Heretics path a science.., p.2
Heretic's Path: A Science Fiction Adventure (Shadow Host Book 3), page 2
Right. Her turn.
He reached a hand down in a nebulous gesture of his intention for her to dive in and for him to catch her.
Honestly, it seemed like a gross overestimation of her current abilities. He might pirouette through Zero-G environs like a skilled and graceful dancer, but she tended to bungle herself awkwardly off of surfaces, then pinwheel-flail her arms until she could grab something.
“Grav field switches just past center,” he said helpfully.
She made sure her blaster was properly secured, braced her knees on the floor outside the opening, and upturned herself into the hatchway again. The regen cast on her left arm made a metallic clunk on the sill, a brief tingle of pain warning her against the movement. Carefully bracing it, she reached for the first rung, eased herself down, then the next.
Her center of balance tipped as her chest went down and her ass went up.
Then, gritting her teeth against the weird topsy-turvy-gut-churning-free-fall-flail between two ships with opposing grav field orientations she was about to do, she took a breath, held it, and dove forward.
The hatchway whooshed past in a blink of darkness. Adrenaline surged, every instinct screaming at her for falling.
She sped past the halfway point, reached for Ji-hun’s outstretched hand…
And missed.
Roth’s grav field caught her short, gently pushing her to a halt. Then it pushed her back the other way.
Shit.
With an educated flail, she managed to grab the side of the ladder before the field shoved her the rest of the way down, and she ended up bobbing in the middle.
Her butt tingled, caught at the border of the two fields.
“Damn it,” she muttered, and started pulling herself up, one rung at a time.
Ji-hun retracted his hand. “It’s because you’re lighter. Not as much mass to power inertia.”
“I’ll carry an anvil next time,” she groused, grunting with effort. “It’s a good thing there aren’t any people to shoot at us on this side. We’d be screwed.”
Another six rungs, and she got high enough to accept help. Ji-hun braced himself against the hatch, ready to pull her over the lip.
But just as she gave him her bad arm to leverage, the light from the open hatch below her winked out.
A cloud of rushing, sentient Shadow blew in, engulfed her body in a lurching plunge of darkness, tingles, and tripping vertigo that sent her mind and stomach spinning like a glittery top, then stuffed itself through the hatch ahead of her. It pooled briefly against the ceiling as a twitchy, aggravated void-form, then shot off to the right.
Somehow, she’d managed to hang onto the ladder. She and Ji-hun exchanged a look.
“Why, yes, Bob,” she said, grunting as she adjusted her hold. “Please. Go first, why don’t you?”
“Thank you, Captain. I already have.”
She rolled her eyes, then held out her arm to Ji-hun again.
Arguing with Shadows was often a pointless task. Even more so with this particular one.
With Ji-hun’s help, she managed to climb into Asa Roth’s hallway in a semi-graceful crawl instead of an awkward flop. He helped her to her feet, too, past the grav field switch point.
She brushed herself off, gave the corridor a quick survey, then headed off to explore the Shadow World’s version of their semi-captured ship.
The Shadow World made a strange, mildly creepy mirror of her normal reality. Discovered a little over ten years ago during the Shadow War, it was a subdimension of Main Reality where the Shadows came from. No one knew how old it was, not even them. A few Talanese psychologists speculated it had existed since the dawn of human civilization. Others insisted it had more to do with quantum physics, relativity, and observation.
Soo-jin thought it was somewhere in the middle, with a large helping of ‘weird shit no one expects’ glommed onto the side. She also thought its origins didn’t fucking matter—it was there, it was spooky, and it had a very convenient duplication policy.
She was, if nothing else, a practical bitch.
Right now, the Shadow World was offering her empty, unguarded access to Roth’s insides, and wasn’t that nice of it? Even if everything had a somewhat desaturated look about it and every sound she and Ji-hun made came across about three times as loud and abrupt in the unnerving silence.
So far, Roth’s insides were an exciting combination of grimy metal and dull prefab. She barely noticed the desaturation anymore, especially with her Shadow-enhanced sight.
