Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(78)

. . . and then suddenly ceased.

I raised my head and looked at the transparent window. Typhon’s enormous bulk hung there, momentarily still. That lethal tail was still bare of solar sails, and I realized it wasn’t only a whip, it was now barbed. Like the tail of a scorpion. It could stab as well as crush. But he hadn’t used that. Yet.

“Nadim?” My cry echoed back from the walls. When he didn’t reply, Bea let out a little sob and let me go. The ship was still spinning, but slowing down now. Gravity stabilized beneath our feet. “Nadim!”

I felt a trickle of something. He might have meant it as reassurance, but it wasn’t that at all. It was so fragile, and it made me think of a long-ago friend in the Zone, beaten to death but still flashing me a bloody grin through broken teeth before he’d breathed his last. The memory terrified me. I pressed hard against the floor. Pressed my cheek to it. Reached for him.

“All right,” Nadim whispered. Even the synthesized voice sounded raw, hardly even understandable. Something groaned deep inside him, and I felt another bright hot-pink spike of pain stab through me. I winced and stumbled, bracing against the console. “Marko stopped him—”

Marko had intervened, somehow. Not quite the human doll after all, which was what I’d so desperately hoped. “Nadim, can you move?”

“No.” I read the desperation in it. “If I try and fail, he will hit me again. It might hurt you.”

“Screw that. Run! Do it!”

I turned my head in surprise, because that was Beatriz saying it, not me. Her hair had broken loose to riot around her face, and her eyes were ferocious. I’d have stayed out of her way if I’d crossed her path in the Zone.

I held up my hand, and she clasped it, our fingers knitting together tightly. “Yeah,” I said. “Nadim—you said you could go into stealth mode?”

If he’d been human, he might have drawn in an audible breath. He’d forgotten that. He’d never even tried it yet. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“Do it!”

“I can’t. I’m not strong enough.”

“I am,” I said. “We are.”

I felt the wild surge in him, and his mind reached and opened to me, and I fell, and it wasn’t I anymore, it was we, spinning in a vortex of black fear and red pain and stars, stars, the pulsing beat of Typhon’s rage pummeling our body, vital fluids streaming into the dark, so much hurt, so much, but we clicked together in pieces made to fit and there, there it was, a shimmering pearl of power greater than either of us could ever be separately.

We disappeared. Typhon’s surprise flared like a dying star. We dove, stiff and awkward with the pain, the damage, and skimmed barely past the stabbing thrust of his barbed tail, drinking thick starlight and whispering by, not even a shadow, not even a ripple. Turning now, gliding, the sun so hot it hissed and burned the wound on our dorsal surface black, turned the blood to ashes drifting on solar clouds, and we ran, racing up and out into the dark.

Escaping.

Behind us, Typhon’s rage exploded with the heat of a supernova, and I felt something grab at us, yank, like a hand around a trembling heart.

Nadim spun, caught like a fish on a line, and I fell out of the bond, slamming back into my body with suffocating force. I tried to get out of my skin, back into us, but he wouldn’t let me in as he twisted and struggled against the pull. He was doing it to protect me.

I clung to the wall and cried for him as he fought, and fought, and lost.





Interlude: Nadim


We come apart. It feels like cutting, like the bleeding holes that the Elder has gouged in me, and though I reach for her, I am now just I, and she is just Zara. There is no we now, no protection, and I am glad for that small favor because in this I am alone, must be alone. She should not suffer for me, though I know she would. There is a bright hot star in Zara, a heat I orbit and drink and wish with all my instincts to share. It is a fierce kind of bravery, a kind I do not possess. I am not made for battle. And like Zara, I am not made for rules, though I know they exist for a reason.

The Elder teaches me this error again, with cold fury and colder precision. In blood and pain, I learn I am not fit, not strong, not ready. I have failed. I will never take the Journey. I will be forced to surrender my Honors. I will be cast out, alone.

These are the threats he beats into my body. But I endure.

I feel Zara, distant starlight on my skin, feeding me her strength. I shut out everything but the faraway warmth, the tiny crack in the wall between us that spills her light into me.

It keeps me alive, but more, it keeps me alert, and under Typhon’s red waves of rage, I sense something else. Something I do not expect to find.

I sense that he is afraid.

He knows I sense it. His fear grows. He inflicts more pain to hide it, but I see. Zara and Beatriz have given me the understanding of these things, and as I drift and fight his hold and lose, lose, always lose, I know one pure thing.

I will find out why he is afraid.

I will find out what he is hiding from me, and I will survive to hurt him in turn. Not for myself.

I will hurt him because he has hurt my Beatriz. My Zara.

He will never hurt them again.

So I endure in the twisting, bitter net of agony, and I listen to their ragged, sobbing songs, and I hold.