Jaqi
I DON’T THINK. I raise my gun and shoot.
And I miss.
Gray girl runs out of the smoke, same color, carrying her sword, flashing white against the darkness. She’s got her head unwrapped now, orange hair springing every which way. Behind her comes a bearded fellow in body armor. His soulsword is up and at the ready too. Blood drips off his hand, and when it hits the ground, it sizzles white.
And behind them—that damn NecroWasp!
“Oh, come on!” I groan at whatever fates are listening.
Bill springs down from where he was. Beard-face is heading for the ship, where the kids will be. Gray girl and the stinking Necro-Shit are heading for us. I shoot again. My hand is shaking. The shards go wide and leave smoking trails across the metal of the hangar floor. The three of them dodge and weave, but they’re in no danger of being hit.
If I shoot wild any more, I could punch holes in this place and send us into vacuum.
When Bill hits the ground, he fires, evil precise. Gray girl raises her sword, catches the shards, and they go flying.
He keeps firing and she keeps catching shards—until he’s out.
Bill decides to act the damn fool and rush her. “I en’t never harmed you!” Bill yells as he runs at her. “I ran guns for your Resistance for ten years, you back-stabbing swine.”
“Run . . .” I say, but as beat as I am, it comes out as a groan.
“You’re not worth my time,” gray girl says. She grabs a pistol from her hip, shoots. The shard-fire tears Bill in half.
“Bill!”
I shoot her before she can react. Wish the shard-fire would tear her in half, but she’s still got her protection trick—it just knocks her flat. I keep firing. I unload the whole clip on her, and it spins her body across the floor like a blackball gone downcourt but it doesn’t touch her skin.
“Shit.” The gun’s empty. Quality antique piece; holds only a fingerful of shards. I try to jump out of the cockpit. I just crash to the ground, in front of old NecroWasp, who still stinks like the whole galaxy took a shit together. “Nice to see you,” I mutter.
The NecroWasp reaches for me with its clawed arm. Its stinger gleams, venom dripping from the tip. It hisses something with that mandible mouth—the usual Death!
“Rrrrrraaaaaaa!” Z leaps from the cockpit onto the Wasp’s head. With them big fingers, he reaches behind its big black eyeball and rips the eyeball out, splattering himself with NecroWasp juice. “Go! I will die here! The ship! Go!”
I get up. Gray girl is still lying on the ground.
Beard-face is walking into the ship, where the kids are. I run, but I en’t got a weapon—my gun is empty. Gray girl’s soulsword lies there in front of me. I grab it.
I en’t ever held a sword in my life.
Got in a knife fight once, and got myself good and cut by the Kurgul on the other end of my knife. I seen what the Jorians do, though, when they fight, once on the news screen.
Maybe it’ll work for any cross, even a scab like me. It’s all I got.
I slash my arm, carefully, not too deep. Everything hurts so much already I hardly feel it.
My blood leaps up the blade. Just jumps right up and turns white, and then the black steel turns white too, with fire.
And I feel something, almost like the soulsword’s my own private node. We’re connected, like this soulsword is a piece of me, ready to burn through the world.
Damn.
I run up the ramp into Palthaz’s ship, where the kids are. I duck under the metal braces, past the locked cargo bays, into the common area.
The common area is lit by the white of red-armor’s soulsword, a good three times brighter than mine. Everything is scattered. Bill’s guitar and all the kids’ clothes are on the floor. A case of clothes is chopped to pieces. He is standing over Toq. Poor kid lies on the ground, staring up. Kalia is against the wall, not moving. Dead? No, she’s trying to move, arms flopping. Bastard probably got a nerve cluster, or hit her on the head.
Beard doesn’t speak. He’s all business, raising that sword to kill a couple of children.
Toq bites his leg. Beard snarls and kicks out, raises his sword—
I run him through from behind.
