As I sat in Sujin’s chair, I could hear the chief calling Medical for assistance. I hoped they’d be able to revive the goblin and do something for those burns, which stank of charred flesh. Meanwhile, my engineer mentor swore and assumed the functions I’d been overseeing.
I could tell at once what had happened. Something had damaged Meridian 3, and the resulting backlash had burned Sujin along the corresponding meridian of their own body. Suddenly I appreciated how dangerous engineering work could be. By taking up Sujin’s station, I was risking my life in the same way. But I was acting the part of Jang, and I couldn’t let down my friends, or the rest of the crew.
The next minutes passed in a haze as I frantically wrestled with the lashing currents of gi. I kept flinching from the task, remembering the livid burns inflicted on my friend. It didn’t help that I could hear their ragged breathing behind me.
Yet the longer I managed the flows, the more natural the task felt. Whenever I wasn’t sure what to do, I just trusted my instincts. Sure, it might have been dangerous, but it was producing good results. I could almost see the flows as a tapestry I was weaving.
Finally, an orderly arrived to take Sujin to Medical. I could only spare the goblin a glance as the orderly hoisted them onto a hover-pallet. Don’t get distracted, I told myself.
As I became more confident in my work, I was able to listen to the others’ terse conversations with half an ear.
The chief engineer was in constant touch with Captain Hwan on the comm channel. “We’ll either have to run soon, or figure out some clever way to outfight the remaining nine ships,” she was saying. “The gi is stable for now, but I can’t guarantee that the current state of affairs is going to last.”
“You’re going to have to do your best,” Captain Hwan said from the bridge. “We need to take them alive if we can.”
“Take them—?” The chief engineer swore at him. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”
“Do your job,” the captain said calmly.
“You requested this mission,” the chief engineer said bitterly. “Even knowing this entire sector is bad luck, and it’s only going to worsen the closer we get to the Fourth Colony.”
“I said, do your job,” the captain repeated, more menacingly, and the chief engineer shut up.
I flinched as if Hwan had addressed me. The gi currents bucked and trembled, and I scrabbled at the controls, worried that I hadn’t reacted in time. But the flows steadied, and I sighed in relief.
I’d relaxed too soon. The gi snarled again like fouled thread, knotting up dangerously. What had I done wrong? I gasped as my insides clenched, feeling as though someone had punched me in the gut. Not just that: A burning sensation roared up through my body, and my vision swam.
Luckily, one of the warrant officers had been keeping an eye on me—probably because she didn’t trust me to get things right, but at the moment I didn’t care about that. She ordered someone to key in an override from another station.
“Stay alert!” she snapped at me. I had to remind myself that my embarrassment was unimportant when the ship’s safety was at stake. “That wasn’t your foul-up,” she went on. “That was an attack getting through the shields. And if the shields are going down . . .”
I swallowed. Had that burning sensation meant that the ship was in real trouble?
“You feel the connection, don’t you?” the warrant officer said in a low, relentless voice. “That’s good. Give yourself over to it.”
The chief engineer started arguing with the captain again. The racket was giving me a headache. Nevertheless, I forced myself to focus on the warrant officer’s words.
“You were starting to go into Engineer’s Trance,” she said, “synchronizing your gi with the ship’s so it’s like a part of your own body. See if you can do it again.”
“But isn’t that dangerous?” I asked. “Cadet Sujin just—”
“Sujin wasn’t in control,” the warrant officer cut in. “For you it would be different. You seem to have a knack for this, and you’d be going into a trance deliberately. It’ll make guiding the gi flows come more naturally.”
I’d just had a small taste of what it felt like to be in sync with the ship, and I wasn’t looking forward to more of the same.
On the other hand, I did want to know what was happening to the Pale Lightning.
“I’ll do it,” I said, nodding firmly even though I was shaken.
The warrant officer clapped me on the shoulder, making me wince, and turned her attention to some new emergency.
I took a deep breath and focused once more on the control panel, which showed pulsing lines of light. I concentrated on them, carefully mapping each of the ship’s meridians to its equivalent in my own body. As I worked with the gi flows, my breathing slowed, and my pulse along with it. After a while, I could detect the ship’s wounds. Two shots had gotten past the shields; one hole was already being patched up. My muscles and joints ached as though I’d been sprinting pell-mell and making sudden starts and stops.
I found myself in two places at once. One version of me sat in front of the panel, adjusting the controls with more certainty than I’d had before. I knew what to do without having to think about it.
The other version of me was flying through deep space. Before, I’d always thought of space as cold and empty. But as the ship, I felt at home there, and I could sense other ships moving through the dark. I knew where the local star and its planets were, and I could detect the pulsing gravitational knot of the nearby Gate, the grand sweeping paths that connected star systems to each other like a skein of ever-shifting constellations.
The Pale Lightning gathered itself and fired its mass drivers. There was a burst of white light behind my eyes.
Then something slammed into my body.
“You went too deep!” I heard someone cry from a distance, but I didn’t understand the words. Everything dissolved into static, and I plummeted into blackness.
I woke up on a pallet in Medical. I’d been dreaming of Jinju—the red skies, and the dust that got into everything—and of my mother shaking her head at me. Then I remembered where I was, and who I was. Who I was pretending to be, that is. I looked down at my body and saw with relief that I was still in the guise of Jang.
I was a bit groggy, but I didn’t appear to be injured anywhere, and my body didn’t hurt. Perhaps I had only fainted. Or maybe they had injected me with a painkiller. If so, I was grateful it hadn’t interfered with my fox magic. The aunties had told me once that ordinary medicine wouldn’t do that. Still, I didn’t trust drugs, and I preferred not to spend any more time in the medical bay.
Since the ship was still in one piece, another of the engineers must have taken over for me when I passed out. I winced, remembering the sensation of the Pale Lightning taking fire. I’d been so deeply linked with the ship that I’d felt the assault as if it had happened to me.
This time, I knew my way around and, with the aid of Charm, it didn’t take long for me to sneak out. With everyone so preoccupied by the attack on the ship, it wasn’t difficult to persuade anybody I came across that I was no one significant.
I already knew where I was going. I would never get a better chance to check out the captain’s quarters. Because right then I was guaranteed that Captain Hwan would be on the bridge dealing with the battle.
Is it really worth it? I wondered. They think you’re Jang. They’re counting on you to get back to your station and help.
But I’d only be gone a little while, long enough to see if the captain had secreted away any information about who was behind the mercenaries or where the deserters had gone. I couldn’t forget my promise to Jang or my quest to find my brother.
Like a heart-stab, an image came to me—Jun pointing out the local constellations on the nights we snuck out to stare up at the sky. I remembered the way we’d stolen a single honey cookie from the pantry—Auntie Areum saved up for honey to make them, on account of her sweet tooth—and we passed it back and forth, nibbling each time we could name one of the Thousand Worlds. We’d drawn out the process as long as we could, but even so the cookie disappeared quickly.
Somewhere in the Thousand Worlds there must be people who would be willing to help restore Jinju, Jun had said. If I have to, I’ll visit every world to find them. I’d believed him then, and I believed him still.
I paused for breath on the way to the elevator. My heart was pounding too hard. My body didn’t like the way I was pushing it, and I wasn’t even walking all that quickly.
I slowed down until my heartbeat eased. I would have to take it easy while being careful not to get caught. The delay was aggravating, because I had no way of telling how long the battle would last. Part of me wanted the Pale Lightning to emerge victorious quickly, of course. But another part wanted as much time as possible.