The Creative Fire: 1 (Ruby's Song) (35 page)

57: Waking

Ruby opened her eyes. A white ceiling above her, blank, fairly clean. She wasn’t in a bed, but on something harder and colder.

A lot colder.

Maybe the cold had woken her.

She swiveled her head to the side and found a white wall. Close, maybe a few inches from her nose.

Her muscles responded, let her move her head, but they made her work for the movement. She had to put way too much conscious thought into shifting her gaze or turning her neck.

Tired.

She wanted to go away and wake up again later. Memories floated like fluff and air, coming back slowly. Almost being caught and running and then really being caught.

That memory made her twitch.

Twitching hurt.

She took in three deep breaths, then turned the other way. Another white wall.

She pushed herself up, needing a door.

No door.

A bed—harder than a bed should be, so hard it hurt. At the foot of it, a sink and a privy.

Then a door opened.

That was a problem. A door with no handle for her.

Ellis. She had enough energy to glare at him, but barely. Spitting would have been even nicer, but she couldn’t quite get there.

He blinked in surprise for just a moment then said, “You’re awake.”

She didn’t feel any need to reply. The question closest to her tongue was
why hadn’t they just killed her?
She was afraid she might not like the answer to that. The next question was
did Onor get away?
And the third was about Joel, whether or not he was free and whether or not he was looking for her, and surely that wasn’t a good question either.

Ellis grabbed her arm, holding her close to him. She smelled sour sweat and stim breath. “Can you walk?”

“Where?”

“Can you?”

Bastard
. “Maybe.”

“Do it.”

She thought about sitting cross-legged on the bed and refusing to move, but instead she let him help her down and then shook his arm off. Standing would be tough. The room spun. “Where am I?”

He just stared at her, clearly unwilling to answer.

A stunner shouldn’t have put her out so far they could carry her away and place her somewhere else. “What did you do to me?”

“We haven’t done anything to you. You started a war.”

“Not me.”

“Your endangered the ship. You’ll be put on trial soon.”

Great
. “I don’t think I can walk yet.”

“I’ll carry you.”

He was an inch shorter than her. The idea was almost funny. Laughing at Ellis wouldn’t be any better than the questions she’d thought of earlier. “Give me a minute.” She lifted a foot, set it down, lifted the other, shook her arms. Her mouth tasted like metal and soap and medication. “Do you have some water?”

He pointed at the sink, backed off, and closed the door, leaving her alone in the very small space. This must have been built to keep prisoners in. She couldn’t think of any other reason for such a room to exist. So she must be in lockup. That meant she was surrounded by her people.

Ruby managed to drink using her cupped palms, use the privy, run her fingers through her hair, and get her legs used to obeying commands again by the time Ellis reappeared.

As she followed Ellis down the hall, two peacers, a man and a woman, slid in behind her. One of the peacers had white hair that contrasted with her brown skin and deep black eyes. Chitt. She winked at Ruby.

Chitt’s multicolored strand of beads wasn’t visible, but Ruby was willing to bet it was still there.

58: Gathering

Onor was almost back to the living habs on B when he heard his name. The voice was familiar, but he couldn’t place it until he turned around and spotted Daria standing behind him.

“Come on!” she called, her voice urgent. “To Kyle’s.”

He’d been going there anyway. “I’m glad to see you.”

“We’ve been watching for you.”

“Ruby’s been captured.”

“We know that. We don’t know where she went.”

“How do you know that?” Not that he really needed to ask. Surely Ix had told them.

“The Jackman heard it from somewhere.” Daria was breathing so hard the words came out in lumps. “He sent messages every direction, but no one’s answered him yet. He’s practically torn the
Fire
apart looking all over for you.”

Onor was still wearing his suit. The awkward overboots clanked on the metal parts of the floor and made it hard to keep up with Daria. “How did you know where to look for me?”

“We didn’t. We hoped.”

He focused on moving as fast as he could until they got to Kyle’s door. As soon as the door opened his stomach screeched in pleasure at the smells of soup and stim leaking into the hallway.

Inside, the room was half full. The Jackman, Daria, Kyle, Conroy, and a few people Onor had seen but didn’t know.

“You’ve still got your helmet with you,” The Jackman pointed out. “Dead giveaway that you’ve been elsewhere.”

“Yeah, well, I’m a little tired.”

He threw the helmet onto a spare spot on the couch and decided not to say he hadn’t wanted to lose his connection to Ix. “Good to see you, too. You know they’ve got Ruby?”

“They?”

“The red and the same man—Ellis—from the day we took the test. Anybody remember them?” He looked around. No one from his school class was in the room.

“We know she’s been taken,” Daria said. “I told you that.”

“I need to get her.” He stripped off his suit, exposing his filthy blue uniform. “What’s the plan?’’

“I’ll get you clean clothes,” Daria offered.

“I might need these.”

