Honour's Knight (31 page)

I cursed and staggered as the Lady’s unsupported weight landed on me. Fortunately, my suit flickered back on almost immediately. As soon as my systems were up again, I started turning them off just like I had on Mycant until I was down to the most basic movement controls and my clock, which I could still see clearly at the edge of my vision, thanks to my neuronet. Already, the seconds seemed to be ticking over more slowly, but I didn’t really believe what I was seeing until I took another step and the numbers stopped moving altogether.

At this point, I was practically standing on top of the phantom. It was howling at my feet, its spindly spider legs bumping against my suit like it was trying to push me away. I drew my gun and aimed at the squirming mass of whisker-like feelers I could only guess was its head. I don’t know if that was right, but I must have been close enough, because the phantom’s screaming stopped on the second bullet of Sasha’s three-shot burst. I sighed in relief as the pressure in my head faded and holstered my gun while I figured out what to do next.

The phantom on the ground was clearly not dead. It wasn’t screaming anymore, but it was still wiggling. I didn’t actually know why my bullets hurt the thing. The little ones didn’t seem to care about physical objects at all, but the bigger ones clearly felt them. Maybe it was a side effect of the big phantom’s ability to distort time and space?

I dropped to a squat, peering carefully at the wounded phantom. Now that I could see the thing, I could actually watch the bullet’s damage mending. Sasha’s burst had ripped three holes in the phantom’s frosted-glass body, but the wounds were repairing before my eyes. No, not repairing. It was like the damaged phantom was turning into jelly and reforming, and as it rebuilt itself, I felt the pressure of the scream begin to rise again.

“Anytime, Miss Morris.”

I ignored the threat in Brenton’s voice and kept my focus on the phantom. Then, reluctantly, I removed my glove. I’d killed Evelyn with a touch, so it made sense I’d need a touch to kill a phantom. Screwing up my courage, I reached down, brushing my fingers over the semitransparent body. Its flesh was just as cold and slick as I remembered from Mycant, only now I could see the thing’s slimy blood on my skin like a shimmering stain. I suppressed my shudder and pushed down harder, digging my fingers into its freezing, squishy, glowing bulk.

I don’t know what I expected from my efforts. A plague of blackness, maybe. What I got was pain, intense, terrified pain shooting up my arm.

I snatched my hand back with a yelp, staring at my fingers, but I didn’t see any black stuff, just the fading glow of the phantom’s freezing blood. But even as my eyes told me I wasn’t wounded, I could feel the pain echoing through my body, bringing with it a terrible fear. Fear of the death bringer.

I stopped, eyes widening as the realization hit me. The pain and fear wasn’t mine at all, it was the phantom’s. To be sure, I touched it again, just a tiny brush, but even that was enough to send the pain shooting up my arm before I could snatch my hand away.

By this point, I was getting pretty damn sick of things moving into my mind without my permission. For once, though, even my anger couldn’t beat out the heavy feeling of pity, because though I was now certain the pain I’d felt was coming from the phantom, I was just as sure the thing wasn’t doing it on purpose. If anything, the phantom was desperately trying
not
to touch me, wiggling weakly against the spike that pinned it in a desperate attempt to get away from my hand. It probably couldn’t help projecting, I realized. The phantom was a creature of pure plasmex; it probably just sent things out. It certainly didn’t seem intelligent. In fact, the more I watched it struggle, the more I was sure that the phantom really was like the wounded dog it had reminded me of when I’d first seen it.

Suddenly, I felt sick. I’m a soldier for hire, I kill things, that’s my job, but this was different. This wasn’t some inimical space monster plotting the death of mankind. It wasn’t even another soldier. This was an animal in pain that didn’t even understand why it was here. All it knew was that I was its death. Me, the death bringer who had shot it and now stood watching as it nearly ripped itself in two trying to get off the spike that trapped it beside the thing it feared most in the universe.

