Stitching Snow (9 page)

“Dimwit, get her strapped in,” he said, nodding to the other command seat.

I willingly collapsed into the chair, and the drone fastened the safety straps around me. Once I was in, I told Dimwit and Cusser to go back to the corridor and mag-lock themselves to the wall.

As we entered the atmosphere of Garam, the vibrations grew, but the shuttle held a steady line.

Then we hit turbulence.

I really hoped Dane was as good a pilot as he was a liar. We both had to survive the landing.

It was the only way I’d get a chance to kill him.

73

8

DANE MANAGED A SOLID LANDING near a Garamite colony.

Hardly a scratch on the exterior, I would guess. By the time we were on the ground, though, I didn’t really care. My adrenaline had faded, and all I knew was pain. My hands felt like they’d been held under a tack laser, like they had no skin left to protect them from anything. They throbbed with every heartbeat, pulsing with pain from the inside out. Every breath was an effort not to scream or cry.

“Here, let me see,” Dane said. He had a medical kit out on his lap, ready to go.

I didn’t want him touching me.

I wanted the pain to stop.

I couldn’t do it myself.

Tank it.
I held my hands toward him, still shaking madly.

His medical supplies were different from what I was used to, more like what I remembered from Windsong when I was little. He cleaned off the blood and sprayed something onto the R.C. ll E WI S

worst cuts to seal them, better and faster than a smart-plaster.

Then he smoothed a cooling gell over the burns, including the one on my cheek. I fought not to fll inch, keeping my eyes locked on the desert landscape on the viewer.

“If you just hadn’t started any trouble—”

“You
kidnapped
me, Dane. Kidnapped me and stole two of my drones. If you hadn’t done that, you could’ve gone home to Candara. It’s only a little farther than Garam. My patches could’ve managed that much, but there’s no way we were getting to Windsong.”

“It’s not like I’m the fi rst.”

My gaze turned sharply to him. “What?”

“The people who kidnapped you eight years ago. Who were they? How did you escape from them? That’s why you were hiding in Forty-Two, right? Or was Petey one of them, got you on his side so he didn’t have to lock you up?” That was enough, and I looked away again, my breath hitch-ing in my chest. But it had nothing to do with my injuries. “Oh, you know
so
much. You don’t need me to tell you anything.” He grabbed my chin and turned my face back toward him.

I couldn’t use my hands yet, and I was at the wrong angle to kick him.

“I know that when you were taken, my people were blamed, and your father arrested all the Candarans on Windsong, people living legally in the embassy. People like . . . People who hadn’t done anything wrong.”

I froze.
If
he was telling the truth—and it seemed likely he was—I hadn’t known. I knew the war with the Exiles had started just after I left Windsong, but I didn’t know about the embassy.

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S T I T C H I N G S N O W

Still, he didn’t understand the situation, why I couldn’t go back, and I had no desire to explain it to him.

“I hope you didn’t steal this shuttle,” I said softly.

“Of course I didn’t.” He fi nally released me and moved away.

“Why?”

“Because the locals have sent someone to greet us.” Dane turned to the viewer to confi rm my claim. A sand-skimmer large enough to carry several Garamites was making a straight line for us. With the vehicle’s speed, they’d arrive within minutes.

“I aimed for
this
colony because I have contacts here,” he said. “It’ll be fi ne.”

Fine for him, maybe. “Are you going to tell them who I am?” His pause told me he hadn’t thought about it yet, but he found an answer quick enough. “I think it’s better if they don’t know.”

I wasn’t sure whether I agreed or not. Between the royal tutors and listening to the miners, I knew a few things about Garam. First of all, Garam had no central government. Each colony on the planet ran itself, and as long as they gave my father what he wanted, the on-site presence from Windsong was kept to a few offi cials at the spaceports.

My tutors had said Garamites were mercenary as a rule and politically fi ckle, leaning toward whichever side seemed most likely to let them do as they pleased. And “what they pleased” usually meant anything they could call an advantage.