“I have blues. And take the sign.” She handed him a string of beads and material so bold it screamed rebel even from a distance. But, then again, he needed to show where he stood now more than ever. It wasn’t like he was right beside Ruby to make it obvious. He put the sign over his head and let it hang over his torn shirt.

“You need to eat,” Kyle said, handing him a bowl of rich, spicy smelling soup. “We’ll fill you in.”

He lifted his spoon. He’d need strength to go after her. “I suspect she’s in lockup.”

“Eat.”

“Do you know where she is?” Onor asked The Jackman.

“No.”

Daria handed him a shirt and he changed. “So what are we going to do?”

“You’re going to eat. We’ll fill you in.”

“All right. I’m done arguing.” Besides, his stomach agreed with them. He put the spoon in his mouth. At the first taste, his body took over, and Onor was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to stop eating if he tried. After he cleaned the bowl, he looked at Kyle. “Good soup. Did the fight come here?”

“Not much,” Conroy answered. “We’re too valuable to wipe out. Ix knows it, and I think Garth does, too.”

“What are you doing here anyway?” Onor asked, grinning.

“Came to find you.”

The Jackman spoke up before Onor could reply. “It was worse in E-pod. Penny’s in the infirmary there, got her head banged up.”

Not Penny! If only he could be with everyone at once.
Damn
. “She’s going to be okay?”

“I think so. If we keep the doctors.”

He hadn’t thought about that. There was too much to worry about at once. He held out the empty bowl for more. “We have to get Ruby before they hurt her.”

The Jackman nodded, but he looked distracted.

“We do!”

“We will. We leave in a half hour.”

That was better. Onor settled into emptying the second bowl while trying to listen to every conversation around him at once. It didn’t work very well, but he caught the tone of the room perfectly.

Ruby would have stuck her tongue out, said they were all worrying far too much, and offered up a song and maybe a dance. At least a hug. But all he felt was worried, and so tired he was cold in spite of the warm soup filling his belly.

And sad. He had let Ruby be caught. He could have stopped it. Somehow.

After he handed the bowl to a rather-too-grim Kyle, The Jackman came up behind him, close enough to talk just above a whisper. “She screwed you up, didn’t she?”

Onor swallowed, his throat too constricted for words to sneak out. What did The Jackman know? That Ruby was Joel’s bedmate now? He hadn’t really stopped running since he found that out, and now it stuck him to his chair like dead weight. He knew she didn’t love him that way, had always known that. Too bad what his head knew didn’t seem to get through to his thick, stupid, loving soul.

When he could speak, Onor kept his voice steady. “Ruby hasn’t changed at all. She’s like she’s always been, looking for a way to change the
Fire
so it bends to her will.”

“The
Fire
’s metal, and that girl is only flesh. Don’t let her hurt you beyond repair while she beats herself to death against the inside wall of a spaceship.”

He swallowed, still thick of throat and tongue. “I just hope she isn’t dead yet.”

“Ix says no.”

“Are you ready?” The Jackman asked. “Can you do this?”

“What are we doing?”

“We’re going to get her. There are others meeting us at various places.”

“Ruby’s in lockup?”

“No. She’s in command.”

Onor grunted. “I just came from there. How the hell are we going to get back?”

“We have help hiding our movements.”

“No. You don’t. Not enough. There’s a table. There’s four tables. They show where everyone is. Magic and scary. They can see us now.”

“I dropped you off there, remember? I saw it.”

“Did you really see it? Did you watch it for hours? Ever?”

“They wouldn’t have let me stay. So I didn’t ask.”

“I watched it, for a very long time.” While Ruby had slept with Joel. “I know a lot about the patterns and the battles. I can help.”

The Jackman sounded wounded. “I only got a glimpse.”

“You can stare at the table for a week after we win,” Onor promised. “Let’s go.”

59: Pieces Revealed

Ruby followed Ellis slowly down the hall, humming “Homecoming” all the way.

He turned and glared at her, so she smiled and continued.

Walking remained hard at first, but eventually her feet started obeying her mind with no extra effort. Thoughts came a bit closer together. Ellis must need her alive, have a plan for her. It would have been so easy to kill her after they’d stunned her.

They stopped outside of a door and Ellis turned to Ruby, his eyes cold and hard. Even so, she saw fear in them. Or maybe she just needed some hope to cling to. “You’re not to speak,” he said. “If you speak we will make sure you cannot ever speak again. Do you understand?”

Well, maybe he
was
afraid. She lifted her chin and straightened her spine, trying to look as strong, female, and unafraid as she could. A lesson from Jali. “I heard you.”

They led her into the biggest room she had ever seen. Rows of tables, seats close together, every seat filled. Faces turned to watch her, curious, suspicious, angry. They all watched her. She saw uniforms of every color except gray. Clean, neat. Not the fighters. The planners. Here and there, even a splash of green.

Sylva. Standing on the far side of the stage, watching, her eyes narrow and her face hard as robot gears.

So many in one place.

