Sound (11 page)

Movement in the rear relay screens. As if I've summoned them, the air lock dilates again, and a trio of matte black birds darts from the hangar behind us.

“Vaat!”
I curse, and slam the push bars forward. The shuttle shoots off, jerking Cassia and me back against our seats and leaving the
Ranganathan
a shrinking shell in our rear viewport relays. Unhobbled by gravity and atmospheric resistance, the engines sing and the bars respond to my fingers' lightest touch.

Cassia glances over at me, half terrified, half awed.

“Chaila,”
I whisper appreciatively. This is a ship made for the Deep.

A warning flare strafes over our bow.

The shuttle's com lines spit to life. “Research shuttle 49-Q. You are not authorized for departure. Return to dock immediately.”

Cassia gives me a worried look. I raise our shields in answer and lock the push bars forward. We have nothing to hide behind this far out from Ceres Station—only a fine grit of asteroid dust and radiation. Our best hope is to push for speed and trust the
Ranganathan
won't authorize its fighters to fire on us.

Another flare explodes before our front viewport, blinding me.

“Research shuttle 49-Q,” the coms repeat. “Desist from your present course or we will be forced to disable your craft.”

Cassia presses her back against the copilot's chair. Her eyes pop wide.

“They won't,” I say, half to her, half to myself. “They won't.”

I press the bars to their limit. The shuttle surges forward, and the
Ranganathan
fades to a bright speck behind us, but the fighters keep pace. Blood pounds in my ears.
Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

“Research shuttle 49-Q,” the coms start again, and then, as abruptly, they stop. Their silence unnerves me more than the flares or warnings. The birds continue by our sides, black shadows flanking us through the perfect night.

Keep going,
I tell myself. I swallow the bile creeping up the back of my throat.
Keep going.

Silence stretches out around us, heavy and oblique as dark matter. Then, when my lungs feel as if they are about to burst, the fighters drop away. I watch them recede in the aft relays. They blend into the darkness, and the
Ranganathan
itself becomes only one among a million stars.

Chapter 9

“Y
ou can't do this, memsahib.” Cassia has Rubio tied to the shuttle's medical gurney. She and Tibbet watch him warily from the passenger lounge on the far side of the shuttle's berth.

I drop down the last rung of the access ladder. “I think you might want to stop calling me that now.”

Rubio glares at me. “You're in deep. Don't you get that? There's no going back. . . .”

“Yeah, we had pretty much figured that out.” I wave an arm at the stolen shuttle and start shuffling through the cabinets to find the medical kit.

“No.” He shakes his head and winces. “Maybe you'd get off light for stealing a ship, but kidnapping? You're going to spend the rest of your lives in a prison camp once the DSRI catches up to you.”

Cassia looks spooked. “Is that true?”

I shrug, even though Rubio's words make me queasy. “So he says.”

“I'm not just saying it, I know it.” Rubio twists on the cot to look at me. “And if the higher-ups don't get you, my flight crew will make it a personal job.”

I make a show of rolling my eyes and pop open the medical kit. “I guess we'd better take care of you, then.” I pull out a penlight and click it on.

He shrinks back on the bed, pulling the nylon strapping Cassia used to tie him taut. “What are you doing?”

“Checking you for a concussion,
badirchand
.” I reach for his head, but he jerks away again. “Hold still, would you?”

“Only if you untie me.”

I raise my eyes to the ceiling. “We both know that's not happening. Now, would you like to let me look at your head, or would you rather not know if your brain is hemorrhaging?”

Rubio gives his bonds one last tug and then leans back on the cot, sullen. “Fine.”

I shine the light in one eye, then the other. His pupils shrink in their pools of blue. Good. “Are you feeling nauseous?”

Rubio laughs. “Are you kidding? No, I feel perfectly fine about being shanghaied and tied to a gurney.”

I glare down at him. “Be serious. Are you dizzy at all? Do you feel like you're going to throw up?”

Rubio sighs. “No. My head hurts like hell, though, thanks to her.” He glares at Cassia, who pretends she hasn't heard and goes on stroking Tibbet's head.

“Right. And we'll forget all about how you pulled a stunner on us, shall we?” I pocket my light, pop an anti-inflammatory from its foil pouch, and hold it up to Rubio's mouth. “Here, take this.”

He narrows his eyes at me. “What is it?”

I let out a sigh. “It's a painkiller. What do you think it is?”

He raises his eyebrows in answer.

“Fine.” I slap the pill down on the medical kit's lid, out of Rubio's reach. “Cassia?”

She looks up, and I nod at the cockpit. We need a place where Rubio can't overhear us.

“What, you're going to leave me here like this?” Rubio squirms on the gurney.