A lot like Thandans, really. Except Thanda only had one advantage—the merinium mines. Garam, on the other hand, had some of the best tech in the system, know-how that no one 76

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else could fi gure, and more solar energy than even they could use, thanks to their proximity to the sun.

Garamites had backed the crown during some attempted uprisings and gone against it in others, depending on which seemed most profi table. That was why I’d swallowed Dane’s story about looking for enough independent wealth to persuade the planet to unify. I had no idea how the Garamites would react if they discovered the missing royal heir was in their grasp.

Maybe they’d send me along to Windsong faster than Dane could. Maybe they’d keep me away to spite my father.

Maybe they’d kill me just to simplify their lives.

If I could fi gure their inclinations, maybe they could help me escape.

Dane must’ve been thinking on a similar track. “Question is, will
you
keep quiet while I get the shuttle fi xed the
right
way?” I supposed screaming that I’d been kidnapped was an option.

Didn’t feel like a good one, though. Not until I had a better idea of the people I was dealing with. Dane was one; they were many.

“Me?” I said. “Don’t exactly like people knowing my business, do I?”

Besides, with the shuttle fi xed, I could use it to get back to Thanda . . . once I rigged a way to dispose of my captor.

Dane told Dimwit and Cusser to stay hidden inside the shuttle until he gave them further instructions, and to attack anyone who found them before those instructions came. So even with his “contacts,” he accounted for the possibility of trouble. Good to know.

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He also thought it would look better if we stood outside waiting to meet the Garamites, leading me to discover I did
not
like Garam’s climate. As soon as the hatch opened, the air seared my skin, particularly the halfway-healed burns. The colony lay to the shaded side of the shuttle, and the sun was already low in the sky, so it could’ve been worse, but not by much.

Three men and two women emerged from the sand-skimmer.

They all wore loose-fi tting clothes in bright colors, and a swath of thin fabric covered their noses and mouths to keep blowing sand out. Each of them also had an electronic pack on their belts with narrow tubes running to the seams of their clothes. A cooling system, maybe.

One of the men—older than the others—stepped forward and shook Dane’s hand. “Good to see you, lad.”

“You know them, Brand?” asked one of the women.

“Dane, yes. He’s from a good family, never ones to take advantage. His friend, however . . . I don’t know her.”

“This is Essie,” Dane jumped in. “I went to Thanda to see if I could arrange a better merinium trade. Instead, I found her. She’s a decent mechanic and was looking to get out of the settlements.”

I could’ve sworn he smirked when he referred to me as a

“decent mechanic,” but I kept my mouth shut.

“Emigration from Thanda is strictly controlled.” The woman again. Her eyes were more suspicious than the others’.

One of the younger men laughed and nudged her. “Come on now, you know those restrictions amount to ‘If you can pay, you can come and go anytime.’ Besides, can you blame him for skirting the rules? Look at her!”

If my face hadn’t already been red from the heat, it certainly 78

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would have colored at his remark. I might have tried knocking the attitude out of him, but Dane shouldered in front of me.

“I brought her for her skills.” He carried off the lie so well, I might have believed him if I didn’t already know he was rock-scum. “Unfortunately, the tech on Thanda wasn’t up to the repairs I needed to get home.”

“We don’t have a repair bay large enough for it here, but we can certainly manage,” the second woman said. “And we’ll determine a fair price. But fi rst, Essie, you’re injured?” I glanced down at my hands. Dane’s patches did a pretty good job but were still little more than a head start. “In-fll ight repairs. Not my sharpest move.”

“Let’s get you out of the sun and into the colony, then. We have doctors who can take a look.”

Doctors . . . I hadn’t seen one since leaving Windsong. As long as they kept their “looking” to my obvious injuries and nowhere else—say, the back of my left shoulder—I’d go along with it.

Anything to get out of that blazing heat.

Thandans thought “grand architecture” meant a shack with the slightest feature beyond utilitarian, like a decorative texture on the paneling. I still had my memories of the palace on Windsong, the sweeping towers and arches, the terraces with their intricate balustrades overlooking gardens. But I’d gotten used to the shacks, the grime, the world existing in shades of gray and black.

The Garam colony was a new experience altogether.

