Edge of Dark (17 page)

It didn't matter. She wasn't sorry for being bold.

She still had her camera. She wasn't going right back to the university, but if she ever taught again, the pictures would give her some standing. Staying busy helped her ignore her rumbling, hungry stomach and Charlie as well. He was on his way back up the beach toward her when she heard the skimmer.

Jean Paul landed on the beach in the dry sand above the seaweed-littered tide line. He and Charlie hugged and slapped each other on the back with open palms.

Blessedly, Jean Paul had brought sandwiches and fresh water. They ate right there on the beach, sitting on three separate rocks. Charlie told Jean Paul about the gleaners and the pictures and the flash of light he thought he saw before they took off.

“You think your ride was sabotaged?” Jean Paul asked as they climbed into his skimmer.

“Probably. Hard to find it and look now.”

“We should go back by the city, check where you last were.”

“You won't find anything,” Charlie said. “My tracks. I walked all the way around the skimmer making sure it hadn't been messed with.”

“Humor me.”

“Suit yourself.” It was friendly banter, warm. It made her think of her and Chrystal back in school, of the comfort of being around someone you'd known for a very long time. Jean Paul flew smoothly, the machine rising and going back over the ocean. She saw that they were pretty far from Neville; walking would have been tough even if they had found a way up the cliff. The gleaners were probably gone by now anyway.

She sat in a back seat behind the two men and drowsed until the skimmer descended.

“Shit.” Charlie, who she hadn't ever heard curse.

She pushed herself up and peered down. Three bodies lay flat on the dirt, pools of dark blood around them. Frieda and the tattered man and Cat-eyes. Not far from where they'd been standing when she last saw them.

“You were right,” Charlie said to Jean Paul. “We did find something.” His voice had gone cold. “I might as well have killed them.”

“You're alive because you took the new skimmer. This one doesn't have air bubbles.”

“Why?” Nona asked, maybe about the skimmers, maybe the bodies, maybe anything. She felt shocked all over again, like she had when she fell from the sky. She had thought the Deep was a dangerous place, but this . . .

Jean Paul answered one of her imprecise questions. “Whoever blew up the skimmer wanted to keep information from getting out of here.”

“The pictures?”

“Probably.”

Jean Paul flew circles around the bodies until Charlie let him land. When Nona went to climb out, Charlie put a hand up to stop her.

She looked him in the eyes. “I'm not a child. I want to see.”

He hesitated, nodded. Grim.

Outside, a wind blew and she had to hold her hair and walk into it to reach the bodies. Frieda had been shot in the chest and lay on her back, eyes wide and staring up. The tattered man lay near her, an arm reaching toward her but not touching. She reached Cat-eyes first and touched his cheek. It had grown cold. One hand had been flung up above his head and the other crumpled under his back awkwardly. She tried to cover the bloody hole in his stomach with a scrap of his shirt, but the wind picked it up. She tried again and then gave up. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, even though none of it was her fault. “I'm so sorry.”

She took pictures. She had never seen death like this, never seen life cut off unexpectedly and brutally and on purpose. She had trouble holding her camera still.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHRYSTAL

Chrystal took a cube of food from a tray carried by one of the humanoid robots. Soulbots. If she hadn't been so tired coming here, she would have recognized the uniformed women right away. Not because she had ever seen one, or even a picture of one. But how could any human work for such monsters?

The transport had come back once and dropped off a young couple who had worked in one of the same shared labs Chrystal and her family used. It didn't come back any more after that. They had slept on the cold floor, dropping from exhaustion, talked out. More than once, so Chrystal had lost all sense of time. They had plentiful cube-food and water, and nothing else. No clean clothes, no showers.

She ate quietly. The cube tasted slightly sweet and slightly chalky. Katherine was sound asleep with her head pillowed on Yi's lap. Jason paced the room, his steps heavy. There were two other men doing the same, the three of them walking and walking with restless energy, whispering.

Four soulbots converged on the remaining humans from four hallways. Chrystal shook Katherine until she woke up, then whispered in her ear. “Stay down, and maybe they won't take us.”

Katherine didn't. She pushed herself to a seated position and then stood. She caught the eye of the closest soulbot and waved her arms.

“What are you doing?” Chrystal hissed.

“Finding out what happens next.”

“Are you crazy?”

Katherine looked directly at her. “No, I don't think so.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHARLIE

A
day and a half after the gleaners were murdered in Neville, Charlie stood next to Nona at the edge of the observation deck at the spaceport near Manna Springs. The grounds looked almost pastoral. There were only three ships at the moment, two of the five they used to go between Lym and the stations that orbited it, and a Transpo Line ship oddly named the
Big Digger
that was getting dry dock repairs. The noon sun faded the colors to summer hues.

A ground-ship from the
Sultry Savior
had already started down. Stupid name for a ship, Charlie thought. Arrogant. But then spacers were generally arrogant bastards, the same kind of humans who had almost destroyed Lym before they finally left it. He wondered if Nona had named the ship.

The glassed-in observation deck was nearly empty. A mother had her two small children here, faces pressed against the glass as if something exciting were about to happen. An artist stood in a corner, sketching the spaceport by hand with a light pen.

Charlie felt Nona's presence acutely. She radiated heat; he felt her even when he wasn't looking at her. Knowing the heat was mostly his imagination made it worse rather than better. There was nothing smart about feeling attraction to someone who was about to leave on a starship.

Nona had been so quiet it startled him when she spoke. “I want Satyana to see Neville.”

