I could have hugged her…and surprised myself when I actually did. I stood and threw my arms around her before realizing it. “Thank you,” I breathed into her shoulder.
She gave me a tearful smile, one that was also as sharp as a knife. I appreciated her edge like never before. We needed it.
We also needed Basra, I realized, as soon as he spoke up.
“I have something that might help, a way to hit the Dracortes where it will hurt them the most—their finances. I’ve actually been working on it for over a week in case things went sour here on Luvos,” he added, almost as an afterthought. “However, it necessitates my going back in. If I’d known things would fall out like this, I would have just stayed in the citadel. I’d tried and failed to comm Arjan, and went in to make sure he was all right. I was only able to get a few things in place while looking for him. A pity I got back to the ship before you could leave me, Telu.” He shrugged slightly curved shoulders, and for a moment he looked incredibly unthreatening. “So we’d better not count on it. We should still try to save Arjan as if it were entirely a suicide mission.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling too grim to be amazed that he could talk about giving his life for my brother so easily. His determination to get Arjan back was second only to mine, it seemed. But then wasn’t everyone else saying the same thing, in their own way? “Then we’ll come up with the suicidal part.”
Planning began in earnest then. Whether or not we were walking into a trap, returning to Dracorva was practically suicide. The discussion occupied most of my attention, but it didn’t escape my notice when Nev stepped off the bridge. I left Telu, already hammering at different infopads, and Eton and Basra, debating the merits of different aerial approaches to the city, to follow him.
Nev, as it turned out, was no longer on the ship. I tracked him into the hold and found the hatch open to the white expanse of a blizzard, his footprints curving off into the snow.
Something like pain—as if it were possible for me to feel any more—spiked through me at the thought of Nev abandoning us. Maybe he’d decided he’d rather not risk his life going back for Arjan after all. I pulled my fur jacket tighter around me as I stepped outside.
He stood near the hatch, his arms braced above his head against the hull, as if he were holding the ship up instead of leaning against it. Even if it was warmer than Alaxak, he had to be cold in his thin synthetic jacket and pants.
I almost didn’t want to disturb him. Maybe it was the look on his face, more somber than I’d ever seen it. I took a breath with relief that he was still here, and then immediately found myself angry; I hated him for bringing us here, I hated him for leaving Arjan, and I hated him for walking away and making me worry when we had more important things to be doing.
We didn’t have time for this. My brother didn’t have time.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my breath billowing and my boots crunching through the snow as I made my way over to him. “We still need you on the bridge. You’re the one who would know of any weaknesses in the structure where they’re holding Arjan. Stop wasting time.”
It came out harsher than I’d meant, but what could I do?
Nev didn’t respond immediately. He only stared out over the landscape, his usually bright eyes as clouded as the sky. When he finally spoke, he sounded far away. “I’m sorry. I know I should be helping. Somehow, I just…I feel as useless as those drones, right now. The purpose that I had, my values—it all came from my family. And now it’s gone. Worse, it was all an illusion to begin with.”
I stepped closer to view the scene from his angle. The Kaitan was nestled deep in an icy, mountain ravine, and massive shapes lurked around us behind a veil of snow—drones, several times the size of the ship. But they weren’t moving much, or paying us any attention. These were the drones the Dracortes had deactivated before the Great Collapse, back when they’d finished excavating mines like the ancient one that supposedly still riddled the slopes around the citadel. The Dracortes had been able to keep the drones from ruining their own planet, of course, just not most everyone else’s. And yet, here were the giant metal monsters hundreds of years later, lying in wait for an activation code that could make them tear through whatever stood in their way.
What would Nev do without his driving purpose?
As if we were both thinking the same thing, he murmured, “And even though I’m furious at the hypocrisy of my family, I just keep thinking of Marsius’s hugs. Even Solara’s indomitable will to get the latest and best gossip. Father, when he would give me an approving nod. Mother, always putting her hand on my shoulder whenever she came up behind me to let me know she was there.”
It hit me, what I was asking him to do. I was asking him to attack his family, turn on his home and country, and betray everything he had been born and raised to believe. In his position, I wasn’t sure how I would bear it. What if I had always just thought that my family was good, that my people and I, in spite of our struggles and setbacks, were doing our best to follow the path our ancestors laid out for us, and that it was the right path…when, in fact, none of that was true? Even in imagining it, a part of me wanted to scream out that it was wrong, that my people were good.
And maybe Nev had that part of himself too. Screaming inside at the lie he’d believed.
I reached out, but only grazed his shoulder with a finger before my hand dropped. It was all I could do, all I could allow myself. I couldn’t do more with Arjan missing. “I’m…I’m sorry, Nev.”
A laugh caught in his throat as if it had been strangled. “You shouldn’t be sorry.” He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against his raised arm, his breath fogging around him. “Only me. And I’m so very sorry, Qole.”
He also looked more tired than I’d ever seen him, as if he’d been carrying a burden as heavy as this ship for a long time. One his father had placed on his shoulders and wouldn’t let him set down. He looked miserable, in fact.
He should be sorry, but not miserable. It wasn’t entirely his fault. He was a Dracorte, but he was not his family. If he’d never found us, maybe we’d all be in a similar situation, no matter what, only with the Treznor-Nirmana family torturing Arjan instead of the Dracortes, and with me still teetering on the edge of madness. But if the Dracortes had never studied the Shadow affinity of people like us in the first place, then the Treznor-Nirmanas would never have known to cut us open to investigate it. And if the Dracortes hadn’t sought all the resources in the galaxy that had never belonged to them…
But how far back did I want to take it? How much could I put on Nev’s shoulders, when he was clearly trying to do things differently from the rest of his family?
Besides, if I’d never come with him, I would never have gained even the glimmer of hope—much fainter now, but still flickering—that someday Shadow wouldn’t have to drive me, my family, and others like us to insanity and death.