The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) (32 page)

52: The Jackman Cometh

Onor felt light as Fox walked away. Before now, he’d only seen Fox once, for a brief moment the day the sky fell. Even so, he’d known who threatened him as soon as he opened his eyes to find the red-haired man poking his shoulder with a stunner. Cocky, clean, full of himself. But oddly, not brave. Fox’s hand had been shaking even as he pointed the stunner at Onor.

Marcelle wrapped her arms around Onor, whispering in his ear. “I kept thinking of Hugh. The whole time the stunner was pointed at you, I felt the absence of Hugh.”

Onor laughed, giddy for having just escaped death by the hand of his archrival. Maybe this was what it felt like to survive a battle. And Marcelle had been his support. “You’d have never let him stun me enough times for that.”

“No.” Her voice was a whisper.

Onor felt thick tongued. Still, he pushed Marcelle’s embrace aside when he saw Ruby and Ani stepping into the kitchen, looking for a private place to talk. He followed after them, unwilling to let Ruby out of his sight until he got her back on track, got them all under Colin’s or Joel’s protection. “We’re supposed to be finding The Jackman,” he said to Ruby’s back when he’d almost caught up. “And we have to do something about Hugh.”

“I know, and isn’t The Jackman supposed to be finding us?”

“Well, but we’re not on gray.”

“The Jackman always knows where to find you, and Conroy will know when to call the reclaimers.”

“Are you really following Conroy?” Onor asked. “Or are you doing whatever you want?”

“Should we have done something different besides come here?”

“No.” He stared at her. She was mussed up from all the fighting, she had a stunner strapped to her middle, and she looked just like he imagined Lila Red would look, except Ruby was dressed in gray. She felt as far away from him as the dead revolutionary, and almost as ruthless.

Ani interrupted. “We need KJ. I don’t know or trust this Jackman, and besides, he’s gray. We need someone who can lead us all.” Ani stopped, hand to mouth, suddenly realizing the words that had run out of her mouth. “Someone we know.” She looked at Ruby, apologizing with her look, almost pleading. “You could do it, except you’re no warrior. We need someone who knows how to fight. Someone we know.”

Onor chose to ignore Ani instead of argue with her. She’d clearly just chosen Ruby over Fox. Even without being able to read the nuances, Onor had been able to see that. Ruby needed Ani. She needed more than just him and Ani. “I promised Colin we’d find The Jackman.” It felt important to stay on Colin’s good side. Onor might have hated the way he looked at Ruby, but that didn’t mean they didn’t need him. “Colin told me to keep you safe.”

Ruby frowned at him. “You sound like Fox.”

“Colin has resources, and Joel let him take care of you, and then he asked me to.”

Ruby turned in the small kitchen and stood with one hand on her hip, her eyes deadly serious. He knew the look well; he wasn’t at all surprised when she spat, “I’m not doing what anyone tells me, except maybe Conroy for the moment. Because I told him I would. But not Ani. Fox. The Jackman. Not even Colin. Not even Joel, who may someday run this ship. And for sure not Garth, who does run it. I am not doing what anyone tells me anymore. Not. Even. You.”

The words were spoken to Onor, but even Ani flinched.

Stung, Onor backed out of the kitchen and stood just outside the door. Ruby wasn’t going to let him be her keeper, and she really never had, anyway. She’d grown past him for sure now.

He paced. Stepping around people, not stopping to talk to anyone except Conroy. “Do we have orders yet?”

Conroy eyed the kitchen door. “I wish.”

Onor stood, waiting, bouncing a little on his toes, wishing he knew what Ruby and Ani were saying behind the closed door. Ruby was a force, an energy that drove him to be brave because she was brave, to question because she questioned. He had orbited her since the day they met. Maybe he would have to be content with watching her back. But if that was what he was going to do, he best not get tangled up with anyone else.

Even Marcelle.

He searched the room until he found Marcelle covering Hugh’s body with a blue blanket she’d taken from Ruby’s room. Doing what needed to be done, even the hard part of helping Lya stand up.

Before Lya had made it to her feet, a knock at the door startled Marcelle to attention. She looked at the door, then turned to stare at Onor. When Onor heard The Jackman’s familiar voice on the other side, he raced to open the door and usher him in. The Jackman looked gaunt, almost hungry, and full of purpose. “Gather them up,” he said to Conroy, not stopping to greet anyone. “We’ve got to go.”

Onor remembered Ruby’s last words to him, about how she wasn’t going to obey anyone, but he went to get her anyway. “The Jackman’s here. We need to go.”