They moved in the opposite direction Bob had gone, checking doors as they went. Divide and conquer. That was the plan. Or, more accurately: Divide, have the Shadow fetch their favorite supersoldier from Hammerclaw, then conquer.
Bob could be incredibly annoying as a roommate, but he also proved incredibly useful.
He was getting stronger, too. Much stronger.
So was she.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Currently, she was feeling nothing but a boatload of pessimism.
“We’re not going to find anything,” she told Ji-hun after roughly one corridor of exploration.
He grunted. “Probably not.”
“It’d be a real stroke of luck if we did. A real fine fucking coincidence.” She poked the next door open, discovering a dingy bathroom with a soap-stained mirror, yellow-brown mildew stains, a flickering tubelight, and—notably—no obvious stash of mind control unit boxes. She moved on. “We’re literally looking for a needle in a haystack, except the needle is in fifty thousand pieces, and the haystack is the entire fucking System.”
“Surely only half. I doubt they sent anything past Amosi.”
She snorted. The only thing past Amosi, apart from a bunch of gas giants no one had even bothered to go to yet, was Clemens, Clemens’ research bases, and the disorganized scattering of mining installations, independent homestead crackpots, and loose criminals who inhabited the asteroid belt.
He was right. Her Evil-Almost-Sister-In-Law Yeon-seo wouldn’t have sent her precious shipment of illegal brain devices past Amosi. Like with all the specialists she’d consulted, everything pointed to her having sent them to the Core. Most likely Nova.
Chamak Udyaan and Tala’s current orbital positions were a real pain in the ass in terms of advanced medical accessibility, but they were damn convenient for predicting a bitch’s likely destination. With them in the ass-ends of their orbits, relatively speaking, Nova was the obvious choice.
“That sure narrows it down,” she said, sarcasm dripping off every syllable. “Only six planets and their satellite entourages to search, instead of seven.”
“That’s over four-thousand-five-hundred million cubic kilometers worth of space, Soo-jin. Surely, you don’t want to add that to your search radius?”
He was trying to make her laugh. He knew it. She knew it. And he knew she knew it. They’d played this game before, many times.
Usually, though, she was the one poking him.
After a second’s struggle, she gave up and let her lips curve. In another few seconds, the smile turned into a grin.
“You know,” she said, closing the cleaning closet she’d been exploring. “I wish they had launched them past Amosi.”
He chuckled, a smile coming to his lips, too. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. Except for, like, one box. So we can reverse-engineer the bullshit out of your head.”
Getting the thing out of Ji-hun’s head was her number one priority. She really hoped the mind control devices were on this fucking ship. It was about time they caught a break.
“I thought we still had two of the devices?” he asked.
“We do. But if we got more of them, we could get more scientists to work on them, and we could afford to lose a few in the reverse-engineering de-bullshittifying.” She met his gaze, a hardness pinching her expression as the rawness of her emotions crashed over her like a wave, heavy and suffocating, closing her throat like a noose. “It’s in your brain. We can’t risk mistakes.”
He caught the look on her face and softened.
“I’ll be fine, Soo-jin,” he assured her. “It’ll work out.”
“Yes, you will be fine. I will make sure of it. And then, I will burn my father’s empire to the ground.”
He gave her a sad smile. “I wish I could believe that would make things better.”
“I’m sure it will make us feel better. Besides, ending him is definitely a good move for the betterment of the system, and even the Lightkeepers.”
“He’s just one man.”
“He’s an asshole with a lot of power, and he’s using that power to powertrip those devices into activity in the first place. Removing him from the ecosystem is definitely a good thing.”
“Yes, yes, I know—believe me, I know—I just—” He rubbed at his eyes, like he was massaging the bridge of his nose. “I’ve seen a lot of similar assholes in my time. It’s not difficult for me to imagine another simply taking his place.”
Okay. Fair point.
