CHAPTER 25

IN WHICH A DIFFICULT CONVERSATION OCCURS, AND NADYA THROWS UP.

I don’t get to talk to Pepper till the next day.

The rest of the night’s too hectic. The police come out with all the kids, who are starting to wake up scared and groggy, and we help Aaron get them settled down. They seem to trust me pretty well, since I freed them from Silvermask. Aaron finds his sister, and sure enough she’s the girl I saw on the Panpathia all those weeks ago out on the Cloud Sea. In all the hubbub of kids wailing and adults trying to calm them down and corral them into the vans, he flies to her like a rocket. The two of them don’t leave each other the whole rest of the night. Not at the police station where serious officers write down our stories one by one. Not on the trip back to the Orion over the bay on a police launch. Not on the long lift ride up the spire to our docking slip. And not once we’re back on the ship, trudging off to bed as dawn turns the sky gray. Sal sleeps on the floor in Tam’s room and lets the two of them have his.

I nab a little sleep, but it’s not very good. I keep remembering that fight with Silvermask on the Panpathia, and Thom with the fire spirit of Far Agondy burning him up from the inside. I wake up pretty often. The fourth time I open my eyes, the mid-morning sun’s creeping across the Orion’s deck and I figure it’s not worth trying to get back to sleep again.

So I pick up my old crutch, the same one I used right after my leg got hurt, and head for Pepper’s cabin.

I hesitate outside her door. I don’t want to wake her up if she’s sleeping. But she’s probably not. She was more upset than any of us last night. Gently, I knock.

For a few seconds, there’s no response, and I figure she’s still asleep. I’m about to head for the galley to make breakfast when her floorboards creak. A second later, the door opens.

Pep looks like she’s been up all night. Her eyes are puffy, her hair’s a rat’s nest, and her cheeks are red. She stares at me blankly, then sighs, “Come in.”

She closes the door behind me, then slumps toward her bed and waves at the chair by her desk. Her room’s still pretty dim, and the morning air is cool and damp. The sun won’t hit her side of the Orion for a while yet.

I sit in her chair and lean my crutch against her desk. My stomach churns and swirls, and my arms tingle. I’ve had all night to think about what I’m gonna say, but I’m still not sure it’s right. “I’m sorry, Pep,” I say. “For everything. I’m sorry for Tam and I’m sorry for Thom and I’m sorry for being a jerk.” My eyes tear up. My jaw aches. “I wish I was a better friend,” I whisper.

There’s silence. A long silence. The tears break free and run down my face. I was so sure she was gonna forgive me.

But she doesn’t.

“Yeah, well . . . ,” Pepper says. “Me too.”

I look up. Her eyes are bloodshot. Her chin quivers. She’s holding her arms so hard her fingers are going white.

“Why are we fighting like this?” I ask. It shouldn’t be this way. Not between us.

Pep looks at her feet, then up at the net full of stuffed animals on her ceiling. “It didn’t used to bother me that everybody thought you were so great. I did too.” Did. I feel like puking. “But, Nadya, you’re taking everything I want. Tam. Thom. What would you do if I told you I wanted to be captain?”

I blink. “You were gonna be the engineer . . .” On the ship we’d run together someday, I mean. The one we’ve always dreamed about.

Pep snorts. “Well, maybe I don’t wanna be anymore. You move so fast, you talk about everything, you think about everything, and you act before I even get a chance to open my mouth. Everybody just stares right past me at you, and then you do stupid stuff and people get hurt, but nobody cares. They just go, ‘Oh, poor Nadya,’ and help you out and then you do the same thing over and over again!”

I look down at my leg. “That’s not true,” I say automatically. “They . . . I mean . . .” But the more I think about it, the more I think maybe it is true. I do think and act fast, and people have gotten hurt because of me. Thom’s gone, and that feels like a boot stomp to the stomach. My head spins.

“I’ll be better,” I say miserably.

Silence again. Pep sits on her bed and starts to cry. I look up, and she’s got her head in her hands.

“Pep . . .”

“Just go,” she says. “I want to be alone.”

“Pep, I—”

“Go!” she screams. “Why don’t you ever listen?” She picks up a shoe and throws it at the wall above my head.

My fingers shake. My leg shakes. But I get up and crutch my way out, because what else am I going to do? I have to lean against the wall in the hallway to pull her door shut. I feel like I might throw up any second, so I slide to the floor and sit there, shivering, my hands and foot cold, my missing leg aching, thinking about everything Pepper said. I wonder if it’s true, whether I’m really that bad a friend, that bad a crewmate, that bad at everything. And as my head goes farther and farther down that path, my stomach finally does lose it, and I barf all over the hallway.

I’m still sitting there, waiting for my head to stop spinning long enough to crutch into the galley for a mop and some rags, when I hear footsteps. My gills burn, and I look up.

Alé’s standing next to me, hands on her hips. She looks a lot less surprised than I’d be if our situations were reversed. “Hey,” she says. “Need a hand?”

