The burn of a spark against my cheek woke me.
“You can reverse time,” I said. “Merulo did it for me. Go back to . . . to before she hurt him.” I choked on the words. My voice felt hoarse. Had I been shouting?
“My idiot brother is fine. Have you not been paying attention?” She paused. “Oh, the ship was speaking in Mandarin, wasn’t it? Damn it, I forgot. Well, if it’ll get you smiling again, I’m sure the ship’ll let you peek at him. We’ve been getting along great.” She patted the metal hull she’d been eviscerating, and from somewhere overhead came a distinctly pleased beeping.
There was whirring, like that of a horribly fattened fly, as another metal construct flew down the hallway. It openedits gut and shit four small beans into Hydna’s outstretched hand. To my disbelief, she inserted two of these in her ears, then held the other two out to me. I didn’t have the energy to protest, instead cramming the cold objects into my ears in self-violation.
“There,” came a bouncy voice of indeterminate sex. “It took me a few minutes to break down your language, but now we can talk properly. I’m the standard mining ship you’re aboard, SMSLunatic Freak. No need to respond aloud, you can vocalize in your throat without letting the sound escape. Sound just clutters the air, don’t you think? When you meet the crew, I’ll play your translations in their ears, and vice versa. With no delay! Isn’t that amazing? Hey, do you happen to know any other languages? Even scraps. I can use them to fill gaps when referring to technology. Hydna knows historical Mandarin, what a clever and beautiful dragon she is, but you haven’t shown any signs of comprehension.”
“English.” Hydna’s lips moved silently as her voice sounded in my ear. “We’ve been teaching him the English names for things. You can use that to plug the gaps.”
“I want to see Merulo.” I attempted to line my voice with steel, but it still quivered.
There was a pause, in which Hydna resumed her excavation of the wall, peeling back a frightening bulk of metal to expose nested wires.
On the opposite wall, a door slid open. I walked through it on unsteady feet, into a sunny wash of light. My ears vibrated with the droning of machines.
Merulo lay on a slab in the midst of them. They’d disposed of his robes—which made fury surge in me, unexpectedly—andhad draped him in a girlish shift that tied at his neck. Merulo’s colouring had improved, a trace of pink returning to his lips, and even his hair looked . . . had the ship styled it?
The machines buzzed around his stumps, fixing them with what looked to be metallic attachment points. I smelled burnt skin, and the fresh rust of blood.
More blood entered him, snaking red through tubes that speared his arm. “Is that human? He’s a dragon, you’ll . . . dilute him! Or something.” I spoke out loud, refusing to play the ship’s game.
“I can’t suck it back out,” came the voice at my ear. “But if the other dragon would like to offer herself as a blood-bag, that’s easily done.”
I shoved a floating machine aside to reach Merulo. My hand grasped his. He felt warm, and further heat emanated from the legless table he lay on.
The ship had done a better job of caring for him than I had, with my collapsing and self-pity. Abruptly, the anger left me. “Thank you. Nothing made you help us. But you still . . . Thank you.” With a free hand, I rubbed at my constricting throat. “Can I stay with him, please?”
One of the machines bumped against my rear. “Sit,” the voice instructed, and I did. Only the frantic increase in buzzing betrayed that it now held a man’s weight.
The door must have closed, for I no longer heard Hydna’s banging. “What’s that?” I pointed at thin rectangles of red, leaking through the sorcerer’s shift above his abdomen.
“His guts were a mess. I fixed them, just a touch. It should help him process nutrients.”
I tried to envision a non-bony sorcerer, and failed. “You cando anything at all, huh. You’re . . . you’re a super-computer, aren’t you?” The machines in the room purred, which I took as assent. “Back in our world, you’d have been a dragon. Like Merulo and Hydna. No wonder you’re so capable.”
“I may as well be a dragon,” said the voice. “I fly! My hide is near impenetrable! And did you know, I can even breathe fire when I like?”
“You’re wonderful.” I yawned, the table’s warmth rising through my arms. “All dragons are. I haven’t met a single one who isn’t brave and brilliant, even . . .” Even Domitia, who had put my sorcerer in his current state. Who had burned herself alive to deny Merulo his dreams.
The room’s light dimmed, as if sensing my exhaustion. “Rest now, if you like,” said the ship. “You, and your sorcerer. We still have a way to go before we reach the moon.”
CHAPTER 58
In Which the Abominable Man in the Med-Bay Has Woken. In Which His Cackling, Even When Heard through the Distance of a Recording, Has Raised Goosebumps on the Captain’s Arms. In Which Everything Is Slipping Out of Their Control.
The polite and friendly sorcerer refused to have his brain chipped.
Without it, the ship-crafted prosthetics still worked, but at a fraction of their potential capacity. No thoughtlessly smooth motion, no transmitted sense of touch or temperature.
He’d communicated his own desires to the ship, demonstrating with sketches. The ship got to work fast, whirring over the limbs, painting alien symbology using blood taken from the woman. It was utterly strange and barbaric. While the golden-haired man bounced about, polluting the stream with his nonstop chatter, the other two finished their work, chanting in a language distinct from the conlang—after minutes of frowning, Gita matched it to spell words fromLegends of Larnia. The captain suspected the ship had known this from the start and simply neglected to share.
Something . . . happened, after the recitation. Captain Abel felt it as a tingle on their skin. Across the cabin, Gita shivered violently. They caught a whiff, faint enough to be almost imagined, of unfamiliar spices. The ship wasn’t all that large, but to have affected them from the opposite end of it?
“Ship, I need a reading on the chemical composition of the med-bay air. And energy readings. I have some concern that whatever happened just breached quarantine.”
The ship did not respond.