I took a deep breath and fell to my knees, plunging my fingers into the phantom’s back again. The pain shot up my arm the second I made contact, but I ignored it, pressing harder as I willed the virus to work. Not because I wanted to prove something to Brenton or his xith’cal, but because there was no other way besides a daughter to put this creature out of its misery, and I was not going to make them bring poor, broken Enna in here to do what I could not. I had no idea how to reach for plasmex, no idea how to trigger what I’d done when I’d killed Evelyn, but I still tried with all my might, digging my fingers into the phantom’s soft, freezing flesh until it whimpered.

The sound cut right to my core. I could feel its pain like the fingers were digging into my own back, but that wasn’t what made me bare my teeth. My eyes were locked on my fingertips, which I could see through the phantom’s translucent flesh. Fingertips that were still clean without a trace of black soot.

I punched down harder, suddenly furious. After being such a pain in my ass, coming and going whenever it saw fit, I couldn’t call the black stuff up when I actually needed it? The phantom was crying below me, its pain sawing on my brain, and I couldn’t even put the damn thing out of its misery.

But while virus failure was enough to make me want to punch something, what really made me angry was the thought that this,
this
was why daughters were taken from their parents and sacrificed to Maat. To kill these poor, stupid animals when they blundered into planets. This phantom was less of a threat to humanity than the xith’cal standing behind me, and yet it was the root of so much suffering: Maat’s, Ren’s, Rashid’s, even Rupert’s. So much goddamn tragedy over a stupid invisible animal who probably didn’t even realize it was doing harm.

But as I sat there getting madder and madder, I realized the pain shooting up my arm was fading. I blinked in confusion, snapping my attention back to my fingers, but what I saw stopped me cold.

The hand I’d dug into the phantom’s back was completely black. I’d been so angry, I hadn’t even noticed the pins and needles replacing the phantom’s pain. Now I could actually see the black stuff inching up my wrist, but the real sight was the phantom itself.

It was frozen midstruggle, its light shining painfully bright in every place but one. On its back, where my hand dug in, a black stain was spreading through its frosted-glass body like ink dripped in water, seeping down the phantom’s legs, through its tentacles, and up to the nearly healed place where I’d shot it. The blackness spread so quickly, I couldn’t do anything except watch. I didn’t even try to pull my hand out until I realized the stain was starting to creep up the spike that held the phantom down.

I jumped to my feet, bracing as I tried to tug my hand out of the phantom, but the thing’s freezing flesh was locked around my fingers. I set my suit and pulled with all the Lady’s might, but it did no good. I was stuck fast. I was just about to try ejecting Elsie to cut myself free when the blackness finished its spread through the phantom.

The moment the last tentacle blackened, the world cut out like a switch.

It happened so suddenly, I thought I’d passed out. The fact that I could think that proved I hadn’t, though. I was clearly still conscious, I just couldn’t see anything. Or move. I was trying to work out why that was when the pain hit.

Back when I was a stupid teenager, I’d hurt my back messing up a flip I never should have attempted. The injury was long healed, but every now and then I still got twinges in the weirdest places, like some muscle I’d never known I had was cramping. That was how this felt, only it was in my brain.

At the center of my mind, in the space I envisioned as being behind my eyes, something seized up. The pain was intense at first, like snapping a joint, but it faded just as fast, leaving not the blinding headache you’d expect, but a strange feeling of emptiness. I felt hollow, not like something was missing, but like I’d been widened. Suddenly, I had this enormous sense of space, like the first time you get back under the open sky after spending months crammed into a tiny ship, and my whole body was twitching to uncurl.

Caught up in the exhilaration, I let it, pushing out into the emptiness. It was the strangest feeling I’d ever experienced, like moving an arm I hadn’t known I’d had until that moment. Encouraged, I pushed further, reaching out until the strange new feeling began to ache. But even that was a good ache, like stretching after a workout. I was savoring the sensation when I realized I was not alone in the dark.

I don’t know how I knew. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t feel anything except emptiness, but I knew they were there just as I knew I still had all my toes. Something was waiting out in that vast emptiness, and as I became aware of them, they became aware of me. I could actually feel their attention sliding over my mind, a cold, dry brush, like a stranger’s hair brushing your shoulder on a crowded street. For a second, the touch was soothing, almost friendly, and then it snatched back in alarm as a new pain hit me hard.

