The lowdeck corridors are choked with the dead.
I step over and around them, my boots slipping and sticking on blood and bullet casings and bits of bone. Everything is washed in emergency lumen red, and the smell of death is overwhelming. My whole right side is alight with pain that radiates out from the deep cut the daemon gave me. The makeshift bandage I tied around my waist is soaked through and cold against my skin. My hands are shaking. I am sweating and freezing all at once. Struggling to breathe. The corridor tilts around me, and I have to put my hand out to keep myself upright.
‘Whoa,’ Zoric says. He tries to help me, as does Yumia, but I shrug them both away.
‘Efrayl,’ I say, into my vox-link. ‘Do you read me?’
There’s no answer but static.
‘Efrayl,’ I say, again. ‘Do you read me?’
I wait for what feels like an age, but he doesn’t answer. All I hear is that white noise rush, like the sound of a mountain storm. I let my hand fall away from my ear and start moving again. Zoric calls after me to wait. To stop. But I don’t. I can’t. Not with Sofika’s whispered words growing louder and louder in my ears.
Where are you, Ahri?
I make it ten steps before the corridor tilts again. More than tilts. It runs like wet paint. I hear my sabre hit the deck, and I end up on my hands and knees amongst the blood and bullet casings. Amongst the silent, still dead. I can’t fight Zoric and Yumia off this time when they move me so that I am sitting up against the corridor wall, nor can I stop Yumia from pushing aside the makeshift bandage at my waist to get a better look at the wound the daemon left me with. She hisses through her teeth.
‘She is bleeding badly,’ she says to Zoric, as if I am not here.
‘So seal it,’ I say.
Yumia shakes her head. ‘I have nothing to seal it with, and even if I did, it would not matter. Something inside is split or severed. This is a killcut.’
I shake my head, the action printing Yumia’s image across my vision over and over.
‘It’s not a killcut,’ I tell her. ‘I’m fine.’
I push her away and get to my feet by leaning on the wall, then I pull the binding around my waist tighter, spattering blood onto the deck. I push myself away from the wall and set to moving again, but this time I only make it two paces before Zoric has to catch me to keep me from falling. It looks as though it hurts him to do it.
‘Efrayl could be anywhere. You’ll bleed out before you find him,’ he says.
I shake my head again, though a part of me knows that there’s a good chance Zoric is right. Yumia, too. My fingers have gone completely numb, and my whole body is trembling, not just my hands. Clouds are stealing in at the edges of my sight, but I can’t stop. Not even the thunder-loudness of my own heart can drown out those whispered words.
Where are you, Ahri?
I need to go to Sofika, but I won’t get there. Not on my own.
‘I don’t need to find Efrayl,’ I tell Zoric. ‘I know exactly where he is, because I told him to stay with her. To keep her safe.’
Zoric frowns at me. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asks. ‘Keep who safe?’
I blink. Take a ragged breath. And then I open my mouth and speak.
‘Sofika,’ I say.
‘Throne,’ Yumia says, to Zoric. ‘I told you, it is a killcut. The blood loss is speaking for her.’
‘It’s not the blood loss,’ I snarl. ‘For Throne’s sake, let me go. I have to get to her.’
Zoric sighs. ‘Sofika isn’t here, lord,’ he says. ‘She died months ago, on Hellebore. You know that.’
I grab hold of the front of his jacket. ‘She is alive,’ I tell him, my voice low and urgent. ‘She has been, all of this time. Sofika is here, aboard the Vow. If you do not let me go to her, she will die.’
Zoric starts to speak again, but I don’t let him. I can’t.
‘It’s the truth, Danil,’ I tell him. ‘I swear it.’
Yumia’s eyes are wide. ‘This is delirium,’ she says. ‘The blood loss.’
Zoric doesn’t answer her. Doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes fixed on mine, searching. Then he shakes his head, his pale eyes glassy.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Sofika is alive.’
