“And once they know they can’t?” Ewan asked. “What will it do to him then? What will we do with him? He’s your blood, your grandson.”
Gran huffed an impatient breath through her teeth. “Don’t borrow trouble, Ewan. Once the gods come to our table, everything is possible. Look at me.”
There was a pause, and Ewan’s voice was thick with longing as he said, “You’re as beautiful as the first day I saw you, like fire in a meadow. But it’s not real, Rose.”
“Does it matter?”
“… no.”
The sound of wet kissing jarred Nick out of his paralysis, and he gagged as he recoiled from the sounds. There were some things that you didn’t want to imagine your gran doing, especially when she was an evil old monster.
Something bigger than a glass smashed down where the party was going on, and a roar of approval and anger rose up.
It reminded Nick of the rest of the medics back in Girvan after they’d swigged the prophets’ tainted brew.
He licked his lips and tasted the sharp poison on his tongue again. What was his gran doing here? What did she want with soldiers and civil servants like Malloy? And what did the Run-Away Man have to do with it?
The answers lay—probably—somewhere ahead of him, but escape didn’t. Nick closed his eyes, turned, and jogged back down the corridor. This wasn’t Girvan. He didn’t owe these people anything.
He’d set Jepson’s ghost free back in Girvan, cut her loose of her bones and her duty to go to whatever reward the ex-army surgeon had earned. Even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t have seen her right then. That didn’t matter. The memory of her still haunted the windows he passed, her face pinched with disapproval.
Yeah, well, she was dead, so she didn’t get a vote.
Someone had stenciled directions on the wall at the end of the hall where it branched. Nick stopped to read them.
Mess and Med-bay were behind him.
Barracks straight ahead.
Labs to the right.
Nothing indicated what was to the left, so Nick went that way. Two more turns and the floor started to incline upward. It got colder too, and Nick shivered as the chill worked under his hoodie to bare flesh. If whatever they’d done to him had killed the bird, would he still be able to survive out there?
It didn’t matter. Gregor would find him. He just had to make it easier to be found.
Two sets of heavy doors got him to the end of the corridor, where heavy, snow-damp coats and insulated boots had been left to drip in front of a heavy steel door painted with a sharp white three.
Something about that seemed important. Nick stared at the door as he tried to work outwhat, but it wouldn’t stick. He grabbed one of the thick, pixelated-gray camo jackets and dragged it on, then swapped too-big sneakers for too-big boots. Once he zipped the coat up, he could smell the man who’d worn it before him—rank sweat and a meaty, sour undertone that reminded him of typhoid.
He had a feeling none of the others would smell better.
The door was sealed with a heavy-duty door bar. It was meant to keep people out, though, not in. He supposed most people wouldn’t want to go back into the storm. He yanked it up with both hands and shouldered the door open against the drift of snow that had formed outside.
An alarm went off as the door opened, flickering red against the walls for a second before a siren kicked in. No going back now. He pulled the hood up with one hand and squeezed out through the crack of the door.
The wind caught him and shoved him forward as he stumbled outside, as though it thought he needed to get away too. The snow was so thick it was like fog. Nick stretched his hands out in front of him and lost sight of them. When he drew them back, they were blanched white and frost rimmed his cuticles.
He clumsily shoved his already numb fingers into his pockets and pushed himself into a shuffling jog through the snow. The direction didn’t matter. He didn’t know where he was or where he should be going, so “away” was the best he could plan.
Voices yelled through the snow behind him, almost lost under the mournful drone of the wind.
“… how’d he get….”
“… go and freeze….”
The stutter of gunfire made him flinch and fold his arms over his head. Bullets zipped past him and slammed into the thick-packed snow on the ground. One hit a tree and took a frozen chunk of bark with it.
“Shit,” he muttered between his elbows.