“Spot on, brain trust.” I pull myself up onto the ladder. “You'd better rest if you're not planning on taking any medicine.”

Cassia follows me into the cockpit and seals the door behind us.

“Was he serious?” Worry pinches the skin between her brows. “Are you sure no one's going to come after us?”

“He's bluffing,” I say. I hope I'm right.

“And if he's not?” She hugs herself.

“Then it'll be me they're after. They won't do anything to you.”

She frowns. “How do you know?”

“Because I won't let them.”

Cassia smiles and sinks down into the copilot's seat. “Now who's bluffing?”

“I mean it.” I say. But something is wrong. Cassia won't look at me. “Are you okay?”

“Sure.” Her voice bobs up, too cheerful. “Everything's going according to plan.”

I lean over the control panels, trying to ignore the false buoyancy in Cassia's voice so I can make sense of the flashing lights and readouts scrolling thick with numbers. The shield indicators flicker yellow to green as we plow through the fine dust of the outer asteroid belt.

“We're six hours from Ceres Station.” I pull my crow from my pocket and hand it to Cassia. “I made a list of
everything we'll need to retrofit the shuttle for deep travel. You think we can find it all?”

“Have you ever been there?” Cassia scrolls through the list. “Ceres?”

I shake my head. I've heard of the station, but beyond the fact that it's built on a dwarf planet in the middle of an asteroid belt, I don't know much. “I'd never been deeper than Bhutto Station before I signed up for this mission.”

Cassia leans back. “If it's not welded down, you can sell it on Ceres.”

“What are we going to sell? Rubio?” I joke.

She looks at me, solemn, and I realize how not funny that is. I drop my eyes. “Sorry.”

She rubs a finger over the telemetry readouts. “Actually, I know someone who'll give us a fair deal on this ship.”

I blink. “You want to sell the shuttle? But . . . I thought you said—”

“I said I needed to get to Ceres. We can get a junker that's fitted out for Deep travel there.”

“A junker?” I make a face.

“Sure,” Cassia says. “What, did you really think we were going to take the time to retrofit this thing? Your people will be looking for it anyway.”

“Why not?” I glance around at the bright new controls,
the pristine seats in dove gray. It's not exactly spacious, but it has to be better than any junker.

“That'd take too much time.” She scowls out the front viewport. “They already have several days' head start. The longer they have Nethanel, the less likely we are to find him.”

I chew my bottom lip. “So, this person who'll trade us . . .”

Cassia nods. “Sweetie.”

“What?” A complicated combination of embarrassment and pleasure tumbles through my stomach.
Why is she calling me that?

Cassia flushes boiled lobster red. “No. Sweetie, he's . . . well, he's sort of my uncle.” She looks sheepish.

“
Sort of
your uncle?” My face feels as hot as Cassia's looks.

“Well, not really.” She hesitates, trying to find the words. “He and my father looked at each other like brothers, except they weren't really. But they'd do anything for each other.”

I raise my eyebrows. “And that means he'd do anything for you, too?”

“Probably.”

The way she says it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. “Probably?”

Cassia meets my eyes. “You trust me, right?”

I hesitate. I do, don't I? I wouldn't be here otherwise. But then again, what was that whole business with the cat about? And why did she let me believe we were going to modify the shuttle when she wanted to trade it all along? Why not tell me?

“Right?” Cassia's mouth twists in a troubled line.

I sit across from her and balance my fingertips under hers. Her hands are warm and soft, her nails smooth, like water-worn shells.

“I do,” I say. I look down at our hands, at my scars, and then up at her again. “You just . . . if we're going to do this, you can't keep secrets from me. Like about Tibbet, or the ship. You have to tell me things.”

“I'm sorry.” A strand of wavy hair falls across Cassia's face, and she looks up at me through it. “I thought you'd change your mind if I told you.”

I frown. “Why?”

She shrugs and looks away.

“Cassia—”

She shakes her head. “Everything's gotten so complicated.”

I scoff. “You think I'm afraid of
complicated
?”

“No. Yes,” she huffs. “I wasn't sure.”

“Well, I'm not,” I say. “We're in this together, right?”

She hesitates.

I lean back, stung. “Don't
you
trust
me
?”

“I want to,” she says. “You're here and everything. I know what that means. I . . . it's only that it's always been me and my brothers. Me and Nethanel, especially since his wife, Ume, died.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. It was Ava and me for a while, before we found Soraya. Just the two of us. A team. I never stopped feeling that way, even when she married Rushil and I left for the DSRI.

Cassia presses her lips together, and I think for a second I see something glistening in her eye. “What you're doing for me, it's—”

“It's not only for you,” I say. “That's not why I came.”

She rubs her eye. One side of her mouth lifts in mischief. “I know. You just wanted more time to get to know Tibbet.”

