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  “Sax, let him go,” Plake says, but not before waiting a long second. “I don’t want him dead.”

  “Then he should pay you what he owes,” Sax says.

  Even though the Oratus hasn’t ever had to deal with currency - the Vincere’s limitless expenses have handled everything for Sax since he became a conscious being - Sax gets the idea of debt, of what’s owed and what’s not being paid.

  And the idea of getting something back, rather than nothing, even if that something is just the satisfaction of knowing your enemy suffered for their choice.

  “I don’t owe her anything!” Innes tries protesting and the voice is tighter than usual as the Flaum tries to keep his throat from catching on Sax’s claw. “It was a fair deal.”

  “I was desperate. You cut me out.” Plake shakes her head. “Let’s go, Sax. I thought once this Flaum had honor, but he’s like all the other skimmers out here. Burning anyone to make a profit.”

  Plake turns and heads back to the Mobius. Sax gets his face real close to Innes, opens his mouth a slight bit, then pulls the claw away and follows.

  Innes makes the smart call and says nothing to their backs.

  Sax doesn’t manage to get Plake alone - following her to the cockpit brings Agra-Red and the Whelk’s omnipresent miner into the picture. Sax, though, suppresses the itchy instincts that come with a weapon pointed at his back . There’s a conversation that needs having, answers that needs getting, and Sax isn’t going to take off with Plake again until he has them.

  “This wasn’t a random choice,” Sax says when Plake settles into the netting that supports her piloting. “You came to Rathfall and Astre’s Spire so we could meet Fraykt and Dol.”

  Plake doesn’t bother hiding it. “I could’ve chosen a few places. There’s a lot of people that don’t like the Amigga, Sax. That don’t have any love for the Vincere. Fraykt and Dol, though, don’t tend to trust newcomers. I figured they’d learn if you two were for real.”

  “After what we did on Scrapper Station? That didn’t convince you?”

  “You talk about being loyal to this commander,” Plake says. “What happens if she dies? Are you and Bas going to run back to the Vincere? We need your help, Sax. You and your pair. But we had to know you’d work with us, even if Evva’s not around.”

  “And the thinking was to separate us, capture me and throw me out?” Sax hisses. “That’s idiocy. Stupid.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  Sax pauses. Breathes. Thinks for a second how he would have handled it if, moments after landing on Rathfall, they’d been asked to take part in a revolution against the Amigga. Against their own species.

  “We would’ve joined anyway,” Sax says. “Where else are we going to go? The Vincere would kill us if we tried to return.”

  “Then we were wrong,” Plake shrugs it off, her feathers remaining unruffled. “We make mistakes, Sax. At least this wound up where we needed it to be.”

  “Not quite,” Sax shifts into a harder stance, makes sure his claws are visible. “We’re not going to Evva. We’re going after Bas.”

  For the first time, Plake actually looks surprised. “That’s not what Fraykt said.”

  “He changed his mind after I crushed him with a table.”

  Plake’s confusion gives Sax the excuse he needs to relay the rest of the meeting, and its results, in a steady drip of slow menace that, by the end, has Plake shaking her head and giving in to what Sax wants.

  “Oratus are so much trouble,” Plake mutters at the end of it. “Don’t know why the Amigga ever created you.”

  “Because we’re effective. How soon can we launch? I don’t want Bas to get there long before we do.”

  The Mobius gets ready fast when Plake wants it to. Silver and Black report back not long after the call to depart goes out, returning flush with the profits of Sax’s broken nest of pollen-chasers. Engee and Nobaa are already on, tweaking gadgets in the crannies of the ship. The last one back, oddly, is Coorvin, who takes up a spot beside Sax in the cargo hold as the Mobius warms up its jets.

  “Is this what you expected when you left Cobalt?” Coorvin, his fur looking a much healthier white than the patchy gray it’d been under the Amigga’s control. “Joining a fight against your own makers?”

  “I stopped expecting anything a long time ago,” Sax replies. “The Vincere sent us often enough into places where we had no idea how many we’d have to carve up, or how far the Sevora infection had spread. You learn to rely on instinct, and on those few you can really trust.”