Chitt had stopped by the door and faded into a line of reds who stood watching the room, leaving Ruby and Ellis on a stage with a giant screen behind them and one on each side of the room. On the screen, she and Ellis loomed over the group. Her face was pale and her damned hair had gone flyaway again. Whatever camera they were using made her hair look the wrong color of red.

They’d left her in her grunged-out grays to set her apart from everyone else. She smiled, used her hand to capture the worst bits of flyaway hair. She straightened her back.

Maybe she would finally meet Garth, the man who seemed to be behind all this. Colin had showed her vid and a picture, so she knew what to look for: a tall, pale-skinned man with dark eyes, slightly hunched over shoulders, and hair beginning to gray. With well over a hundred in the one room, there were too many people to see them all individually in the crowd

She kept smiling at the crowd, making eye contact, doing her best to own the stage. It would be a great place for a concert. She drew it in her mind and heard the instruments tuning up.

Next to her, Ellis’s face looked purple with anger. He should be saying something if he wanted to shift attention away from her, but he seemed to be waiting. Sylva also stood, tapping her toe lightly.

Garth didn’t appear to be here. Mostly she saw strangers or noticed faces she’d seen in passing. A reminder, again, of how big the
Fire
was and how she was only one person, and a small, young one at that.

The vid screens snapped away from Ruby to show a close-up of Garth, his face too big to look natural. It appeared on three walls, behind her and on both sides. Coward. If he wasn’t here, how was she supposed to influence him or capture him or do anything useful at all?

She hadn’t forgotten Chitt, or the fact that Lila Red the Releaser had been like Chitt, or like her. The faces could all be enemies, or a mix.

The projected image of Garth showed details she hadn’t been able to see from the picture Joel had pointed out for her on his wall. Garth’s cheeks were high and a bit sunken, his lips nearly colorless. His eyes were a bright dark, almost gray, his lashes long and feminine and deep black. Worry lines carved the skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

She expected Garth to talk, but it was Ellis who spoke first. “Ruby Martin, you are here to be judged. Your trial is being broadcast on all of the ship’s channels and witnessed by the ship’s captain.”

Now Garth spoke. He addressed neither Ellis nor Ruby. “People of
The
Creative Fire
. We are almost home.”

Ruby bristled. He wouldn’t be telling the grays that—if he even told the truth about broadcasting to everyone—unless she had done so first. Bastard. Liar.

“And it is time for all of us all to work together. We must do that in the ways that we know. We must have order and discipline. We will begin to enforce discipline rigidly in all areas of the ship.”

Right. He was willing to kill. She imagined people stopping to listen and shaking their heads or making bad jokes.

“We do not know what we’ll find at Adiamo, whether we will meet friends or enemies. We must stand united in case we find danger. We must stay where we know how to act. We must do our jobs.”

The grays must stay slaves
. She wanted to get her hands on this vid and edit it so people would hear what he was really saying. He sounded so fervent, so confident, and so wrong.

She had to stay alive to write songs about him.

“Today, we are putting one of our workers on trial. We are doing so because she has been trying to cause change in a time when we can’t afford change. We have been patient. She is young, and a girl.”

“Woman,” she whispered.

Ellis glared at her.

“But we cannot allow mutinous thoughts or deeds in any form, and we will root them out so that we remain strong together to face the growing threats.”

She looked back out at the faces. They were difficult to read. Some set hard against her. Some curious. Not that it mattered; this wouldn’t be a fair trial. If she were lucky, she’d go to lockup. She did not expect luck. But you made your own.

She took a deep breath and gathered as much strength as she could. She glanced down, noticing that she still wore the necklace Joel had left for her. Surely Ellis and his supporters knew the power of the mixed-color symbol. Yet they were underestimating it, and her, and the people who followed her. All she had to do was glance at Chitt, who looked angry and betrayed and also ready to act. And who had been on Ruby’s side since before Fox came for her.

She felt rifts in this room that could crack wide open.

When Ruby let her breath out, she took another one in, feeling it fill behind her belly button, deep. She gathered as much of her anger in to her as she could.

She spoke.

“My most mutinous thought has been that we go home the same way we left, where everyone aboard
The Creative Fire
has a voice.”

Ellis grabbed her and pulled her toward him. He stank.

“Let her talk!” someone yelled from the back of the room.

Ellis’s hand covered her mouth.

She slimed his sweaty palm with her tongue. A short scream exited her throat and pushed through his fingers.

His hand opened.

She got out the words, “We are not killing you,” before he leaned over and replaced his hand on her mouth, whispering in her ear.

She had to stop struggling to hear what he said. “I will see that Fox dies for this if you don’t stop.”

He was quite behind the times. But for the moment, she stopped. Fox didn’t deserve death for coming to get her.

Garth watched her intently from whatever safe bunker he was in.

Ellis accepted her stillness as acquiescence and let go of her face.

She kept her gaze firmly on Garth and spoke a single word loud enough for the whole room to hear. “Coward.”