I en’t never stabbed anyone before. Good thing I’m evil juiced, cuz I ram that sword in, screeching past bone, harder than I ever hammered in a nail or a rivet. The way that flesh gives and resists at once—it en’t a good feeling.
The soulsword turns space-cold in my hand. It’s like a pillar, connecting my arm to his insides, and I can feel him die.
His memories come flooding into me. This man’s killed more people than the primaria virus. Dead, dead, dead Kurguls and other crosses and traitors and humans, and I see him all the way back to the vats, I see battle after battle until he dreamed about blood and shard-fire, until he didn’t care. The whole galaxy is just meat. That’s the thought drives this man.
I see he’s got a fella, someone he loves, back at home. People are funny. He goes out killing kids and then he goes back to his fella and they sit and hold hands and read.
He’s rushing into me, his memories, his loves, his whole life, up my arm and into my heart, out my veins, into my brain.
Then he dies. Like that. Falls to the ground.
After a moment, I fall down too.
“Jaqi!” Toq is sitting on me, hitting my head. “Please! Wake up!”
I look up. There, down the ramp, the NecroWasp is coming for us, a long trail of goo coming out of its eye socket. It stops at the ramp, and does something I wouldn’t have thought. It speaks, a low throaty grumble thick with mucus.
“He wants me to spare you.” It starts up the ramp, its stinger protruding, bright with the gleam of poison. “My new owner does not understand. Death is mercy.”
I don’t think I can move.
Z jumps up behind it, all blood and snarls. He reaches around its belly and grabs the thing’s stinger, and with a roar like a beast gone rabid, he rips the stinger off and jams it into the Necro-Stink’s head. For a second, I figure it en’t done anything—but no, even this thing can’t take a spike in the brain. It topples and slides off the ramp.
Z, all over bloody, crawls up the ramp.
I look up into that tattooed face. His veins stand out even against his tattoos, thick rivers of black. There’s a little welt on his chest. “Thought you were going to die. In blood and honor.”
“There’s no honor in being killed by something that’s already dead.”
“It stung you,” Kalia says, pointing to the welt on his chest. The little spot’s all swollen and black.
“I have been poisoned before,” Z rasps. “Go!”
I slump into the cockpit. Don’t know whether Bill got the coordinates programmed in for his big secret mainframe. Looking out the cockpit, I see that gray girl is gone. Damn. I wanted to shoot her. I hit the hangar controls, and above us the doors open—
A hail of shards cuts apart the hangar. The bugs, and the Vanguard ship, and everything up there rains down hell on us. “Jaqi!” Z shouts. “Jump! Jump!”
I reach out and grab the node, and I jump us blind.
* * *
It’s cold.
It’s dark.
Where the burning hell are we?
I can see the kids, and Z, but hardly, as if by some kind of pale, sick light, kind of thing that shines from the rotten vegetation in Swiney Niney at night. They look all washed out. The light is faint, white, a little blue. Feels almost like the memory of a light, something I create out of my own mind.
Kalia’s eyes flicker open. She looks at me. The blood makes a line down the side of her face. “Where— What happened?”
“Vanguard came close enough to kiss is what happened.” I don’t see anything out the viewscreen. Nothing but blackness. Nothing but—
“Jaqi?” Toq says. “Jaqi, I think I hear something.”
“I don’t hear anything,” Z says.
“I hear someone.” Toq looks up at me. He looks a bit too much like his brother. “I hear someone talking.”
I reckon I hear something too, now he says it. I hold a hand up. Z’s got his usual scowl on, aimed toward the viewscreen. The viewscreen that is completely dark, with not a star to be seen.
I hear something, all right. I hear little whispers, and they turn my skin to ice.
We know you.
We watched you. We watched you, when you tore their bodies. We watched you, when you cut him, he who is dead.
“Do you hear it?” Toq’s voice is marred by his pitiful little-kid trembling, trying to form words when it’s killing him. “Do you?”
