I had never heard my name spoken with such venom before. Which was saying something.
She had a look of practiced confusion on her face. It would have fooled me if I hadn’t been so convinced that I had found her. Despite what Ryzek insisted, I was capable of detecting subtleties.
“Your name?” I said.
“You’re the one who broke into my home, and you need me to give you a name?” She stepped in farther, and closed the door behind her.
She was a head shorter than me, but her movements were strong and purposeful. I didn’t doubt that she was a talented fighter, which was probably why the renegades had sent her after me that night. I wondered if they had wanted her to kill me. It didn’t really matter anymore.
“It’ll be faster if you give me your name.”
“Teka Surukta, then.”
“Okay, Teka Surukta.” I put her makeshift knife down on the edge of the sink. “I think that belongs to you. I came to return it.”
“I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I didn’t turn you in that night, so what makes you think I’m going to turn you in now?” I tried to slouch, like she was, but the position felt unnatural to me. My mother and father had taught me to stand up straight, knees together, hands folded when I wasn’t using them. There was no such thing as casual conversation when you were a Noavek, so I had never learned the art of it.
She didn’t look confused anymore.
“You know, you might have better luck carrying around some of your tools over there as weapons instead of the tape . . . thing,” I said, gesturing to the delicate instruments magnetized to the wall. “They look sharp as needles.”
“They’re too valuable,” Teka replied. “What do you want from me?”
“I suppose that depends on what sort of people you and your renegade cohort are.” All around me was the sound of dripping water and creaking pipes. Everything smelled moldy and dank, like a tomb. “If the interrogations don’t yield actual results within the next few days, my brother is going to frame someone and execute them. They will likely be innocent. He doesn’t care.”
“I’m shocked that you do,” Teka said. “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of sadist.”
I felt a sharp pain as a currentshadow darted across my cheek and spread over my temple. I saw it in my periphery, and suppressed the urge to wince at the pain it brought, a sharp ache in my sinuses.
“Presumably you all knew the potential consequences of your actions when you signed up for your cause, whatever it is,” I said, ignoring her comment. “Whoever my brother selects to take the fall will not have made that calculated risk. They will die because you wanted to pull a prank on Ryzek Noavek.”
“A prank?” Teka said. “Is that what you call acknowledging the truth? Destabilizing your brother’s regime? Showing that we can control the movement of the ship itself?”
“For our purposes, yes,” I said. Currentshadows traveled up my arm and curled around my shoulder, showing through my white shirt. Teka’s eye followed them. I flinched, and continued, “If you care about the death of an innocent person, I suggest you come up with a real name to give me by the end of the day. If you don’t care, I will just let Ryzek pick his target. It’s entirely up to you—for me it’s the same either way.”
She uncrossed her arms and turned, so both shoulders were against the door.
“Well, shit,” she said.
A few minutes later I was following Teka Surukta down the maintenance tunnel, toward the loading bay. I jumped at every noise, every creak, which in this part of the ship meant I jumped more often than not. It was loud down here, though we were far from most of the ship’s population.
We were on a raised metal platform, wide enough for two slim people to pass each other with stomachs held in, hanging above all the machinery and water tanks and furnaces and current engines that kept the ship running and habitable. If I had gotten lost among the gears and pipes, I would never have found my way out.
“You know,” I said, “if your plan is to get me far away from most people so that you can kill me, you might find it’s more difficult than you imagine.”
“I’d like to see what you’re about first,” Teka said. “You’re not quite what I expected.”
“Who is?” I said grimly. “I suppose it would be a waste of time for me to ask you how you managed to disable the ship’s lights.”
“No, that’s easy.” Teka stopped, and touched her palm to the wall. She closed her eye, and the light just above us, trapped in a metal cage to protect it, flickered. Once, then three times. The same rhythm I had heard tapped out when she attacked me.
“Anything that runs on current, I can mess with,” Teka said. “That’s why I’m a technician. Sadly that ‘light’ trick only works on the sojourn ship—all the lights in Voa are fenzu or burnstone, and there’s not much I can do to those.”