“Under the circumstances, I agree.”
He still obeyed me, she thinks as he pulls them both up the elevator shaft, moving slower one-handed but still fast. Even though he could’ve gone home to Mansfield with the Queen and Charlie. He stayed by my side.
That’s a trick of his programming—a fault in it, really. It tells her that Abel’s been honest about his limitations and boundaries. He truly will see her through this, with or without her presence, all the way to the end. She can trust him.
The trouble is, it doesn’t feel like trusting a bridge to hold you over a river, or an oven to bake your bread. It feels like… trusting a person. Which it shouldn’t. She can’t afford to get confused about Abel’s true nature, not now and particularly not later, at the end.
They reach the upper level, jump out, and run for the hangar. Their surroundings remain deserted, but emergency beacons and klaxon alarms have transformed Wayland Station into a den of sound and red strobe lights. It’s even more disorienting when they reach the hangar; all the ships seem to have become more ominous versions of themselves, colored charcoal and crimson, completely forbidding.
And by now the authorities have to be close. Will they be on the lookout for thieves and traitors? For terrorists?
“Can you hear over this?” she shouts to Abel. Nobody farther than ten yards away would be able to overhear her if she yelled at top volume.
“It’s a lot of input to sort through.” That must be mech for no.
Noemi starts running again, and Abel follows. Although she remembers roughly where they’re docked, the red strobe lights make everything look so strange. Each flash shows her a still image, and each image looks different from the one before. It’s as if she were trying to find her way out of a maze, one that keeps shifting by the second.
Abel, however, races forward in a straight line, undaunted. Noemi lets him get a few steps ahead to lead. He can be trusted.
Flash—they’re ducking around a corsair ship, elaborate with its fins and chrome.
Flash—the Daedalus finally comes into sight, its mirrored surface brilliant scarlet. Instead of a teardrop it now looks like the first drip of blood from a wound.
Flash—a dark shape darts toward Abel.
“Look out!” Noemi cries. But Abel’s already whirling around, blocking his attacker in a collision she can only see as a tangle of limbs and a sudden drop.
Abel is the one left standing. Noemi catches up with him as he stares down at their attacker, a dazed man wearing a worker’s coverall. She’s never seen him before, and to judge by the way Abel squints at the guy, he hasn’t either.
Noemi asks, “Is he police?”
“You wish,” says a female voice behind them. Both she and Abel turn to see—
“Riko Watanabe.” Abel speaks as calmly and confidently as he did to the Queen and Charlie, even though Riko’s grip on her blaster seems much more ominous than the mechs’, for some reason. Riko’s short hair is disheveled, and her smile is terrifying. “Can I ask why you have chosen to assault us?”
“Because she thinks we’re here to stop her, or turn her in,” Noemi says. “Because we’re two of the only witnesses who saw her smuggling explosives down to Kismet. We know she’s with Remedy.”
Quietly Abel says, “It might have been wiser not to point that out.”
“She knows we know.” Noemi shrugs. “No point pretending otherwise.”
“You seem like nice kids. I wish you hadn’t recognized me.” Riko sounds so completely sincere that Noemi knows they’re about thirty seconds from getting murdered.
Once again Noemi thinks fast. “We’re not Vagabonds. I’m here from Genesis.”
The name of her planet makes Riko gasp—as does the man at their feet, and the other handful of people now approaching from the shadows. Noemi recognizes a couple of them as med techs or doctors from the Cobweb screening; they must’ve used the screening as cover to travel here for the festival. The red strobe lights make it so hard to focus, but Noemi knows she has to. Everything relies on what she says in the next few minutes.
“You know Earth’s been attacking my planet again, right?” Noemi isn’t sure whether Earth tells the truth about its plans, and Genesis hasn’t had a chance to present its side of the story in more than three decades. “What you guys put on those screens—they way you feel about Earth—we do, too, on Genesis. We understand. We’re fighting back, and it could make all the difference if we weren’t fighting alone.”
What Noemi can’t agree with is terrorism. Genesis has fought a savage war; she knows that millions of lives were lost on both her home world and on Earth. But her people fight fair. They meet their enemies in open combat. That has a nobility to it—unlike setting off an explosion in a stadium where people danced and sang to music, sending mechs to kill humans, or leaving bombs on the ground for families to drive over years later, while the children were still small.
“You can’t be from Genesis. It’s impossible. Nobody can get through the Gate.” Riko lifts her chin. “You shouldn’t tell such obvious lies.”
“We had the help of a special navigational device.” Abel leaves out the detail where he’s the navigational device in question.
Riko hasn’t lowered the blaster one millimeter. “Prove it, then. Prove you’re from Genesis.”
“How am I supposed to prove that?” Noemi protests. “We’re here on fake IDs.”
“Convenient,” mutters one of Riko’s compatriots. Noemi wants to scream with frustration—does this guy honestly think she’d be walking around this station with a sign reading Hey, I’m from Genesis?—but manages to hold on to her temper. Not even she’s hothead enough to mouth off to terrorists holding weapons.
Abel takes one step forward and slightly to the side. She realizes he’s again trying to stand between her body and the blaster. “If you had time, you could run a medical scan that would prove her to be from Genesis. But I suspect time is not a luxury either of us can indulge in at present.”
Riko hesitates. “What do you want?”
“For now, we just want to leave,” Noemi says. “Someday, though—if you can find a way to get through the Kismet Gate—Genesis could use allies.”
“We don’t have the strength for a war.” Riko shakes her head sadly. Noemi’s eyes have adjusted enough to the light for her to see the smudge on Riko’s cheek: grease, or maybe soot. Did Riko help detonate the bombs on Wayland Station herself? “Earth’s too powerful. All those mechs—all those people—we can’t compete on a battlefield. We have to strike out in other ways.”