Chapter 17

The happy spell aboard the Jinx was ruined the very next day.

The morning started off well enough. With the hyperspace transit’s end coming up fast, Cass had a pile of small jobs and chores to finish around her ship, so after breakfast she left Jonesy to start her daily Fluxing practice by herself.

Jonesy hadn’t been practicing long when Cass called her back to the cargo compartment. Cass was running through her spacesuit’s maintenance checklist and wanted Jonesy’s help to make sure she hadn’t missed any other problems like the badly seated seal Jonesy had caught back on Lumen Station Six.

Even if it meant interrupting her Flux practice, Jonesy was happy to jump in and help her sister take her suit apart for inspection. It was fun to play the teacher for once, because she’d logged more suit-time in her few months on the salvage team than Cass had in her whole career as a Dexei courier, and she’d been curious to learn more about Cass’s strange, streamlined suit anyway. Cass had to complete a thirty-page security waiver before she could even let Jonesy touch it because it was stuffed with secret Dexei technology. A few parts were so secret they weren’t even listed in the maintenance manual, waiver or no waiver. Cass thought they were last-ditch weapons because her trainers had said she mustn’t activate them unless she was in deadly serious trouble, but even she didn’t know for sure.

Compared to a normal spacesuit, the strangest parts of Cass’s suit were its gloves. They had clever hatches that could slide apart to expose Cass’s bare palms if she brought them close together, along with built-in patch fields to keep her air in. “It’s for Keying,” she explained when Jonesy asked. “See, you can Key with stuff in the way or your hands apart, but it’s like trying to open a heavy door with your pinky or something. This way I don’t lose efficiency. It’s sort of an emergency thing, though. The fields eat the batteries pretty fast.”

Jonesy nodded as she picked up one of the gloves for a closer look. “Norcross’s gloves had holes like this,” she said. “Except without shutters—I think they had fields over them all the time. And his whole helmet was a field, too. But Cass, how could he have a field for his helmet? Wouldn’t he run out of batteries and—pop?”

“If this was a fair fight, sure. But it’s not.”

Jonesy was surprised by how frustrated Cass sounded. “Why isn’t it fair?”

Cass took the glove back from Jonesy and started reassembling her spacesuit. “Well, let’s start with that suit you saw Norcross wearing. Nobody makes suits like that, because nobody’s got the tech to make it practical and safe. Except for some reason, the Legion does. And think about the Seraph—how could such a little corvette pack enough punch to take out a station the size of Canary? All we know is that it did. They told me in training that for as long as Dexei’s been fighting the Legion, their tech has always been about thirty years ahead of the United Colonies Navy’s best stuff, and usually a solid twenty beyond the craziest stuff the Americans or ACU have in development. We don’t know where they get it.”

“That’s not fair,” Jonesy said. “But who do they work for, then? Norcross had an American accent.”

“Yeah, but so do like a billion independent colonists. It doesn’t tell us anything. Dexei’s pretty sure the Legion doesn’t work for anybody. And that they’re up to a lot more than we know about.” Cass scowled as she started tightening the bolts on her suit’s backpack unit. “The problem is, we can’t even keep track of what they do, except when we bump into them and record our own logs. Otherwise, wherever they go, whatever they do—once they’re gone, it’s like they were never there. They’re like ghosts.”

“But the security records—”

“Don’t show them. Not for long, anyway, once the data touches the hypernet. If you went back to Lumen and checked the footage from that docker market now, it’d show FPC fighting some local gangsters or something, not us fighting Legion marines. We don’t even know their actual name. We just call them the Gray Legion because that’s the only color scheme they seem to use for ships and drones and stuff.”

Jonesy hesitated, then asked, “Cass, why is there so much you don’t know? Does Dexei have to keep a lot of secrets from you, too?”

“Oh, for sure, but that’s not a bad thing,” Cass replied. “The Legion catches people, so it wouldn’t be safe if we all knew everything. If you mean about the Legion and stuff, though, that’s mainly because there is a lot we just don’t know, yet, because Dexei’s so new at this.”

“New at what?”

“Fluxing, fighting the Legion, all of it. For a long time—maybe forever—nobody but the Legion knew about Fluxers, so they got all the new ones. They’re not perfect, though. At some point they messed up and let a couple of new Fluxers get away, just like you did. And those kids ran long enough, and found enough help, to figure out the basics without killing themselves, and eventually how to detect it like the Legion does, so they could start trying to race them to new Fluxers. And that’s how Dexei started—”

“But how did they get away?” Jonesy couldn’t help interrupting. “How’d they figure it out on their own?”