And he did know about her father. Not only had he listened to her rants and confessions over the years, he’d all but admitted to investigating the man. Hells, he’d actually invited her to participate in said investigation a little while back.
And, also, he had a fucking mind control unit forcibly implanted in his head.
She let her smile show again. “Guess I better make sure to salt the ground after I burn it. Make sure none of those assholes can simply step in and take the reins.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Gods, he sounded down. Even here, exploring the ship—it felt like he was going through the motions, with less than his normal level of attention.
Then again, if she had a mind control unit placed into her brain, she’d be fucking distracted, too.
Before she could respond, though, their comms crackled.
“Goddess to Magic Fox. You there, Boss Bitch?”
Nomiki.
She activated her comms to reply. “Hello, Goddess, this is Boss Bitch. I’m here and bitching.”
“Have you bitched up any mind control shit?”
“Not unless you count the disgusting toilet I just found.”
“I do not. Bob and I will take the Cargo level. Nyland and Zan are having fun suggesting vague threats to Asa Roth’s crew. We detected some movement toward Engineering. You and Baik want to check it out in case they’re hiding something?”
Huh. She wondered if those ‘vague threats’ involved Yeon-seo Kim’s body parts.
“Sure,” she said, refocusing on the mission. “Sounds better than disgusting toilets.”
She doubted they’d find anything. What kind of moron hid contraband right out in the open? Even if it were tucked away in an engineering compartment? No, they’d either have the boxes in their original container, all tidy and together, or they’d have them well hidden behind the ship’s walls or something.
Then again, the devices weren’t exactly contraband, were they? They weren’t drugs, and they weren’t weapons. They didn’t exist in any banned registry. As far as a scan or customs officer could tell, they were simply miscellaneous pieces of professionally packaged cyberware.
Maybe they would be out in the open.
At the end of the corridor, Soo-jin found a ship map bolted to the wall. She located Engineering—all the way up, it turned out. Asa Roth had a vertical plan—and, signaling Ji-hun, headed for the next lift to check it out.
TWO
Asa Roth’s elevator was a terrifying affair. Old and creaky, with weird grunts and hisses. The Shadow World’s deep, unsettling silence made it a thousand times worse. Soo-jin spat out a swear of relief when it finally clunked to a lurching, springy halt and opened the doors to Engineering.
She took two steps in, looked around, and spat out another swear.
“I take it back. This is worse than the toilet.”
Ji-hun snorted. “Let me guess: the engineering is questionable?”
“Oh, no. It’s not questionable. It’s unquestionably bad.” She brandished her gibbled arm at the nearest mess of pipework. “Look at these welds. I wouldn’t trust them to assemble a chair, let alone keep an engine going.”
Not only did the mess look like it had been put together by someone routinely accustomed to seeing double, a quick look at the floor showed they’d managed to drip solder everywhere, including over their own work.
The little flecks of silver flashed like fishing lures under her scrutiny.
Whoever’d done it also hadn’t bothered to clean since. Or ever. The grime here was even worse than the corridors down below.
Ji-hun laughed. “You are a snob.”
“I am a safety chief.”
“Bullshit. You blew every single speed limit chasing this ship.”
“No, I blew every single speed limit getting your ungrateful ass en route to Nova—and I did it within every safe operating parameter Huli Jing has.”
“Your ship is a hundred-and-twenty-year-old military ship. How many actual safety parameters does she have?”
“Three hundred and forty-two, and all of them tested.” She hit him with a sneer. “I’m a professional, unlike these buttfucks.”
Ji-hun erupted with laughter. The intensity of it surprised them both, but him most of all. She grinned as he took two steps to the nearest coolant tank, put his blaster down, and leaned on the control unit for support.
“A professional who refers to non-professionals as ‘buttfucks,’” he finally wheezed.
“Of course,” she said, still grinning. “It’s important to form a distinction.”
Another spurt of laughter tripped through him, this one a more silent, breathless shake.
Then he winced and rubbed at his temple.
Alarm shot through her.
