Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(61)
We were slowing down, here in the darkness between stars, and as we did, I saw we were in the orbiting graveyard of a pulverized planet or moon—debris everywhere, from dust to pebble-sized fragments to enormous islands of rock. If we’d gone farther into it and hit one of those floating mountains . . . The one on the port side had to be the size of the entire city of New Detroit. Maybe an Elder could have survived the impact, but I didn’t like to even think what would have happened to Nadim.
We slowed, still bumping into fragments, creating an open wake behind us until the collisions bled enough of our momentum that we hung silent and still, trapped in the middle of this dead debris field. It was moving too, driven by whatever long-ago forces had acted on it to blow it to pieces. As I joined Bea at the console, I realized she was manually controlling our position and speed relative to it. We were moving. Just matching our speed to the cloud.
“Can you get us out of here?” I asked. She took her hands off the controls long enough to wrap her hair into an untidy knot at the back of her head.
“Not until I make sure I have all the other pieces’ vectors mapped,” she said. “I might be able to, a little at a time. But it’s dangerous.”
“So, we stay here?”
“Just as dangerous. Everything’s moving, Z, at different speeds, different angles. He’ll keep getting hit, I can’t avoid everything. Sooner or later, one of the big ones that are moving around out there will crash into us.” She looked up at me, dark eyes fierce. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I think he’s asleep.” I hesitated for about two seconds, then nudged her aside and started the vid of Voyage Three on the console screen.
She flinched and covered her mouth by the end, and gave me a horrified look as I shut it down. “What is this?”
“Nadim lost his Honors,” I said. “Early on. He’s got a kind of condition—a very deep sleep, like a coma. He only does it when he expends too much energy and is too far from stars to recharge properly. It wasn’t supposed to happen on the Tour. Part of my checklist was building him a kind of alarm clock to wake him up if it ever happened again. But there weren’t any directions to install it, just to build it.”
“But he was fine yesterday!” Somebody else might waste energy getting pissed over being out of the loop, but Bea was all business during a crisis, checking our position on the star charts. “How close does he need to be to a star to refuel?”
“Closer than this, or he wouldn’t be drifting,” I said. “What’s our nearest option?”
“There.” A star chart flickered to life all around us, glorious 3D. She pointed. “This is a red giant. So we shouldn’t have to go more than half a day at his normal speed to reach a significant amount of light and radiation coming from it.”
I had a terrible suspicion as to why Nadim was hibernating. For all my contempt toward rules, I was starting to think that the Elders’ restrictions about deep bonding might have been in place for a reason. Maybe he’d used too much of his strength last night. Guilt tapped at the edges of my brain, but falling into a pit of remorse wouldn’t help. Only action could.
I swallowed hard and said, “How can I help?”
Beatriz switched back to the screens that showed the dizzily moving field of debris around us. “Take the biggest pieces,” she said. “Calculate their speeds and trajectories. Be careful, we need to know exactly where they’ll be to chart our path. I’ll take the medium-sized ones.”
“I should have said something, Bea,” I said as I took my place. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think this would happen.”
“We should have both been told,” she said. I heard the grim tone of it. “Never mind. First we have to get out of this. All of us.”
We both started in on the calculations, the same kind of exercises that the checklists had been drilling us in since we’d started. I was grateful for the hard training now, under pressure, with our lives on the line. This was what we had going for us that his long-dead Honors hadn’t on that fatal voyage. We weren’t necessarily smarter or better, but at least we had training.
Of the two of us, I’d taken the more intensive interest in Leviathan physiology, an offshoot of my fascination with Nadim. So I called up the system that monitored his physical condition. It was basic, and the diagnostic did show me the location of the debris projectiles that had penetrated him, but it gave me no sense of scale.
“Can you find out more?” Bea asked.
“Not through the console.”
I’m doing this to help, I told myself as I sat down and closed my eyes, flattening my palms on the floor. That contact resonated between us, so the thrum of his energy trembled through me. Something sparked in my head, and the vibration passed between us in a feedback loop of theta waves like the tap of a tuning fork with each moment that I focused. Matching frequencies, he’d said. I quieted my mind, blocking out everything else.
Nadim, asleep, was a haunted house. I could sense him somewhere on the fringes of my awareness, a shimmering silvery light, but here, in his skin, everything was shadows.
And in the shadows, blackened wounds that bled smoke.
“He’s got two large injuries,” I heard myself say aloud, but it sounded like someone else’s voice. “One above us, on his dorsal side. It goes down through the skin and into muscles. The area’s exposed into space. He’s bleeding.”