Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(62)

“Bleeding?” Her voice seemed fainter, farther away as I mentally moved closer to the site of the wound. Splitting my consciousness like this, it was more than disorienting; my head hurt like back in the old days, though maybe that was an echo of Nadim’s pain too. Ghostly flickers of anguish crawled over my skin: side, sternum, ankles, shoulder, off and on like a water tap.

“It’s not as bad as I thought. I don’t think he can control his right side until those muscles heal and the tear closes up. But it’s mending on its own. Leviathan bodies can heal faster than ours.”

“And the other wound?”

“It’s not as large,” I said, “but . . .” My mind drifted, pulled by the shimmering afterimages of pain that still lit the nerves, and saw a foreign object lodged inside him. In the strange vision I had here, it looked like all spikes and angles, but I thought it was one of the jagged pieces of planetary debris.

Worse, it was stuck very close to a thick, throbbing membrane that served as filtration for his respiratory equivalent, according to the studies I’d been doing. I came out of my trance for a moment and accessed the data console again.

Leviathan didn’t have a single pumping mechanism for their blood, but they did have critical junctures. This was one of them. Damage to it would be very dangerous. Maybe fatal.

I had the eerie impression that the organ was moving. It sat within a large, empty space, but I could sense it steadily expanding to fill that space. If it shifted much farther, it would jam up against the sharp rocks that had never seen the softening effects of wind or water. And those edges would slice that membrane right open. Maybe, in time, softer tissue would form, pushing the foreign matter out, but it wasn’t happening yet, and it couldn’t happen fast enough. Not if we intended to try to fly Nadim out of here with any kind of precision.

We might kill him if we tried. Or even if we did nothing.

Dropping the connection left me weak and dizzy. I stammered my findings to Beatriz, shivering as if I’d crawled out of a cold river. She grabbed a blanket and put it around my trembling shoulders.

“Well. That was something they didn’t cover in the manual.”

“I . . . we can talk about it later. If we survive.”

Her mouth compressed. “This isn’t the time, but yeah. We’ll have words.”

I remembered how Nadim had kept me warm through the night and wondered just when he’d dropped off to sleep. Maybe our very closeness had lulled him into it. Guilt had an ugly rust-red color to it and a bitter taste on my tongue.

As I shivered, a warning flashed on the console: EMERGENCY INTERVENTION REQUIRED. Follow Leviathan care protocols set forth in Appendix A-17.

This time, I didn’t even need to reach for my H2 to understand my mission.

“We have to get that rock out of there,” I told her. “It’s below us, off to the left. I can find it, but . . .”

“But what?”

“It’s not one of the areas he’s let us go into before. Not fitted out for human habitation.” I struggled up to my feet. “I’m going to need a skinsuit.”

Bea didn’t argue about it; she ran and got one, and I stripped down and put it on. It melted onto me, gray and then swirling with colors, as if it wasn’t quite sure how to camouflage me. I settled the hood and mask on and felt a momentary panic as it molded to my face before starting to process air in a cool, constant flow.

“How are you going to get to it?” she asked me.

“The waste system,” I said. “It links up after the filters with natural venting, and then I can get from there into his circulatory system. I think I can fit through the waste tubes. But—” I didn’t like the idea, but I said it anyway. “I’m going to need the medical kit. I’ll have to cut into his blood vessels.” Quickly, I activated a holo of his full biosystem. Lines of light appeared, a complicated 3D maze that twisted and wrapped around itself, branched off into sections and groupings. Each blood vessel seemed large enough for a human to pass through. That didn’t mean it was safe. “I’ll get as close as I can to the site before I get into his bloodstream.”

If Nadim were awake, he would have been able to adjust the atmosphere inside himself, maybe even eject the rock fragment on his own.

But Nadim wasn’t awake, and he needed me to do this.

Beatriz stopped me as I picked up the portable med kit. I thought she wanted to talk strategy, but she grabbed me by the arms and looked me right in the eyes. “Zara, this is dangerous—”

“Better for me to go. I can—I can feel my way better than you can right now.”

“Because he’s connected to you,” she said. “In a way he isn’t to me.”

“Doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about you, Bea.”

“I know. I can feel he does. But—not like he cares for you.”

I wanted to stop and tell her about the sensations from the time I first came on board, about the Leviathan DNA grafted into my own to stop my brain from destroying me. About the joy of it, and the terror, and everything. But I couldn’t. We were all going to die—all three of us—if we wasted time right now.

So I hugged her close, and she hugged me back, and I said, “I’m coming back, and when I do, I’ll open up on all counts. I swear.”

“You’d better.”