“Ji-hun?” She took a couple of steps toward him, the cold fingers of panic stitching her chest. “Are you okay?”
He visibly grimaced at her attention, taking a step back and lifting a hand to wave her off.
“Yeah. Just a headache.” His other hand kept rubbing for a few seconds, his expression pinched, then he let off and met her concerned gaze. “I’m fine. Probably just a…normal symptom.”
Her jaw muscles tightened.
Yeah. He was right. Headaches probably were a normal symptom of being forcibly implanted with a mind control unit directly into your brain.
But her heart twisted at his reaction—at the way he tried to shut himself off from her. He did it to protect her, she knew. He didn’t want her to worry. She understood this. In his shoes, she’d do the exact same thing.
It wouldn’t help them, though. It wouldn’t help either of them.
“Have you been getting many of them?” she asked.
Even to her ears, her voice sounded weak.
He hesitated.
“Come on. You can tell me. I’m a big girl.”
He grimaced again, this one more from guilt, she thought, then let out a breath.
“A few. Small ones. They come and go. Nothing too bad.”
Her stomach turned into a hard, putrid stone. Gods, this was awful. She wanted to reach out to him, tell him it was going to be okay. Her hand tried, twitching outward to him as if to snag his arm and give it a squeeze, or pull him close, but her other instincts halted the movement, stranding it halfway.
How could she tell him that? It would be a Sol-burned lie.
They both knew how tenuous this was.
She let the hand fall, but it was too late. His gaze had dropped to the movement, then back up to meet hers, a knowing look clouding his eyes.
Pain sliced at her chest.
Fuck. She couldn’t be like this. They needed strength and confidence, not disbelief and despair.
She shoved her feelings down and hardened her expression. The hand she’d let fall morphed into a closed fist at her side.
“We’ll get it out of you. I promise.”
“I know.”
“Any other…” she hesitated, the word a bitter taste on her tongue. “‘Normal’ things happening?”
He grinned suddenly. “I have yet to convert to your father’s fucked up regime, if that’s what you mean.”
And just like that, the previous moment’s laughter hung in the air, inviting her to snatch it up again.
Black humor. It was how she—and the rest of her ship’s inhabitants—functioned.
In a blink, she had her usual lofty sarcasm back in place.
“Good. Because I can tell you right now—it absolutely sucks.” A laugh popped out of her. Sardonism trapped in a champagne bubble of hysteria. “Gods. You know, he’s the worst thing that could have happened to the Lightkeepers. The absolute worst thing. I hate him so much.”
He chuckled. “So, your plan to dethrone him is for the good of the Lightkeepers?”
“Believe it or not, my plan to dethrone him and burn him and his entire empire to the ground, including the Lightkeepers’ current management, will only make the organization better. Gods—I couldn’t make it much worse, could I?”
“I suppose not. Like cutting rot off an apple,” he agreed.
She hid a wince, his choice of words hitting a little too close to home for her. Silence grew, dead air compounded by the too-quiet baseline hum of the ship’s systems. Her smile faltered.
She gave him another look, assessing his well-being. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure.” He gestured to the engine room around them. “Let’s get on with this.”
She wasn’t sure. In fact, she was the opposite of sure. The man had a freakin’ mind control unit in his head!
But she satisfied herself with the fact he was no longer rubbing at it and forced herself to move on.
The quicker they found—or failed to find—those potential mind control units aboard Asa Roth, the quicker she could scream Huli Jing’s engines back up and get Ji-hun to the medical professionals on Nova.
As she moved deeper into the compartment, the air felt even closer and more humid than it had in the bowels of the ship. Warm, too, with the taste of exhaust like metallic ash in her mouth, tinged with the sharp, industrial burned-plastic edge of heated lubricant. It felt like the entire place was exhaling on her. The usual hums, whirs, and rumbles felt subdued and isolated in the closed-in quiet of the Shadow World, as if each sound somehow differentiated itself from the rest. When she passed a coolant buffer, a slow leak put a suspiciously damp coolness into the nearby atmosphere, along with an odd, earthy scent. Dutifully, she looked underneath.