“Look, you’ll have a whole class about it at the Academy,” Cass said. “The point is, it wasn’t that long ago. Well, end of the Exodus, ish, but six or seven decades still isn’t much in the grand scheme. Not when you’re playing catch-up against somebody as nasty as the Legion and there’s no way but the hard way to figure out what Fluxing works and what blows you up.”

Cass paused and laughed to herself. “So I guess that’s a long way to say it’s not my fault I don’t know everything.”

Maybe Cass thought it was funny, but Jonesy’s head was spinning a little, now. “Do the bad guys still get new Fluxers?”

Cass made a face. “Yeah, they do. Way more than we do, still. Only Dexei’s absolute best Fluxers get to race for the new kids because it’s the most dangerous job there is. If the Legion operators beat our rescue teams, they don’t just grab the new Fluxers. They usually wait around to ambush us when we show up, too. And they send out a lot of fake signals.”

“That’s horrible!” Jonesy exclaimed. “Why can’t they leave them alone? What do they want them for?”

“We’re pretty close to dropping,” Cass said, putting her reassembled spacesuit away. “Come on.”

“But what does the Gray Legion want with the new Fluxers?” Jonesy asked again, following Cass up through the ship to the cockpit.

“Well,” Cass said as she climbed into the pilot’s seat, “it’s pretty important for somebody to pick up the new Fluxers, because they usually end up exploding if nobody trains them. And we know the Legion trains some to be field agents, like Norcross.”

“Are the gray marines Fluxers, too?”

“Nope, just ultra-well-trained regular people in gear three notches past the best stuff money can buy. The actual Legion Fluxers nearly always work alone.”

“So what happens to the rest? The ones they don’t train? They don’t, like—?”

“Kill them? We don’t think so. They’ll kill normal people left and right, but they’ll do almost anything to get Fluxers alive. Not just new ones—our agents, too.”

“Oh,” Jonesy said, relieved. “That’s good.”

“Actually, it probably isn’t that good,” Cass said vaguely as she tapped through a menu on one of her screens. “Don’t worry about it, though. They won’t get you.”

“Okay,” Jonesy said. She tried to smile, but all this talk about the Gray Legion had made her kind of queasy. “They won’t win, right? We’ll stop the ones like Norcross, right?”

Cass hesitated while she changed to a different screen. “I sure hope so. Especially Norcross. Sometimes I have this dream where I’m the one, you know? Where it’s just me and him, and I get to be the one who makes him pay.”

Something in Cass’s face scared Jonesy a little. “What would you do to him?”

“As much as I could,” Cass said, in a low voice. “Slowly.”

The flight computer chirped. “ETR to drop waypoint, three minutes.”

“Okay, just about there,” Cass said. “This next place is pretty cool—it’s a city named Phosphor on the planet Septima, in Irrinus. You won’t get a chance to see much, but at least you’ll be able to say you were there. Flight computer, silence the rest of the pre-drop notifications except the final ten-count.”

“Confirmed, verbals off,” replied the Jinx’s flight computer.

“Cass?” Jonesy asked.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe you could ask them to let you go with them when we get to the Academy.”

“Go with who?”

“The ones they send to rescue my friends. I’m going to ask for sure, so maybe we could go together? Maybe that could be your chance to be the one who gets him.”

Cass turned away suddenly. “Flight computer, how’s our drop vector looking?”

“High-plane pattern Tango Tango Eight, minimal signature, latest estimated drift off original plot well below threshold. Would you like a detailed report?”

“Flight computer, no,” Jonesy said. “Cass?”

Cass still wasn’t looking at her. “Listen, Jonesy—”

“No!” Jonesy had a horrible lump in her throat, now, because she’d started thinking back on how Cass had been talking about her friends all this time. “Cass, they’re—Dexei’s going to rescue my friends, right? They’ll catch Norcross, right?”

“Jonesy,” Cass said thickly, “don’t make me answer that. Just—just don’t.”

“But I can tell them everything I saw—”

“It doesn’t matter!” Cass snapped. Then her shoulders fell. “I’m sorry, Jonesy. You’re going to have to grow up way too fast, and it’s not fair. It’s just how it is.”