He saw her begin to refuse, but then she rushed past him, stopping in front of The Jackman. “What’s happening?”

The Jackman looked Ruby up and down, taking in her gray clothes and the way her red hair had gone half-tamed at best. When The Jackman spoke, he didn’t even sound like he hated her anymore. “They’re killing people. We’ve got to rethink this.”

“I know. Hugh.”

The Jackman glanced at the body under the blanket and his face grew even harder. “I see.”

Ruby shook her head. “Who else?”

“Salli and Jinn. Together.” The Jackman paused, looking stricken, almost—for just a second—weak. Then he growled, “They were women, damn it!”

“Yeah. So am I. What are we
doing
? If we kill each other, who’s going to run the
Fire
?”

“Someone forgot to remind Garth about that.”

Ruby’s eyes lit up with sudden purpose. “I need to find Joel.”

The Jackman stood still, a dumbfounded look on his face.

Ruby shifted into relentless mode. “I need to be at the center long enough to see the whole picture.” She leaned in and grabbed The Jackman by the front of his shirt. “We’re going to win. There’s as many of us as there are of them, and half of them are on our side.”

The Jackman looked into her face. “How do you plan to get near someone like Joel right now?” The Jackman stepped back from her so he could see Onor and Marcelle. He looked at them, one at a time, stopping with Onor. “You too? Is this what you believe? That she—” he sighed.

Onor had never seen The Jackman so torn.

He stopped and stood right in front of Ruby, looking down at her. “I’ll take you back to the cargo bars. The fight has been there and gone. But I won’t take you into the middle of it.”

Ruby shrugged. “Then we’ll find our own way.”

The Jackman crossed his arms and looked at Conroy, not needing to ask his question out loud.

Conroy nodded.

53: The Table

Ruby’s belly screamed hunger and her feet hurt. It seemed like she was always standing or walking lately, and her feet always hurt. She glared at The Jackman’s back, bent now, looking as tired as she felt. He’d kept them walking through random corridors and tunnels and maintenance hallways full of dirty robots.

Maybe he meant to keep her from being any use to anybody. After all, he’d never liked her, and he’d never made that a secret.

Given the way her feet hurt and her belly had started screaming for food again, they’d been walking and hiding and walking a long time. They’d heard fighting, or what might be fighting—raised voices and running feet—twice. The Jackman had deftly turned them away from it.

She could feel the fight. It existed in the way the mood within the ship had changed, in the way they walked differently through the corridors, more watchful, maybe even a bit afraid. There was even a change in the way the ship smelled, although when she tried to find words for it, they weren’t there.

Whatever else she thought about him, The Jackman knew the back warrens of the
Fire
.

Marcelle had stayed behind to take care of Lya. She’d clung to Ruby for a long while. Both thinner and dirtier and scrappier than ever. Conroy was still waiting for orders, but he’d sent Ruby and Onor and Ani with The Jackman.

It was as if her time of being a well-dressed blue was days or even a week behind her instead of only hours or maybe a day.

To keep her feet moving, she started planning the words to a song about change. The ship was going to need one.

The Jackman opened a door, and she expected it to open on another dusty, empty corridor, just like the other twenty or thirty doors he’d led them through.

Just beyond the door, KJ stood ready, hands at his side, clearly prepared to fight. When he recognized them, he stopped and gaped. Blinked. And then relaxed. He stepped aside.

Ruby looked closely, trying to tell if he was glad to see her.

KJ gave no clue.

The room was big, with red couches and chairs bolted to silver walls and a square table with a vid screen embedded in the middle. There were no chairs around the table. Instead, about ten people stood around it, looking down.

Joel stood across the table from her. He looked up, a momentary lightness crossing his features. He waved and then returned to a conversation he was having with Par.

Thank god. Her doubts about The Jackman melted. She turned and planted a kiss on his right cheek, which felt stubbly and wrinkly and dry under her lips.

The Jackman flinched and took a step away from her.

She frowned but didn’t take time to worry. She had already recognized Joel and KJ and Par. She looked closer, half expecting Colin, but he wasn’t here. There were four others she didn’t recognize: two men and two women. Both women were older than Ruby, but one of them—a gray-haired matron—was much older. Only Joel and the oldest woman wore green.

Everyone else in the room was male, and neat, and looked confident. Clearly none of
them
had been fighting or running through corridors.

The table drew her.

As Ruby stepped toward it, KJ stepped between her and the table. He blocked her, but he spoke to The Jackman. “What’s she doing here?”