He reached a hand down in a nebulous gesture of his intention for her to dive in and for him to catch her.
Honestly, it seemed like a gross overestimation of her current abilities. He might pirouette through Zero-G environs like a skilled and graceful dancer, but she tended to bungle herself awkwardly off of surfaces, then pinwheel-flail her arms until she could grab something.
“Grav field switches just past center,” he said helpfully.
She made sure her blaster was properly secured, braced her knees on the floor outside the opening, and upturned herself into the hatchway again. The regen cast on her left arm made a metallic clunk on the sill, a brief tingle of pain warning her against the movement. Carefully bracing it, she reached for the first rung, eased herself down, then the next.
Her center of balance tipped as her chest went down and her ass went up.
Then, gritting her teeth against the weird topsy-turvy-gut-churning-free-fall-flail between two ships with opposing grav field orientations she was about to do, she took a breath, held it, and dove forward.
The hatchway whooshed past in a blink of darkness. Adrenaline surged, every instinct screaming at her for falling.
She sped past the halfway point, reached for Ji-hun’s outstretched hand…
And missed.
Roth’s grav field caught her short, gently pushing her to a halt. Then it pushed her back the other way.
Shit.
With an educated flail, she managed to grab the side of the ladder before the field shoved her the rest of the way down, and she ended up bobbing in the middle.
Her butt tingled, caught at the border of the two fields.
“Damn it,” she muttered, and started pulling herself up, one rung at a time.
Ji-hun retracted his hand. “It’s because you’re lighter. Not as much mass to power inertia.”
“I’ll carry an anvil next time,” she groused, grunting with effort. “It’s a good thing there aren’t any people to shoot at us on this side. We’d be screwed.”
Another six rungs, and she got high enough to accept help. Ji-hun braced himself against the hatch, ready to pull her over the lip.
But just as she gave him her bad arm to leverage, the light from the open hatch below her winked out.
A cloud of rushing, sentient Shadow blew in, engulfed her body in a lurching plunge of darkness, tingles, and tripping vertigo that sent her mind and stomach spinning like a glittery top, then stuffed itself through the hatch ahead of her. It pooled briefly against the ceiling as a twitchy, aggravated void-form, then shot off to the right.
Somehow, she’d managed to hang onto the ladder. She and Ji-hun exchanged a look.
“Why, yes, Bob,” she said, grunting as she adjusted her hold. “Please. Go first, why don’t you?”
“Thank you, Captain. I already have.”
She rolled her eyes, then held out her arm to Ji-hun again.
Arguing with Shadows was often a pointless task. Even more so with this particular one.
With Ji-hun’s help, she managed to climb into Asa Roth’s hallway in a semi-graceful crawl instead of an awkward flop. He helped her to her feet, too, past the grav field switch point.
She brushed herself off, gave the corridor a quick survey, then headed off to explore the Shadow World’s version of their semi-captured ship.
The Shadow World made a strange, mildly creepy mirror of her normal reality. Discovered a little over ten years ago during the Shadow War, it was a subdimension of Main Reality where the Shadows came from. No one knew how old it was, not even them. A few Talanese psychologists speculated it had existed since the dawn of human civilization. Others insisted it had more to do with quantum physics, relativity, and observation.
Soo-jin thought it was somewhere in the middle, with a large helping of ‘weird shit no one expects’ glommed onto the side. She also thought its origins didn’t fucking matter—it was there, it was spooky, and it had a very convenient duplication policy.
She was, if nothing else, a practical bitch.
Right now, the Shadow World was offering her empty, unguarded access to Roth’s insides, and wasn’t that nice of it? Even if everything had a somewhat desaturated look about it and every sound she and Ji-hun made came across about three times as loud and abrupt in the unnerving silence.
So far, Roth’s insides were an exciting combination of grimy metal and dull prefab. She barely noticed the desaturation anymore, especially with her Shadow-enhanced sight.
