The words came from inside his head, but he had a strange feeling he hadn’t said them.
He walked like a good boy in restraints to get dinner, but he didn’t know which disturbed him more—Linao and her casual cruelty, or the possibility there was something inside him with opinions and a voice.
15
They had been taken backto their cell, and Velda could see Ethan had withdrawn into his own thoughts.
Not surprising—the revelations had come thick and fast in the med bay. Another Verdant String planet? A whole new population like them? A planet with a social structure that included enhanced super soldiers whose abilities were the result of nanotech?
Nanotech that she suspected had just been dropped into her and Ethan three times.
There was a lot on her mind, too.
She showered again—it was something to do and she liked being clean—but when she came out, Ethan was lying over on his own bunk for the first time.
She lay down on hers, rolling onto her side to face him, and he turned to her, flicked a look at the lens in the corner, but said nothing until the lights dimmed and then shut off.
Their captors had done that last night, too, turning off the lights after she and Ethan had already closed their eyes.
Ethan had been waiting for it, she realized, because the moment they were off, he slid down his bench to the bottom,then wedged himself into the corner under the lens and somehow leveraged himself up, using elbows and feet, until he was directly underneath it.
Then he touched it with a finger and she saw the tiny light on one side of it blink off.
He slid back down the wall, and she turned onto her back as he climbed onto her bed, then held himself above her, hands on either side of her head.
“Do you think it was vision and sound?” she whispered into his ear. She gave a shiver at his proximity.
“It was. It’s neither, anymore.” He seemed certain.
“They’ll probably notice,” she said. “But how did you do it?”
He settled down, not on top of her, as she thought he would, but angling to the side again, so she scooted closer to the wall to give him room.
“They probably will.” He sounded resigned, and she guessed he didn’t want anyone bursting into the room to find them in a compromising position. “I had the sense that if I touched it, I could break it.”
His words lay between them, and they both understood what he was saying.
“So, Garmen has an ancestral wreck, there’s a whole undiscovered-by-us Verdant String planet, and the Cores found both of them.” Her tone was deliberately dry, and not exactly a change of topic.
“Just a few mildly interesting nuggets,” he agreed, sounding relieved she hadn’t pursued how he’d known he could break a lens by touching it with the tip of his finger. “Shit, how the hell didn’t we know any of this?”
“They obviously never let any part of the Garmen find leak, or the VSC would have been far less accommodating when the Cores declared they owned Garmen because they’d found it.” She still couldn’t believe the Verdant String Coalition hadallowed Garmen to be run by the Cores, although what it was supposed to be at the start and what it turned into had been vastly different. “As for this new planet, Fjern, they must have found it recently.”
“But still . . .” Ethan shook his head. “Linao said she was there six months ago. And no one in the crew that went there—mining the planet’s ore, she said—has leaked a word about it? Even if they took as few people as possible, that’s still a sizable number. They’re either dead or too scared they will be if they talk.”
“Dead, as in, killed specifically so they couldn’t talk?” Velda didn’t want to think about that, but then Linao hadn’t been subtle about her clear threat to kill them when they were no longer useful. Maybe that’s how they operated.
“Linao certainly seems to know a lot about everything,” Ethan said. “She’s got top-level intel.”
“She does, doesn’t she? She was obviously told to help Ritter by sharing insider details, but she enjoyed letting him know how much she’s done and how much she knows.” Velda wondered if she wasn’t able to talk freely to her peers.
If, as Ritter speculated with Brink earlier, she was not as she seemed, if she were someone pretending to be a grunt when she actually sat far higher on the hierarchy, then that made sense.
“I wonder what she was doing on Ytla,” Ethan said.
“Looking for the wreck Wren found, is my guess,” Velda answered. “And she didn’t let on to her new bestie, Ritter, anything about it.”
“No.” Ethan sounded thoughtful. “She didn’t. And that’s interesting.”
