“It’ll be faster if you give me your name.”
“Teka Surukta, then.”
“Okay, Teka Surukta.” I put her makeshift knife down on the edge of the sink. “I think that belongs to you. I came to return it.”
“I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I didn’t turn you in that night, so what makes you think I’m going to turn you in now?” I tried to slouch, like she was, but the position felt unnatural to me. My mother and father had taught me to stand up straight, knees together, hands folded when I wasn’t using them. There was no such thing as casual conversation when you were a Noavek, so I had never learned the art of it.
She didn’t look confused anymore.
“You know, you might have better luck carrying around some of your tools over there as weapons instead of the tape . . . thing,” I said, gesturing to the delicate instruments magnetized to the wall. “They look sharp as needles.”
“They’re too valuable,” Teka replied. “What do you want from me?”
“I suppose that depends on what sort of people you and your renegade cohort are.” All around me was the sound of dripping water and creaking pipes. Everything smelled moldy and dank, like a tomb. “If the interrogations don’t yield actual results within the next few days, my brother is going to frame someone and execute them. They will likely be innocent. He doesn’t care.”
“I’m shocked that you do,” Teka said. “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of sadist.”
I felt a sharp pain as a currentshadow darted across my cheek and spread over my temple. I saw it in my periphery, and suppressed the urge to wince at the pain it brought, a sharp ache in my sinuses.
“Presumably you all knew the potential consequences of your actions when you signed up for your cause, whatever it is,” I said, ignoring her comment. “Whoever my brother selects to take the fall will not have made that calculated risk. They will die because you wanted to pull a prank on Ryzek Noavek.”
“A prank?” Teka said. “Is that what you call acknowledging the truth? Destabilizing your brother’s regime? Showing that we can control the movement of the ship itself?”
“For our purposes, yes,” I said. Currentshadows traveled up my arm and curled around my shoulder, showing through my white shirt. Teka’s eye followed them. I flinched, and continued, “If you care about the death of an innocent person, I suggest you come up with a real name to give me by the end of the day. If you don’t care, I will just let Ryzek pick his target. It’s entirely up to you—for me it’s the same either way.”
She uncrossed her arms and turned, so both shoulders were against the door.
“Well, shit,” she said.
A few minutes later I was following Teka Surukta down the maintenance tunnel, toward the loading bay. I jumped at every noise, every creak, which in this part of the ship meant I jumped more often than not. It was loud down here, though we were far from most of the ship’s population.
We were on a raised metal platform, wide enough for two slim people to pass each other with stomachs held in, hanging above all the machinery and water tanks and furnaces and current engines that kept the ship running and habitable. If I had gotten lost among the gears and pipes, I would never have found my way out.
“You know,” I said, “if your plan is to get me far away from most people so that you can kill me, you might find it’s more difficult than you imagine.”
“I’d like to see what you’re about first,” Teka said. “You’re not quite what I expected.”
“Who is?” I said grimly. “I suppose it would be a waste of time for me to ask you how you managed to disable the ship’s lights.”
“No, that’s easy.” Teka stopped, and touched her palm to the wall. She closed her eye, and the light just above us, trapped in a metal cage to protect it, flickered. Once, then three times. The same rhythm I had heard tapped out when she attacked me.
“Anything that runs on current, I can mess with,” Teka said. “That’s why I’m a technician. Sadly that ‘light’ trick only works on the sojourn ship—all the lights in Voa are fenzu or burnstone, and there’s not much I can do to those.”
“You must like the sojourn ship best, then.”
“In a manner of speaking,” she said. “But it’s a little claustrophobic on this ship when you live in a room the size of a closet.”
We reached an open area, a grate above one of the oxygen converters, which were three times my height, and twice again as wide around. They processed the carbon dioxide we emitted, drawn in by the ship’s vents, and converted it through a complex process I didn’t understand. I had tried to read a book about it on the last sojourn, but the language was too technical for me. There were only so many things I could master.
“Stay here,” she said. “I’m going to get someone.”
“Stay here?” I said, but she was already gone.
As I stood on the grate, beads of sweat collected at the small of my back. I could hear her footsteps, but because of the echoes, couldn’t tell which direction they were going. Would she bring back a horde of renegades to finish the work she had begun during the attack? Or was she sincere in saying that she no longer wanted to kill me? I had walked into this situation with so little regard for my own safety, and I wasn’t even sure why, except that I didn’t want to watch the execution of an innocent when there were so many guilty hidden away.