“But it’s my fault! It’s my fault he took them! He came for me—”

“That doesn’t matter! You didn’t ask him to come. You were there minding your own business, just like we—just—it’s Norcross’s fault. It’s the Gray Legion’s fault. It’s not yours.”

“I thought—if I just found help—they’d be okay.” Jonesy sniffed and blinked, sending hot tears down her cheeks. “I wish you’d been there.”

The look on Cass’s face made Jonesy wish she hadn’t said anything.

“You don’t think I would have been there if I could have? You don’t think I haven’t been wishing I’d been there for you every single day for the last three years?”

“No, no, I just—you could have stopped them—”

“Stopped them? You have no idea about those guys, kiddo. At all.”

“But what if—”

“Stop! For the—just stop. I know you want to hear me say I could make everything better if I had the chance, and I’m not going to because I don’t want to lie to you, okay? That’s not how the world works. You have to be a grown-up about this, and I’m sorry—”

“I don’t want to be a grown-up about this!” Jonesy yelled.

“Too bad!” Cass yelled back. “I can only do what I can do! And what I can do is keep you safe, so that’s what I’m going to do. Maybe someday I’ll be able to clobber Norcross by myself, and the Seraph, too, but not now.”

“But what if we did run into him? What if we snuck up on his ship? Then we could—”

“Then we’d be dead. Dead or worse. Look—before they hit Canary, I felt just like you. I was just learning about Fluxing, and I felt invulnerable. But the truth is this power makes us more vulnerable. And it—it makes everybody around us vulnerable! So if we ran into him, there’s only one thing we’d do, and that’s run.”

“But my friends—”

“Forget your friends!” Cass shouted.

“No!” Jonesy cried. “And I wouldn’t run. Know why?”

“Jonesy—” Cass began, but the flight computer chirped again.

“Ten seconds to drop,” it said.

“Know why, Cass?”

Cass jerked away from Jonesy and strapped herself in. “Go to your cabin.”

“Five seconds.”

“BECAUSE GETTING LEFT BEHIND SUCKS, CASS!”

Jonesy wasn’t sure what shocked her most: that she’d just said that, or the realization that she meant it. Neither was as shocking as seeing Cass unclip her straps and swivel around with her hands together and her eyes flaring neon.

“I said,” she hissed as Jonesy’s feet left the floor, “go to your cabin now.”

“Dropping,” said the flight computer.

Jonesy burst into tears as a neon-magenta wave of force swept her from the cockpit.

Jonesy sobbed with her face buried in her pillow until Cass opened the door to her cabin and came in. “Go away,” Jonesy said, without looking up.

Cass didn’t go away. Jonesy felt her bunk shift as Cass sat down on the other end.

“Kiddo—”

“THAT’S NOT MY NAME,” Jonesy screamed into her pillow. “JUST GO AWAY, CASS!”

She heard Cass take a slow, deep breath.

“Jonesy, I didn’t say that stuff to be mean. Or because I don’t care about what happened to your friends.”

Jonesy peeled her face out of her pillow to glare at her sister. “Then why?”

“Because I love you, stupid!” Cass sniffed and blotted her eyes with her sleeve. “You died, okay?”

“No, I didn’t—”

“Yes, you did. I left you behind on Canary, and I watched Norcross blow it up. Mom tried to keep me from watching the screens, but I did. To me, that was watching you die. That was bad enough, knowing my kid sister was dead because I screwed up.

“Three years I had to live with that. Three years I couldn’t sleep because I had this little voice in my head going what if, what if, trying to get me to go back and check. And then—then I heard a new Fluxer had popped up in Noraza, right? Because Dexei keeps us posted on that kind of stuff. And I knew it was you. So I knew I could have come and found you anytime after I got the Jinx if I’d listened to that stupid voice, but instead I told myself I was being stupid and blew my chance. I could have—I could have just—died.”

“But,” Jonesy protested. “But then you knew I was okay!”

Cass laughed miserably. “Yeah, for a few hours. And then I found out the Legion beat our rescue team to Noraza and they had to abort. That’s what I meant when I said I’d lost you twice.”

