Chapter 16

What happened after the accident was a bit of a muddle for Jonesy.

She hurt like she’d never hurt before. Somewhere far away, she felt Cass’s hands and heard Cass’s voice, but she couldn’t understand her because she couldn’t stop screaming.

Finally, though, Jonesy realized she was all tucked into her bunk and the unimaginable pain was almost gone. Cass was beside her, red and puffy around the eyes like she was still getting over being scared to death or mad enough to explode. Or maybe both.

“How’s that?” Cass was asking.

Jonesy looked down and almost started crying in relief because her arms were both still attached and whole. Her right was wrapped in blue medical tape from wrist to elbow and felt strangely cold. “What happened?” she asked.

“You gave yourself a wicked third-degree burn all along here,” Cass said, tracing a finger along the top of Jonesy’s forearm without touching it. “Do you know how lucky you are?”

Jonesy shook her head miserably. “I’m sorry. It started fighting me like before, to open more. And then it did.”

“You stopped it before. Did it get you by surprise this time or what?”

“I didn’t mean to let it. I tried to stop it. But—I think maybe I didn’t mean it enough.”

For a moment Cass looked like she was about to start shouting. Then something changed in her expression. “Well, anyway,” she said softly as she stood up, “I had to shoot you up with some heavy-duty pain stuff, so you should rest until dinner.”

“Okay,” Jonesy said, blinking sleepily. “Thanks, Cass. Guess I’m done training, huh.”

Cass stopped in the doorway. “Nah. You’ll be far enough along by tomorrow morning to pick back up. If you want to.”

Jonesy swallowed, looking at her blue, taped-up arm, but she thought of Trace and Rook and all the others and said, “Yeah, I want to. I’ll be okay to?”

Cass nodded. “I greased you up with NSCaF. That’s the good stuff, like Navy medics carry. You probably won’t even have a scar by the time we drop.”

“I won’t?” Jonesy asked, shocked. “Doesn’t third degree mean my skin’s—”

“Gone, yeah,” Cass said, looking a bit green. “But like I said, NSCaF is the good stuff—the tubes cost more than Whistler’s ship’s worth, but Dexei keeps me stocked. I don’t even want to know what I’d look like without it.”

“Oh,” Jonesy said, and yawned. “Why do you still have the scar on your back, then?”

“You know, I told Mom I wanted it as a reminder,” Cass said, “but—honestly, I just thought it was cool that it was a K for kidney. Is that weird?”

“Super weird,” Jonesy said, with a giggle that became another yawn. “But cool, too.”

Cass grinned. “Plus it was about as close as she was ever going to let me get to getting a tattoo. Rest up. I’ll get you when it’s dinnertime.”

Cass shut the door, and Jonesy snuggled into her bunk, smiling faintly to herself. She was so sleepy that even the thump-thump-THWACKing of Cass going a round with her punching bag in the cargo compartment couldn’t stop her eyes from falling shut and staying that way.

That night at dinner Jonesy asked Cass if couriers ever worked in teams, but Cass said they usually worked solo after they completed their field training.

“Oh,” Jonesy said, disappointed. “I was thinking maybe someday we could do this together. I could do the small Fluxing, and you could do the big Fluxing.”

“You don’t have to be a courier just because I am,” Cass said, propping her chin in her hand. “Look, I know exactly what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you’re stuck like this.”

“Yeah,” Jonesy admitted. “So I was—just trying to think—”

“How to make the best of it?”

“Yeah.”

“Because you can’t go as big as you want, yet, even when you just started and I keep telling you it’ll be fine? Why?”

“Because—I was thinking—maybe I’ll never be good at big stuff because I’m good at details, like you’re good at big stuff but, um”—Jonesy paused to pick at the blue tape on her arm, trying to smooth out a corner Cass had folded back on itself— “not that good at details.”

Cass burst out laughing. “Wow, okay, maybe I didn’t know exactly what you were thinking. Look—every Fluxer has strengths and weaknesses, yeah, but that doesn’t mean there’s stuff they can’t learn.”

“But—but then why can’t you—?”

“Dude, give me a little credit,” Cass said. “For one thing, it’s not that I can’t, it’s just that I’m not dialed-in enough with some stuff to try teaching it. And if you must know, that’s mostly because I stopped training at the Academy as soon as my one-year minimum term was up, so I didn’t stick around to learn as much as I could have. I wanted to get out and do something, make a difference, blah blah blah.”

