And she told him. All of it. From her father’s tit-for-tat plan with the things hidden at the gates to the death of the Typhoon to the conspiracy to hide her father’s illness and the bemused absence that he’d become. The more she talked, the easier it got. Timothy barely spoke, only asking a few questions here and there along the way. He just gave her his attention and asked for nothing in return.
Eventually she ran out of words. The sorrow in her chest was still there, still as painful and heavy and hard, but bearable somehow in a way it hadn’t been before. Timothy ran his palm over his scalp. It was a dry sound, like dust hissing against a window. Back toward the mouth of the cave, Muskrat barked happily.
“Yeah, that all sucks,” he said. “It’s like that sometimes.”
“It gets better, though. Right?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just one shit sandwich after another.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do? It’s the only game in town.”
“I just want—”
Timothy held up his hand, gesturing her to silence. Muskrat barked again, the bark she used when she saw a friend. And there were voices behind it. Timothy scooped up his gun, his eyes fixed on the entrance.
“It’s okay,” Teresa said. “They’re probably just following me.”
Timothy nodded, but he didn’t seem to hear her.
“Following you?”
“I have a tracker. They planted a tracker on me, can you believe that?”
His eyes widened, just for a second. “Ah, Tiny. Didn’t see it coming down like this,” he said. She saw something in his face, and she couldn’t tell if it was sorrow or amusement or both. Resignation, maybe. “You should lie down on the floor there. Flat as you can. Put your hands over your ears, okay?”
Who’s there? came from the entrance, sharp and hard.
“No, it’s all right. They’re not going to be mad at you,” Teresa said, and Colonel Ilich stepped out of the gloom, a rifle in his hand. Three guards from the State Building were behind him.
Everyone went quiet. Teresa felt a sudden dread bloom in her heart, the realization that she’d misunderstood something badly. That she’d made a mistake she couldn’t take back.
“You!” Ilich snapped. “Put the gun down! Get away from the girl!”
“Close your eyes, Tiny. You don’t want to watch this.”
“Stop,” Teresa said. “He’s my friend.”
The roar of Timothy’s gun was louder than anything she’d ever heard. It was like being punched from all directions at once. The sound alone was a kind of violence. She dropped to her knees, her palms pressed against her ears. Gunfire ripped through the cave. Ilich ran toward her, fear in his eyes, and pushed her down, shielding her with his body.
Timothy was screaming like an animal—deep and full of rage. He pushed past her, past Ilich, barreling toward the guards like he could brush them aside. The charge seemed to make the nearest man forget he had a gun in his hand. He tried to grab Timothy, but Timothy took the man’s wrist like it was something that belonged to him, shifted it until it snapped. Ilich pushed her down again, and she had to fight to see. Another gun fired. Someone shouted, not Timothy. Teresa twisted under Ilich’s knee, trying to find Timothy in the gloom. She got her head up enough to see him just as a wound bloomed on his leg. Redness splattered the cave behind him as he fell. Timothy lay in a fast-spreading pool of his own blood, twitching. Trying to get up as if he didn’t know his leg had been turned to splinters. He bared his teeth in pain and anger, swinging his gun around toward Ilich. She screamed No! She felt it ripping at her throat, but couldn’t even hear it herself.
Someone fired twice. The first round took the top of Timothy’s head off. The second blasted a wide hole in his chest. Timothy collapsed, motionless. The silence after rang like a bell.
“What did you do?” Teresa said. She didn’t know who she was saying it to. Ilich pulled her up. He bunched her shirt in his fist at the back of her neck like it was a handle, pushing her past Timothy’s body.
“Fall back,” Ilich said. “Fall back to the truck! We have the girl.”
Teresa shifted, trying to turn back to the cave. Timothy was hurt. She needed to help him. Ilich yanked her along.
“Stevens is hit pretty bad,” one of the guards said.
“Carry him. We can’t wait here. We don’t know if the target was alone. We have to get the girl out.”
