Edge of Dark (7 page)

Maybe it wasn't much like home after all. She expected him to ask if she liked it, and when he didn't she said, “It's pretty.”

“I'll show you pretty tomorrow.” He fell silent again, and that was fine with her. She struggled to take in as much new information as she could and not to complain about her legs or her lower back, which had gotten in on the game. By the time they arrived at the hotel, her legs were shaking, although she refused to complain.

To her surprise, Charlie said, “Go clean up. Eat. I'll meet you back here twenty minutes before sunset. The first sunset's free.”

She blinked. “What time is that?”

“Figure it out.”

Nona sat on the steps of the Spacer's Rest, waiting. She had no idea if she was early or late, but it hadn't started getting dark yet. The light had turned softer, and in turn softened the edges of buildings. It glowed faintly gold through the freshly growing leaves on a tree by the steps. A surprising contentment settled over her.

She'd had a salad for dinner, and all of the parts of it were grown. Every one. The dressing had been made with real eggs from real chickens. It was possible to eat like that on the Deep, but not on her salary.

She supposed she could do that now. She'd been avoiding thinking about it. Her mother wouldn't have ever spent credit on such things, and Nona couldn't imagine doing so. She'd hear Marcelle in her head telling her c
redit is for the collective and for health and education and never, ever for showing off
.

She'd never been someplace where there wasn't anyone she knew. She loved the anonymity of it, the freedom.

Two women dressed in work clothes smiled at her. Five men walked up the street, laughing, almost certainly released from some job. Most of them looked as plain as Charlie, although once she spotted cat-eyes on a teenaged girl and an overly-tall woman walked by with long blue hair that nearly touched the ground in spite of the high heels she wore. A couple rode by on bicycles. There were some on the Deep, but they were in gyms and on tracks, and not . . . so complex. These had baskets in the front and back, and lights in both places, and the riders wore regular clothes. She was still focused on the bikes when she heard her name. She turned and spotted Charlie standing on a skimmer with a huge dog-like creature at his side. As she approached, he said, “This is Cricket. If you hire me, you also hire her.”

Cricket regarded Nona with a controlled stare, nearly as still as a statue. Some of the richer people on the Deep had cats, and there was an aviary in one of the bars. Part of one food habitat she'd gone to visit as a child had real chickens. She'd heard about dogs, knew that some existed. That's what this had to be. A very big version of a canine. She'd studied the animals on Lym during the trip here, and her brain raced through what she remembered. “Tongat?” she asked.

A smile spread across his face. “Yes.”

“What happened to her leg?”

“Some idiot shot her and left her to die when she was a pup. I scared off a pack of predators and took her home.”

“She's beautiful.” Nona reached a hand out toward her.

“Stop,” Charlie said.

“I wasn't going to hurt her.”

“She is the most dangerous animal you have ever been near.”

Nona took a step back.

“And you can't ever forget that or remind her of it. Don't act like prey around her. I'll show you how to greet her later.”

“Will she come with us tomorrow?”

“Yes,” he said. “But now, come around and get in. The sun isn't going to wait for you and Cricket to get used to each other.”

He helped her up and had her sit down next to him on a seat, careful to keep her as far away from Cricket as possible. “Hold on.”

The machine accelerated fast. Certainly not faster than she was used to, but like the planet, it wasn't enclosed. She had to put a hand up and hold her hair in a knot to keep it from whipping her face. They flew low, just above the buildings, which let her see the layout of the town. She noticed more animals. A few large ones that people rode, a few dogs that were far smaller than Cricket. She startled as a fat furry ball a little bigger than her closed fist jumped. A tharp, if she remembered right. A common part of the mammal food chain. They'd be plentiful here.

He took her to the top of a hill not far from the town and parked, helping her climb down. “This is a good place.”

Mountains rose up in the east, behind them, but he took her to two benches that faced the west, and the setting sun. He left her to get Cricket, and she sat and stared in wonder. The sun had been obscured by a layer of clouds. Bright beams of light escaped them and infused the bottoms of the higher clouds with a yellow gold. Slowly, color spread across the whole sky, deepening and gaining subtle hues. All of the light softened.

Charlie and Cricket took the other bench, both eerily silent.

She felt big, as expansive as the sky, as if she and it and Charlie and Cricket were all somehow one thing in that moment even though none of them touched.

Perhaps the sky touched them all. It no longer looked like nothing. It had become art. Orange and gold and hints of fluorescent pink.

Even Cricket seemed to be watching the sky, although she was also watching Nona. Nona was happy that Charlie didn't talk; the spectacle in the sky was so far beyond words she didn't want to break the spell by trying to capture it with anything. She didn't even take a picture.

Adiamo gave them a brief glimpse of its near-red body, striped by glowing clouds, and then it was gone. After the colors faded back to a soft gray at the horizon line and stars started to show up, he said, “We're lucky. They aren't always so pretty.”

It took a few breaths before she could say anything. “Lym keeps striking me silent. It's so big.”

“Why did you come?” he asked.

It felt like a personal question, but to her surprise, she answered it. “I promised my parents. They're dead now.” Before he could express surprise, she added the details. “They were crew on
The Creative Fire
, the generation ship, and they didn't have the right drugs and mods when they were young.”

“I read up on that.”

Oh. Of course. Satyana had told him about her. “I promised my dad I would see a sky. It was a dream of his. He never got here, but he was determined to send me.” In that moment, she realized that it was probably Onor who had talked Marcelle into funding the ship. It might have all been about this place, about a sky.