“But that’s what I want, too,” Jonesy said.

Cass just smiled at her instead of replying.

“What?”

I did a little research in my copy of the Dexei field manual while you were sleeping. How many Fluxers do you think have hacked a flight computer?”

Jonesy frowned. She’d never wondered about it, but she could guess the answer from Cass’s expression. “Not a lot?”

“None. Like, ever.”

“Never ever?”

“Pretty sure, yeah. My files don’t even have a heading for messing with computers, other than how to break them. Any Fluxer can do that, no problem. But hacking one? I don’t think anybody in Dexei’s even tried.”

Jonesy still didn’t quite believe it. “But I still messed up a lot of stuff without meaning to. And the record I made wouldn’t have fooled anybody but a computer.”

Cass rolled her eyes. “Who cares if you didn’t get it right the first time? It was, what, your second or third time Fluxing? And you messed up that stuff because you did mean to, because you were mad. Don’t you get what that means?”

“You think I could do it without messing up?”

“Oh, no question. No, I think—okay, here. There’s this object lesson they teach at the Academy, right? They set up a game where there’s a hundred marines in a room between you and the prize, and you’ve only got a thousand calories to burn for Fluxing.”

“So what do you do?” Jonesy asked. “Is a thousand enough to beat a hundred marines?”

“In the game, yeah—they set the rules so it’s exactly enough, at least if you’re clever. So you figure it out and tell them how you beat the hundred marines, and then you get to open the door for the prize. Which turns out to be one more marine.”

Jonesy giggled, but it wasn’t funny when she thought about it. “That’s mean.”

“Teaches a good point, though. See, you’re supposed to ask if you can skip around the marines for under a thousand so you can keep some in reserve.”

“Ohhh,” Jonesy said slowly.

“Don’t tell anyone I told you about it,” Cass said, shaking a finger. “Anyway, I think that’s where this could get amazing for you. Computers are in everything. Ships, doors, guns, armor, drones, you name it—and if you own their computers, you own them. If you got good enough at this to wipe palmlock chips and scramble drone brains—boom! Now the bad guys can’t shoot you, and the drones are their problem, not yours. And that sounds a lot more efficient than blocking bullets and smashing drones to me. I guess I don’t know how much work the hacking would be, but it shouldn’t be a once-a-day wipeout thing once you’re older and all trained up. Not if you’ve done it with your limits where they are now.” Cass paused, lips pursed thoughtfully. “Actually, how did you do it? I don’t even know where I’d start, but I don’t have a clue about what’s inside a flight computer.”

“They’re pretty tough,” Jonesy said eagerly, and almost launched into explaining high-tolerance neural bus architecture before realizing that wasn’t what Cass was asking. She hesitated, embarrassed by how backward, and even dangerous, her approach to hacking the flight computer seemed after Cass’s training. Then she thought of never telling Rook how she’d fixed the climate consoles, so she went ahead and explained—how she’d planned it all out, visualizing what she needed to find and change in the computer’s memory, and let the Flux just sort of run with it after she’d Keyed.

Cass’s eyebrows ratcheted higher and higher as she listened. “Wow,” she said afterward. “That’s—huh. And you didn’t get hurt at all?”

Jonesy shook her head. “Why?”

“Well, it sounds like you Keyed without Shaping, and that’s supposed to be Disasterpiece Theater. If that’s how it works, then yeah, you probably shouldn’t experiment with it until we get to the Academy. But after that, you’ve got to get this figured out because it’s awesome. And hey—if you can learn to hack with Flux, I wouldn’t be the only one who’d want you backing me up once you graduated. There are way cooler jobs you could help with than mine.”

“Like”—Jonesy took a deep breath, almost afraid to ask—“rescuing people?”

Cass considered her with an odd, uncertain expression, half-amused and half-sad, before cracking a smile. “Especially like rescuing people.”

Jonesy drummed both hands on the table. “I knew it! So how soon do we get there?”

“Soon. A little sooner than before, actually, with this schedule change. If I could tell you exactly, I would, but it’s one of those things I’m only cleared to know, not tell. Dexei’s got to be super-careful with information like that.”

“So you can’t tell me anything about the Academy?”

