As soon as Gareth crossed the threshold into the lab, a sharp needle pricked into his upper arm, and Alex appeared out of nowhere to bully him toward the table. He was pretty sure she’d been waiting behind the doorway for him, which seemed entirely unnecessary. He’d have gone in any case, though perhaps it was his lack of speed she objected to, rather than his degree of willingness.

  His head throbbed with pain, knees shaking from the exertion of the zero-grav battle and the ride back to Moneymaker. The Current’s song was a constant grind, like a wild animal that was contained, for now, in a compartment of his mind. If the door burst open, it might maul the rest of him.

  Not a perfect metaphor, but the best he could come up with while his very consciousness remained a question mark. He doubted his ability to retain it at all, should he allow himself to close his eyes for longer than a blink. He might well wake up a few hours from now, confused.

  If at all, said a voice in the back of his mind. He shoved it away.

  “We need live samples,” Alex said as Chief Escher shoved a metal circle around his head, stabbing what felt like dozens of wire feelers into his scalp. A second needle pricked his left arm as he lifted himself onto his usual spot on the table beside Damian. The pirate’s pillow nest was gone, and he looked as ready to pass out as Gareth felt, his skin far too white, those poison lines working their way further toward his cheekbones. Had something triggered them into expanding? Or was it just the natural course of whatever condition he had?

  The two scientists were working in tandem now, passing equipment back and forth without their usual bickering. They worked quickly and silently, too, as if they could suddenly read one another’s minds. Though Gareth supposed it was possible they were trading messages via eye screen.

  “Damian’s cells are linked to the Current,” Alex said, shoving a third needle into Gareth’s wrist and leaving it there. Gentle, she was not. Though he did think it was an IV, which would hopefully contain helpful fluids or drugs, or both.

  Sloane, who’d stayed to lean in the doorway, had been watching the proceedings with eyebrow-lifted confusion, said, “I’m sorry, did you say his cells?”

  It was confusing. But then, everything was confusing at the moment. His thoughts passed in a blurry roar, the edges of his vision loosening and hardening as he fought to maintain consciousness.

  “Bits of his cells.” Escher waved a hand, then pinched her fingers together as if to demonstrate. “Even smaller.”

  “So, atomic-level shit,” Damian said.

  Gareth looked at his friend, who had even more needles protruding from his skin than Gareth did—though given time, Alex and Escher would no doubt ensure he caught up—along with a headband to match Gareth’s. “You don’t seem surprised,” Gareth said.

  Damian gave him a tilted smile, like this was all a game he was on the verge of winning. “Commander, if they told me there was a chorus line of invisible peachicks in my blood, I don’t think I’d be surprised at this point.”

  “I think I would,” Gareth mused.

  Damian just kept on smiling, like this was all an expected part of the process when one boasted alien blood. All part of the adventure.

  It was a mask, Gareth knew, one so neatly fused to Damian’s exterior that he hardly seemed to realize it was there anymore. Gareth had glimpsed behind it, once or twice, but no more than that. Even his closest friends—even Ivy—didn’t seem to know him all that well.

  Sloane tapped her foot on the floor. “What isn’t connected to the Current?”

  “Most things,” Alex snapped.

  “Don’t pretend it’s not a fair question,” Sloane said. “First the stasis fields, then the Commander’s ability to hear them, now Damian’s blood—”

  “So, mostly alien things,” Damian said.

  Sloane shrugged. “Two out of three, unless there’s something Gareth’s not telling us.”

  “Not that I know of,” he said.

  Sloane nodded, eyes narrowed in focus. When she went to work on a problem, things got done. He could practically see the wheels turning in her head, the pieces of a puzzle drifting together. No doubt she’d have the whole thing worked out before they even reached Ensign Sands and his mysterious headaches.

  Though right now, she appeared to be focused on the mystery of Damian’s blood. “Is it connected the same way Ivy’s inlays connect with tech?” she asked.