Shakily, I nod. She helps me into the galley and sits me down on one of the benches. “This is the kitchen, right?” she asks, nodding at the door that leads there.

“Yeah,” I mumble.

She limps in—I guess she’s off crutches now—and comes back a second later with a wet cloth for my face. “I’m making tea,” she says decisively. “What kind you like?”

“Chamomile,” I mumble. Alé disappears into the galley, and a second later I hear the kettle heating up. She takes a bucket and some rags into the hallway and spends a few minutes there while I try to make my hands stop shaking. We don’t talk again until she plunks two cups of tea down in front of me. Hers smells like chai.

“Fighting with your best friend?” she asks.

I nod.

“I figured,” she says. “Her window was open. We could hear you guys as we came on the ship.”

My gills burn even hotter, and I thump my forehead against the table. “Who’s ‘we’?”

“Me, Gossner, Rash, and Raj. Raj is here for help from Aaron and his sister, and the Goss brought your prosthesis. It’s finished.”

I stare at my tea, blinking. I should be excited about that. Raj is going to be okay. The prosthesis means walking again, maybe running.

But all I can think about is the look on Pepper’s face when she was screaming at me to get out, and her talking about how people get hurt because of me.

Alé nudges my tea toward me. “Drink,” she says. “You’re not gonna feel any better just staring at it.”

I do like she says. It’s warm and sweet. It reminds me of Mrs. T, but she’s gone too, just like Thom, and it’s all I can do to hold my heart together because it feels like everything’s cracking in half right now.

Alé takes a deep breath. “Look,” she says. “I don’t know you that well. I don’t know your crew that well either. But the Goss told us some things about Thom, and I don’t think you should be beating yourself up like this.”

I look up. Alé stares at me across her tea, sipping it slowly.

“You’re not giving him any credit. You’re not giving Tam any credit. And you’re not giving anybody else any credit either.”

I thump my skull on the table again. “That’s what Pep was accusing me of,” I mutter.

Alé shakes her head. “No, it’s not. She’s not giving them any credit either. Look,” she says. “How do you think Thom knew what to do in that mansion? How’d he know he needed to summon that particular fire creature in order to beat Silvermask?”

I never really thought about that.

“Because he’d been preparing for it. Because he knew he might have to and he thought it was the right thing to do. He and the Goss spent hours reading through her library, trying to find information on the Malumbra and how to beat it.” She leans back. “He didn’t do that because he wanted no part of fighting Silvermask. He did it because he wanted to be ready. You ask me, he did it because he wanted to be the hero. When he left the Goss’s tower last night, he didn’t look surprised, didn’t look upset. She was with Rash and me, asking what was going on, and he just came in and said, ‘They’re gone. I’m ready. I’m going,’ like they’d discussed the whole thing already.”

I wipe some tears from my eyes. That sounds like Thom, I guess. Maybe that’s what he was doing when I saw him staring at the boilers. Getting ready. “I never thought about him wanting to be a hero,” I mumble. “I never thought about him wanting anything. He was just . . . a grown-up, you know?”

Alé nods. “Believe me, I know. I made the same mistake about the Goss once, and she gave me a lecture that just about burned my hair off. So lemme tell you something: Grown-ups have dreams. They want things. And mostly when they do something it’s because of what they want, not because of what we do.”

I think of Thom as he hugged us all and got ready to head to the World Beyond. Maybe he does have dreams I don’t know about. Maybe he’s making some of them come true.

“As for Tam,” Alé says, and I want to crawl under the table and hide because I really don’t want to think about Pep liking Tam and Tam only paying attention to me, and I still feel terrible about that hug at Gossner’s tower. “Tam’s gonna like who he likes, or not. He’s his own boss. And if Pepper really wants his attention, she should be talking to him, not to you.”

“It’s not that easy,” I say. “She—”

Alé waves me off. “I know it’s not easy. You think with all those kids crammed together at the Goss’s we don’t have fights over who likes who? It happens all the time, and the Goss has some strict rules about it to keep things from getting out of hand.” She counts down on her fingers. “Rule number one: If you like somebody, you talk to that person about it, not to their friends or your friends or the person you think they like or whatever. Rule two’s that everybody gets to make up their own mind about who they like, no begging or arguing or manipulating. Rule three’s not really a rule, but it’s still important. The Goss says crushes come and go, but the best friendships last forever.” She pauses, then shrugs. “The rest of the rules are all just, like, logistics and who sleeps where and stuff.”

I was kinda wondering about that. “So,” I say delicately. “Are you and Rash . . . ?”

Alé snorts. “Ha! Not even. He’s not into anybody and I like girls. We’re just best friends, like I said before.”

“Oh,” I mumble, and my gills burn again. I’m not exactly at my sharpest lately.

Alé slurps down her tea, then listens to someone stomping around above our heads. “And that’s it for your pep talk.” She grins, then rolls her eyes. “Get it? ‘Pep talk’?” She shakes her head and offers me her arm. “The Goss is probably done talking with Nic by now, so let’s go get your prosthesis, okay?”