Charlie spoke gently. “I'm sorry about your parents. My father is dead, too.”

“Really?”

“Accident. He was working in Palat, one of our old cities on Entare. It was a salvage job, and an old metal girder crushed him.”

“Don't you just use nano?”

“Sure. But not the way I hear you do. We're wilding Lym. That means removing technology, except here and on Lagara, where we grow food.”

Before she could formulate a question about wilding he asked her another one. “So your dead parents drove you here. But what do you want? If I'm going to show you Lym, I want to know what you want to discover here.”

It had grown dark enough that she couldn't really make out his features. “The falls. Some mountains. I'd like to go to Lagara. I want to sail on the ocean. I can't imagine that much water. We saw it from space but I know that won't be the same.”

“That's good. But that's a list of places. What do you want to understand?”

She looked up at the dark of the sky and tried to pick out constellations. It had grown colder now that Lym had turned their location away from the sun. Another thing to marvel at. Rotation. His question seemed important, but it was too damned personal. She didn't want to answer him. The tongat—Cricket—unsettled her as well. She loved animals, but she'd never been near one that exuded such a sense of power.

Charlie elaborated. “Most people that come here want something. Some connection to their past or this place or a spiritual evolution. We had one visitor who said she wanted to touch the face of God. Another one wanted to write a book of poetry about a planet. Many come wanting to live here, but we don't let tourists just decide to live here. We control who stays here pretty tightly.”

“You'd have to, to keep it so empty.”

“There's a lottery system with a thousand, thousand entries for every one who wins a chance to even visit.”

She had just come. No problems. No waiting. Probably another perk of knowing Satyana, and another piece of the trap of her life. She blurted out, “I want to be free.”

He laughed, the first truly genuine laugh she had heard from him. It filled the cold air between them with warmth. “I'll work on the freedom itinerary.”

Oddly, he didn't sound sarcastic about it at all.

CHAPTER SIX

CHRYSTAL

Chrystal hated the dark. She had always hated the dark. Near dark was fine, and in the observation bubble, near dark was the worst it ever got. Emergency lighting always glowed in a faint strip near every door and window, top and bottom.

Not now.

Now the dark was absolute, and no matter how much she widened her eyes or how many times she blinked, it remained absolute, a dark so black that it created a wall between her and anything she couldn't touch or hear.

It seemed like hours and hours had passed, but how could she tell?

The small touch of her pinky toe to Jason's or Katherine's calves helped a little, as did the sound of everyone breathing, and of her own breathing, which seemed so loud it filled her. She heard her breath in her ears and in the back of her throat.

Even the loudspeaker had gone silent.

For a long time, nothing happened.

“The animals must be so scared,” she said into the silence, her words loud and grating.

Katherine made a sound of agreement. “We should have put them all in the barn.”

“Maybe.” Chrystal said.

“We can start over,” Yi murmured. “They're already approved.”

Did he think they were already dead? She didn't ask. Unlike the other three, Yi was bonded to the
idea
of the animals far more than he cared about individual animals.

Silence fell again.

“We should put on psuits,” Yi stated.

Katherine laughed. “They'd tell us if we should do that.”

“Maybe.” Yi didn't sound like he was buying it. “I think we should do it anyway.”

“There must be a battle going on out there,” Chrystal mused. Now, as they lay still and helpless, ships from High Sweet Home were probably fighting pirate ships. She didn't actually know what the High Sweet Home military ships looked like, and she had even less of an idea what the ships from the Edge looked like. It wasn't like there had ever been a real space battle in her lifetime; just spats. Border incursions that she had never seen. She was certain the ships were big and powerful, maybe like the biggest of Satyana's ships from the Deep. That made her think of her friend Nona. “I hope this isn't happening to other stations.”

Stilted small talk continued for a long time. It only made things worse. Scarier. When they ran out of things to say, they unstrapped and led each other through the too-black dark to the bathroom and back. They sat on the bed and drank water. After, they strapped back in, and within a few minutes Yi succumbed to sleep, snoring softly. Chrystal followed him into a place full of unease and drowsiness, her dreams troubled with images of being tied to the outside of a spaceship.

Lights and sound all came on at once, startling Chrystal awake. “The High Sweet Home has been captured and is going to be moved beyond the Ring of Darkness. This process will take some time. Civilian inhabitants should prepare to be moved.” The same message played three times in a row. The lights stayed on.

Yi was the first to get the restraints off and stand up. He'd gone pale white. “There's no way for that to be true. We don't have engines.”

“We have
some
,” Chrystal said.

“Enough to avoid an asteroid,” Yi replied. “Slowly. Not enough to get beyond the Ring in less than a year to two. I have no idea if the station can move that far that fast without breaking up, even if it gets towed.”

The others all stared at him.

“We need to pack
fast
and put on psuits after that. Then we should strap back in.” Everything about him screamed calm-within-an-emergency and demanded that they obey. The vehemence of it startled her.

“Really?” Katherine combed her long hair out with her fingers. “If we need both the acceleration couch and the psuits, we might as well be dead.”

“Do you want to find out?” Jason asked.

Yi didn't even bother to join the argument. He simply gathered up everyone's suits and handed them around.

“I'm going to check on the animals.” Katherine took her suit from Yi and put it on the bed. “Just through the bubble. Not by going there.” And then she was gone. Chrystal threw her suit down and followed, the others all doing the same, as if some invisible glue held everyone close together against the dangers that lurked outside of their little nest.