I look out the viewscreen. It’s dark. Total, black darkness, the kind makes you feel like you’ve gone blind. And yet, out there, if you look long enough, you can see traces of that ghost-light. Little, small blips of white and blue, almost enough to give a shape to the darkness.
My skin was cold, but now I feel weirdly calm. I shouldn’t, with a voice from nowhere saying it’s going to eat me. But I feel, at last, like I don’t need to think. I don’t need to think on my feet and fight my way through this. I can just rest in the darkness, in the voice.
I stare into the darkness, and I start to see it all.
Those little, faint rushes of light illuminate a darkness strung together. Hints, edges, vague shapes of a web, thick strings running together, knotting, fibers and cables of absolute blackness the size of planetary systems.
Tens of millions of knots and strings and patterns, into the infinite distance. Like the collected cobwebs of a million star-sized spiders.
“Do you hear them?” Toq is going to cry.
I reach out absentmindedly, stroke his hair. “We’re fine.” We are. I am so calm.
We are going to eat you.
“We are in the Dark Zone!” Z says. He seizes me by the shoulder. “Jump us!”
“But . . .” It sounds so nice. Just to lie back, and let the spiders crawl over me, drag me into the darkness. There won’t be anything in that darkness, except a hungry maw. I won’t have to shoot Vanguard, or swing a soulsword, or anything. I’ll just let them eat me, slowly.
“We will not die here!” Z says. But his normal growly roaring voice is just a small thing next to that whispering warmth. “This is not where we die, Jaqi!”
We are coming to eat you.
The flashes of sick-light increase around us. It’s so dark it’s hard to tell, but I could almost say that something is moving along the cords of those webs. Something vaster than a star, and alive. Many somethings. The cords tremble.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s okay. We’ll like it.” I won’t remember Quinn dying. I won’t remember Bill dying. I won’t remember . . .
I won’t remember my mother, either.
Strange thought. I haven’t thought about my mater in some time. That memory comes, my first memory, of her sprinkling salt on a tomato slice. The tomato is big and red and glistening under our flickering lights. Her voice is singing a field-worker’s song. Bend, pull. Bend, pull. I remember her hand as she gives the tomato to me, the soft, sweet, sharp taste.
Like sunlight . . .
I don’t want to forget my mother. Odd thought, that. As nice as this warmth is, as nice as it sounds to go into the dark and be consumed, I don’t want to forget the dirt caking her hands, the way her fingerprints were creased with black and the edges of her fingers were cracked from picking crops. I don’t want to forget the way she slid the slice of tomato into my mouth.
I don’t want to forget Quinn. He thought I was worth saving, and I can’t just let his brother and sister get et . . . Don’t want to forget Bill.
No.
“Shit!” I’m not warm anymore. I’m cold. Freezing, like ice is eating me up an inch at a time. The kind voices turn to hisses, to loud screams in my ears, scream after scream after scream slicing into me.
“Where are those coordinates?”
“Right in front of you, idiot!” Z says.
He’s right. They’re flashing on a readout, clear as day, but in this darkness, it makes it burning hard even to focus. Everything’s getting darker, all around us. The Shir’s screams are high and cutting; they rip through my muscle and bone and open my heart. He promised you to us!
I en’t never seen coordinates for this node before. It don’t matter. I reach out, find the node we must have jumped through. Even in the Dark Zone the nodes are here; it opens for me and sucks us in—
They’re fighting it. I can hear their screams, and the screams have a kind of force, like a wind wrenching at you, pulling you off your feet.
Outside the viewscreen, I think I can see a face, in that sick half-light, an enormous, old face with a hundred eyes and wide broken rings of mandibles and a million spars of teeth, the size of a planet. We will not let you go.
“Burning hell you won’t!” I grab the node, and I force the jump, sling us into pure space.
The Shir’s cry of agony follows us into the white flash of pure space. As our ship bends and pitches through speeds much faster than light, their screams echo and echo and echo.