Stitching Snow (12 page)

I remembered the shock-fi eld in the VT fi ght. Walking into the solar screen would be much worse.

“We can’t go through there,” I said as Dane came up over the edge. “That useless malfunction will botch it. You should’ve sent Cusser.”

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He took my arm and got me up and moving again. “Haven’t you noticed? Dimwit never botches anything that’s really important.”

I’d have argued that the time the drone narrowly missed shooting a rivet through my arm was plenty important, but I didn’t have time. The fuzzy distortion of the fi eld loomed closer every second.

Nearer . . . nearer . . . then a patch wasn’t fuzzy anymore. I could see Dimwit clearly at the edge of it.

“Go! I don’t know how long he can hold it.” I ran harder, instinctively ducking as I went through the gap.

Fire blazed over my skin, convincing me I’d been caught in the fi eld. But no, I was on the other side, yet it still burned. I fell forward onto the sand, my lungs fll aming with the searing air I sucked in.

Dane hauled me up yet again. “No stopping, Essie. They’ll be up here any minute. Dimwit, let’s go.” He kept hold of my arm and dragged me along. I couldn’t keep going. It was so hot, I couldn’t understand how anyone wouldn’t burn to ash in moments.

If I fell down dead, the Garamites couldn’t use me, and Dane couldn’t make me go home. Problem solved.

Tempting as it was, I still had a few self-preservation instincts left. I’d fi nd another way.

Somehow I kept my feet under me, letting Dane’s momentum carry me forward. He glanced over his shoulder and ran faster, saying nothing. He didn’t have to—I knew he’d seen the sand-skimmer behind us, too.

“Dimwit, go on ahead,” he said. “Help Cusser fi re up the engines.”

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The drone scuttled past, kicking sand in my face. Grit stung my eyes and caught in my teeth, but it was the least of my problems. My head throbbed, sweat soaked my clothes, and every breath came in a heaving gasp.

Moments after Dimwit disappeared through the hatch, the engines roared to life. That little drone had become frighten-ingly reliable.

I heard something else, too. A higher-pitched sort of whine, very much like the sound of a sand-skimmer. I didn’t dare look back to confi rm it.

We scrambled through the hatch and bumped shoulders as we both ran up to the command compartment. I fell into the second chair, giving myself a moment to breathe in the climate-controlled interior.

“Close it up, Cusser,” Dane called, skipping all the usual prefl ight checks. He jabbed at the controls, and my stomach dropped to my feet as the shuttle launched into the air.

I checked the viewer. The sand-skimmer was right where we’d been a moment before, its occupants fi ring energy weapons at us. They were too weak to do worse than singe the shuttle’s exterior, though, and quickly fell out of range. We were safe.

Safe from the Garamites. I wasn’t safe from Dane.

As we cleared the atmosphere, I stood and shoved him out of the way, entering a few quick commands on the control panel.

“What are you doing?”

“Setting a course for Candara.”

His mouth snapped shut. I was pretty surprised, too. Not like I’d actually thought it out before doing it, but it was the only option I had left. He’d never take me back to Thanda, and I refused to go to Windsong like he wanted.

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“Why?” he asked.

“I’m your prisoner—fi ne. But it occurs to me that if this were an offi cial Exile move, they wouldn’t have sent a kid to pull it off. I want to see whoever’s in charge.
They
can decide what to do with me.”

He stared at me for several moments, both our hands hovering over the controls, daring the other to make a battle of it. His eyes hardened, and a fi nger twitched.

“It won’t change anything.”

“Then the detour won’t matter, will it?” At last, his hands relaxed. “Fine. We go to Candara.” I sat back down, too worn to do anything else. Dimwit came into the compartment, probably looking for new instructions. I turned toward it to thank it for doing a good job.

Then it stepped on my foot, nearly crushing my toes, and I changed my mind.

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11

THE SHUTTLE QUICKLY BECAME

a very awkward place.

Dane didn’t try to confi ne me in the side room again, but I went there myself to drink some water and rest. It was easier to be alone, particularly when I wasn’t feeling well. Before I went, he gave me a tube from his bag. Dye stripper. He’d either traded for or stolen it from the Garamites. In his words, if we were going to Candara, then I was going to be recognizable.