“Oh, no, I can tell you plenty,” Cass said. “As soon as you run a hundred laps for me. Cockpit to cargo and back.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I need ten minutes to finish a checklist up front. And because you’re vibrating.”

Jonesy had to admit that was true.

“And I’m not that bad with details,” Cass said.

“Are so!” Jonesy said, bouncing up. “That’s why you never got away with anything!”

“No,” Cass called after her, “that was because somebody had to ask about every little thing Mom and Dad would never have noticed!”

Jonesy giggled from cockpit to cargo and back. She had to admit that was true, too.

If Jonesy had been looking forward to the Academy before, it was nothing compared to how she felt when Cass told her about it. Or as much as she was allowed to tell, anyway. She couldn’t describe it for Jonesy in any detail, except to say it was “on a planet” and “pretty big,” but what she could talk about, at least a little, was what Dexei did there. She said the Academy might remind Jonesy of Canary Station because it wasn’t just for training new Fluxers—it was also where Dexei built ships like the Jinx, and where scientists like their parents invented clever new technology for Dexei’s field divisions, and where Dexei’s best Fluxers did all the research to learn more about how Fluxing worked. The Flux research was incredibly important for Dexei, but it was often incredibly dangerous, too, which was why the campus had its share of craters like Cass had mentioned during training. Some accidents left weirder marks than craters, though, like the place where a whole lab had disappeared, along with three Fluxers and a perfect sphere cut from the surrounding supply rooms and bedrock.

“Disappeared? ” Jonesy asked. “You can disappear stuff with Flux?”

“Well, I can’t,” Cass replied. “But yeah, if you really know your freaky physics stuff, you can have all kinds of mad-science whoopsies. Dexei isn’t even sure what they did. They keep getting super-weird readings around the place with particle detectors, though, so they sealed it off and pumped out all the air.”

“Why?”

“Because they think it might reappear someday, and they don’t know what would happen if anything was in the way.”

“They think what? That doesn’t make sense!”

Cass laughed. “Yeah, well, get used to it. Things happen at the Academy all the time that don’t make sense. Doesn’t stop them from happening.”

Jonesy scowled. “What are the classes like? Can the teachers explain this stuff better than you?”

That made Cass laugh even louder. “Yeah, probably. You’ll have a training mentor all to yourself, anyway—and they’ll pick somebody perfect for your strengths and weaknesses, too, so it’ll definitely be somebody who doesn’t mind answering bazillions of questions instead of getting any actual training done.”

“Well, good,” Jonesy said, ignoring the way Cass had made that sound like a bad thing. “So you just had one teacher the whole time you were there?”

“Well, there’s still all the normal classes for regular school, but only one for Flux training, yeah. I had Mrs. Tempest. She’s a little old lady who wears pink sweaters and ten pounds of gold bracelets, but she’s still about twice as strong a Fluxer as I am.”

Jonesy giggled at the idea of a little grandma in pink being stronger than her sister. “Is she nice?”

“Well, she taught me really well and really fast, but nice? Uh, no. You wouldn’t get her, though. You’d get—I don’t know. Somebody super-smart. And super-patient, obviously. Maybe Willow or Fieldstone, or maybe Doctor Gonzalez. They’re all pretty nice. And if you think stuff like making that flower was cool, wait til you see what they can do. I saw Doctor Gonzalez take a mechanical wristwatch apart with Flux and spread all the gears and springs and jewels out in the air like an exploded diagram—except it didn’t stop ticking, and it still had the right time when he made it screw itself back together.”

“Cool.” Jonesy sighed happily and sat there thinking for a minute before something occurred to her. “Is everybody there a Fluxer, or are there regular people, too?”

“There are plenty of regular people, sure,” Cass said. “Like, sometimes Dexei recruits people who can support the cause—advanced physics researchers, data security experts, genius engineers, people like that. The guy who designed the Jinx for me was one of those. Most of them are basically refugees, though, like everybody who escaped Canary with us. People who didn’t do anything wrong but have to hide from the official story anyway.”

“Okay,” Jonesy said, relieved. “Good.”

Jonesy wanted the transit to go on forever, but suddenly it was the last full day and Cass reminded her they’d be arriving in the morning. Cass also warned Jonesy that her job would be too hectic for her to train Jonesy much more until after her last stop. After that, though, they’d be on their way to drop off Jonesy at the Academy.