Cass held her hands palms-up and looked at them with her mouth all screwed up, like she was about to have a properly loud cry. “I couldn’t Flux after that,” she said unsteadily. “Not with the kind of thoughts I had when I thought Norcross had snatched you after you’d been waiting three years for us to show up. It would’ve turned out like you and that flight computer, except it wouldn’t have been database records my Flux fried by accident. I was so messed up I almost couldn’t even get my head clear enough to rescue you for real when I found you on Lumen. If I’d missed you then—I don’t know.” She curled both hands into fists. “Maybe I would have popped my valve anyway.”

“But Cass—” Jonesy whispered.

“The point is, I get it. I get exactly how you feel because I’ve been there. For a really long time. And I’m so, so sorry about your friends, but they’re gone. As gone as Canary. You’re not. And I won’t lose you a third time. Not ever.”

Jonesy nodded slowly. “I know,” she said. “Thanks, Cass. I—what are you doing?”

Cass hesitated with her hands behind her neck. “Giving this back to you,” she said, lifting the glass hawk pendant out from under her shirt. “Just for now.”

Jonesy grabbed Cass’s wrists before she could undo the clasp. “No, no, no.”

“I don’t deserve it yet,” Cass said gently. “And you know it.”

“I don’t care. I don’t deserve a big sister like you, either.”

Cass rolled her eyes sadly and opened her mouth like she was about to make a joke, then closed it and eyed Jonesy for a moment. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jonesy said firmly.

Cass smiled, sniffed, and crushed her into a hug. “Okay,” she said. And again, whispering: “Okay.” She let Jonesy go, then asked, “Still mad?”

Jonesy sighed. “Yeah. I never wanted to be, but—yeah. Except I’m really glad you rescued me, too. And I’m mad about you guys never telling me about Fluxing when I was little, even though I get why you couldn’t. So I guess—I guess I just need time to even out.”

“I think we both do,” Cass admitted. “Sorry for losing my temper back there.”

“Me too,” Jonesy said, with a faint smile. “I just—it’s not fair. Trace, Rook, Eva, Hunter—everybody—they didn’t do anything wrong. They protected me.”

“I know. I know it’s not fair. And I won’t mess up your head making you think there’s some chance we might get them back, because that’s just not how it works.”

Jonesy nodded like this made sense, but it didn’t, and she couldn’t stand to leave it there even if Cass clearly did. “But you said being a Fluxer is like being a superhero,” she said quietly. “I don’t get it, Cass! If we’re like superheroes, why can’t we help them? Why can’t we fight pirates, or the Gray Legion, or anything? What’s even the point of Dexei if the guys like Norcross can do stuff like steal my friends and get away with it?”

“I know, I know,” Cass said. “You think I like running away from anybody? We’re just not there yet. If we tried taking on the Legion right now, we’d just get crushed, and there’d be no good guys again, like before. The only way we’ll ever beat the guys like Norcross is by staying secret and safe until we’re stronger than them. So what we need now is for smarties like you to figure out the stuff like hacking with Flux—stuff that’ll be nasty and mean and unfair for the bad guys, for once. That’s how we win someday.”

Jonesy sniffed and stared at the floor, thinking about her friends. She couldn’t believe how much she missed them, how strange and empty the Jinx felt sometimes with only Cass for company—no back-to-back fist bumps in the corridors, no early-morning smell of Meg’s jealously hoarded Nova Citrus moisturizer, no slappity-slap of Davenport Jr. running around barefoot, no Terry and Nikita giggling in a corner with a shared terminal and one earbud apiece. Finally she leaned into Cass again and hugged her around the waist. “I’ll figure it out, Cass. I’ll work so hard. But I don’t want to forget them, either.”

Cass hugged her back. “Then don’t. I shouldn’t have asked you that anyway. But I need you to promise me something. I need you to promise me you’ll keep out of trouble and let me get you to the Academy. I’ll do everything I can to keep you safe, but I need your help. Okay?”

Jonesy swallowed, then nodded. “Okay.”

“Promise me. You play it safe. No risks. No sending messages with your terminal. No listening to any messages you get. No wandering off without me. And especially no Fluxing when we’re not together, because you won’t be shielded. Promise.”

Jonesy shut her eyes tight and nodded again. “I promise.”

Cass returned to the cockpit, but Jonesy didn’t follow her right away. Instead she went to the lavatory and peeled the medical tape from her arm, one blue loop after another, until it was all off and she could stuff it in the waste slot. She had her arm back, white with freckles again.

And just like Cass had predicted, she didn’t have a scar.