Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(80)

“You didn’t allow shit,” I said. “That’s on us. Besides, what else were we supposed to do, let you die?”

“None of it was intentional,” Bea protested. “What’s the worst that can happen at this Gathering? They’ll tell you never to do it again?”

Please say yes, Nadim. Please.

“It’s already been decided,” he said in a lightless voice that held no hint of hope. “I am unfit to continue. The Gathering will silence my voice. I will be driven out. I will be alone.”

I felt cold, colder than when our life support was beginning to fail. What he was talking about . . . for a Leviathan, it meant being mute. Never speaking again, never joining the lonely songs across the dark. Listening, but apart.

Silence, to a Leviathan, was worse than death.

“No, you—you won’t be alone,” Beatriz said. “We’ll be with you, Nadim!” Even to me, that sounded weak. She might not get the full picture yet, but she was glimpsing the edges.

And I wasn’t surprised when Nadim said, “No. You won’t.” I still heard that extraordinary compassion in his voice. As if he was trying to shield us from the worst. “They will send you home, to Earth. Back to your people.”

“No! No, they can’t do that. We’ll tell everyone what—”

“They’ll do something to us,” I said flatly. “The way they did to Gregory Valenzuela. They wiped his memories and sent him home half-crazy. But that’s the point, right? Even if we remember something, nobody believes us.”

Nadim didn’t answer that. But I knew I was right. Most probably Valenzuela’s Leviathan had been exiled, the way Nadim would be, and he’d not only been damaged but grieving. Suddenly I wished I had been kinder to that stranger. It seemed to me that Nadim must be a lot like me, knowing that shit could go disastrously wrong yet unable to comply with rules he didn’t agree with or understand.

The silence was profound, broken only by a faint hiss of the static interference from the stars . . . starsong, even here. I tried to think of something to say. Something that didn’t contain a scream or a sob.

Finally, it was Beatriz who came up with just the right thing.

“Then we don’t play,” she said. “We get away before we arrive at the Gathering. And we avoid Typhon until you’re strong enough to stop him.”

Of course, that was a great goal, but it wasn’t exactly what I’d call a plan. Plans had steps, and we had to start from scratch. First: How could we help Nadim heal faster from his injuries?

I looked up at the curving ceiling. “Nadim. How long until we reach the Gathering?”

“A few days at most, in your time.”

“And . . . how long until you heal from your damage?”

“Five days,” he said. “At least.”

“Can’t we speed it up? With EMITU, maybe?”

“Your robot can’t help me,” he said. “But perhaps you can.”

That, it turned out, involved music. We started blasting recordings through the ship, loud enough to vibrate; according to Nadim, the songs helped accelerate his healing process. At least six times a day, Bea sang. When she slept, we played a recording of it back on a loop and kept earplugs jammed firmly into our ears to avoid going crazy from the repetition.

I felt the damage to him slowly knitting together. It would have been faster if we’d stayed in orbit around the white dwarf, but Typhon towed us away into the black, and even with his fins spread wide, Nadim’s energy levels began to slip.

He sacrificed nonessential systems, closed up spaces we didn’t need, cut his power outputs to nearly nothing. And he healed.

Whatever it cost, we would make sure Nadim didn’t go out like this.

Three long days into the trip to the Gathering, I remembered to ask Nadim about Typhon’s barbed tail as I got ready for bed. Turned out, that was aftermarket, grafted by another alien race humans had never met. It wasn’t the Elder’s only body modification, either.

I’d been angry over making a weapon for Nadim. Come to find out, Typhon already had them. Lots of them.

“He has weapons that fire sublight projectiles at very high velocities,” Nadim clarified. “Telling you this is another crime, by the way.”

“I’ll add it to the list. So, we call those rail guns. How many?”

“Six, I think.”

I whistled. That was an impressive armament system. The Mars colony only had one, meant to take out incoming asteroids. I’d seen the vids of rail guns firing and it was terrifying how accurate and destructive they could be. “Where are they on his body? I can’t see them.”

“The dark patches,” Nadim said. “They are grafted beneath his skin, into special chambers. He has many modifications. Do you remember asking me about space lasers?”

“Oh, crap, Nadim, he has those?”

“I was truthful in telling you that I didn’t.”

“Well, points for that. But shit.” Our chances of breaking loose from Typhon couldn’t have looked worse. Out here in the black emptiness, there weren’t even stars or nebulas to use for cover. This was a wasteland. “Why didn’t he use any of it before?”

“He didn’t need to,” Nadim said. “Physical force is enough to subdue me. Also, we do not use weapons on one another.”