  “No,” Alex said, then paused, hand poised above her tray of blood vials as she exchanged a glance with Escher. “Actually, maybe. The inlays are Interplanetary Dwellers’ tech.”

  Alex admitting there was something she hadn’t thought of? Impressive.

  Escher nodded in agreement, then grabbed Ivy by the upper arm and dragged her over to the table. “Sit.”

  Ivy sighed, lifting herself gracefully to sit on the edge of the table beside Gareth. “You should teach your Fleet scientists to be gentler,” she said.

  He didn’t disagree. “We do have a self-guided training everyone’s required to take.”

  Escher snorted. “I played the holos in the background while I did real work.”

  Gareth frowned. “That’s against regulation.”

  Sloane rolled her eyes, but she was smiling, too. He wasn’t sure if she was laughing at him or at Escher, then decided it was probably a little of both.

  Didn’t matter, as long as she kept smiling. Though admittedly, this smile was darkened by a crease of worry between her eyebrows, and the nervous way she kept rolling her bottom lip between her teeth.

  “Welcome to the party, sis,” Damian said, craning his neck to wink at Ivy from Gareth’s other side. She shook her head, but she allowed Alex to start drawing blood samples. Which, Gareth noted, Alex did much more gently with her girlfriend than she had with either him or Damian.

  Alex always seemed focused, but she seemed… especially focused at the moment. So focused, in fact, that it began to feel as if she were very pointedly not looking in Gareth’s direction, or Damian’s. When he glanced over at Chief Escher, he found her looking back and forth between them, blinking rapidly. Were those tears in her eyes?

  There was, he thought vaguely, something the scientists weren’t telling them. But when had Alex ever hesitated to be direct? When had Chief Escher, for that matter?

  Sloane was still tapping her foot, bottom lip wedged between her teeth. Tackling a problem, if Gareth knew her at all. But which one, when there was a whole menu of problems to choose from? She didn’t appear to have noticed the scientists’ strange behavior. Perhaps Gareth was imagining it.

  “How do we get the moon out of the Current?” Sloane asked.

  Ah, that one. Excellent choice. A big-picture choice. Gareth blinked slowly, aware that his thoughts were skittering, and tried to focus.

  “Unless the moon has huge rockets like the slab of planet Damian hid his scientist friends on,” Alex said, “we don’t. We escape.”

  Ah. That explained their distress. Or… did it? Escher was looking at Alex, mouth half open. When she saw him looking, she snapped it shut.

  There was more, then.

  Gareth frowned, remembering the thread of a crack he’d seen snaking along the dome. It hadn’t taken very long for the stress to begin showing, especially with all the branches and other debris pummeling the shield from the inside. “That dome isn’t going to withstand the pressure of the Current,” he said. “You’re saying we need to doom an entire moon?”

  Sloane shook her head, clearly refusing to accept it. “There were people out there. Regular people just living their lives. We have to help them.”

  Alex sighed. “We were afraid you’d say that.”

  And now Gareth felt it coming. The truth. Perhaps the Current was letting him predict what was going to happen, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Only the feeling of it. And the feeling wasn’t a good one.

  He wasn’t sure if it was his skittering brain, or if this conversation was going around in seven circles at once. He blinked again. Maybe it was the constant blood draws, making him weak. Or maybe the Current’s song was making him crazy.

  It was Escher who stopped in front of the table, planting her fists on her hips as she looked back and forth between Gareth and Damian. “If we want to save the moon,” she said, “we’ll need one of you Current whisperers to go out there and communicate with it. Directly.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Sloane wished that for once, everything would just be simple. No uncles would disappear or reappear, no cartels would need cajoling, no alien tech would start bending out of control, and no sacrifices would be required.

  Alex’s face was pinched with sympathy—not a usual emotion for her, to be honest—as if she wished the same thing. The silence stretched, making every clink of every beaker ring out like a struck bell. But Sloane could practically hear a clock ticking through it all; there were people in trouble out there, or soon would be. Those domes wouldn’t hold; she needed to help.

