CORA STOOD OVER BONEBREAK’S shoulder, gazing at the ship’s view screen. “Is that Drogane?” she asked. It was hard not to be awed by the green-and-blue planet that filled the sky. It looked so similar to Earth, except the blue color of the water was two shades lighter, and the shapes of the continents were all different. Regardless, it made her heart ache with longing. Lyrics drifted into her mind.
Home is more than a house . . .
It’s more than a room . . .
Home means loved ones and . . .
“That’s Drogane, all right. It’s got a similar atmosphere to your planet, but the air has a higher nitrogen content. Swallow these—oxygen adjusters. You’ll be able to breathe.” He handed her three white pills, which she weighed in her hand hesitantly, then distributed to Anya and Willa. She swallowed her own down dry. Bonebreak began the procedure to slow the ship and then started muttering as he fumbled with the controls. “Damn Axion technology. Where’s the blasted . . . oh.”
The ship lurched sharply to the left, and Cora clutched the back of his chair to steady herself.
“Go sit with the others,” Bonebreak said, waving toward the corner where Anya and Willa were seated. “You make me nervous hovering so close.”
Cora sat on the floor next to Willa, who slid a paper her way.
You know you cannot trust the Mosca, don’t you?
Cora glanced at Bonebreak and tried to keep her voice low. “I actually think he’s not so bad,” she whispered. “But just in case, that’s why Mali and Leon went back to the aggregate station. If Bonebreak tries to claim ownership and sell us, Cassian will stop him. Technically, Cassian’s still our owner. Once they find him, they’re going to meet us on Drogane.”
Willa wrote something else.
Was it true what Dane said? That you love this Kindred?
Cora read the note and felt her cheeks warm. The first time she’d seen Cassian, she’d certainly been intrigued. Drawn to him, even. And she had to admit that there were times when she’d lain awake at night, thinking of their kiss, breathless at the memory. But love? How could she love someone who wasn’t even human?
And then she pictured him being tortured.
She closed her eyes.
Images filled her head: him with those snaking wires attached to his skin, and then flashes of her nightmare too, bullet holes ripping through him. They mixed together in a guilty haze that she could barely swallow down. If she really loved him, how could she have let that happen?
And yet, she told herself, it had been his choice.
Love was always about choice.
“I do care about him. And he does for me. But it isn’t as simple as it sounds. It isn’t love like regular couples back home. It’s more like . . . a connection. Like we see something special in each other, something no one else fully sees. It’s just . . .” She opened her eyes. “How can you really love someone you can never fully understand? A different species?”
Willa nodded thoughtfully and then wrote:
Anya and I are different species and yet we care about each other. Not romantic love, but still the care you describe. A connection. A recognition of something special. That kind of bond is not easily broken. Perhaps different species have more in common than you believe.
As Cora read the note, her guilt lessened, and a thrill ran through her. It was true that the bond she felt with Cassian was powerful: it had been built slowly, over many trials, and was all the stronger because of it.
She felt herself shaking a little with hope.
Could she and Cassian actually have a chance for a future together?
She glanced over the paper at Anya, who was turned toward the view screen, silently watching the stars, knees hugged in close. Even if she hadn’t known Anya long, she too felt a connection, and not just awe at the girl’s unnatural brilliance. Anya was the only other human she’d been able to communicate with telepathically.
She closed her eyes and tried to reach into Anya’s mind to send a message of reassurance. Everything will be all right. The wolves are strong, but the rabbits are clever.
But her thoughts hit a wall. It felt odd, as though there were something mentally blocking her. Anya only continued staring at the screen as though she hadn’t sensed anything at all.
“Anya?” she asked aloud.
The girl turned and smiled, flashing a thumbs-up.
Her thumb didn’t shake.
The ship began to rumble as they entered Drogane’s atmosphere. Cora folded the paper and stashed it in her pocket. Strange curled clouds flew by, giving way to a ridge of mountains in the distance. The mountains were mostly bare patches of steep rock with a few clusters of trees nestled in the lower elevations, towering over lakes and oceans shimmering in the valleys. The entire planet looked pristine and untouched.
“Where are the cities?” Cora asked.
“The climate is too volatile for any species to live permanently on the surface,” Bonebreak explained. “The mountains are hollow. We make our cities there, where it is safe from the storms.” He wagged a finger at the beautiful blue sky. “Don’t trust clear skies. You take a breath and next thing you know there’s a snowstorm.”
He piloted the ship into a valley, toward a dark shadow Cora had mistaken for a cave, which turned out to be a docking port. Heavy metal doors fixed with intricate Mosca locks opened with a rumble as Bonebreak evened out the ship for entry.
“I can smell roast cave rat already,” he said happily.