The original settlers had taken a massive impact crater and built the colony within it. Perhaps at fi rst they’d sought the shade 79

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

the crater walls provided during all but the midday hours, but they didn’t have to worry about the sun anymore. They had a solar screen, an energetic fi eld forming a dome over the colony, allowing the right amount of sunlight through and converting the rest to usable energy. That was in addition to the solar col-lectors dispersed planetwide.

The sand-skimmer had large openings on the sides and roof, letting hot air blow through. Our vulnerability as we passed through the energy fi eld made me anxious, but the man pilot-ing the skimmer didn’t seem worried as he tapped the controls.

I spotted the word
polarization
on the readout as he did, and the skimmer’s vibrations changed just a sniff. We got through easily. The polarization must have formed a safe buffer around us.

As soon as we were on the other side of the screen, I felt the difference. Still far warmer than Thanda could ever hope to be, but refreshingly cool compared to the bare desert. The Garamites lowered their masks and deactivated their belt packs.

I didn’t have to squint nearly as much, either, so I could take in more of my surroundings.

Green.

Trees and shrubs and fll owers and grass. Not like Thanda, where stubborn, hardy plants barely clung to life. These fll our-ished, lush and unfettered.

And in the midst of the foliage was a city—large by Thandan standards, small by Windsong’s. Buildings with more shapes, sizes, and colors than I could take in at once. Bold colors, too, like vibrant tropical fll owers. Nothing hinted at the harsh landscape beyond the perimeter.

Yet with all that, I found myself looking up at the sky. The fi eld made it strange . . . fuzzy-looking somehow. I was stuck next 80

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to Dane, so in an attempt to resist hitting him, I focused on my curiosity.

“How does it work?” I asked.

“How does what work?” said the man who’d teased me earlier.

“The solar screen. I’ve heard of them, but didn’t realize they could create such a wildly different climate.” The man smiled in a way I didn’t like. A way that said he thought he was better than any lowly Thandan mechanic. “Ah, that’s one of the great secrets of Garam. And we don’t tell our secrets to strangers.”

Secrets all around, then.

We slowed as we got farther into the colony and consequently drew stares from passersby. Most of the stares were directed at me. Dane didn’t look any different from the Garamites—so at least I hadn’t been right dimwitted to swallow his lie on that front. But no one on this planet had skin as pale as mine.

“Here we are,” said the second woman—Liza, I’d heard the others call her. The skimmer came to a stop in front of a sleek blue building. “Essie, we can get those injuries treated inside.”

“Meanwhile, Dane,” Brand picked up, “perhaps we should discuss arrangements for your repairs.” Dane tensed so much, I felt it. “If it’s all right, I’d rather stick with Essie. Besides, she knows what the shuttle needs better than I do.”

“Very well.”

Brand and Liza both got out with us, and the others continued on.

The blue building felt more like a clinic than a full hospital.

Certainly it was nothing like the bustling hospitals of Windsong, 81

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

but it served far fewer people. A doctor saw to me right away . . .

and couldn’t stop staring, narrowing his shrewd eyes at my grubby clothes and the grime under my fi ngernails. On Thanda, a perpetual state of dinginess meant blending in. Here, they looked at me like some kind of botched science experiment.

“Got something to say, Doc?” I prompted when I couldn’t take it anymore.

He cleared his throat and fi nished healing my hands. No scars. No new ones, anyway. I still had the jagged scar on my wrist, courtesy of Cusser when I fi rst upgraded it. It was no mystery where the drone had picked up the habit that spawned its name.

“I think you’ll fi nd accommodations here more sanitary than you’re used to,” the doctor said.

“I’ll try not to leave a trail of stains in my wake,” I retorted.

Dane glared. I ignored him. I was there against my will.

Just because I was keeping quiet about it didn’t mean I had to be polite.

Liza cleared her throat. “What’s the extent of the shuttle damage?”

I rattled off some things I knew were botched, some I thought were botched, and some that might very well be botched but I’d been too busy trying to stitch things together to notice.

Brand gave me a look like he couldn’t believe we’d landed in one piece. “Repairs like this won’t be cheap,” he said. “How do you intend to pay for them?”