  But she didn’t want to send Gareth or Damian to negotiate a treaty with the Current, or whatever this new mission would entail.

  For one thing, Gareth had only ever communicated with the stasis fields—not the Currents. And the last time he’d done that, it’d made him so sick she’d feared he might not make it. Yes, he’d bounced back. But every time it happened, it took him longer to recover.

  Right now, he looked like one good hard push might knock him over for at least an hour.

  For another thing, the Currents were technology. Not people. She didn’t know why Gareth could hear their music, didn’t know why the fields whispered in the background. She only knew that technology needed codes and passwords and buttons and wires. Not requests to please keep from murdering an entire population, please and thank you.

  There was no evidence that talking to a Current would even work the way they wanted it to. This wasn’t the end of a little kid’s vid show, where everyone learned to communicate so they could get along, where everyone and everything turned out to be simply another misunderstood hero.

  And yet, Alex and Escher were standing there looking at her with twin looks of patience—again, not the norm for either—waiting for a response. All the while, Darrow’s clock was ticking.

  “When you say ‘directly,’” Sloane said, “you mean…”

  “This is new to us,” Alex replied. “But whatever the Commander usually does to get in touch with this tech, we need him to do that. Get close to it.”

  Escher pushed her glasses up on her nose. “Get inside of it, and use his influence to push the moon out of the Current.”

  They didn’t even know how Gareth was doing any of it. Damian’s cells might have some kind of alien tech inside them that was causing feedback or something, but Gareth didn’t. They’d established that. Even once they got Sands here for further study, it would take a while.

  If Sloane had learned one thing about experimental processes since meeting Alex, it was that science could be an agonizingly slow process.

  She refused to look straight at Gareth, who was sitting patiently on the table with his brow furrowed, looking very much like a fool preparing to make a sacrifice. At least, based on what she could see in her peripheral vision.

  “Can’t we just evacuate the people from Darrow and call the moon a loss?” Sloane asked. Elter had two more; what was one lost moon among friends, as long as they saved the people?

  Aside from millions of tokens in infrastructure, hundreds if not thousands of homes, plus businesses, libraries, labs, research, history, and at least three very banged-up bell towers.

  Alex folded her arms, looking troubled. “We could try that,” she allowed. “Except that this is an entire moon. I know it’s a small one, but we still only have access to a tiny bit of the population. How many people could we reasonably evacuate?”

  Right. They couldn’t just head back to the dome where Vin had ambushed them and call it a day.

  “We can’t leave an entire moon to bounce around in the Current, either,” Chief Escher added. “It would be a major hazard, and there’s no guarantee we’d be able to land here again to extract it.”

  “So,” Alex continued, as if these two had been working happily together for years rather than snapping at one another as bitter rivals mere hours ago, “the Current whisperer can coax the Current into letting the moon out, which we know it can do because it kept ejecting our ship. And in the meantime, we’ll evacuate as many people as we can.”

  “In case of disastrous system failures,” Escher said.

  Sloane looked back and forth between the women, who had clearly already predicted this move would be necessary. “Afraid we’d ask about saving the moon, huh?” she said wryly. “Sounds like you’ve got it all worked out.”

  Alex shrugged, but Sloane had the distinct feeling that she and Escher were in charge now. Given their focus, they might well be the galaxy’s leading experts on Current and stasis field technology, so it did make sense. It did.

  Still, she wished they’d come up with another solution. Any other solution.

  “Can we at least call it something else?” Damian asked, swinging his legs rhythmically under the lab table. “Current whisperer sounds so…”

  “Gimmicky,” Gareth finished.

  Damian scoffed. “Not gimmicky enough, Commander. I’d prefer Current Mover or Current Manager… no, that sounds corporate…. what about Current Wrangler?”

  Gareth slid off the table and yanked Alex’s tube from his arm, then lifted the brain-measuring headband from his brow. She didn’t think the headband actually measured brains, but it was probably close enough. He set it gently on the lab table, then turned to face her.

