Page 14 of The Space Between Stars

The desert was at its most beautiful in the early hours. Stars still burned overhead, but a bloody hue pierced the line where the land met the sky. Calver paused his exercise to watch. For the few precious minutes the sun lingered on the horizon, his perception distorted so that the sand looked like it could be the sea.

He pretended he was still with Fankalo. That he hadn’t messed up so badly as to become a liability to his only kin. The ocean hadn’t done for him what it had for her; it hadn’t freed him. But it had put him beside her, which, in hindsight, had given him temporary peace.

The illusion faded as the sun passed the threshold of the dunes. The time for peace was over.

Calver turned to return to the encampment. It was hard to say what made him pause to listen, but listen he did. An off-beat slipping of sand. A padding of near-silent feet.

If it was Raimee again he would… He thought about things he hadn’t before. Things like the angles of collarbones and the texture of hair and—

This was escalating. He had no idea what he would do. He—

He would ignore her. Easy.

As if that’s ever worked.

From the shadows of the dunes, a silhouette encroached. Not Raimee. A young man, awkwardly pubescent in a too-large Red Wing uniform. He had a hawkish nose and sprouted shoulder-length ebony hair, stiff and slick like a horse’s mane. He crept down from the dunes with an exchange of the world’s most gut-scrambling currency: eye contact. Those black eyes seemed entirely too dilated. An Azadonian.

What was he doing here?

He was young enough to have been born after the Azadonian quarantine; the Red Wing only began recruiting men at age seventeen. Panic, sharp and cold, sliced Calver right through. This was the shadow he’d seen in the mess storage wagon.

When the young man was within striking distance, he spoke, somewhere between a question and a demand. “What are you doing out here?”

What was he doing? He had been trying to not kill the witness, and the witness in question was presently Chaos-bent on thwarting that plan.

The boy leaned sideways, waiting for a response.

It would be safer for Calver to kill him out here in the desert—where a mile of dunes and crags and caverns stood between them and the encampment—than it had been in the wagon. How long would it take for anyone to come looking for the body? How easily would this death be traced back to Calver? Calver’s stomach churned. Without the Survivor, he was not prepared to strangle this boy.

Perhaps he wouldn’t have to. He’d caught this boy doing something he shouldn’t have. The boy had come to him—to parlay. He was going to be sorely disappointed. Calver put a hand to his mouth, pulling it away before slicing sideways. It was usually the most effective way to get the message across.

“You don’t speak?”

Calver nodded. Usually people left him alone after that.

Usually.

“And you’re training outside of sanctioned hours. You’re revoked?”

What kind of person kept asking a mute man questions?

“Right,” the boy said to Calver’s lack of response. His eyes darted back and forth. “I won’t tell anyone about the revoked man trying to break into the mess wagon, if you train me in what I just watched you practice.”

Calver’s brows nearly dented his nose. He wouldn’t tell anyone? The question remained what the boy was doing in that wagon during the deepest dark of the night.

The boy stared at Calver as though waiting for him to grin and give a thumbs up. As if Calver couldn’t snap the fragile strand of sinew and bones that he was in two. As if the boy could run twenty steps without wheezing. Preservation, something about him was so much like Raimee, and—

Chaos, with all this moral warfare, perhaps he had been better off with the mind djinn.

Something rippled beyond the void. Calver tried to force his thoughts in any other direction. Short of seizing up and permitting the Survivor back into his headspace, he acted on instinct. He ran—sprinted, really—into the desert. He focused on his surging breaths. The sound of footfalls on sand.

It was only after he realized the boy was running after him that he considered the insanity of his actions. He stopped. The boy caught up and stopped as well, hands on his knees.

“No one—has—to know,” he gasped.

So, he did wheeze after all.

Calver would have thought running away to be an effective social cue to make a person scram. People who weren’t Raimee usually steered clear of him. He shouldn’t have to shake this boy off as if he clung to his sirwal. Besides, he had nothing on Calver. The threat was a flex. He’d come out here to bargain—to make sure Calver wouldn’t be the one talking. Calver couldn’t care less what the boy had been doing, regardless, but now the boy had his side of the deal.