They moved in the opposite direction Bob had gone, checking doors as they went. Divide and conquer. That was the plan. Or, more accurately: Divide, have the Shadow fetch their favorite supersoldier from Hammerclaw, then conquer.
Bob could be incredibly annoying as a roommate, but he also proved incredibly useful.
He was getting stronger, too. Much stronger.
So was she.
She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.
Currently, she was feeling nothing but a boatload of pessimism.
“We’re not going to find anything,” she told Ji-hun after roughly one corridor of exploration.
He grunted. “Probably not.”
“It’d be a real stroke of luck if we did. A real fine fucking coincidence.” She poked the next door open, discovering a dingy bathroom with a soap-stained mirror, yellow-brown mildew stains, a flickering tubelight, and—notably—no obvious stash of mind control unit boxes. She moved on. “We’re literally looking for a needle in a haystack, except the needle is in fifty thousand pieces, and the haystack is the entire fucking System.”
“Surely only half. I doubt they sent anything past Amosi.”
She snorted. The only thing past Amosi, apart from a bunch of gas giants no one had even bothered to go to yet, was Clemens, Clemens’ research bases, and the disorganized scattering of mining installations, independent homestead crackpots, and loose criminals who inhabited the asteroid belt.
He was right. Her Evil-Almost-Sister-In-Law Yeon-seo wouldn’t have sent her precious shipment of illegal brain devices past Amosi. Like with all the specialists she’d consulted, everything pointed to her having sent them to the Core. Most likely Nova.
Chamak Udyaan and Tala’s current orbital positions were a real pain in the ass in terms of advanced medical accessibility, but they were damn convenient for predicting a bitch’s likely destination. With them in the ass-ends of their orbits, relatively speaking, Nova was the obvious choice.
“That sure narrows it down,” she said, sarcasm dripping off every syllable. “Only six planets and their satellite entourages to search, instead of seven.”
“That’s over four-thousand-five-hundred million cubic kilometers worth of space, Soo-jin. Surely, you don’t want to add that to your search radius?”
He was trying to make her laugh. He knew it. She knew it. And he knew she knew it. They’d played this game before, many times.
Usually, though, she was the one poking him.
After a second’s struggle, she gave up and let her lips curve. In another few seconds, the smile turned into a grin.
“You know,” she said, closing the cleaning closet she’d been exploring. “I wish they had launched them past Amosi.”
He chuckled, a smile coming to his lips, too. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes. Except for, like, one box. So we can reverse-engineer the bullshit out of your head.”
Getting the thing out of Ji-hun’s head was her number one priority. She really hoped the mind control devices were on this fucking ship. It was about time they caught a break.
“I thought we still had two of the devices?” he asked.
“We do. But if we got more of them, we could get more scientists to work on them, and we could afford to lose a few in the reverse-engineering de-bullshittifying.” She met his gaze, a hardness pinching her expression as the rawness of her emotions crashed over her like a wave, heavy and suffocating, closing her throat like a noose. “It’s in your brain. We can’t risk mistakes.”
He caught the look on her face and softened.
“I’ll be fine, Soo-jin,” he assured her. “It’ll work out.”
“Yes, you will be fine. I will make sure of it. And then, I will burn my father’s empire to the ground.”
He gave her a sad smile. “I wish I could believe that would make things better.”
“I’m sure it will make us feel better. Besides, ending him is definitely a good move for the betterment of the system, and even the Lightkeepers.”
“He’s just one man.”
“He’s an asshole with a lot of power, and he’s using that power to powertrip those devices into activity in the first place. Removing him from the ecosystem is definitely a good thing.”
“Yes, yes, I know—believe me, I know—I just—” He rubbed at his eyes, like he was massaging the bridge of his nose. “I’ve seen a lot of similar assholes in my time. It’s not difficult for me to imagine another simply taking his place.”
Okay. Fair point.
And he did know about her father. Not only had he listened to her rants and confessions over the years, he’d all but admitted to investigating the man. Hells, he’d actually invited her to participate in said investigation a little while back.
