Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(48)

“How’s Beatriz doing?”

“I can’t tell you, Zara.”

“Oh, come on. I’m not interfering!”

“I can’t.”

“Fine, let’s talk about where we go from here. The Tour. Will we get to meet any little green men?” Maybe that ancient SF turnip hadn’t made it up here, so I tried, “I mean, alien life forms? Besides you.”

“You’re alien to me too, you know.”

“True.”

“No,” he said. “You will not meet any little green men. Not on the Tour.”

“Is that why I’m really building the weapon for you?”

“No,” he said, quickly and decisively.

“What about after the Tour?” I hadn’t missed his qualifier. “Any little green men then?”

He was silent. Very silent. Wary. I could feel it through our link in waves of gunmetal gray. Funny. This one was like a shield, flickering to life between us like a force field.

“Wait . . . you’re not allowed to answer? Is that what I’m getting here?” I asked.

“Zara—”

“If you tell me about it, will they still let you go on the Journey?” I felt the shield grow spikes of white ice. Fear. Real fear.

“I can’t talk to you about this,” he said.

“Because of Typhon?” No answer. Paranoid curiosity burned a hole in my head, but I had to give in. I couldn’t push him. He’d shut down completely on me. “All right,” I said. “I won’t ask.”

Warm, orange gratitude burst within me like fireworks, sending tingles down every nerve. I found my fingers moving slowly over the wall, and I could see the whispering warmth of it lingering on his skin. I wanted to ask him if it felt good to him, but it was obvious it did. Maybe too much for comfort. Closing my eyes, I let the strange sensation wash over me, while at the same time fighting the irrational conviction that I’d been lost and angry my whole damn life because I hadn’t had this. A real, cell-deep connection to someone else.

Maybe the Leviathan DNA in me that had fixed my brain had, at the same time, given me an aching kind of loneliness I’d never recognized before.

With a faint shiver, I stepped away and struggled to separate myself, put myself back into my own skin. I still tingled all over, and there was a flushing warmth to my body that mirrored what I’d felt from him.

We weren’t in each other’s heads, exactly, but it seemed we couldn’t avoid being in each other’s nervous systems. I wanted to ask if that was all due to my Leviathan DNA patch, but I didn’t. Some things were too fragile to say out loud.

Nadim said, “I have to go. Typhon is calling,” and I felt him—or his attention—leave me.

It felt cold. Very cold. That was both his withdrawal and a ghostly image of the icy calm he had to put on when facing his Elder. I went in search of Beatriz. By that time, almost seventeen hours had passed since she’d gotten her lists, and she was just finishing up in the equipment assembly room—finally, she had her turn in the box. She looked dirty, exhausted, and triumphant under all that as she pressed her thumb to the last item to mark it complete. I watched one of the massive bins roll back to its assigned spot and wondered what she’d been asked to assemble.

I wondered if it was another weapon. And if she’d even asked.

“Done?” I asked her.

Most of her hair had been tied up in a thick mane behind her, but she used the back of one dirty hand to swipe some loose curls away from her face. “I think so. I could use a long shower—”

We both staggered, because Nadim rocked hard on his side. We hit the wall, and I braced myself against it as he rolled back to the normal axis. Physical contact clicked us together, and—

His pain was so overwhelming that I cried out, and then I went down, smothering in the anguish, in the rage.





CHAPTER TEN


Breaking Faith


“Z? Z, WAKE up! Please!”

For a fuzzy second, I thought it was my mother’s voice, but then a sharp, pungent smell jabbed into my nostrils, and I jerked back to reality.

Reality was me lying flat on the floor with Beatriz kneeling next to me, a snapped capsule in her shaking hands held close to my nose. I ached all over. It felt like I’d been burned in a flash fire . . . and then it faded, slowly, to nothing. I mumbled something incoherent, and Bea dropped the capsule and helped me sit up. It took me a second to remember why I was on the floor, and another to remember the pain, panic, and rage. I shook her off and stumbled to my feet to lay hands against Nadim’s skin.

Nothing. Nothing.

“Nadim!” I said. No response. “Nadim!”

And then he was there. Faint and far away, but there. He didn’t speak, but I felt him.

“Is he all right?” Bea asked anxiously. “Are you?”

I was. Just barely. If he was blocking us deliberately, I knew why.

The sledgehammer of pain had knocked me unconscious. He didn’t want to risk that again. He was suffering in silence, alone, to protect us.

“Typhon,” I said. “Typhon hurt him.” The surety came as a wave, not my memory but Nadim’s, and I didn’t question it. I was angry enough to chew nails and spit bullets, not that it would make any difference to a Leviathan. “Bastard hurt him.”