If the first pain had felt like a joint snapping, this was like being hit head-on by a sonic train. It landed with a slug, whacking me out of the emptiness like a flyswatter. But even while it was happening, my momentum felt trivial. Unimportant. Because as I flew, I heard it.

“Heard” is the wrong word, actually. The thing I caught wasn’t a sound. It wasn’t even an image. It was an impression, almost like when Rupert’s memories popped up, but with none of the familiarity. In it, I got the strangely distinct sense of a crowd turning in unison to look at me in alarm. The great threat had resurfaced, the death of us, only
us
didn’t include me, because I was the threat.

That was the last thing I got before I left the emptiness like a shot and slammed back into my body, my eyes popping open to see Brenton right in my face.

“Deviana!”

He had me by the shoulders, his face red and panicked. He’d clearly been shouting for a while, but I hadn’t heard a thing. Now that the emptiness was gone, though, the world came rushing back. Suddenly, I could hear alarms blaring everywhere. Behind me, the three xith’cal females were flat on the ground with the human slave curled up beside them. The woman was so still, it took me a second to realize her dull skin was now black as soot.

I jumped back with a curse, head whipping down to look at my feet. What I saw was not what I’d expected, though. I’d thought to find a carcass, some black, desecrated mass of dissolved phantom, but there was nothing. No body, no ooze, not even a lingering feeling of cold. The phantom was just gone. They all were, leaving the cavern dark and empty except for the flashing orange emergency lights.

But while the phantom was gone, the legacy of what I’d done was not. My hand was as black as the dead slave girl’s flesh. I couldn’t see how far up the black stain went because of my suit, but I could feel the pins and needles all the way up to my elbow on both sides. Trembling, I lifted my hand to my open visor, holding my black fingertips under my nose.

I was expecting it, but that didn’t make the smell of rotten meat any less horrifying. It was very faint, not nearly as strong as the stench I remembered from the ghost ship, but it was there, and now that I knew what it meant, I couldn’t stop shaking. I was still standing there quivering when Brenton grabbed my shoulder.

“Come on,” he said, turning me around and shoving my glove, which I didn’t realize I’d dropped, back onto my hand. “We have to go.”

Too numb to protest, I nodded, pulling on my glove as I followed him back to the train. We had to step over the three dead xith’cal to get out of the cave, and as I edged past them, I realized the blackened bodies were already twitching. I went for my gun with a yelp, plugging a shot into each of their heads before I could think better of it. That stopped the twitching all right, but I swore their glazed eyes still followed me as I scrambled onto the train. “What the hell just happened?”

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Brenton said, hitting the switch that started the train’s engine. “From what I could see, it looked like you stood around waving your hand back and forth through the air until your fingers turned black. The xith’cal died right after that. Just keeled over and started convulsing. The slave went down a few seconds later. That was when I grabbed you, but you didn’t wake up until just now.”

I looked down at my hands. With my glove back on, I couldn’t see whether or not my skin was still black, but I didn’t feel the pins and needles anymore. I ripped my glove off, hands shaking, but when my fingers appeared, they were clean.

“I saw the blackness spread up their plasmex spike,” I said, putting my glove back on again as the train began to move. “I tried to pull out, but then the phantom died, and everything went…” I trailed off. How could I explain that endless emptiness? Or the things inside it? “Black,” I said at last. “Everything went black.”

“I saw that much,” Brenton said as the train raced us backward down the tunnel. “Get ready, we’ve got a hot exit.”

His warning broke the emptiness’s spell. All at once, I remembered that I was on a xith’cal asteroid with alarms going off all around me. I slammed my visor back into place and sealed my suit, searching the com channels at the same time for something I could use. All I got was a lot of lizard squawking, but it didn’t take a genius to guess the alert might have something to do with the three xith’cal leaders I’d just killed.

“What do you think we’re in for?” I asked, grabbing Mia off my back. My plasma shotgun had only one shot left, but that would be enough to blow a hole if there were warriors waiting at the tunnel’s end.

“Actually, I don’t think that’s for us,” Brenton said, nodding at the blinking lights.