“He’s my friend,” Teresa shouted, but Ilich didn’t hear her, or he didn’t care.
The night air was cold now. She could see her breath in the glare of the guard transport headlights. Ilich shoved her into the backseat before pushing in beside her. They threw the wounded guard in the back. He groaned when the transport truck lurched backward. Ilich leaned against her, murmuring something fast and low. Her ears weren’t right, so it wasn’t until she could shift enough to see his lips that she understood it was fuck fuck fuck fuck . . . There was blood on his neck, dark and thick.
“Sir!” the driver said. “Are you okay? You’ve been hit.”
“What?” Ilich said, and then, “Teresa, are you okay? Tell me you’re okay!”
The transport truck hit a bump in the road, shaking a little, and the shock of it all fell away. She understood clearly what had just happened. She balled her fists and she shrieked.
The infirmary was quiet. She was shaking. Cortázar and Trejo and Kelly were all there, standing in the anteroom talking to each other in low, urgent voices. Ilich was in the autodoc beside hers, a thick bandage on his shoulder and neck. Dawn would be coming soon. She didn’t care as much as she’d expected to. The autodoc fed something cool into her bloodstream. Another sedative, maybe. It made her feel cloudy, but she wasn’t going to sleep. She half suspected she’d never sleep again.
When the door opened, Trejo stepped in. He wore gray flannel pajamas a size too small for his belly. He didn’t look like the secret ruler of humanity, he looked like a sleepy uncle. He pulled a chair up to her bed, sat down, and sighed.
“Teresa,” he said, sternly. “I need you to tell me everything you know about the man in the cave. What he said to you. What you said to him. Everything.”
“He was my friend,” Teresa said.
“He was not. We have body camera data from Ilich and the recovery team. The facial recognition data matches the . . . the bloodstains. We know who he was, and once we have a secure perimeter and get a cleanup team back into that beshitted cave, we may have a better idea what he was doing here. But I need to hear everything from you. Now.”
“His name was Timothy. He was my best friend.”
Trejo’s jaw went tight.
“His name was Amos Burton. He was a terrorist and murderer and the mechanic on James Holden’s ship, and apparently he’s been sipping tea with the daughter of the high consul for months. Anything you told him, the underground may know. So begin at the beginning, go slow, be thorough, and tell me what you have fucking done to us.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Naomi
The thing that surprised Naomi most was how quickly it happened. How little convincing people needed. She had assumed that Emma and Chava would agree because they knew her personally. They had a history together. And maybe their contacts would be amenable to connecting with her, since known-safe members of the underground were vouching. After that, she had expected it to be difficult—sometimes impossible—to convince Saba’s network to reveal itself to her. Everyone in the underground was in danger of death. Maybe worse. They would all be as wary as she would have been in their place.
She’d overlooked the fact that she was Naomi Nagata, and that fear drove people to look for leaders. Emma had five contacts in the underground. Three of them were on ships in other systems, but one was a technician in Auberon’s planetary transfer station, and the other was an engineer on a Transport Union ship that was presently in-system. Chava’s connections were more local. A doctor at one of the major hospitals down the well. A taxation agent and forensic accountant on contract to Laconia. A manager of a fashionable brothel at the governmental center. The husband of a security specialist contracted with Laconia to maintain and protect the biometric identification systems. Some of those were single nodes in the network, but some were cell leaders with four or five other connections, some of whom knew a couple other people and so on until it felt like the underground had as many loyalists as the governor.
It was an illusion, but it was a powerful one.
“The thing is the fuckers came in like the flood, yeah?” the man across the table from her said. He was a communications engineer for an independent design collective tasked with building a tight-beam network—repeaters and relays—in the still-unexplored vastness of Auberon system. He called himself Bone, but Naomi was fairly certain it was a nickname he’d given himself. “Overwhelming force, Laconia. Unstoppable. Which, yeah, they are. But you can beat the shit out of a river and not change how it flows.”