Chapter One
Only a ghost, she thought, staring back at her face reflected in the transparent canopy of the stolen Prowler, her pale, expressionless face superimposed over the pin-prick spread of stars. The only thing that's left of me, a ghost running scared, scared and running away.
Slowly, Nar'eth eased her grip on the throttle, the aching muscles in her right hand beginning to relax for the first time since the Prowler had slipped out into the endless night waiting beyond the docking bay of the command carrier. Easing back, letting go, as if she were actually flying the ship, as though she knew what she were doing, when she'd set it to run on auto, the way that Maer had shown her. He'd explained the three simple steps over and over again, like she was dumb, like she was only a child, like he thought she was nothing more than a lab animal.
Nar'eth glanced over her shoulder, because it was one thing for the ship's proximity display to tell her that the carrier was almost sixteen hundred kmetras behind her. It was another thing to see for herself, with her own eyes. She craned her neck, pulling hard against the seat's snug restraints to get a better look, unable to turn all the way, but she was pretty sure there was nothing back there now, nothing but the stars and freezing vacuum. No frelling command carrier and no PK prowlers or marauders closing in to shoot her down or drag her back to the Velbidar. So the tech had kept his word. The codes were good. And she was free. After almost a cycle locked in this or that cage deep inside the steel bowels of the ship, after all the tests and questions and pain, she was finally free.
Nar'eth turned back around, adjusted the safety restraints, and wiped at her dirty face. The Nebari girl in the canopy wiped her face, too.
"You really think you're gonna live through this?" she whispered, and the see-through girl mocked her, silently mouthing the words.
Maer had given her two data chips: the first to open the lab doors and the second to feed the prowler's computer. Then he'd left her cage unlocked. She'd waited a long time after he shut off the lights in the laboratory and left her alone, sat listening to her racing heart and the restless sounds of other things in other cages. When she pushed at the cage door, it had swung silently open, even though she'd expected that it wouldn't, everything Maer had promised her only some new test, another maze for her to solve. But it had opened, and then she'd sat there in the dark waiting for someone to shut it again.
"You coward," she whispered to her reflection. "You left them there. You left them there to die."
They're already dead, her reflection sneered. Dead or worse. You couldn't help them. You couldn't even help yourself.
"I don't know that," she replied. "I don't know that and neither do you."
When no one came to shut the cage door, Nar'eth had climbed out and stood waiting for the lights to come back up, because they would, surely, waiting for a stun shot to the throat that would put her out for arns and leave her sick and disoriented. The small, bristling thing in the cage above hers had stared out with its softly glowing yellow eyes, clicking its jaws in some language she could never hope to comprehend, something so alien or primitive not even the translator microbes could make sense of it.
"I would let you out if I could," she promised the staring yellow eyes, because she couldn't think of anything else to say. "But I can't. And anyway, they'll be locking me up again soon enough. Wait and see."
She'd walked down the long aisle of identical cages and past the counters crowded with instruments and computer terminals, metal and glass and flickering screens. When she'd reached the lab doors, Nar'eth had taken a very deep breath, held it, and slipped the data chip into the lock.
The door had slid smoothly, obediently open and she'd exhaled, then stepped quickly out into the wide corridor beyond, bracing herself for the stun, or electrinet, or whatever they'd use to end the experiment.
Maer had told her to turn left and follow the curving corridor until it turned sharply towards the hammon side of the vessel. There'd be a ventilation duct there, he'd said, and the grate would be loose.
"He didn't lie," Nar'eth said, narrowing her black eyes, daring her reflection to contradict her. "So maybe they're not dead. Maybe—"
—they aren't dead, her reflection whispered. Maybe not yet. But they will be soon, when the Peacekeepers find out you're gone. When they find out you've escaped, they'll kill Maer, and then they'll kill Jexana, and then Corsin—
"Shut up," Nar'eth snarled and looked away, watching the baffling array of colored lights on the prowler's control panel instead. Maer had made her promise that she wouldn't touch any of them, that she wouldn't do anything at all but insert the data chip, then flip the three switches to engage autopilot. There was just enough fuel to get her to the coordinates he'd programmed into the chip, and there would be people there who'd help her.
"And then I'll go back," she said, gripping the throttle again "When I have help, we'll go back for them."
She'd found the ventilation duct exactly where Maer said that she would, and the grate came away with only a little effort and almost no noise at all. Nar'eth had laid it aside and squeezed herself into the musty smelling shaft; she'd just fit, with barely enough room left over to move, barely enough room to even breathe. But she'd started moving and kept on moving until she'd reached the first juncture, and then the second, and a third, just the way that Maer had described them to her. The third juncture had led her to a vertical maintenance shaft, which led, in turn, to a remote section of the carrier's sewer system.