  “Like Bas?”

  “Only Bas.”

  Coorvin nods. Stays silent as the Mobius rumbles and rises. The quiet churn takes Sax’s own loneliness at being apart from his pair and has him looking at the Flaum. Coorvin had survived on Cobalt for who knows how long, virtually alone and in thrall to a domineering creature that never cared one bit for the Flaum’s own survival.

  “You’re alone.” Sax says the words without a question.

  “I have been for a very long time.” Coorvin glances up towards the ceiling, where the cargo netting - useful here to keep them stable during the leap in a mostly-empty bay - hangs.

  “The Oratus that lose their pairs?” Sax says. “Most die soon after. They throw themselves into impossible fights. Accept suicidal missions.”

  “Like Evva?”

  “Could you call going against the Chorus anything else?”

  “Meaning,” Coorvin says. “That’s the hardest part, Sax. With Dalachite, on Cobalt, I had constant goals. A drive to keep it alive, to help its experiments succeed. Without Dalachite, I have nothing.”

  “And now you have this?”

  “Yes. Now I have this,” Coorvin says. “If you lose Bas, or she loses you, this cause might help you as it’s helped me.”

  Sax, though, doesn’t find the idea comforting. Anyway, he’s not going to lose Bas. Not now. Not ever.

  13 Cave Running

  Vee stares at the torch in his hand like Diego stares at him - an alien thing that’s changing his worldview by its very presence.

  “You use fire for light?” Vee hisses. “I have never seen this before.”

  “Now I know he’s an alien,” I say, watching the Oratus with a slight smile.

  We’d had our nutrient goop breakfast - supplemented by a bit of cave mushroom soup for a side of ‘real’ food, and now Diego has us gearing up to go. The other members of Diego’s watchband stand somewhere between at-the-ready and drowsy, their hands near their pistols and their eyes half-closed.

  I feel the early hour even though it’s impossible to tell in the cave’s separate reality. Diego rustled us up before dawn, declared that we ought to get started because the further we get before the creatures start to roam, the better.

  When I ask Diego what creatures he means, the Lunare just laughs. Says if I find out, it’ll probably be too late.

  “He’s exaggerating,” Viera brushes him off.

  The night sleeping on the rocks seems to have helped her most of all. Viera springs up, helps me pack, and even manages some of the cooking, which I’ve never seen her do before. Her lips curl up often and laughs came easier for her down here.

  The mark of home, I think, and I hope the jungle would bring about the same for me. If I ever see it again.

  “Kaishi,” T’Oli says, slurping its way over to me. “May I travel next to you?”

  “Sure,” I reply. “Why?”

  “Because I want to be able to protect you,” T’Oli replies, and while it’s sometimes hard to distinguish tone in the slapping voice of the Ooblot, I get that it’s being sincere.

  “Protect me?” I don’t mean to question T’Oli, but I kind of do. What’s the slime species going to do if an attack comes?

  In answer, T’Oli surges over my feet, up my legs and across my body until its eye stalks are level with my head. T’Oli’s heavier than I would’ve thought, like wearing bulky ceremonial robes, if they were cool and wet. Then the Ooblot ha
rdens and I’m suddenly wearing armor.

  “I get it,” I say. T’Oli stops its reach just beneath my neck. “Thanks.”

  It’s a little disconcerting to have a large pair of eyes blink at me directly in front of my own, but T’Oli liquidates and drops away quick.

  “You’ve seen masks?” T’Oli says as Diego calls for us to get moving.

  “I’ve worn them.”

  “Sapphrite told me the Amigga developed them from Ooblots,” T’Oli replies. “They never could perfect the hardening, though.”

  “Do they steal from every species?”

  “They steal from everything.”

  What I don’t ask, what I don’t need to ask, is what they do with the things they steal. I know, because I’m increasingly certain that’s what I am.

  I’m in the middle of the pack, with Vee picking up the rear and Diego and Viera leading. From the very first step, I can hear Viera start to pick at our guide’s thoughts.