As the doors opened, they plunged into the deep of the mountain, and the view screen went black. Bonebreak hummed to himself as they flew into the blackness, seemingly untroubled about the absence of light.
“I already radioed in from the outer atmosphere,” he said. “My brother will be waiting for us in the terminal. Expect to be filled with delicious foods—we are a hospitable race even to lowly humans and apes.”
Cora rolled her eyes, but there was a smile on her lips too.
The ship landed.
The hatch opened, and Bonebreak took his bag and jumped down. Willa helped Anya and Cora down. She blinked in the darkness. There were no lights or guides to show where they were going, only the faint glow of what seemed to be glowworms or bioluminescence up high.
“Bonebreak?” she called. She could hear him humming ahead. “Wait! Turn a light on.”
“Light?” His voice was disembodied in the darkness. “What light?”
Cora reached out in front of her to avoid bumping into anything. “How are we supposed to see where we’re going?”
Bonebreak grumbled to himself as his footsteps returned, and she felt his glove on her shoulder. “I forgot about humans’ poor eyes. Our masks give us the ability to see in the dark as well as in the light. My brother will have some extra masks for you. Until then, link hands, and I will guide you.”
Cora gagged at the thought of having to wear one of the Mosca’s reeking masks. Willa slipped her hand in Cora’s, and Anya took the other one, and they started walking. Cora couldn’t help noticing how eerily still Anya’s hand was, clutched in her own.
She gave Anya’s fingers a squeeze. “It seems like you’re doing better. With the tremor in your hand, I mean.”
Anya’s hand suddenly went rigid. “It . . . comes and goes,” she said. “I’ve been sleeping better, and that helps.”
A cold premonition ran down Cora’s back. Sleeping better? Would that really make a difference on a physical impairment? And yet she hardly knew the girl, not really. She certainly didn’t know the details about how exactly the Kindred drugs had affected her.
“I’m glad,” Cora said.
The temperature was cool and damp, a blessing after Armstrong’s blistering desert. Bonebreak stopped, and she heard more complicated locks opening and then a few formal-sounding Mosca exchanges between shadowy figures she could barely make out in the bioluminescent light. And then gloved hands were on her, patting down her body like an inspection. The mystery hands found Lucky’s journal before she could stop them, but whoever the Mosca inspector was flipped through it with little interest and handed it back to her.
And then Bonebreak’s voice rang with joy. “Ah! Brother!” In the faint light, Cora could make out the vague shape of another hunchback Mosca embracing Bonebreak and something like smaller people skittering all around, hunchback too, breathing heavily through masks. One of them spoke foreign words in a high-pitched voice, and with a start Cora realized the little shadows were Mosca children.
“Here.” Bonebreak shoved something into her hands, and she heard him do the same for Anya and Willa. “Goggles. They belong to my brother’s children, but the young have good eyes. They can see well enough in the dark without them until we get back to their home. Also your puny heads are so small that our regular masks would probably fall off your faces.”
Hesitantly, Cora felt the shape of the goggles. They were thick, round lenses with a strap that felt fleshy and stank something awful. She tentatively slid them over her head and then jumped as some kind of machinery automatically turned on. The goggles started vibrating, the lenses rotated, and the apparatus clicked loudly.
Suddenly, she could see.
She nearly jumped again. They were standing in a room the size of a train station lobby. It even reminded her of one, with something that looked like a digitized timetable on the wall and low benches in the center built for the Mosca’s hunched frames. There were a dozen Mosca scattered throughout the hall, waiting by doors, standing by something that looked and smelled like a restaurant.
And the children! She tried hard not to recoil. She’d never seen a Mosca without a mask before. The children’s faces without masks or goggles were wrinkled, with heavy eyelids and unnaturally large eyes and almost no nose at all—no wonder they didn’t mind the stench. Yet at the same time, there was something almost endearing about their oversized features.
She found herself smiling—was she actually starting to like the Mosca?
A grown Mosca, who she assumed was Bonebreak’s brother, patted her shoulder as though she too were a small child. “Little human childrens,” he said. “I am Ironmage. My brother tells me he has a deal with you. A lucrative deal. If you win the Gauntlet.” He let out a burst of laughter. “My brother was never bright. But come, get food just the same.”
He patted her again. Less like a child, she realized, and more like a dog.
“This is crazy,” she muttered. With the goggles on, Anya and Willa looked almost alien themselves, and Cora knew she must look just as strange.
A Mosca child excitedly pounced on her, pulling her along amid a torrent of giggles. “Come,” it said in slightly broken English. “I’ll feed you and give you a baths and take good care of you.”
Cora sighed and let herself be dragged along. Forget beating the Gauntlet. It would be challenging enough to prove humanity’s worth to a species who thought of her as nothing more than an overgrown puppy.