Do something, said a voice in my head that didn’t sound like my own. Do something, do something, do something—
Do what, though?
After what seemed like a half an, I realized who I was pleading with, and what I had been waiting for. And that Singer wasn’t coming to rescue me this time, or to tweak my brain just enough to make me functional again.
I was in the stage of panic where it’s hard to do anything. Hard to make decisions, because they all seem like they will end in catastrophe. What if I tuned wrong? What if I made myself too calm, and I didn’t react appropriately to the threat? My attitude jets were misaligned, and all I was succeeding in doing was burning fuel and just spinning myself in circles.
So that was the first thing to fix, if I wanted to live. Calm the hell down, Dz. Thinking the command to myself alone was enough to release me from the paralysis, and I managed to tune myself to something more like a functional state of hyperarousal and settle in. Tuning myself always made me nervous—too easy to check right out of reality, if you got too reliant on it, and never worry about whether your decisions were smart or ambitious, when you could just turn off feeling weird about them later.
That was how I justified letting—making—Singer do most of the work, and why I always made sure there were strict time limits on his interventions. But I didn’t have Singer now, and panic paralysis over that fact wasn’t helping me.
I turned down my grief, too. There would be time for it later, and I knew I would have to experience it, because even with rightminding, experiences repressed and unexperienced lead to a series of sophipathologies. Anxiety being one of them.
The last thing I really needed was more anxiety.
I reached back into my fox for the precise memories of what it had felt like when Farweather struck the hull. Could I use the sense of impact, possibly combined with that weird proprioception, to determine where she was? Where she might be gaining entry to the ship? Where she was now, in relation to me?
Could I hide, or fight, or set up an ambush?
Probably, I thought. Yes, probably. I didn’t touch her awareness again, but I reached out gently, trying to sense her weight in space without actually making contact with her. I was pretty sure that if she had a sense of my whereabouts, she would be heading for me. Was she able to feel me taking up space in the universe, the same way I could sometimes feel her? Could I hide myself somehow? It was a big, labyrinthine ship. If I could make it so that she couldn’t feel me, did she stand much of a chance of fighting me?
Well, who knew what technology the Freeporters had, or had stolen. She might have a really good infrared imager, for all I knew. I thought about the chances for an ambush. I didn’t know the ship well—at all, really—which was a major drawback. Also the fact that Farweather and I shared a weird alien kind of senso did seem to make it unlikely that I could hide myself from her with any accuracy. Although, honestly, it was hard to guess what she could or couldn’t do. If it was possible to hide ourselves from each other very well—
Well, wouldn’t she be doing it?
Maybe. Or she might be trying to stampede me. It was impossible to know.
Right. So I needed to be on the move, and I needed to be on the move in whatever direction she was neither coming from, nor heading. And I needed to conceal myself from her, if that was possible, or alternately I needed to make it too risky or dangerous for her to come after me.
I was, I realized, afraid of her. Not just in the adversary sense. Not just in the sense that here was a person who was stalking me. No, I was afraid of Zanya Farweather, pirate, in and of her own self.
Why?
Well, she was kind of a badass, for one thing.
And then, she reminded me of my ex.
Not physically. But in a sense of presence, and something—a rogue something, an edgy something that might be just a disdain for social norms—that my unrightminded self found ineluctably compelling.
She was trouble. And I liked trouble.
That’s my problem. I always have.
I imagined Singer saying Your bad girl problem is a problem, girl. It broke my heart a little, but this time thinking about Singer got me moving. Paying attention a little more. Going forward.
I was walking, and I was headed for the door. Companionway. Whatever.
When I realized that I’d actually managed to start moving, I kicked up my adrenaline a notch and gave myself a fuel boost and began to run. It hurt my afthands (sooo not designed for this), but I shut the pain off as an inconvenience. Either I’d survive this, in which case I could look into fixing anything I’d busted, or they’d wind up infected inside my suit and I’d probably die of gas gangrene.
Hey, I’d found an option that was even less appealing than starving to death! Let’s hear it for human ingenuity!
I didn’t have a plan. I followed my instincts, mouselike, into the tunnels of the Koregoi ship—or, as I was starting to think of it, the Prize. I tried not to think about it too much, remembering that my link to the ship had seemed to work better when I wasn’t trying to guide things consciously. That, in fact, the less I tried to control and second-guess my connection with the Koregoi senso, the better it had seemed to work.
So I just ran, and followed my instincts. And tried not to choke.
The Prize was gigantic. It seemed to have endless miles of corridors, all twisty and disorienting. I hit on a trick that helped with the vertigo, at least: fixing my gaze on a spot as far ahead as I could make out, and not letting it waver from that spot until I had to switch it—snap—to a new spot. Drishti, yogis called the tactic. Spotting, if you were a dancer.
I visualized myself small as I ran. I didn’t know if it would help, but I was pretty confident that Farweather had noticed her sensorium contacting mine, and I was additionally pretty sure that reaching out to check her location was as likely to give her new information on me as it was to reassure me about her whereabouts. If I could see her, she could probably see me. If she was looking, and maybe even if she wasn’t. And I expected her to be looking.
Still, not peeking was hard—one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
I had no real plan except hide, go to ground, bide my time. I wondered if Farweather had come alone. If she’d expected the Prize to be empty.
If she’d brought supplies.
If I could steal those supplies.
My flight led me through twisting companionways and chambers vast and tiny and in between, whose purposes were indeterminate because I did not stop to investigate. Many of them were full of stuff, and the purposes of that stuff were also indeterminate, because of all those same reasons.
I dialed up my endorphins, and still my afthands were killing me.
I didn’t think too hard about anything, which, being me, was one of the most unnatural things I have ever done.
I ran.
I went to ground, finally, in a storage locker. It seemed as good a place as any to hole up. Being at the conjunction of three different corridors, it offered a number of escape routes, and whatever the purpose of the material in it was, the stuff was soft and made decent padding. I propped the cover open and built myself a crude little nest by pulling the clothlike substance into a pile.
Having found a place to stretch out, I made the next—and potentially stupid—executive decision. My boots had to come off. I needed to see if the moisture pooling against my skin was sweat, or if it was lymph and blood.
And if the boots came off, the whole suit might as well come off. There was no integrity to the seal after that.