A few minutes in the lavatory took care of that. No more not-quite-natural red. Instead, my hair was the barely natural white I hadn’t seen in years. When I came out and returned to the command compartment, Dane raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.

He wasn’t subtle about keeping an eye on me, either. I put up with it for about two hours before I couldn’t anymore.

“I’m not going to crash us again,” I fi nally told him.

“And I’m supposed to take your word for that?” he retorted.

R.C. ll E WI S

“You’re not taking me to Windsong just yet, and I already decided I don’t want to die in space if I can help it.” He fussed with the controls. Running a general system check, it looked like. “Why are you so set against going home?” he asked. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Something clicked. The look I’d seen in Dane’s eyes ever since he took me. He’d expected me to be glad to go, that he’d be doing me a favor and getting his father back in the process.

My resistance had botched his brain.

The truth botched my stomach, and I pushed it down. “People often
don’t
make sense, I’ve found. You, for instance. Why’d you want to body-hop Tobias and Harper? You’re a trained fi ghter—you could’ve stopped them without it.”

“Transitioning, not body-hopping. Didn’t you see the weapons on their belts?”

“I did, but you’ve proven yourself quick enough to manage that, I’d think.”

He shrugged. “Didn’t want to chance it. Transitioning always causes a moment of disorientation. I hoped it’d be enough for us to take them down before they could pull their guns.”

“Aye, they were disoriented, and
I
may as well have been sleepwalking for all the brains I had left. Sparkling plan you had.”

“You—what?”

“If I’m in someone else’s head, I’m not exactly in my own, am I?”

“That’s how it is when we Transition to non-Candarans as children, before we learn to split our attention. You never learned?”

I bristled and didn’t bother hiding it. “My mother didn’t 113

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have a chance to teach me everything about it before she was killed, did she? And she kept the focus on making sure no one discovered I could do it at all. The most we fi gured is I can’t do it without touching the person, and I’m not very good at it.” Dane looked at the controls again, perhaps considering an apology, but it didn’t come. “Either way, we were lucky. Tobias was too committed to using you. I couldn’t Tip him.” My brows knit. “Tip?”

“No matter what they say, we can’t just turn people into puppets. Not really. But you were right about us stealing secrets.

Not that we do—but that we can. When we Transition, they can’t hide anything from us. It’s like we
are
them. People make decisions all the time, and sometimes they could go either way.

If they’re uncertain about a decision, we’ll know it when we Transition, and we can sometimes nudge them in one direction or the other.”

“Make them listen to the voice in the corner.”

“Exactly. We call it Tipping. Doesn’t always work. I—we try not to do it if we can avoid it.”

I remembered Moray looming over my bed and restricted my shudder to just a slight clenching of my toes. “Sometimes a nudge can save your life, can’t it?”

Dane’s jaw muscles twitched, like he wanted to say something else, maybe ask what I meant. I was glad he resisted.

Cusser came into the command compartment, checking the system status display, and seeing the drone sparked another question.

“We were lucky to stop Tobias and Harper, then. But having the virus ready, prepping the drones to breach the solar screen and get the shuttle running? More luck?” 114

R.C. ll E WI S

“Let’s just say I don’t trust easily, and I plan ahead.” His plan had been better than mine. I had to give him credit for that. And I had a pretty good idea where those trust issues stemmed from.

“Some of your other plans are making more sense. Tell me about your father.” When he stayed silent, I pushed harder. “Tell me why you’re doing this, or I’ll decide
you
aren’t included in my promise not to botch anything.”

He held back a moment longer before the words burst out.

“I was born on Windsong, all right? At the embassy—only it was hardly an embassy at all, just a place they could keep a few ‘Exiles’ contained. We were activists Matthias barely put up with, trying to show that we wouldn’t Transition uninvited, that we wouldn’t ‘possess’ or control anyone. Trying to bring this system back together. All of us came from Windsong once.

We used to be one people.”