“How long will she be here? Manny needs to meet with her, and so does the rest of the Council.” Satyana had managed to pull off a diplomatic landing permit and Manny was home cleaning and fretting about what to wear.

“Promise to show her the pictures?”

“That's all Manny. I'm the ranger and the guide and the worker all wrapped in one. No one gives me diplomatic tasks.”

“And guiding me around wasn't a diplomatic task?”

“No.” He found the idea repulsive. “I
chose
to be your guide.”

“But between them, Satyana and Manny chose you.”

She had met Manny in his offices that morning, seen him surrounded by people demanding information he didn't have, wanting actions that made no sense. The whole scene had made Charlie shudder, but Manny called everyone by name and stayed serene, his quiet confidence calming people. “Manny loves politics and government. I hate them both.”

“Isn't being a ranger a government job?”

“I love the wild. I don't want a job that takes me away from here.”

She looked at him for a long time before she nodded.

He pointed at the sky. “There it is.”

A moving dot at this point, barely more than that. Absurdly, he wanted Nona to take his hand again as they watched the dot resolve into a slender, pretty ship. It looked brand new and very expensive, the kind of ship that only landed here when the rich came down to play. It glided gently and expertly to a perfect stop. He led Nona out onto the tarmac and they jogged slowly toward the ship, arriving in time to greet Satyana as she came down a set of steps that had folded out from the side.

She and Nona hugged, the hug drawing a look of surprise briefly across Satyana's features before she buried her face in Nona's hair. The women stayed still, breathing together. Satyana stood even smaller than Nona, and also thinner. Smooth, night-black hair framed her face.

He had imagined someone with so much power would be bigger.

Nona turned to introduce them. He expected displeasure, but instead Satyana greeted him warmly, with a firm handshake. “Thank you for being Nona's guide.” No rancor, no gloating. Just a simple thank you.

Maybe he wasn't going to be able to hate this woman either. “You're welcome.”

Charlie drove. Satyana and Nona both sat in the front, and a hulking woman named Britta massed uncomfortably in the back. Probably a bodyguard. Nona quietly filled them both in on her adventures on Lym. Charlie expected Satyana to stop liking him as soon as she heard about the trip to Neville. To his surprise, she didn't seem to hold him at all responsible for Nona's double near-death experiences and seemed more worried than he was about the robots in the pictures.

He slowed the skimmer. “We're almost to Manny's office. Shall I drop all three of you off?”

“Just me and Britta. You two can have another afternoon of touristing. Come back for me at the end of the day.”

That wasn't the answer he expected. From the look on Nona's face, she hadn't expected it either. As they pulled away, Nona asked, “Can we go get Cricket? And then maybe hike? I want to see another waterfall before I leave.”

Charlie chose a flat, gentle hike along a well-kept trail by a stream with multiple waterfalls. Huge trees towered over them, and a gentle rain cooled them without making the path too muddy to manage.

As they flew back, Nona looked tired. Even now she didn't complain, but just watched Lym go by in the window, with one hand on Cricket's enormous head and a pensive look on her face. The tongat had clearly adopted Nona. She'd stuck closer to her heels than to Charlie's on the hike. Charlie had tried to tell himself Nona needed protection more than he did.

He stopped to drop Cricket off at Manny's and found a sign on Cricket's door. “Stay for dinner. Both of you.”

He'd left Nona in the skimmer.

“I should have changed,” she said.

“You're beautiful enough.” He hadn't meant to say that out loud. Maybe he was tired, too. She blushed, and he expected his cheeks were pink, too.

He led her in, watching her smile and shake hands and look pleased to meet everyone. He was going to miss her.

As usual, they ate with the children and talked of ordinary things. Chairs sat close together so elbows bumped and someone balanced a plate on every corner. After dinner, Pi, Bonnie, and Amara all disappeared with pressing business related to parenting, leaving Manny, Charlie, Nona, Satyana, and Britta at the table.

Manny brought them all wine and cookies, being very formal about the whole affair. Even though it could surely be attributed to Satyana's status, the not-Manny behavior disturbed Charlie. Everyone around the table looked awkward, except maybe Britta, who just looked stoic.

“Have you heard today's news?” Manny asked him and Nona.

“We were hiking,” he said, feeling slightly guilty for it.

“What news?” Nona asked. “Did you hear any more about the High Sweet Home?”

Manny shook his head.

Satyana said, “The Next are massing on at the Ring's borders.”

Charlie tried to picture that. The Ring was a circle in reality, and way out beyond the orbit of the stations in the Glittering. It was too big to “mass” at the edge of; space wasn't an island or a continent. “What do you mean?”

Satyana sipped daintily at her wine. “There are hundreds of Next ships stopping just short of violating the treaty.”

“Have they said what they want?” Nona asked.

“No,” Manny said. “No, they haven't. But it sure looks like they plan to come in as a group.”

Satyana added, “We caught a few Next on the Deep, once we started looking.”

“How do you tell a regular robot from a Next?” Charlie asked.

Satyana pursed her lips. “Carefully. By watching how they act, what they do. A regular robot doesn't make autonomous decisions. We sent some AI algorithms through the security data and found some robots that were clearly thinking for themselves. I'm more worried about the ones we surely missed.”

Charlie said, “So maybe the robots in Neville were from the Edge?”

“No,” Manny answered him. “Well, we don't think so. We're going to try and catch one.”

“I'll get one for you,” Charlie replied.

“I have a better idea.”

Charlie sat back, puzzled.

“You're going with Nona,” Manny said.

Charlie blinked and bit his tongue before a curse came out. He looked at Satyana. “No. No, I'm not. I don't work for you.”