Ruby tried to step around KJ to glimpse the table, but he blocked her again.

She stepped on his foot.

“She’s rather difficult,” The Jackman said dryly as KJ lifted his foot and leaned into Ruby, one arm around her waist in an imprisoning caress.

Ruby struggled.

“She’s also rather hard to say no to,” The Jackman said.

Joel spoke from across the room. “Let her come.”

The Jackman said, “See?”

KJ grinned at her. There was no anger. If anything, the crook in his smile suggested tenderness and worry. “If you’re caught here, Garth will have you killed.”

Ruby smiled. “It’s no different for you, right? He’d kill you, too?”

KJ nodded.

As she stepped past him she said, “I hope your foot’s okay.”

“It’s fine.”

As she stepped up to the table, a set of blinking colors disappeared. Still, her eyes were drawn to the surface, where golden light still glowed in lines and circles.

She recognized the image as a very precise drawing of the
Fire
. She’d seen pale imitations of the picture back in school, when they were trying to teach her about the universe outside of the world she saw inside
The Creative Fire
. It had always fascinated her—an unseen mystery in her life. “You can’t come out of the shell,” one of her teachers had said. “There is no way to leave the ship while it flies through space. But there is a whole universe out there. We have stories. We have these drawings passed to us from the
Fire
’s makers.”

Ruby had repeatedly asked for more detail, to know what the ship looked like from the outside as well as the inside. No one had ever shown her. It hadn’t really helped that none of her teachers seemed to really understand the universe—the one outside the
Fire
, or maybe even the one within the
Fire
. And now, in front of her, the
Fire
was drawn in detail and light. Every corridor. On the screen, the ship was round, the open corners full of words and controls. Movement bloomed in various places. Different levels and views were available at a flick of a hand.

She would never have imagined such a thing as the table, or such a place as this room full of the answers to almost every question she had ever asked, existed. She felt completely awed.

The cargo pods were half the ship, maybe more. The gray pods—if you included the two dead ones—took half the rest. Actually seeing the dimensions told her volumes about the control of the ship, about the reasons the cargo bays had become partly taken over, even about the number of reds.

Joel came to stand beside her. She asked him, “Where are we?”

He pointed to a pulsing yellow light in one of the inner levels—but still not the center—of the ship.

She pointed to the very center, which was dark and thick with shapes she didn’t understand. “Is that command?”

“No. This is command.”

“Here?” An idea dawned on her. “We won?”

He shook his head. “No. Not yet. There are four places like this.” Joel pointed to each of them. “They control three. They think this one is broken, and so we’re here.”

“Ix?”

His eyes looked approving. “Colin told me you’re brilliant.”

“So what’s in the middle?” she said.

“That’s where the
Fire
’s guts and brains are, where Ix lives, where pilots go when they’re needed.”

Wow. She spread her hands out across the whole table, including all of its lights and colors. “Tell me what this shows you.”

She expected him to show her the battle, but he didn’t. He started with the ship, making sure she understood how to read the labels and how to control the images on the table.

A few of the other people in the room watched, but mostly they gathered in corners. Ruby sensed they were talking about her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t want to be ripped away from the table in front of her, ever. It was bigger and more important than her hunger or her thirst or her curiosity about the old woman dressed in green. It was simply the best thing she had ever seen, and each time Joel touched a control and brought a new bit of information up, she felt fuller and more complete.

The pulse of fresh and grey water through the veins of the
Fire
fascinated her. So did Joel’s quiet explanation of how water acted as lifeline, as ballast, as shield, and as fuel.

The movement of trains. The stopped trains, one for sabotage in the tunnel and the others to cut off parts of the ship and make it hard for people to get around. The train lines that were broken. “Some have been broken for generations,” Joel said, “and maybe they never worked.”

She needed to know more. She had to figure out how to help. “What did you turn off? When I came up?”

Joel stepped back for a moment, looking around. She caught a nod from KJ and then another one from the old woman. A trio of deciders? Or had she missed some? At least they all agreed.

The lights blossomed again. They started out as gray, red, blue, and green. Thousands of lights, thousands on thousands of lights, tiny, bigger when a lot were clumped together. “It’s the battle, isn’t it?” she asked. “Who’s on our side?”

In response, the lights changed to three colors. Not points, not individuals like the other ones must be. Instead, it was shading. White—the gray pods all colored white. Brown—most of command and some spots everywhere else, a few long lines of brown, quite controlled. And everywhere, like a contamination, tans shaded to darker brown or lighter.