  She didn’t think she’d ever seen him look so serious, and that was saying something. He was very good at looking serious. His mouth was pressed into a hard line, gray eyes shining like slate in the harsh lights of the lab.

  Sloane abandoned the support of her door frame to step fully into the room, blocking his path to the exit. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this twice in an hour, Fortune, but don’t you fucking dare.”

  He didn’t try to move past her. He was looking at her like a doctor who’d come to break very, very bad news. “Probably been more than an hour,” he said.

  “You’re not funny.”

  “He’s correct, though!” BRO chimed in. “It’s been exactly one hundred and thirty-three minutes! Well over an hour!”

  Gareth smiled at her, but it didn’t touch his eyes. “I have to do it, Sloane. You know I do.”

  She didn’t know any such thing. They could help the people on this moon without sacrificing anyone’s life. There was always another resource. A disguise to throw on, a criminal to charm, an especially dedicated office assistant to shove paperwork in your enemy’s face.

  Unless you’re stuck in a stasis field, a voice in the back of her brain whispered. Unless you’re spinning out into space.

  Fine, so she’d been faced with a few impossible situations lately. But she was still here, wasn’t she? Something always turned up.

  Half the time, that something was Gareth. Maybe forty percent.

  She didn’t budge. She couldn’t take him physically, but she was very good at tripping people. “You are sick,” she said, enunciating her words very clearly, since he didn’t seem to be understanding the situation to its fullest right now. “The last time you talked to Current-adjacent technology, it knocked you out for hours.”

  “True, but—”

  She shook her head. “No. Veto. Look at you. You’re barely standing. How are you going to do anything useful out there? You promised you’d stop ramming your spaceship into other spaceships. You promised.”

  A shadow flickered across his eyes, and she almost regretted bringing up the incident on Olton Moon. Almost, but not quite.

  “It’s not the same,” he said softly.

  It wasn’t. She knew it wasn’t; she just wanted it to be. There was a bitter, chemical taste on the back of her tongue, like rubbing alcohol, and she wished she could spit it out. She wished she could scream.

  “It might be fine,” he said.

  She considered hitting him in the head with one of Alex’s microscopes. Or—easier, perhaps—jabbing him with a sedative. If she could figure out which of the millions of needles in here even had sedatives in them. Surely they’d be color coded or something.

  She could call Captain Lager, have him talk some sense into the man. Or Candace, even.

  Or she could try telling him the truth.

  “‘Might’ isn’t comforting,” she said, “when we’re deciding the fate of the man I love. At all. Just for future reference.”

  The idiot actually smiled at her. Mortal danger just outside the airlock, his fate essentially sealed, and he was smiling. He made absolutely no sense. “Was it really so hard to say?” he asked.

  She folded her arms over her chest. “Yes. I prefer subtext.”

  He pressed his forehead to hers, enveloping her in his leather-and-oil scent. “It might be—”

  “If you say ‘it might be fine’ again, I’m taking it back.”

  He grimaced, but at least he didn’t try to come up with a more convincing lie. It wasn’t going to be fine, and he knew it. If he went out there now, practically unprotected as Alex was suggesting, he wouldn’t come back. She knew it in her gut, as surely as she knew that those domes would not hold out forever.

  Alex cleared her throat. “I’m sorry to interrupt when you’re having a moment, but we’re kind of in a hurry here.”

  “You don’t look sorry,” Sloane said. Though she couldn’t confirm that, honestly, since she was only looking at Gareth. “Damian, see if you can take over piloting for Hilda. I need her down here.”

  If Sloane couldn’t convince Gareth that this plan was nonsense, then surely Hilda could. She could glare at him disapprovingly until he caved. Though some part of Sloane’s staticky thoughts knew that what she wanted was her friend—her family—when everything was falling apart.

  “We need Damian in the lab,” Escher argued.

  Sloane shook her head. “I need him to fly the ship for a second.”

 

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