In the prowler, Nar'eth watched the screen that would tell her exactly where she was and where the ship was headed, if she knew how to read it. To her, the display was merely larger and smaller points of light connected by meaningless red lines and blue lines and yellow lines. She wasn't a stranger to space. She'd been born in space, like so many of her people, on the great wheel of Sanctuary ringing the frigid Nebari homeworld. But she'd never had to face it alone.
And she was more alone now than she'd ever been, even during her captivity, even after they moved her to the carrier. She might be the only living creature for almost two thousand kmetras in any direction...
Don't think about that, she told herself, looking away from the navigational console. Think of that and you'll go crazy. Think of that and you'll never make it.
After the squeeze through the ventilation ducts, after the long climb down the maintenance shaft, what happened next? she asked herself. She could make a game of it, recalling the whole thing step by step. And a game could keep her sane. Her mother, Jexana, had taught her this before they were separated. "You can make a game of almost anything, Nar'eth," she'd said, when they we're still being held in the same cell. "And the best games are always right in here," and she'd tapped an index finger against her forehead.
Her mind was a sanctuary, just like the great wheel encircling Nebari Prime, and it had kept her alive, just as the wheel had once kept her entire race alive.
Past the maintenance shaft there'd been a short hallway, and she'd almost turned back, because Maer hadn't mentioned a hallway and he'd mentioned everything. Maybe she'd taken a wrong turn at one of the junctures, a left that should have been a right. Maybe she was lost and if she went back straight away, she'd at least be able to retrace the path back to the lab and her cage.
She'd stood in the shadows, staring desperately back up the shaft, that great throat ribbed with support struts and scabbed with rust and parasitic fungi, leading up and up the way she'd come. Nar'eth had stood listening to the drone of the recirculation fans, the rumble of the turbines, and the thoughts racing through her mind. Then she'd turned her back on the ladder and followed the unexpected hallway. It hadn't led very far at all.
And next, and next, and next...
And next there had been a door, which hadn't been locked, and behind it was a small, circular chamber lit by dim and buzzing banks of fluorescent bulbs. She'd begun noticing the smell of dren and rot and garbage almost as soon as she started down the ladder, but in that small room it was almost overwhelming, and she'd guessed that the hatchway set into the floor would take her down to the carrier's sewer.
And next...
She'd only just managed to open the hatchway, the release levers heavy and rusted. They'd groaned like dying animals as she'd forced them flush with the floor. The hatch dropped opened and the smell that rose up from the blackness nearly forced her back into the short hallway again. Instead, she'd knelt beside the pit and retched until there was nothing left inside to vomit.
And she'd gone down another ladder to stand on a very small platform, listening to flowing water that she'd been unable to actually see. There was no light in that place but the stingy fluorescent pool falling through the open hatchway onto the platform, onto her, and she'd wondered if Maer had really believed that she'd ever get that far.
"Am I passing the test?" she'd asked the sludgy, unseen river flowing by on its way to the filtration vats. "What is this one teaching you?"
But no one had replied, not Maer and not the sewer and not the voice of some PK scientist piped in on hidden comm ports, no reply but her own voice echoing faintly back. Which meant there must be a bend up ahead, just like Maer had said there would be.
Nar'eth had stepped off the platform, the sewage closing cold and thick around her bare legs, and she'd almost slipped, had almost gone down and then it might have swept her away to be recycled with the rest of the refuse. But she'd grasped the edge of the platform and found her balance again.
"That's my little nixar," a firm and encouraging voice had said, a voice that she could have sworn wasn't only trapped inside her head, a voice that sounded more like her dead sire, Ress'lan, than any memory ever could. She'd waited for more, until she was sure it had only been her imagination, only wishes she'd be better off without.
Games inside my head. And what happened next, Nar'eth?
What had happened next, a step, and then another, the sewage rising as high as her thighs and Maer had warned her that even a Nebari could only breathe those levels of hydrogen sulfide and methane for a very short while. She'd have preferred to stop breathing altogether. Once something had slithered past her legs and she'd almost screamed.
And she'd counted her steps.
Twenty.
Fifty.
A hundred, and she'd reached the bend in the enormous pipe. The handholds were there, where Maer had promised her they would be, set deep into the wall of the sewer. Nar'eth looked back, at the faint light leaking gently down from the open hatchway and then she'd pulled herself free of the muck and climbed up to another hatchway, and then a wide room filled with empty storage crates and bits of ruined machinery, and finally the crawlspace leading directly beneath one of the prowler bays.
No one saw me, she thought risking a glance at her reflection. Not the guards, not the techs, not anyone.
Are you sure, Nar'eth? Are you absolutely sure?
"Yes," she said. "I am," even though she wasn't, and the Nebari girl looked past herself and all her doubts, all the ghosts haunting her soul, into the endless gulf of stars that lay ahead of the sleek red and silver craft. She would die somewhere out there, or the prowler would find whoever it was Maer believed would help her. Or something else would happen.
And what happened next?
Nar'eth shut her eyes, wishing that she'd believed Maer, that she'd thanked him, knowing that she'd never see him again, no matter how this ended.