She understood immediately. She pointed at a knot of tans. “These are the people Ix can’t tell us about. It doesn’t know what side they’re on.”

Joel laughed. “Mostly Ix knows if the people themselves know. They wear the sign, which Ix can see as well as we can, or they’re directly following Garth’s orders. Ix can read all of that pretty well. But humans can’t always read themselves.”

“Are we winning?”

Joel shook his head. “We’re not losing yet. It’s close.”

The other people in the room had slowly gathered back around the table. She felt out of place. Still, she watched, the colors mesmerizing. She was pretty sure she could see battles and movement, and also the simple rhythms of work. The work would have to go on. They would all die if the orchards perished or the water systems stopped working.

She had a hundred questions, but no one looked like they had time to answer them. She put her hands down on the edge of the table, needing something to lean on. She’d been so fascinated that she’d forgotten how much her feet hurt.

The surface under her hand glowed red in the outline of her fingers.

Joel plucked her hand up and backed her away a step or two. “Don’t touch the screen.”

“I need to sit down.”

To her surprise, he backed up with her. Surely he was the boss and had other things to do. “Wait,” she whispered. “I’ll be right back.”

She went to the privy, splashing water on her face and doing her best to comb her fingers through her hair. Walking forever to get here had undone all the repairs she’d managed in her hab, and worse. She pulled her soiled gray shirt off and scrubbed at her body with damp wet hands and a twist of material she ripped from the shirt. Where was Ani when she needed her? For advice. For a comb. She sighed. The mirror showed a topless wild woman with a stunner wrapped around her middle. She pulled the shirt back on and frowned. At least she smelled better.

Joel stood outside, waiting calmly, looking a tiny bit bemused. He led her to one of the couches. She sat awkwardly, the stunner on her hip an unfamiliar object that unbalanced her. “I’ll get you water,” he told her.

Ruby took the moment to look around. Onor and Ani and KJ stood in the far corner talking. Two peacers had joined them.

Most of the rest of the people still clustered around the table, and Ruby realized she hadn’t even noticed if Onor had been able to see the table close-up like she had. She needed time to talk to him. There was too much to do, too much to remember.

Joel appeared beside her with a flask of water and a plate of flat protein crackers and orbfruit. Her hand reached for the food before her brain even recognized it was there.

She watched Joel as he watched her. She hadn’t really noticed details about him before. There hadn’t ever been a quiet moment like this.

The effort of leading his side—her side—their side—had taken a toll on him. The spidery age lines that edged his eyes ran long. Exhaustion sat deep in his eyes and face, aging him and making him look a bit vulnerable. In spite of that, he was neat, his gray hair combed back from his prominent cheeks and thin lips. His eyes were a lovely blue-green she could swear she’d never seen in another face anywhere.

She’d nearly emptied the plate before she could concentrate on anything other than eating and watching him. “Thank you,” she managed to choke out.

He smiled, his teeth an even white, his lovely eyes looking pleased. “You’re welcome. I needed a small success.”

“So I’m a success?”

“You look much better now, so feeding you must have been a success.”

“Are we going to win?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. They’re killing us and we aren’t killing them. Do the math.”

“Even with Ix?”

“Ix can’t disobey direct orders, except orders that hurt people.”

“But Ix is helping us?”

“Of course. We’re right.”

She loved how he was sure of himself. The food had given her energy, and she drew more from the way Joel looked at her, as if she were clean and her hair had been done up for a trip to sing in the cargo bar. “We are. I want to help.”

“You can. But not now. Now, we’re stopping for a bit, resting, getting ready to start all over. Garth has agreed to talk to us in the morning if we promise to keep working.”

“You mean the gray shifts?”

“Everyone. But we’ve set plans in motion.”

“What plans?”

He shook his head.

“He’ll keep his word?” she asked. “Garth will talk to us?”

He nodded.

“How much time, then? When is morning?”

He laughed. “A few hours yet.” He reached over and touched her cheek lightly. “Time to rest.”

“I want to help.”

“Will you sing me a song? That will help.”

He was flirting. In the middle of a battle, this man was flirting with her.

She’d fallen for Fox’s flirting, and look how that had turned out. She couldn’t give Joel, or anyone else, power over her. Ever. But she could feel him like a magnet. She wanted to touch him, to know how far her head would come on his shoulder. Which was really, really stupid. She shook herself, and a tiny moan escaped her lips. “I’ll sing for you.”