The corridor that leads to Sofika’s chambers is just like the others. Fouled with blood and shell casings and broken, lifeless bodies. Zoric helps me pick my way through it. I can hardly stand without him now and my breathing is short and shallow, but neither of those things stop me from trying to fight free of him when we get close enough to see that the bulkhead door is locked partway open, false starlight spilling out from inside.
‘Mia,’ Zoric says. ‘Check the chamber is clear.’
She nods, without looking at him or me. She hasn’t since she found out the truth. Yumia approaches the chamber silently, her rope darts held in her hands like knives. She crosses the threshold without a sound, disappearing into the starlit dark.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Let me go.’
But Zoric doesn’t, no matter how much I fight him, so I stop struggling and just wait for what feels like minutes before Yumia speaks again.
‘Clear,’ she says.
Zoric eases his grip on me and then helps me the rest of the way to the door. Yumia is standing stock-still inside, surrounded by the still forms of dead crewmen and vassals. I barely even spare a glance for them, or for her. My eyes go straight to Sofika.
‘Throne,’ Zoric says, softly.
My dream-taker is still, and silent, coiled in the pipes and cables of her machine. Tiny speckles of blood paint her pale skin with a pattern like stars.
‘Sofi,’ I say, and I shrug free of Zoric’s grip. This time, he doesn’t try to stop me.
Despite my shallow lungs and my numb legs I make it most of the way across the chamber before I have to stop. This time it’s not because I’m dizzy. It’s because one of the bodies at the base of Sofika’s machine moves. Breathes. Speaks.
‘S-stop,’ Efrayl says, holding up the pistol I gave him in shaking hands.
‘Efrayl,’ I say raggedly. ‘It’s me.’
‘Ahri?’ he says.
I nod. ‘Ahri.’
He lowers the pistol slowly and puts it down in his lap. Efrayl’s pale face is a mess of deep, ugly cuts. Deep enough to see through to the workings beneath his skin. His tunic and trousers are soaked black with blood.
‘Is she alive?’ I ask.
Efrayl picks up a device from the floor beside him. An external monitron, with a blood-splattered screen. He smears the blood obscuring the display with his thumb, and then nods.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘She is alive.’
I go to my knees, then, from the impact of his words alone. A single tear rolls down my cheek, hot and stinging. ‘You kept her safe,’ I say.
He nods, a lolling motion of his head. ‘You said to shoot anyone who tried to get to her,’ he says thickly. ‘So I did.’
I look around at those he killed. At the makeshift weapons in their hands. Bits of broken glass, and cutting tools.
‘You did well, Efrayl.’
He nods again. His breathing is ragged and fitful. ‘What you said before, about switching off the machine,’ he says. ‘Did you mean it?’
I glance up at Sofika, coiled in the cables of her machine. My dream-taker. My soulmate. The only person who knows exactly what I am and what I’ve done, and still has the heart to smile at the sight of me.
‘She won’t suffer any more,’ I say, looking back at Efrayl. ‘Not after Dimmamar.’
‘Good,’ he says. ‘That is good.’
‘Thank you, Efrayl,’ I say. ‘For everything you have done.’
He smiles faintly. ‘I did my best,’ he says, between breaths. ‘That’s all.’
And then my medicae takes a rasping breath and starts to shake just like Sofika did before. A seizure.
I try to get up to help him, but my legs won’t obey me and neither will my lungs. They are so shallow now that I can’t get air at all. I fall properly onto the deck, face down. Zoric runs over and crouches down beside me. He rolls me onto my back and puts his hand to that wound in my side and I hear him shout at Yumia to run for a medicae. I try to tell him that I don’t need one. That it doesn’t hurt, really. That I just need a moment. But the words won’t come. I don’t have enough air to speak them. I can’t move. Can’t breathe. All that I can do is lie still on my back and watch as Sofika’s stars disappear from the edges inwards, swallowed by darkness.