“I have enough merinium for some,” Dane said. “For the rest, I’ll work it off in the support lab, same as usual. Essie, too.”

“Indeed. Let’s get you something to eat and settled for the night. We’ll get things started in the morning.” 82

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Dane, continuing his trend of being a worm-ridden fll eck of stone-scum, didn’t argue when the Garamites offered a single room on the ground fll oor of a short-term residential building.

That added credence to their earlier assumption of why he’d brought me along, but I knew better than to believe that was his motivation. He probably just wanted to make sure I didn’t try to sneak off.

He shouldn’t have worried. I didn’t have enough information to run away . . . yet. I needed the shuttle repaired. Failing that, I needed to fi gure where I could run to, how I could get there, and how to twist the situation to get myself back to Thanda. Either way, I had to wait.

The residential buildings were all consolidated in one corner of the colony. The short-term facility had smaller units rather than full apartments. Those catered to people coming from other colonies to collaborate on projects, or occasional visitors from Windsong coming to learn maintenance on some form of tech.

Brand and Liza took us to a vacant unit and tapped a code on a control pad before letting us in. A panel above the door lit up with a blue-and-green pattern and Dane’s name underneath.

I glanced up and down the hallway. Many doors had darkened panels, but all the other lit ones had a solid blue band. We were being singled out.

I waited until Brand and Liza left us before positioning myself very carefully on the far side of the room from Dane.

“That panel above the door—it’s that important for everyone to know where the offworlders are staying?” 83

S T I T C H I N G S N O W

He collapsed on the bed and kicked off his shoes. “That’s for me, not you. So everyone knows not to engage me one-on-one.

We won’t be allowed to go anywhere alone, either.” As much as I wanted to leave it at that and ignore him the rest of the night, my curiosity wouldn’t let up. Gathering information was important, and I remembered what Brand had said—“never ones to take advantage.” “They know you’re an Exile, don’t they?”

“They know I’m
Candaran
.”

“You told Brand ‘same as usual.’ You’ve been here a lot?”

“A few times. Just because Garam won’t help us against Windsong doesn’t mean they’ll turn away a fair trade from either side.”

“Then why don’t they trust you ‘one-on-one’ if they know you that well?”

Something in Dane’s expression shifted, as though the question bothered him. “They also know Transitioning only works on one person at a time, and they know the signs to watch for if I try it on someone. Of course, they don’t know about
you
, so if there are only two of them, we could get around that.”

“Not likely,” I grunted. Not with the blankness I saw in my own eyes when I body-hopped Moray. I couldn’t leave myself defenseless like that.

You have to coordinate two parts of yourself, the part that Transi-tions and the part that stays behind. Like bouncing a ball with one hand
and drawing a circle with the other.

Mother had tried to teach me about Transitioning, but she’d died before I could learn much. Mostly I’d learned that I shouldn’t use it at all because no one could discover what I 84

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was. Years of not practicing made hiding the ability easy—until I panicked—but left me with no real skill. Just vulnerability.

“I wouldn’t do it anyway,” Dane said, unaware of the memories pummeling me. “The people here don’t automatically assume the worst of Candarans. I wouldn’t jeopardize that.”

“Clearly they don’t know you as well as I do.” His jaw set as he glared again. “Get some sleep, Essie.” I grabbed a blanket and pillow from the foot of the bed and curled up on the fll oor.

“Don’t try to run off,” he added as he dimmed the lights.

“I won’t. Don’t you come near me, or I’ll bite your hand off.”

“I’d expect nothing less.”

85

9

THE SUPPORT LAB WHERE

we were to work to pay for

the shuttle repairs was an insult. “Drudge-work lab” would’ve been more accurate. Just a place for people to do minor technical tasks that needed doing but were beneath the brilliance of most Garamites.

It was exactly what I needed.

I had my own workstation with a computer terminal and a full set of gear. The computer displayed the work order, and components showed up behind a sliding grate. Everything was sleek clean-tech, but the repairs were beyond boring. Replace three fuses. Fix a faulty regulator. Reconfi gure a conduit for reversed polarity. Each work order came complete with step-by-step, even-Dimwit-couldn’t-botch-it instructions on the monitor.