  “So why’re you trusting us?” Viera says as we get going. “Just you, with a group of strangers, at least two of which are very dangerous.”

  “Two dangerous ones?” Diego’s gruff growl carries back through the rocks. “I get the creature with all the claws. Who’s the second?”

  “You’re looking at her.”

  Diego starts to laugh as his boots crunch along the rock, when Viera flashes a shard of stone I’d not seen her pick up. It’s small, and it gleams in the torchlight, pressed up against Diego’s throat.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Viera says.

  “Same to you,” Diego rubs his throat after Viera pulls the stone away. “What do you think happens, you show up at a Lunare waystation without me? They’ll shoot you. And that’s assuming you even find your way through this maze.”

  “We’d figure it out,” I say up to them.

  “Or, you could be thankful I’m taking my damn time to guide you, and be nice about it.” Diego actually sounds miffed.

  “If you get us to the rest of your people safely, I will be,” I say.

  Once we leave the outpost, the cave narrows until we’re going single-file, black and beige rock pressing in around us. Unlike smoother caverns that I’d found by following streams as a child, these are rougher, with jagged edges and sharp turns avoiding large stones. Man-made.

  Periodically, our torchlight is joined by fungal growths adding hazy colors to the scene; blues and pinks, mostly, in bulbous splotches spreading like diseases along the walls. The mood brightens every time we come across these markers of biological progress, a neon countdown to our goal.

  “A week,” Diego says when I ask how long this is going to take. “And that’s just to the nearest village, the outer arm of Lunare territory.”

  “You carved a tunnel this far for nothing?”

  “Not for nothing,” Diego replies. “Plenty of mines and other things between here and there, and Lunare like to explore. We’re not content to sit in the shade and watch the seasons pass us by.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Diego,” Viera interrupts. “Answer her questions without the comebacks.”

  “Are humans always like this?” Vee asks T’Oli, behind me.

  “Haven’t been around them long, but they do seem prone to arguments,” T’Oli replies. “I think they can be violent when the situation calls for it, and sometimes when it doesn’t.”

  “We’re not perfect,” I say to them, almost laughing when I see how much Vee needs to scrunch himself together to fit in the tight quarters. “But we’re not evil.”

  “Evil,” Vee hisses his way around the word. “I would never use that to describe a species as a whole.”

  “Not even the Sevora?”

  “The Sevora are prey, Kaishi. Prey that fulfill their imperative. As I exist to destroy them, so the Sevora exist to take control of others.” Vee’s rasping out a deeper argument, but it’s hard to take him seriously when his claws are all tight together, his shoulders are hunched, and his legs and half-tail are scraping against the ground.

  “You don’t think taking control of others is inherently evil?”

  “I don’t think they have a choice, so if it is their only possible course of action, then I cannot consider that an evil act.”

  We have to catch up to Diego and Viera, whose fires are flickering further, so I turn away from Vee, but don’t stop thinking about what the Oratus is saying. I had a Sevora in my mind once. It had lived there, spoke with me and read my thoughts, and never took control. Ignos, the Sevora, claimed it had no choice. That it couldn’t direct me as it could, say, a Flaum.

  Which means Vee is wrong, which means the Sevora very much could live without controlling others.

  Which, to me, makes them plenty evil.

  As we walk, I notice occasional spikes driven into the rock ceiling. They’re cylindrical, with a mesh lining of tight-woven metal. Even when I raise the torch to one, I can’t make out what’s sitting inside.

  “What’re these?” I ask Diego when we’ve gone past a third one.

  “Being underground doesn’t mean we don’t have problems,” Diego replies. “You ever see one of those glowing red, you go the other way. Means there’s dangerous gas, and the plant inside it can’t keep up.”

  “Keep up?”

  “No different than your jungles, Empress,” Diego spits the title. “Everything either eats or gets eaten down here, even the air.”

  It’s difficult to tell how much time passes before Diego calls us to a halt for the day. Without a sky, without even the changing temperature of the air, and only the smell of wet rock, I can’t gauge where I am, when I am.

