Better look out for herself, then. She wasn’t sure how much longer this crew was going to hold together.
She made her way down the steps to the floor of the hold. Bess spotted her and came thundering over with such speed that Ashua almost had to jump out of the way. The golem only just stopped in time. She stood there, looming over Ashua, regarding her with those sharp glimmers of light from behind her face-grille. Then she thrust out a hand.
The armoured glove was holding something. A large red leather book, slightly battered by her grip. Ashua just looked at it. Bess proffered it again, cooing impatiently. Ashua got the hint that time, and took it.
Stories for Little Girls.
Ashua didn’t quite know what to think. She raised an uncertain eyebrow at the golem. ‘You want me to have this?’
Bess poked the book with a heavy, urging finger. Then Ashua remembered hearing the faint murmur of Crake’s voice from behind the tarp curtain at the back of the hold, and she figured it out. ‘You want me to read this to you?’
Bess cooed eagerly. Ashua made a face. ‘Oh, Bess, you’ve got me all wrong. I’m not the mothering type. Sorry.’
She handed the book back to Bess. Bess took it and clutched it to her chest. Despite having no features, she somehow managed to look hurt. She sloped away, moaning disconsolately.
Ashua felt a pang of guilt. Crake had always been evasive about the exact nature of his guardian, but sometimes it seemed almost alive. A passing anger took her, that Crake would abandon his golem this way. She reminded herself that it wasn’t her problem.
She made her way to the nook between the pipes where she slept. She’d fashioned herself a cosy little spot there, lined with tarp and blankets, scattered with what meagre possessions she had. There was a fabric curtain for privacy. She liked her little den; in fact, she’d turned down the chance of a bunk for it. Having grown up sleeping on floors and in corners, she didn’t get on with beds. She enjoyed having the whole cargo hold as her domain instead of the cramped quarters upstairs. The pipes kept her warm at night, and soothed her with their creaking and tapping.
She rummaged through her bedding until she found what she was looking for. She’d hidden it away well between the pipes. She didn’t want anyone asking any questions. They wouldn’t understand.
She brought out the object that Bargo Ocken had given her back in Timberjack Falls, and studied it. It was a brass cube, small enough to sit in her hand. On the upper face was a button. On one of the adjacent faces was a small circular opening, covered with glass. That was all. An innocuous-looking thing, but an important one. With this, she could work her way to a small fortune.
She saw Bargo Ocken’s face as he sat across the table from her in a smoky bar. She heard his slow, measured voice. Look on us as, well, something on the side. Insurance. In case it all goes wrong somewhere down the line.
She began tapping the button on top of the cube. A code, a language she’d memorised long ago, created for just this purpose. With each touch, a light came on behind the glass circle on the side of the cube.
When she was finished, she waited. After a short while, it started blinking back at her.
Slag, the Ketty Jay’s moderately psychopathic cat, clambered out of the ventilation ducts and into the engine room. He was battered, scratched and bloodied, but he was triumphant. Another battle had been won deep in the guts of the aircraft, another blow struck in his lifelong war against the rats. It was all he’d ever known, this conflict. He was a warrior to the core.
The engine room was a noisy, rattling place full of machine smells. Neither the noise nor the stink bothered him: he was more at home here than he ever would be in a field or garden. The pipes and walkways that surrounded the huge engine assembly were Slag’s jungle. Right now he wanted somewhere to rest, somewhere that would put some heat into his ancient bones and tired muscles. He picked his way to his favourite spot atop a water pipe, tested the temperature and found it just right. There he settled to lick his wounds.
In days gone by the breeders in the depths had turned out monsters, huge rats to test his mettle. These were the challengers to his supremacy. The fights were vicious and terrible, but always he put them down. His many years of experience, his strength and speed told out in the end. He reddened his claws on the best of them.
This rat had not been the best of them. Big, yes, but nothing like the legendary enemies he’d defeated in his prime. And yet he’d struggled. He’d killed it, but he’d struggled.
Slag was an old cat. Tough as a chewed boot, but old. And of late he wasn’t as strong as he had been, nor as quick. He lived in a world of instinct and not reason, but even so, on some level he was dimly aware that his body was failing him.
The knowledge meant nothing. He could conceive of no other life but this one. His world was the Ketty Jay, its ducts and crawlspaces and pipes, and there he was a tyrant. He’d been beaten only once, by one of the huge two-legged entities that wandered around in the open spaces. The vile scrawny one had lured him away from his territory once, and defeated him there. But never on his own turf. Here, he was still supreme.
He lifted his head. A strange smell came to his nostrils, the merest whiff in amongst the acrid stench of aerium and prothane and oil. It was gone in a moment, but it was enough to put a suspicion in him. Ignoring the pain of his wounds and the aches in his joints, he dropped down from his perch and went prowling.
There it was again. He followed his nose, padding along metal walkways, up and down steps. It was no human smell that he knew, nor a smell of machines or rats. Soon he found a spot where it was strong, a particular corner he liked to spray on to mark his territory.
But there was a new scent there now, over the old. He sniffed. Something about it stirred a sense-memory from a time before the Ketty Jay, when he was only a squirming kitten in a litter. It took a few moments for everything to fall into place.
A cat. He was smelling another cat.
And it was on board the Ketty Jay.
Jez’s eyes opened. A crushing sense of loss settled on her. She was back on her bunk on the Ketty Jay.
How she dearly wanted that unconsciousness back. For that precious time, she’d been formless, drifting, and all around her had been music. The voices of her kin calling, their thoughts flashing everywhere, the great communication of the Manes. And in the darkness of non-thought she’d been with them, connected, and they’d welcomed her and begged their reluctant sibling to stay, stay, come and join them and be one of them for ever. She’d felt the enormity of belonging, and it was like a glowing coal in her heart.
But the memory was fading faster than a dream. She was back in the world, back in that place of limited senses and limited desires. Back to the drab, cold torpor of isolation.
‘You hear them, don’t you?’
Pelaru’s voice made her turn her head sharply. He was sitting in the dark by her bunk. She felt a flood of nervous joy at seeing him there, washing away the sadness.
‘Yes,’ she said. Her tongue felt unfamiliar. She had trouble shaping the word. It was sometimes like this, when she returned. It got harder and harder to remember how to be human.
Pelaru shifted himself. He seemed discomfited. ‘Osger heard them. All the time, he said. Tempting him. Drawing him away from me. Sometimes he. .’ The Thacian’s voice drifted off. ‘What is it like, to be so close to them?’
‘It’s. . wonderful,’ she said. His expression tightened, and she knew she’d said the wrong thing. But she couldn’t lie.
‘Do you think he’s with them now?’
‘I don’t know.’
Her eyes roamed over his face in the dark. His grief suited him, made him seem nobler; but she longed to see him smile.