“It was a long flight.”
“Of course.” She recovers herself quickly, but I don’t miss the way she’s eyeing me, like maybe she’s finally noticed the strain in my voice. I wonder if she’ll insist I wait for Doc Min to arrive before I go anywhere, but she only nods and points. “Just out the doors to the left. You can’t miss it.”
I don’t go to the bathroom. My feet take me swiftly away from the lounge, up a corridor and back into The Parallax’s main chamber. I learned as much as I could questioning my mother, which wasn’t much. Not that I expected her to be forthcoming about Doc Min’s simulation, but her deflections, her overbright attitude, the shifty change in conversation…
She’s hiding something.
I consider waiting for Ran Doc Min. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To question the man myself. Only now I’m realizing that plan comes with onepretty huge flaw: I don’t trust Doc Min any more than I trust my mother. She’s not giving me the answers I came for, so who’s to say he will?
If I want to unravel the mystery of the space mist, Bast, and FPS, I’ll have to do it on my own. And as I stare down the hallway, I realize I might have just stumbled upon that very opportunity.
I bolt through corridors, recalling the image of Jester’s heat map (thank the stars I have it memorized) and setting my watch countdown to fifteen minutes. That’s the amount of time I estimate it would take a visitor to vanish to the restroom before their Determinist mother started to grow suspicious. I have fifteen minutes to find the center of the ship, sneak into the simulation room, learn whatever I can, and return to Nina before anyone realizes I’m missing. Which suddenly feels like a fucking impossibly short amount of time.
Rash, says the memory of Master Ira’s voice, still so familiar after all these years.Reckless.
I know, I think back. It’s not enough to stop me.
I turn off the main chamber, pass the moat (still no sharks), and dart up a different corridor, walking as fast as I can without drawing attention. The hallway is square and straight, illuminated by white overhead lights. There are a fair number of people around (guards, extraterrestrial species, buff-looking people in gray-and-yellow flight suits), which is actually a good thing—the crowd helps conceal my presence. As it is, my heart ratchets every time someone glances in my direction, but the Determinists seem absorbed in their own thoughts, their own lives. My civilian clothes blend seamlessly in with the throng, and my face, while recognizable (I’m starting to understand why Lament works so hard to stay out of the news) is just average enough to avoid notice. No one looks at me twice.
I come to a T-shaped dead end and hang a left, moving down yet another hallway (this one features a unit of marching guards wielding fire blasters—yay) and deeper into the belly of The Parallax. The walls are a smooth, uniform gray. The floors are textured to prevent slipping. By myestimation, I’m somewhere in the lower right quadrant of the craft heading toward its center. I speedwalk under archways and through doors (square, circle, circle, hexagon), but I keep meeting dead ends, forcing me to backtrack and eating up precious time.
I’m starting to feel disoriented. I debate, madly, whether I could ask someone for directions to the simulation room. I barrel onward, keep my face down, trying not to meet anyone’s eye. I hit another dead end. Curse. Turn back.
Then I start to notice the pattern.
If I pass through a hexagon door and take a left, it will lead me to a circular door. When I pass through that and take a right, it will lead me back to a hexagon. No more dead ends. I follow this series, avoiding rectangular doors entirely. It’s like a maze with a secret code, guiding me to the ship’s center.
There are fewer people now, just enough that I can’t hide in a crowd. I start checking around corners, waiting until the coast is clear before moving through a new door, doing everything in my power to stay out of sight. If I get caught this far from the lounge, I won’t have any excuses.
I try not to dwell on that.
The overhead lights have been growing steadily dimmer as I continue into the labyrinth. Sometimes, they cut out altogether. I presume this has to do with saving energy on lesser-used sections of the spacecraft and is not some psychological hack to make invaders feel like the walls are closing in. Which, they do feel like that. I round yet another corner and see a bot holding a drink tray, much like the one that delivered Nina and me coffee. On impulse, I grab the tray out of the bot’s mechanical hands. It doesn’t seem to notice.
I reach a final hallway and peer around the corner.
At the end of the corridor is a single door with a hand scan access pad and a scrolling sign overhead that readsSIMULATION IN PROGRESS: DO NOT ENTER. A guard stands on either side of the door. The one on the left looks like any regular guard, her uniform neat but her face bored. My eyes slideto the one on the right, and I do a double take, because I recognize them from Avi’s lessons: That’s Jij, the poisons master.
I dip back out of sight, press my back against the flat wall. I’m sweating. My stomach hurts. I check my watch: already ten minutes down.
I briefly consider aborting this mission. Back on Skyhub, we’d talked about what it might take for me to get my eyes on FPS. Presumably, the simulation spits its predictions out onto some kind of monitor, which is located in the same room as FPS’s processors. All the Sixers agreed that even if I was able to get my eyes on that screen myself, it wouldn’t do much good, since I don’t know how to read computer code. Which is all to say that this little detour has probably been totally pointless. I’m sure Lament will wring my neck when he finds out. And yet.
And yet.
I have this feeling in my gut, same as I do when I’m lining up the perfect shot, ray gun in hand, finger on the trigger. Things justclick, and right now, something is clicking.
I need to see the simulation. I am meant to go through that door.
I hoist the stolen tray like I’m a waiter at a diner, emerge around the corner, and start forward at a fast clip. At a glance, Jij could be mistaken for human, except for a few small oddities: the slitted nose, the wide-set eyes, the faint blue tint to their skin. Jij and the other guard glance up, their hands going to their ray guns.
“Delivery,” I say.
“This room is closed to—”
I hurl the tray through the air. It catches the first guard in the stomach while I dodge a ray beam from Jij, pull out my gun, shoot the weapon from their hand. It’s noisy, Mother of Stars, it’snoisy. While the woman is trying to draw air back into her lungs, Jij produces a small black pouch of I-don’t-know-what-but-I-think-I-can-guess.
I close the distance between us, come in with a fist to the face. Jij is clearly not expecting a gunman to do anything so obviously physical,especially given I still have a gunin my hand. They reel back. Hit the wall. In the confusion, the contents of their pouch spill down their front.
Jij’s eyes bulge. The veins grow in their neck, swelling at an alarming rate. They give a short, surprised gurgle before slumping to the floor.