The tension breaks. I laugh. “Yep. He's my favorite member of this crew.”

“Not Rubio?” She raises an eyebrow.

“He's a close second,” I agree.

We burst into giggles. We may be royally screwed, but at least we're not alone.

Ceres Station rotates beneath us, spread out over the dwarf planet's surface like a copper grid shining through black lacquer. As we fly lower, the grid resolves itself into a million amber bulbs marking the corners of buildings and shining out from beneath the dusty, domed ceilings of the hyperbaric walkways that link the station together. Vast boreholes interrupt the neat pattern of lights, each gently glowing, as if the planet's core houses a colony of fireflies.

“It's pretty,” I murmur, easing the controls forward.

“Only from up here,” Cassia says.

We dock near one of the smaller boreholes. Cassia checks Rubio's bonds while I test my pressure suit for breaches. DSRI protocol requires that we wear one whenever we cross over to an unstable environment, and from everything Cassia has said, I'm pretty sure Ceres qualifies.

“You're going to be hot in that.” She tugs at the strap around Rubio's left wrist.

I frown. “Don't they mine ice?”

“I'm just saying.” She circles the bed and pulls at his other restraint. “At least don't wear your jacket on top of all that.”

“She's right, you know,” Rubio says. “All that dust. The air circulation systems don't work too well.”

I stare at them. “Are you two agreeing about something?”

They glance at each other. Rubio snorts, and Cassia looks away.

A wave of thick, hot air rolls over me as soon as we open the air lock. Our ship is docked directly on the hangar floor, along with a dozen other small vessels loading and unloading supplies. A fine skin of dust coats everything—the floor, the exposed ductwork snaking along the ceiling, even the men and women guiding along lev trolleys weighed down by head-high corks of glistening ice. The air scrubbers grind and whirr above our heads, trying to keep pace with each breath of carbon dioxide the crowd exhales.

As we watch, one of the scrubbers overheats. It blares out a series of panicked beeps and winds to a stop. Two little boys in ragged coveralls dart up one of the access ladders bolted to the wall and race across the tops of the ductwork, sure-footed as rats on a wire. One of them reaches into the scrubber's intake vent and scoops out a handful of black gunk—probably hair, dust, and sloughed skin turned damp in the humid air. The other straddles the duct and pulls a small suction fan from his pocket. Within seconds, they have the scrubber going again. The crowd below claps, and a few people toss coins or scraps of food up to the boys.

“Come on.” Cassia nudges my back. “They'll see you gawping.”

By the time we make our way out of the dock and into a low-ceilinged market, I'm sincerely wishing I had left the pressure suit behind and dressed in short sleeves and trousers like Cassia. We have more people in Mumbai, but we've worked out ways to move around one another for the most part, and where we haven't, at least we have the open sky above us. Here, the rafters rise only a meter or so above the tallest men's heads, and vendors selling food or used ship components narrow the room's current to one teeming lane. Everyone presses shoulder to shoulder to keep out of the way of the trundling ice sledges on their way to buyers at the docks. The thick smell of synthetic vegetable oil and frying dough permeates the air, undercut with the subtle stink of mechanics' oil. Cassia reaches for my hand, and I grab it. If I let the crush of people separate us, I'll never find her again.

“Where are we going?” I call.

She answers, but I can't hear her over the thundering of the sledges.

“What?” I say.

“Underneath,” she repeats.

My stomach drops.

We ride an open-sided freight lift down a black rock shaft. The only light comes from a single lamp hooked to the top of the car and the eerie stripes of phosphorous paint guiding our descent. I look up through the lift's metal grating and notice two rat boys riding above us, two small, silent silhouettes against our tiny pool of light.

The lift comes to a stop before a wide, carved passageway leading to a massive air lock. I move to get off the lift with the rest of the crowd, but Cassia pulls me back.

“Not yet,” she says. “Unless you want to mine some ice.”

One of the miners—a boy a few years younger than I am—glances back at us as Cassia latches the metal grate. Our eyes meet for only half a second before we drop out of view, but it's long enough for me to see the fear and alarm running over his face like wildfire. No one else has stayed behind on the lift with us.

“So, this place we're going . . .” I clear my throat. “You've been there before?”

Cassia peers out and down into the shaft. “Once or twice.”

I look up. The rat boys are gone. “And your Uncle Sweetie's down in the bore pits . . . why?”

“He's Ceres's
shateigashira
,” she says simply.

“Its what?”

“You know,” she says. “Like, the boss.”

I frown. “The station head?” But why wouldn't she come out and say that? And why would the lift to the station head's office be down at the bottom of a deserted bore shaft? My palms begin to sweat inside my gloves.