Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(64)

It came unstuck from where it had embedded itself in his skin and muscle. Heavier than I’d expected, and yes, sharp, so sharp that I was bleeding as it sliced through skinsuit and skin alike, and the crippling, searing cold of Nadim’s blood made me shriek wordlessly, then pant in agony. The debris had blown in through his thick outer skin to lodge here, and I could feel the wound track still grooved in the flesh near me. I pushed through the blood, weight clutched in both hands. When I reached the wound track where it had entered, I realized his body had already started healing and sealing up the hole.

The wound was too small to push the fragment back out now.

I couldn’t feel my fingers, and trying to find the laser scalpel was hard enough. But then turning it on and using it to slice open a wider hole would be far worse.

I braced myself, took in a deep breath, and ignited the laser. Fast, do it fast, I thought. Then the laser made contact with Nadim’s healing flesh, and the pain roared and dragged me under, a red tsunami of anguish that made me scream and shake and keep cutting. Mercy wasn’t an option now; the only way through this for either one of us was to bear it, scream through it, try to stay conscious under the numbing impact of the knowledge of the pain I was causing him.

I shut the laser off when I had a rough hole hacked all the way through to the thin membrane that covered the outside of Nadim’s body.

I shoved the rock into it, still screaming. My throat felt raw, and I tasted metal. I was hurting myself, but I didn’t care, because at least we were hurting together.

The rock’s razor edges sliced the membrane, and it tumbled through, even as the vacuum of space sucked a bright spray of silvery blood after it—with some red human droplets that froze instantly—out into the black. Ruby jewels, frosting with ice crystals, mingling with still-liquid Leviathan blood out here in the ultimate wilderness. Nadim shuddered, and the pain flashed in such a spike that I lost the ability to scream at all.

Vacuum pulled at me, but the agony drove a wave through the liquid at staggering speed. I slipped, and the slick silvery lake of blood flowed over me in a disorienting flood.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


Breaking Out


I DIDN’T KNOW where I was. I was down, floating, lost . . . and then, as the pain gradually began to recede, I heard someone talking to me. Just a voice at first, with no meaning.

Then Beatriz was saying in my ear, “Zara, get up, you have to try! Come on! I can see where you are, and you need to get up and out of there! Please!”

I fumbled around. There was no sense of up or down anymore, and I was floating blind . . . but then my shoulder brushed something. It was soft, and yielding, but it was also strong.

And it pushed me forward.

It took me a few seconds to get my brain operating again and to remember the pink membrane that had been moving toward the sharp edges of the debris. It was shoving me, and now, I felt a solid surface under my feet. I put my back against the membrane and let it push me on. The surface beneath my feet rose sharply in a curve, and I scrambled up, flailing for purchase. If I wasn’t careful, it would crush me against the slope. I’d slid down this wall. Now, half-enveloped by Nadim’s expanding tissue, I fought my way back up again.

As I came up out of the blood and rolled onto the flatter surface, I realized I still couldn’t feel my hands. They didn’t hurt anymore, at least.

Actually it felt like they didn’t exist.

“Bea?” I gasped. “Bea?”

“I’m here! Zara, you did it, you got it out. He’s going to be okay. But you need to come back now. You have to.”

“I can’t feel my hands.” My voice was shaking. I didn’t want to look at what was happening to me. What had already happened to me.

“We can fix that when you get back,” she said, and her voice was calm, clear, just what I needed. “I’m going to guide you, all right? Can you see your H2?”

I clumsily lifted my left arm and tried to look. The screen was gummed with silver blood. I tried wiping it off, but it only smeared. “No,” I said. I was so tired. I just wanted to sit down and rest. “I can’t. I’m going to lie down now.”

“Don’t you dare!” Bea’s voice thundered at me, and I remembered all the authority figures who’d ever yelled at me. Underneath all of that was my father’s voice. I wanted to lie down just to spite them . . . and then the tone changed. “Zara, please. He needs you. I need you. If you quit now, you’re not coming back, and you belong here. With me. With us.”

That sounded like someone else now. It sounded like all the people who’d cared. Who’d loved me, despite all my cracks and flaws. My mother. My sister. Even Derry, sometimes.

It reminded me of Nadim too. And reminded me of just who Bea was, the angel who could sing stars out of the sky. I could hear music in her.

So I sucked in a shaking breath and said, “Help me.”

“Okay, you can’t climb back up. I want you to go straight ahead . . . now a little left . . . a little more . . . Stop. Reach up, there should be a kind of ledge there. Pull yourself up.”

“I can’t. I can’t feel my hands.”

“You can.”

Bea’s certainty made me reach up, and I did feel . . . something. A distant pressure, maybe. My body remembered things my mind didn’t. I went up. Then I kept going, walking blind, turning and twisting, an exhausted stumble into silence where Nadim should have been. At least he wasn’t hurting anymore. But what did that mean? If he wasn’t hurting . . . Panic chewed at the corners of my mind; I didn’t let it take root.