And, also, he had a fucking mind control unit forcibly implanted in his head.
She let her smile show again. “Guess I better make sure to salt the ground after I burn it. Make sure none of those assholes can simply step in and take the reins.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Gods, he sounded down. Even here, exploring the ship—it felt like he was going through the motions, with less than his normal level of attention.
Then again, if she had a mind control unit placed into her brain, she’d be fucking distracted, too.
Before she could respond, though, their comms crackled.
“Goddess to Magic Fox. You there, Boss Bitch?”
Nomiki.
She activated her comms to reply. “Hello, Goddess, this is Boss Bitch. I’m here and bitching.”
“Have you bitched up any mind control shit?”
“Not unless you count the disgusting toilet I just found.”
“I do not. Bob and I will take the Cargo level. Nyland and Zan are having fun suggesting vague threats to Asa Roth’s crew. We detected some movement toward Engineering. You and Baik want to check it out in case they’re hiding something?”
Huh. She wondered if those ‘vague threats’ involved Yeon-seo Kim’s body parts.
“Sure,” she said, refocusing on the mission. “Sounds better than disgusting toilets.”
She doubted they’d find anything. What kind of moron hid contraband right out in the open? Even if it were tucked away in an engineering compartment? No, they’d either have the boxes in their original container, all tidy and together, or they’d have them well hidden behind the ship’s walls or something.
Then again, the devices weren’t exactly contraband, were they? They weren’t drugs, and they weren’t weapons. They didn’t exist in any banned registry. As far as a scan or customs officer could tell, they were simply miscellaneous pieces of professionally packaged cyberware.
Maybe they would be out in the open.
At the end of the corridor, Soo-jin found a ship map bolted to the wall. She located Engineering—all the way up, it turned out. Asa Roth had a vertical plan—and, signaling Ji-hun, headed for the next lift to check it out.
TWO
Asa Roth’s elevator was a terrifying affair. Old and creaky, with weird grunts and hisses. The Shadow World’s deep, unsettling silence made it a thousand times worse. Soo-jin spat out a swear of relief when it finally clunked to a lurching, springy halt and opened the doors to Engineering.
She took two steps in, looked around, and spat out another swear.
“I take it back. This is worse than the toilet.”
Ji-hun snorted. “Let me guess: the engineering is questionable?”
“Oh, no. It’s not questionable. It’s unquestionably bad.” She brandished her gibbled arm at the nearest mess of pipework. “Look at these welds. I wouldn’t trust them to assemble a chair, let alone keep an engine going.”
Not only did the mess look like it had been put together by someone routinely accustomed to seeing double, a quick look at the floor showed they’d managed to drip solder everywhere, including over their own work.
The little flecks of silver flashed like fishing lures under her scrutiny.
Whoever’d done it also hadn’t bothered to clean since. Or ever. The grime here was even worse than the corridors down below.
Ji-hun laughed. “You are a snob.”
“I am a safety chief.”
“Bullshit. You blew every single speed limit chasing this ship.”
“No, I blew every single speed limit getting your ungrateful ass en route to Nova—and I did it within every safe operating parameter Huli Jing has.”
“Your ship is a hundred-and-twenty-year-old military ship. How many actual safety parameters does she have?”
“Three hundred and forty-two, and all of them tested.” She hit him with a sneer. “I’m a professional, unlike these buttfucks.”
Ji-hun erupted with laughter. The intensity of it surprised them both, but him most of all. She grinned as he took two steps to the nearest coolant tank, put his blaster down, and leaned on the control unit for support.
“A professional who refers to non-professionals as ‘buttfucks,’” he finally wheezed.
“Of course,” she said, still grinning. “It’s important to form a distinction.”
Another spurt of laughter tripped through him, this one a more silent, breathless shake.
Then he winced and rubbed at his temple.
Alarm shot through her.
“Ji-hun?” She took a couple of steps toward him, the cold fingers of panic stitching her chest. “Are you okay?”