Jonesy couldn’t wait to get there. She couldn’t wait to help rescue her friends and start her real training, and she especially couldn’t wait to see her mom. Her mom didn’t even know she was alive, yet, because the Jinx was way too small to have a hypercast transmitter, and sending messages on the hypernet wasn’t safe. Thinking about surprising her mom when they arrived made Jonesy happy and excited and heartsick all at once—so much so that she wouldn’t have minded that the week was almost over, except for one other thing she’d learned from Cass.

And that was that super-secret Dexei couriers didn’t always get to hang around at the Academy for long. Cass had racked up a few months of shore leave and said Dexei would probably let her blow it all at once for such a special occasion, but if something big came up, she might only have time for a quick hug goodbye on the landing pad. Jonesy knew that meant she had to act like that last full day of hyperspace might be their last chance for proper Sister Time for a long while.

And after thinking about it all morning, she came up with a plan.

That afternoon, before she got too tired from practicing, she went and interrupted Cass in the cockpit. “I need you to wait in your cabin.”

“Oh, really?” Cass inquired, arching an eyebrow. “For what?”

“No questions!” Jonesy barked, pulling her from the cockpit by the hand. “You have to stay inside until I say. And no peeking!”

“Cross my heart,” Cass said as she shut her cabin door.

Jonesy ran to her cabin for the baggie of red sand she’d saved from Dreschirr-St. Francis, dumped it on the dining table beside her resin-encased flower, and got started. The idea she’d come up with wasn’t simple, but she was so focused and sure that molding the sand took her hardly any time at all—and when her gates started getting impatient halfway through, she didn’t even have to yell at them. She just gave them a stern look in the dark place and that was enough.

It was still a lot of work, though.

“Cass!” she finally yelled, shaking from the effort of holding her finished creation together. “Cass, come quick! I need you!”

Cass burst from her cabin. “Are you okay? What’s wrong? What are you doing?”

“Take it,” Jonesy gasped. “Take it, quick.”

Cass darted to the bench across from Jonesy without another word, put her hands together, and took over just as Jonesy was about to lose it.

Jonesy Keyed closed and grabbed the table so she wouldn’t topple off her bench. She felt like she’d run a thousand laps of the Jinx and spun in circles until she couldn’t stand up. “Could you—could you melt it—melt the sand—for me?”

Cass nodded. “Back up.”

Jonesy stumbled away from the table and covered her eyes. She heard Cass draw a breath, and suddenly the dining compartment was as hot as a sauna. The Jinx’s air-conditioning system kicked into overdrive with a roar of fans.

When Jonesy uncovered her eyes, her creation was glowing orange in the air between Cass’s hands, and Cass looked like somebody had dumped a bucket of water on her head.

“Just so you know,” Cass said, “this is the kind of thing you want to do outdoors.” She looked annoyed as she waggled her fingers to spin the cooling piece of glass for a closer look, but then she lit up with a huge smile. “Dude, it’s a hawk. A ghost hawk.”

Jonesy nodded furiously. “It’s a pendant. That’s why there’s the hole.”

“This is really good,” Cass said, and glanced at the cabinet where the Jinx’s fabricator lived. “I’ll bet I even have enough titanium left. Okay, your turn. Go to your cabin and don’t come out until I say. And no peeking!”

Jonesy couldn’t have peeked if she’d wanted to, because she fell asleep the moment she fell into her bunk. The next thing she knew, Cass was shaking her awake and leading her back out to the dining compartment, where the fabricator’s screen said CURE CYCLE COMPLETE with a timer flashing all zeroes.

Cass opened the hatch and lifted out a loop of silvery-gray chain with the streaky gray glass hawk dangling from the end. “Check this. Titanium alloy. And—”

Jonesy screamed as Cass dropped the pendant and stepped on it, then gasped when she lifted her boot and it was still in one piece. “I thought it was glass!”

Cass grinned as she picked it back up. “Still is. And now it’s glass inside a couple layers of bulletproof poly armor. My job gets rough sometimes.” She unhitched the clasp and fastened it around her neck. “I never want to have to take it off.”

Cass teared up and hugged Jonesy so hard her feet left the floor. “I love it. And as soon as you’ve finished your training and picked your code name, I’ll make you one, too.”

“I’d love that,” Jonesy said. “Promise?”

“Promise,” Cass replied, squeezing her even tighter. “No matter how many tries it takes me.”