“Looking at me. You keep looking at me.”
“Well, that’s terrible of me. Maybe I should just throw myself back on that prison train, see if the wardens can take me down to the Ninth Circle, after all.”
I make an irritated noise in the back of my throat. “You know what I mean. You want to ask something, Booker, spit it out and get it over with.”
“Your personality has only gotten more charming, I have to say.”
“Don’t act like you still know anything about me.”
“Trust me, I won’t.” Orion straightens his shoulders, his eyes fixed on the silhouette of Covenant as it gets ever closer to us. “Because what I saw back there on the train? That was… some brand-new stuff.”
“Orion…,” Atlas says quietly off to our right. “Stop.”
I shake my head, glaring at Orion’s back even as I’m forced to keep my hands tight on his waist. “No, it’s fine. Go ahead and get it off your chest. Tell me how awful I am.”
He sighs. “I didn’t say you were awful, V. It’s just… The person I knew definitely didn’t know how to kill like that. They had a lot more lines they wouldn’t cross.”
I snort. “Ah, yes, because everyone knows that on Trinity it’s all about having a moral code. Give me a break, O. We dustershave ten times that shit done to us. But somehow it’s worse when I do it?”
“Yeah, it’s worsebecauseit’s you doing it. I expect it fromthem.”
His words cut sharply across the air between us. I glance up at him, but his eyes are fixed on the Plains in front of us, his jaw clenched tight.
“It’s all just survival, O,” I say finally. Biting off the words like I can dismiss this whole argument.
“It shouldn’t be.” His voice is almost wistful. “We deserve better than that. We deserve to live for something.”
He sounds like Halle. Words that had come spilling out in the midst of one of our many fights in the last few years.
Surviving can’t be all that matters, Val! I want something better than that! I want to do something big and amazing and stupid!
It hits me hard enough that it steals the breath out of my lungs. The awful blankness of my sisters’ absence every moment, the guilt and fear and failure dragging at my body. I ball my weighted gloves into tight fists, hardening myself so I don’t crumple underneath it.
The truth is, I never did understand that part of Halle and I never really tried to, either. When I was a little kid, all I wanted was to leave Covenant. After Mama was gone, all I wanted was for us to survive. And lately, I just wanted cash. Because cash bought water and food, cash bought safety.
Or at least, it did. Until I messed everything up.
“You’re still an idealistic sop, huh?” I say, all sharp edges, more cutting than anything I keep in a sheath.
Orion shakes his head at me, lips pulling into a tight, brittle smile. “And you apparently still have no patience for idealistic sops.”
“That’s enough.” Atlas moves his mount up closer, his low voice coming down like a gavel, shutting us both up. “Rehashing old grievances isn’t going to help this situation.” He sighs, muttering under his breath. “… literal children…”
We ride faster after that, the Bookers kicking their mounts into a stride that looks easy and flowing but actually results in me bouncing around ungracefully on the automaton’s back, clinging to Orion to keep my seat. But we have to make sure we’re not out in the open before dawn, when the lightningrail is scheduled to arrive at the Ninth Circle. Once they see no Skywayman and train cars full of eviscerated wardens, the skies above the Copper Plains will be flooded with airships looking for us.
It’s about an hour before sunrise by the time we reach the edge of Covenant and its low, sprawling buildings. It’s a relief to hear and see and smell everything that’s most familiar to me. The little bells outside the magdalena houses tinkling. The clatter and calls of apothecaries and tinkerers as they open up their shops for the day. The air bright with the smell of spices and hot cooking oil.
I lean hard against Orion’s back as we move down the streets, sagging with a bone-deep exhaustion that’s been coming on for the past two hours. I keep thinking I see other people walking with us—Halle. Kelda. Mama and Papa. But then I blink and they’re gone. The landscape of Trinity swims around me, switching from buildings to strange, towering plants, from flat copper metal to impossible greenery. One time I even think I see the skies overhead darken with gray clouds that unleash sheets of water all over me. But then the mount beneath me jostles and my gaze clears and Trinity is Trinity again. Dry wind and dusty plains and that all too familiar thirst aching in the back of my throat.
It’s just the hair of the dog. More hallucinations. I need to get ahold of myself.
Orion tilts his head back over his shoulder, eyeing me. “Maybe we should go with Atlas. Let you get some rest before we make any moves.”
I straighten immediately, putting distance between us. “No. I’m good.”
“Val—”
“I just rested for hours, doing nothing on the back of this thing. If you have a lead on where we need to go, then I want to go. Now.”