To keep me from dawdling too much, each task had a time limit I had to meet, or we wouldn’t get credit toward the shuttle repairs. A ridiculously long time limit. The Garamites seemed to have a pretty low opinion of a Thandan’s capabilities.

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Dane worked at the station next to mine, debugging code and writing simple routines. Work I’d rather do, even if it still amounted to puzzles any child could solve. We could hear each other, but a divider meant he couldn’t see anything I did.

Couldn’t see me fi nish each repair in a fraction of the allotted time and spend the rest exploring the computer network—on-planet networks I hadn’t been able to access from Thanda.

I fi gured the Garamites could access a log of my above-board activities, and I didn’t dare push my cracking efforts too far.

Their code was the most sophisticated I’d seen by links and spans. Didn’t matter. Some gentle nosing around told me they were like everyone else in the solar system. They expected computer fi ddling through software, but upgrading the drones had taught me plenty about fi nding hardware work-arounds. They’d given me all the necessary gear to pull the identifi cation chip from the terminal and recalibrate it with a tag for a location on the other side of the colony. If they traced my activities, they wouldn’t know it was
me
.

“How’s it going over there, Essie?” Dane said.

I snapped the modifi ed chip back into place. “Positively sparkling. You?”

“The same.”

Once the computer forgot it was in the support lab, I dove in.

I had more important things to do, but I couldn’t help satisfying my curiosity about the solar screen fi rst. Some of it got too technical to unravel between mindless stitching assignments.

One particular component caught my attention—the control for modulating and stabilizing the fi eld. It used a core of crystal-lized merinium. I’d never heard of anyone using the mineral that way.

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S T I T C H I N G S N O W

Interesting as it was, it didn’t help me.

I needed a way off the planet and back to Thanda. I probably couldn’t stay in Forty-Two, but I could take the drones to another settlement, do a better job of staying hidden. Make it harder for Dane or anyone else to fi nd me again. Petey would help me fi nd someplace safe.

Petey, who had no idea why I’d disappeared or what was happening. I was halfway to sending a message to him before I stopped. I couldn’t risk the communication systems. Getting word to Petey would have to wait, and I refocused myself.

The Garam colony had plenty of short-range vehicles such as the sand-skimmers, but the nearest spaceport was a hundred links away. I fi ltered through piles of network data until I came across an intercolony trade schedule. Transports regularly went from one colony to another with goods and passengers.

The next one heading for the spaceport would arrive in four days, but the price was steep. Not as steep as the repairs for the shuttle, but steep enough. And then I’d have to negotiate for off-planet passage . . . if I could convince anyone I wasn’t illegally off Thanda in the fi rst place.

Or I could stick with the shuttle and its scan-scrambler, but that meant getting aboard without Dane. As much as I still really liked the idea of killing him, I just didn’t see any way it could work. His insistence on one room left plenty of murder-ous opportunities every night as he slept, but then what? I had to get from the colony to the shuttle without anyone catching me, and once they found the corpse, I’d be done. Maybe I could rig a way to get to the shuttle quickly enough for it to work. I ran through scenarios, looking for a solution, but kept stopping cold at the “murder Dane in his sleep” part.

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Face it, Essie, you’re no killer.

The computer beeped, warning me that I only had a few seconds left to fi nish calibrating a thermal sensor. I slid the part back behind the grate and waited for the next one to arrive.

“Keep up with that timer, Essie. You won’t get credit if you fi nish late.”

Killing, no. Maiming, on the other hand . . .

“Worry about your own blazing work, Dane.” I made sure the terminal didn’t beep again.

Around midday, the door to the lab slid open and several sets of footsteps entered.

“Dane? Essie?” Liza’s voice called. “A moment, please.” My timer paused, so I stepped out of my workstation’s cubi-cle. The Garamite woman stood waiting with two boys, thirteen years old at most.

“The technicians have completed their initial survey,” she said, turning to the boys. One handed a slate to Dane.