He visibly grimaced at her attention, taking a step back and lifting a hand to wave her off.
“Yeah. Just a headache.” His other hand kept rubbing for a few seconds, his expression pinched, then he let off and met her concerned gaze. “I’m fine. Probably just a…normal symptom.”
Her jaw muscles tightened.
Yeah. He was right. Headaches probably were a normal symptom of being forcibly implanted with a mind control unit directly into your brain.
But her heart twisted at his reaction—at the way he tried to shut himself off from her. He did it to protect her, she knew. He didn’t want her to worry. She understood this. In his shoes, she’d do the exact same thing.
It wouldn’t help them, though. It wouldn’t help either of them.
“Have you been getting many of them?” she asked.
Even to her ears, her voice sounded weak.
He hesitated.
“Come on. You can tell me. I’m a big girl.”
He grimaced again, this one more from guilt, she thought, then let out a breath.
“A few. Small ones. They come and go. Nothing too bad.”
Her stomach turned into a hard, putrid stone. Gods, this was awful. She wanted to reach out to him, tell him it was going to be okay. Her hand tried, twitching outward to him as if to snag his arm and give it a squeeze, or pull him close, but her other instincts halted the movement, stranding it halfway.
How could she tell him that? It would be a Sol-burned lie.
They both knew how tenuous this was.
She let the hand fall, but it was too late. His gaze had dropped to the movement, then back up to meet hers, a knowing look clouding his eyes.
Pain sliced at her chest.
Fuck. She couldn’t be like this. They needed strength and confidence, not disbelief and despair.
She shoved her feelings down and hardened her expression. The hand she’d let fall morphed into a closed fist at her side.
“We’ll get it out of you. I promise.”
“I know.”
“Any other…” she hesitated, the word a bitter taste on her tongue. “‘Normal’ things happening?”
He grinned suddenly. “I have yet to convert to your father’s fucked up regime, if that’s what you mean.”
And just like that, the previous moment’s laughter hung in the air, inviting her to snatch it up again.
Black humor. It was how she—and the rest of her ship’s inhabitants—functioned.
In a blink, she had her usual lofty sarcasm back in place.
“Good. Because I can tell you right now—it absolutely sucks.” A laugh popped out of her. Sardonism trapped in a champagne bubble of hysteria. “Gods. You know, he’s the worst thing that could have happened to the Lightkeepers. The absolute worst thing. I hate him so much.”
He chuckled. “So, your plan to dethrone him is for the good of the Lightkeepers?”
“Believe it or not, my plan to dethrone him and burn him and his entire empire to the ground, including the Lightkeepers’ current management, will only make the organization better. Gods—I couldn’t make it much worse, could I?”
“I suppose not. Like cutting rot off an apple,” he agreed.
She hid a wince, his choice of words hitting a little too close to home for her. Silence grew, dead air compounded by the too-quiet baseline hum of the ship’s systems. Her smile faltered.
She gave him another look, assessing his well-being. “You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure.” He gestured to the engine room around them. “Let’s get on with this.”
She wasn’t sure. In fact, she was the opposite of sure. The man had a freakin’ mind control unit in his head!
But she satisfied herself with the fact he was no longer rubbing at it and forced herself to move on.
The quicker they found—or failed to find—those potential mind control units aboard Asa Roth, the quicker she could scream Huli Jing’s engines back up and get Ji-hun to the medical professionals on Nova.
As she moved deeper into the compartment, the air felt even closer and more humid than it had in the bowels of the ship. Warm, too, with the taste of exhaust like metallic ash in her mouth, tinged with the sharp, industrial burned-plastic edge of heated lubricant. It felt like the entire place was exhaling on her. The usual hums, whirs, and rumbles felt subdued and isolated in the closed-in quiet of the Shadow World, as if each sound somehow differentiated itself from the rest. When she passed a coolant buffer, a slow leak put a suspiciously damp coolness into the nearby atmosphere, along with an odd, earthy scent. Dutifully, she looked underneath.
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