Honor Among Thieves (The Honors #1)(91)

That was so purely Beatriz’s tone that I had to laugh as I swung my legs off the bed. I felt good. Really good. The bot was dead right. Four hours of sleep and some pain chem shouldn’t have done that, but I felt like I could run every corridor on the ship and still have energy to burn. In fact, I grabbed Beatriz out of her chair and danced her around the room in something that was half salsa, half stumble.

“You,” she said with mock severity, “are high.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m fine.”

We walked to the kitchen and made a meal. Nadim, I realized, hadn’t spoken, but I felt him there, calm and assured at the edges of my awareness. I brushed fingers over the wall, and light followed in a lazy streak. Pulsing gold. My brown skin was beautiful against the blushing pallor of Nadim’s.

Bea watched me, then hesitantly reached out and put her palm flat on his skin. A flare of color streaked away—purple, not gold. It zipped back and exploded in a corona of color around her fingers, and from the smile, she could feel that. “My favorite color,” she said, and stroked the wall just a little. “Thank you, Nadim.”

“You’re welcome, Beatriz,” he said. “Is there anything you need?”

“I—I’d like to hear the stars sing. The way you hear them.”

I could feel Nadim’s surprise and his pleasure that she seemed willing to take this step. “Close your eyes. I promise, I won’t take you deep.”

It was strange, watching her go away, disappear out of herself and swim with Nadim . . . shallow, as he’d promised, but the sensations I felt from her were familiar. Delight. Wonder.

He let her go just a moment later, and when she opened her eyes again, they shone brighter than ever. “Oh,” she said faintly. “I see. Wow.” She let that hang for a few seconds in silence, then said, “I—I’m not comfortable with the idea of losing myself. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course. But you won’t. I’m not Typhon.”

Typhon wasn’t Typhon, once upon a time, I thought. That haunted me, the memory of that young and hopeful Leviathan bonding so exultantly, so freely with his pilot and starsinger. Broken and mutilated by grief. But I didn’t say anything.

More to the point, I couldn’t stop thinking about the glimpse I’d had of Typhon as a lone soldier. If the Leviathan were fighting some unknown enemy, it explained the need for weapons. Maybe we needed to worry about something other than Typhon?

I dug into my pancakes. “Hey, Nadim?”

“Yes, Zara?”

“Where are we?”

He linked with me just enough to show me a vast star field with a giant white arrow pointing to a tiny speck moving through it. I laughed, because he spelled out YOU ARE HERE.

But the humor faded fast, and I said, “What about Typhon?”

The star field collapsed into darkness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t feel him anymore. We’ve left him behind.”

“Good.” But it still bothered me. Typhon wasn’t one to give up easily, if at all, and he considered it a mission to bring Nadim in for the rough justice of the Leviathan’s Gathering. So why wasn’t he on our track? He was quick and angry. If he had to quarter the galaxy to find us, he would. Leviathan didn’t forget.

“Nadim, I was thinking . . . back on Earth, I lived in the Zone. You know, with the fringers. People who couldn’t fit into the perfect society. Anything like that exist out here?”

“A complicated question,” he said. “There are thousands of civilizations scattered through the stars that we visit. Most are well advanced, some are not. Some are barely controlled chaos, like your Earth.”

Bea and I both burst out laughing. We were trying to imagine casting our clean, straight streets and orderly houses as chaos. “Okay, so . . . are there places we can hide? Aliens who could grant asylum or something?”

“It’s possible. The younger Leviathan who embark on the Tour, who bond with humans, we are not told of these things either. We’re . . . sheltered for your protection. But Zara has queried me so much that I had to question things too.”

“Like why I’m building you a weapon,” I said. “Which you never answered.”

“Because I didn’t know. I still don’t,” Nadim said. “But I do suspect.”

A vid screen opened in midair. It showed us a series of images.

Typhon. Covered with scars and spots of damage.

Typhon’s wicked barbed tail, gleaming hard black under starlight.

Typhon’s skin peeling away, revealing bio-grafted weapons.

Nadim said, aloud, “I believe the Elders may be involved in some kind of intergalactic crisis.”

That lined up perfectly with what I’d glimpsed in Typhon: the lonely, fatalistic soldier, weary and afraid and unable to hope. Glimpses of death and horror, all too fast for me to understand.

“Don’t hold back, Zara,” Nadim said, gently. “We have to trust each other.”

I gave in and let him share those memories. With her heightened connection, Bea saw them now too. She bounced right out of the link, shivering in her skin, hands held to her mouth as if she might vomit, but it was more shock than sickness.

Nadim was rocked too. “Typhon showed you this?”