Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(63)

I flashed her a grin. “Come back?”

“And tell me everything,” she said. “I’m holding you to it.”

“Keep us alive until I get there.”

She stepped back and nodded, and I saw the Beatriz she’d become these past few days—calm, steady, relentlessly capable.

I wished I had her focus. All I had was nerve, and now, I was going to have to use it.

Med kit and H2 attached to my suit, I began the long, dirty crawl through the waste tunnels. We’d done a good job of keeping them clean, so it wasn’t nearly as bad as it might have been, plus the skinsuit insulated me from the smells and tactile nastiness of it. I unlocked the filters, slipped through, and Beatriz, who’d followed in her own biohazard suit, replaced them with a whisper that I thought was a prayer.

That left me crawling alone in the dark through incredibly narrow tubing that flexed when I pushed at it. It was exhausting and slow; I had to keep fighting my own clumsiness and checking the map. I had no sense of direction here, and Nadim’s injuries echoed loud inside me. I had to close him out; his pain threatened to drain what little energy I had left.

It seemed to take forever before I reached a spot close to the damage. I took a laser scalpel from the med kit, turned it on, and made one quick, cauterizing cut to slice open the tube.

Red-edged pain shot through me, as if I’d taken the scalpel to myself, and I had to bite my lip not to yell; I didn’t want to panic Beatriz, and answering questions would distract me. I could feel—even though I’d muted the connection—that the problem of the sharp, protruding rock so near Nadim’s fragile organ was growing more urgent, the damage more severe. No time to waste.

I slithered through the wound I’d inflicted. I’d intended to close it up with the same cauterizing laser, but there was nothing to stand on beneath, nothing to hold on to; coming out of the tube, there was just a long, sloping organic wall curving into the dark.

I had no choice. I let go, bounced, rolled, and landed in something thick, gooey, and—when I lifted my gloved hand to the light—silvery, with weird oily rainbows shimmering on the surface.

Nadim’s body suddenly shuddered, hard, but it didn’t feel like another impact; I didn’t sense anything hitting him or injuring him again. It was more like a reaction to me being here, where I wasn’t supposed to be. He had antibodies, the way humans did, and they’d detected me. Would the bond we’d made protect me? I couldn’t be sure.

“Nadim,” I said aloud. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but if you can, I’m trying to help you, okay? I swear, what I’m doing is to make you better. So please, uh, don’t kill me. All right?”

I so badly wanted to hear him say, “Acceptable,” in the dry, amused tone he so often used to respond to my attempts at humor. Yet there was nothing but the echo of my voice through a vast, dark chamber, and the knowledge that he was depending on me.

I trudged on through the dark, trying not to step in the rivulets of silver again, and then quite suddenly, the floor dropped off and down another sharp slope—into a lake of the silver stuff. Well, a pond, anyway. How deep, I couldn’t tell.

I checked the H2 again on its wrist mount, then closed my eyes and tried to figure out where I was relative to the rock that needed to come out. As I opened them, I realized that the wall opposite me, shimmering pearl pink in the light attached to the side of my mask, was moving. Slowly expanding toward me, pushing the silvery liquid in front of it.

I was in the right place. This was the membrane I’d sensed, and somewhere under that liquid was that damn rock. If I didn’t move it, right now, it would slice through that wall like a laser scalpel, and . . .

Nadim would die. Then we’d be trapped aboard a drifting, dead ship, all systems down until there was nothing to breathe or the cold got us first. Three frozen corpses, drifting on into the dark.

Kicking off, I landed on my back and slid down the wall, straight into the silver fluid. I hit it with what I thought would have been a splash, but it was thicker and heavier than water, more like liquid mercury. I disappeared underneath the surface without a ripple.

For a second I panicked, because I was sure I was going to drown in Nadim’s blood, but the skinsuit, though it seemed to tighten hard around me, coped with the change. Air continued flowing, less than before, or maybe I was just breathing too fast. The liquid felt heavy. I wasn’t buoyant, like I’d have been in water; moving was a huge effort, and I couldn’t see a damn thing. The light on the side of my mask provided a dim, ghostly glow, but it didn’t even penetrate past my nose. If I wasn’t careful, I’d never figure out which way was up, much less where I needed to go.

Calm down, I told myself, and shut my eyes. I could visualize myself now as a weird shadow over the misty shape of Nadim’s insides. Ahead of me, maybe twenty meters away, I could see the denser, sharper shape of that rock.

The moving, expanding tissue came terrifyingly close to those cutting edges. I had to move, and I had to do it fast.

I pushed off, struggling against the thick, muffling liquid. One step, another, another. Then I reached out my hand and brushed something solid.

Something that cut cleanly through my skinsuit, and Nadim’s thick blood glided in. Cold. The cold quickly turned into a burning sensation, and I was afraid of exactly what this stuff would do to me, but there was no time to think. I was swimming in it and the debris was a hand’s breadth from cutting into a major circulatory junction. I wrapped both hands around it and heaved, hard.