Page 50 of The Space Between Stars

“Why are you giving him that?” Dex asked, words slurring and eyes crossing, before he emptied the contents of his stomach in the sand.

Well. He was small, and the drinks had not been. But that left Niklaus with the problem of getting the boy to his tent.

He looked at the mute.

The mute’s eyes narrowed.

“It’s a long walk.”

The mute sighed, the sound as heavy as Niklaus felt, and pulled Dex over his shoulder as easily as lifting a sack of rice.

“I’m fine. Really, I am,” Dex muttered.

Niklaus cleared his throat. “Right this way.”

They wound through the tents and wagons in silence, but it was a different silence now. Not amicable, no—but without the knifing, screaming unease of before. They laid the Azadonian in his tent, pitched beside Niklaus’s in front of the mess supply wagon.

Niklaus hesitated before blurting out, “This worked out.”

The mute nodded.

Niklaus had bought enough moss to last him through to the end. Just enough. Things came at ten times the expense out here in the desert, after all. But what if it went missing, like before? Security funds would be helpful.

But the mute already had what he wanted. What else could Niklaus possibly offer?

“We should do this again,” he tested. “Next month?”

The mute lifted his chin.

Thank the Fates. “They issued you a tent, eah? Didn’t take you as a finicky type.”

The mute shifted like the soles of his feet were especially uncomfortable.

Back to pragmatics. “Yeah. But I can come and go as I please.”

The man’s stare was so cold that it burned.

TWELVE

FANKALO

Year: 748 Post Cataclysm: Present Day

Location: Rollard Isles

Fankalo stood between Mitek and Drogus, her first and second Hands, in the dim Dreiden warehouse. Dreiden’s consultant arithmetist, Cosaile, had taken nearly two weeks to arrive in response to her emergency summons. The broad-nosed man was as strongly built as he was gifted with numbers, but he shifted nervously in their presence. His brown eyes flicked between Drogus—even more imposing than he—and Mitek, who kept a line of daggers on his belt and had a penchant for looking at people like he might bite.

After the rolling tides and swaying palms outside, the sparsely lit interior of the warehouse was less than welcoming. The air was stale with the scent of their headquarters: metal and oil, freshly turned soil and sea. And, of course, the sulfur of Mount Vespeyan. There was just enough breeze to make the room feel like it wasn’t an elaborate tomb, though the walls of unadorned adobe and the floor of compressed earth might have argued otherwise. Fankalo appreciated that: a tomb was a reminder of what faced them, should their economics fail in the short months ahead.

But Cosaile did not hold that same appreciation. “Here?" he barked. "Surely there is a superior space for our discussion? I imagine it will take significant time to reassess, following this mishap.” That certainly was a cordial word for the utter fucking disaster of Calver’s demolition failure, yet it struck the one nerve she’d never been able to properly sheathe.

“Are you suggesting these accommodations do not suit you?” In the culture she had cobbled from dust into dynasty, conference rooms were an unnecessary flaunt.

Cosaile’s tanned face hardened as he thought a circle around a rebuke. “No… White Flower. I wish only to make suggestions related to the finances of your operation.”

Fankalo sighed. “Then let’s begin. Yes, here. What are we looking at for total loss?”

“Roughly five million silver notes.”