We were, hundreds of years ago. Before merinium was discovered on Thanda, before the technology was developed to tame Garam. And before people became so afraid of a subgroup that had a peculiar genetic quirk for body-hopping, before my ancestors led the Liberation that ousted the body-hoppers from the throne.

Dane wasn’t fi nished. “My mother died when I was born, so I grew up in the embassy with my father. He sent me away to live on Candara when I was eight because he thought Windsong was becoming too dangerous. He promised he’d follow soon, but then you were taken and they were all arrested.” My throat cinched shut. I wanted to say I was sorry, but I couldn’t. An apology was nothing in the face of something like that.

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“There, I answered your questions, Essie,” he continued.

“Now tell me the truth. Why didn’t you jump at the chance to get off Thanda? Was I right about Petey?”

“No, absolutely not. It’s because I didn’t want to go home,” I said simply. “I still don’t.”

“What do you mean? Who were the people who took you, then? How did you get away from them and end up alone in a mining settlement?”

I didn’t want to answer. The answer made everything even worse. It admitted my failure. It made all the bad things that had happened my fault.

“Why didn’t you go to the Bands, tell the offi cials who you were?” he pressed.

The instinct to run pushed me to my feet. I only got as far as the compartment threshold before the truth spilled out.

“Because no one kidnapped me, Dane. I ran away.” I kept busy in the engine compartment whenever I could, making Cusser double-check the Garamite brats’ work and ensuring everything held together. When those tasks were done, I pulled out my slate and fell back on my old routines. Being busy meant fi lling my head with simple, logical thoughts rather than memories I’d struggled to keep buried for years. Better to solve a trifold number matrix puzzle than consider the ramifi cations of choices made by my nine-year-old self.

Dane let me be sometimes, but when I refused to answer his questions, he came up with his own theories. That I’d run away because I was angry with my parents, or I didn’t like the 116

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pressure to be queen someday, or I feared they would realize I was part Candaran. Perfectly good theories, so I let him think he was right.

Surely, he fi gured, I’d stayed on Thanda so long afterward because I was afraid of the trouble I’d caused and how angry my father would be.

Sounds good, Dane. Let’s go with that.
I wouldn’t say the words aloud. Nor would I tell him the truth. All I said was, “You might just as well kill me as take me back there.” Two days after our escape from Garam, Cusser reported that a relay for the radiation shield was being a bit twitchy, adding a few choice adjectives of its own. So much for the repairs being simple enough for schoolchildren to do. I checked the diagnostic while hoping the kids got failing marks. Software problem—

the relay wasn’t communicating properly with the rest of the system—so I activated a console and set about stitching up the code. Dane leaned against the adjacent wall and watched me work.

“There’s something I can’t fi gure out,” he said. “How did you do it? Just nine years old . . . How did you get all the way from Windsong to Thanda and survive there on your own?” His questions scraped against my nerves, but this was something I supposed I
could
tell him. “Had a bit of help early on.

Someone who got me away from the palace.” A member of the Midnight Blade—the queen’s guard—but that bit was none of Dane’s business. “I cut my hair, kept my head covered. I was clever enough to get to a spaceport and stowed away on a transport that got me to a merinium barge bound for Thanda. Only off-planet passage I could fi nd.”

“And once you got to Thanda?”

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“I pretended to be a boy at fi rst, made things a sniff easier.

Got down to the Bands and scraped by. Learned to fi ght because there were always bullies about. Once people knew I was handy with tech, being a girl didn’t matter. Like I told you, though, they only have a few uses for girls in the Bands, and I decided I’d be better off in one of the mining settlements. You know the story from there.”

He remained quiet until I got the relay to play nicely. “My uncle told me what the palace on Windsong was like,” he said when I was done. “All lazy luxury. Servants making sure you don’t have to lift a fi nger, cleaning drones so effi cient you never actually see them at work. Hard to believe a girl who grew up with that could handle life on Thanda.”

“Well, you adapt quickly when you have to. Can’t be that surprised. You came to Thanda knowing I was there, didn’t you?”

“Sort of. Eight years with no sign of you, so I picked the least likely rumor to try fi rst.”