisible text. “I’m not obligated to provide information simply because you ask for it.”

“You didn’t used to be such an asshole,” I muttered.

“Word of advice, Zara: don’t try to help Beatriz. We’ll know.”

His lack of emotion troubled me. I missed the old Marko. This grim stranger in his violently red uniform, with too-black eyes . . . I wouldn’t have recognized him. Or liked him.

“Marko. Are you okay? Really?”

His head tilted just a fraction to one side, and a corner of his mouth curled into what was almost a lopsided smile. “If I’m not, what can you do about it?”

He was out the door, following Chao-Xing, before I could frame a response.

“What happened to them?” No answer. “Nadim?”

His eventual reply scared the crap out of me. “I don’t know.”

Beatriz worked like a demon all day. I couldn’t help her and I’d be damned if I got in her way, so I called up every difficult, dirty maintenance task I could find, up to and including flushing out our biomechanical sewer system, which involved cramming myself into tight, claustrophobic tunnels and wading knee-deep in muck. Back when I was around fourteen or so, Derry and I had slept in a squat down a drainpipe. Took some crawling through awful to reach our hideaway, but that same filth kept us safe. People didn’t want to brave it to get at what little we had stashed, and on the street, the grime made me invisible.

It gave me time to wonder why someone—Chao-Xing, especially—hadn’t discovered I’d lied about assembling that weapons array. I’d checked it off my list, but surely they had some kind of audit, right? Otherwise, what was keeping any of us from cheating our way right on through this bullshit test period?

Oh, I realized. Nobody’s ever tried. And why would they? They’re stuck on an alien spaceship, isolated and unnerved, and until I showed up, they were all super achievers who’d never cheated a day in their life. It would never have occurred to them.

And since the Leviathan’s experience of humanity got filtered through the Honors they interacted with, it probably never occurred to them, either.

I wrote a note on a piece of scrap paper and passed it to Beatriz during her brief lunch break. She looked hunted and haunted, but when she read it, her eyes widened, and she looked up at me in shock. “You don’t mean this,” she whispered. Like Nadim couldn’t hear everything.

“I do,” I said. “It works. Try it.”

My advice was, simply, cheat.

For an answer, Beatriz—a super achiever if ever there was one—crumpled up my note, dropped it in a flash bin that incinerated it, and said, “Thanks, but I’ll do it my way.”

But she wanted to ask, I thought. She wanted to ask if I’d cheated my way through to get to this point. I hadn’t—well, except for that last thing, and that was a purely moral objection—but I could see it was easy for her to make that assumption. I’d just cracked her trust. Maybe even broken it.

At least I knew Beatriz well enough to know that she didn’t tell tales. Even if she failed out, she wouldn’t rat on me.

I’d done what I could. I went to the console and tried to pull up information on all the bins that were stored in the assembly room—where they’d come from (which turned out to be Earth, not a shock) and full instructions so I could see the final products. Most were things I’d already glimpsed on Elder Typhon, like flexible scaling that would protect Nadim’s skin.

But there were also weapons. Definitely weapons. Like the one I’d refused to build.

So I went back to my quarters and, with the door opened, said, “Nadim? I want to have a private talk. Inside.”

I shut the door and locked it, and sat down on the bed.

“Yes, Zara?” he said, in a tone so neutral I knew he expected the worst.

“You have to know I didn’t do that last thing I marked off on the list.”