“Last chance,” she said.
“I have the wet drive,” I told her. “It’s all I have. I’ll give it to you.”
“Not good enough.”
Vamp looked over at me from the corner of his eye, his breath coming fast as the needles moved closer.
“Run, Sam,” he managed. “Don’t watch this, just—”
Out of nowhere, Nix flew across the room and planted one heel in the middle of Sillith’s chest. The force threw her into the wall, and caused her to let go of Vamp, who pitched down onto the floor. The wand spun in the air and then clattered down next to him as Nix leapt between the two. Sillith sprang back to her feet, every inch of her bristling as she glared back at him.
Nix closed the distance between them and I heard a chirp as he punched through the spot underneath her chest plate.
His fist went straight through, and splintered the latticework bones underneath. I expected to feel agony from her, but it didn’t come. Even when he wrenched his fist free and I saw he had dragged something out with it, I sensed no pain. Instead, she looked down at the wormy mass that pulsed between his fingers and I felt fury from her, and something else… betrayal maybe.
“You—” she started, when all at once the air around her warped and shimmered like water. The ripples grew, and then she vanished.
I jumped as air rushed into the vacuum left behind with a loud bang, and then everything was quiet. Nix turned from the empty space where Sillith had been, his eyes leaving pink trails in the air as he looked down at me.
“Are you okay?” he asked. I nodded, staring at the thing in his hand. The air around it had already begun to ripple when he tossed it away. Before it could hit the floor, it popped out of existence.
“Where did she go?”
“When a haan dies, the body and anything else caught in the warp bubble is gated back to the ship for processing. I tricked the mechanism into believing she was dead.”
“So… she’s not?”
“No.”
I looked at the hand he’d punched her with. It was clean, and dry, with no evidence of what he’d done. I could almost have imagined it.
“What did you do to her?” I asked him.
“We need to leave,” he said.
“No, answer me.”
She’d hit him hard—hard enough to kill him, easy. Some stupid street dreg broke his arm in two without even trying, but even though he’d hit the wall hard enough to break through, there he stood like it never happened.
Vamp backed away from the wet clothing and wiped his face, flicking the salty water away.
“What the hell was that?” he asked. “What did she do to him?”
“Organic nutrient condensation,” Nix said. “It’s food processing technology. Part of the Phase Seven package, though it isn’t meant to be used on living creatures.”
“You okay?” Vamp asked. He put his hands on my shoulders, but I was still staring at Nix. “Sam, what’s up?”
“I know what I saw,” I told Nix.
“The inertial dampener was able to—”
“That wasn’t the dampener—”
My voice faded as he approached me on a wave of signal that drilled straight into my brain. I felt the confusion and the fear drift away.
“It was the inertial dampener,” he said again. “We have to go.”
“So she’s on the ship?” Vamp asked.
“Not for long,” Nix said. “She’s already on her way back, I guarantee. The trick won’t work a second time.”
I looked at the crack in the wall where Nix had struck it, still unsure.
“What is it?” Vamp asked.
I looked from the splintered wood back to Nix. He’s lying. Again, he’s lying.
“Nothing,” I said. “He’s right. We have to get to Render’s Strip. If Dragan did cash in his ration sheet there, Fang might know something.”
I picked the pistol up off the floor and stuck it in my pocket, then gave Vamp a hug. We were both still wet.
“Thanks for trying to cover for me,” I told him, “but she’s dangerous, Vamp. Don’t mess with her, okay?”
“Where did you go?” he asked.
“I had to check something out. I didn’t want to get you guys involved.”
“I woke up and you were gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
I looked back down at Wei’s wet clothes and saw the needles lying on the floor next to them. When I reached down to pick them up, though, Nix intercepted and snatched it away.
“Vamp, wait for me outside,” I said.
He looked from me to Nix, wary, but he did as I asked. When I heard him moving down the hall, I moved closer to Nix and lowered my voice.
“I want to know what’s going on,” I said.
“I’ve told you everything I can.”
I sighed, and I think he knew what was coming next. I could sense his unspoken protest, his dismay, in a way that reminded me unpleasantly of Tānchi.
“Nix, thanks for all your help, but I think I’ll take it from here.”
“You are sending me away.” Again, the thought of Tānchi jabbed at me, that look he gave me as he looked back from the hopper.
“Yeah. I guess I am. No offense, Nix, but I’ve got enough going on right now without having to watch my back.”
“But I—”
“Tell me,” I snapped. “Give me a straight answer. If you can’t give me one straight answer, then leave. I mean it.”
He was quiet for a minute, and I sensed him as he struggled with something. Then he raised his arm, the injured one, and ran his finger along the seam of his sleeve. When it peeled apart, I could see his arm was fine. No break. It was as if it never even happened.
“I wasn’t sent to help you,” he said. “I was sent to kill you.”
It was the truth. I could tell. This time, it was the truth.
“Why?” I asked.
“You knew a haan had murdered, or attempted to murder, several humans. Our leaders were afraid of retaliation by your government. The ones who sent me reasoned that you were thought to be dead already, and loss of one life would be better than the loss of many.”
“So why didn’t you do it?”
“Because I couldn’t.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He took my wrist, his long fingers closing around it with a firm but gentle pressure. I had opened my mouth to say something when he reached out through the surrogate bond and I froze.
His presence surged through like an icicle pushing into my forehead. It was more intense than anything I’d ever felt before. Even the dream images that had bled over from Sillith were nothing compared to the way he poured into my mind and filled it.
The hotel room disappeared, and I was somewhere else as suddenly as if I’d been gated there. I knew at once that I wasn’t seeing through my own eyes, that this was something Nix was showing me, a memory he had plugged directly into my consciousness somehow. Ghost images flashed throughout the room, towering bars, and a large figure that loomed next to me. It was a giant human skeleton, the gray bones surrounded by the cottony blur of transparent soft tissue. Large, translucent orbs rolled in the empty, saucer sockets of the skull face as it looked down at me. Tiny points of light, electrical impulses, flashed through the wrinkles of the giant’s brain, flowing up and down the spinal column and coursing along the vast network of nerves that branched from it.
It’s not a giant, I realized. It’s not big. Nix is small. This is an old memory.
Pulses of light flashed through household wires, inside appliances, and even through the air where drifting particles carried scents and pheromones. The amount of information pouring in was overwhelming, like a flood that threatened to carry me away.
This is how he sees the world, I thought. How the haan see our world.