  But my muscles let me know they’re tired. My ankles are sore from having to keep their footing on smooth and rough stones all day. My arms ache from holding the torch, and my back’s letting me know that it’s not thrilled at having to carry the pack for so long. So I’m not upset when Diego slings his own pack off and sets it on the ground.

  The chamber’s about as large as the shuttle’s living space. Enough for us all to have our own bedrolls, but not much more. There’s a patch of pink-glowing fungus in the center ceiling that provides enough light for us to douse our torches. The glow also illuminates several exits.

  Diego points to one, “That’s the latrine. Like the other ones, you go back there if you need to take care of yourself. There’s a hole, use it.” Then he angles towards the middle one. “There’s a spring back there, ought to be warm. Good for baths. The last one’s where we’re going tomorrow.”

  “You managed to make these every day’s length away?” T’Oli asks. “That’s remarkable.”

  “It’s not precise,” Diego huffs. “We use what nature gives us.”

  Not long after, feeling the dirt sticking to me with my sweat and more, I decide to take up the offer of the spring. Head that way with a torch and T’Oli for company. Make it about five steps into the spring’s cave, before both the Ooblot and I notice something different.

  This tunnel’s not hard-edged like the others. The rocks are broken, yes, but these stones look like they’ve been whittled away, as if something’s gnawed at them as opposed to using the picks and drills Diego says are the core of the Lunare digging operations.

  “What do you think made this?” I ask the Ooblot.

  “I can think of many things,” T’Oli replies. “The most likely, though, is some sort of creature. Which, given my current assessment of human capabilities, would provide a better reason for this tunnel to be here.”

  “What do you mean, capabilities?” The way T’Oli said that has me raising an eyebrow.

  “Compared to other species, like Vee and the Oratus, your senses seem average, at best,” T’Oli doesn’t put any judgment in the tone, only simple fact. “That one of your kind could smell and taste spring water through the rock from any distance away seems unlikely. Rather, my guess is that this tunnel already existed.”

  “Yeah, well, at least we’re smart enough to use it.” I c
ounter, and keep walking towards the spring.

  “That’s only smart if the creature that made it is no longer here.”

  “I’m sure Diego would warn us otherwise.”

  “Yes, because, as we’ve discussed, humans are excellent judges of their environments.”

  Now I stop, glare down at T’Oli. “You don’t have to keep insulting us.”

  “Kaishi, Ooblots are literally puddles of amorphous genetic material. Before you would feel attacked by a word of mine, consider the source.” T’Oli waves its twin eye stalks back and forth and, I have to agree, the Ooblot does look pretty pathetic there on the ground.

  The pool is lit in mirrored green, the plants hiding beneath the surface and shimmering their light up through the bubbling water. Steam rises from the surface, coasting towards invisible escape in the ceiling. I can feel the heat from the edge, and I jam my torch between a few rocks, slip off the dirty clothes, and dip a toe in.

  T’Oli, though, races by me, slurping into the spring, where its body expands and ripples until the Ooblot looks like a lily pad.

  “You like this?” I ask T’Oli, giving my feet time to acclimate to the heat.

  “What, you don’t think Ooblots need to clean ourselves the same as you?”

  Guess I didn’t. I shake my head, then lower myself the rest of the way inside the pool. After the lip, it drops off fast and I have to tread water, at least until I find the right spot where I can rest my shoulder on a stone lip.

  To say that the pool’s relaxing would be to rob it of its due; I simply haven’t felt anything this good since Damantum’s own bath houses. My soreness vanishes, I breathe the moisture into my lungs and feel the warmth excise the day’s dust. Whatever dirt I have sloughs off and disappears into the depths.

  T’Oli floats further, eventually disappearing towards the far end of the pool, beyond the edge of the fungus light. There’s no sound save the bubbling, nothing to see except the mist and the soft green.

  “You never seemed this happy in Damantum,” Malo says, and I see him standing there, on the edge of the pool. Through the mist, he’s indistinct, but I think he’s smiling.