Page 88 of The Space Between Stars

He flashed her a wolfish smile. “I’m going to buy some apples.”

TWENTY-ONE

NIKLAUS

Year: 748 Post Cataclysm: Present Day

Location: Jiradesh Desert

Monotony had had Niklaus’s life in a chokehold. The days began early and stretched long: cleaning until his hands cramped, walking until his feet were more blister than skin. The Jiradesh gave no indication of whether they had progressed on their route or if every day simply repeated, following a tilted series of the same events: moss, scrub, walk, repeat.

But now, for the first time in a long time, the days passed in companionship. Dex never left Niklaus’s side. Niklaus sat idly while he trained with the mute in the tail hours of the night. Translating signals gave way to training Dex in the signals themselves: over scrubbing pots and pans, while putting away trays and utensils, while trekking the sands. While the boy’s resentment never gave way to respect, it did give way to a volley of well-intended insults, which gave way to the occasional chuckle.

Like mess trays, the days stacked up; time flew by in a steady moss state. Their trio spent frequent evenings in the supply wagon, where Niklaus held an Aetech lamp at indefinite angles for the mute to see by as he fiddled with the shields. They would speak on simple things, since they had little in common, and only two of them could speak. Even in company that signaled, the mute seemed to be the type that preferred to listen.

And work. Like the slipping of wind over sand, he never stopped. Niklaus exchanged the plate for a new one a dozen times. The mute went through the same process for each. If he was frustrated, he did not show it: his eyes were carved from stone.

“I’ll admit, I can see why he has you convinced,” Dex started one evening over dishes, his voice barely above a whisper. He nodded towards the mess sector. The mute sat alone, thirty meters from them, head down. “But have you considered…?”

Niklaus had not yet questioned, aloud, the mute’s sanity. With the fear of the boy exposing them ever present, he’d never fully disclosed what the mute had signaled to him in confidence. The things that made it seem reasonable for a man to tinker with distortion plates for hours on end, looking for a flaw that might not exist.

“That he could be nuts?” Niklaus asked. Dex scrubbed a little harder. “More than once.”

And yet, Niklaus had felt in his bones that war loomed on the horizon—and that Aethertech Mechanics’s contributions were at the center of it—long before he had joined the Red Wing. The mute’s daily zeal only made that heat-hazed line grow closer and darker.

Niklaus remembered the Chori fleet, twenty years ago, darkening the Casowhatan sea at sunset. He remembered the panic and the hope. For nothing. For a father who never came home from a battle that should never have been fought. Niklaus had never idolized violence in the way so many of his peers did. Good men are better than violence, his father had said. Good men were constituted of principles that were stronger than muscle and bone.

Those principles had failed him when the Red Wing’s own leader—Major General Thadinar Curtaim—betrayed them.

Niklaus stared at the mute, a product of violence if ever there was one, who’d lost sleep again over a distortion core because he believed it might save a recruitment that cared nothing for him.

“What do you think it is that makes a good man?” he asked Dex. “Is it the things he says? The things he hopes for? Or could it be the things he doesn’t?”

Dex rolled his eyes. “Meyernes. You’re doing it again. Just because you muse on something doesn’t mean you have to vocalize it. Not all thoughts need to be a conversation.”

If only Dex knew how much Niklaus didn’t say. There were times he wished his lips would fall clean off. “Humor me.”

Dex sighed, long and slow. “I think it’s the choices he makes when his back’s against a wall.”

The mute might be wrong about everything. He might be out of his mind. But he’d chosen what no one else ever had: to put faith in Niklaus. From an objective standpoint, that should mean nothing. And yet, it meant everything.

When the mess tent had been cleaned for the night, Niklaus made for the wagon, where he hid his quickly dwindling moss reserves. Too quickly. Taking a full tab after the first rally had been a critical mistake, true. But he’d dropped back to a half—not much beyond his usual third. Then, as the days ticked by, a half had warranted another half. And another. Now a third would not do. One half became two thirds. Two thirds and the day was brighter, the walk bearable, his body a decade younger.

It would have been nice, had the wagon been empty, to get what he needed without rebuke.

It wasn’t.

The mute handed Niklaus an Aetech lamp, the one Niklaus had given him weeks ago, following the first rally.

Niklaus held it to the light cast by the spare lamp—his only spare lamp—hanging from the wagon’s joint. “Technically, I made this.”

“Altered it how?”

“And what precisely am I to do with it?”