the smart play would just be to sell her to the GIA and pray our court-martials don’t end us in prison. But my whole life, I’ve been on the outside looking in. A problem. A burden. An aberration. Just like her. And it’s taught me to be sure of one thing.
Us outsiders gotta stick together.
I lie in the dark. Watch Scarlett watching over the rest of us. She reaches over, pulls the blanket up under Cat’s chin, tucks another around her brother. There’s something about her—under the bitchy and the sexy. Something almost maternal. Goldenboy looks after us because we’re his squad. His responsibility.
Scarlett looks after us because she cares.
She catches me watching her.
“Go to sleep, Finian,” she whispers.
I close my eyes, and let the slow breathing of my squadmates lulls me to sleep.
I dream of home, of Trask, with its red sun and sprawling city hives running deep beneath the ground. I’m topside in my dream and it’s snowing, tiny flakes spilling from the sky and covering the unforgiving white rock surface in an endless thick blanket, far as my eyes can see.
It’s the weirdest thing, though.
Last time I checked, snow isn’t supposed to be blue. …
•••••
I wake up to the sound of Tyler and Cat arguing in whispers.
“I don’t care,” she hisses. “This is bloody creepy, Ty. And we’re in it up to our love pillows already. She’s a wanted fugitive. We need to turn her in.”
“We don’t even know what this is,” he points out, just as soft.
Zila’s voice comes next. “It appears to be repetitions of a single image.”
I roll over from where I’m huddled in against the wall. My major servos and muscle-weave activate immediately, though my fingers take a moment to articulate. Cranking open my eyes, I’m greeted with our grungy little room and …
Maker’s bits.
By the light of Cat’s uniglass, I see a design—the same design—daubed over and over again in the luminescent white ship paint. It’s on every grubby wall, every hatch, every crate, and it’s slowly dribbling toward the floor, where one huge version of the design takes up all the space that wasn’t needed by sleeping squad members.
It’s a figure. Humanoid. But it has only three fingers, growing longer from left to right. Its eyes are mismatched—the left one empty, the right one filled in white. And there’s a shape drawn on its chest where its heart would be.
A diamond.
Kal wakes, and Scarlett opens her eyes after a nudge from her brother. She props up on one elbow with a groan, arches her back, then freezes in place when she spots the hundreds of glowing figures now decorating our temporary home. The six of us sit and stare at the paint on the walls, or stare into each other’s eyes.
“Zero’s right,” I say quietly, looking around. “This is spooky shit, Goldenboy.”
At the sound of my voice, our stowaway stirs in the bunk where she slept with Zila. She sits up to dangle her legs over the edge of the bunk, yawning, squinting at the light in Cat’s hand. Wiping the sleep from her eyes, she blinks around the room, finally twigs we’re all staring at her.
“What?” she asks. “Was I snoring or something?”
Her fingers are smudged with luminescent white.
There’s a smear of paint across her cheek.
She looks at the pictograms on the wall. Down at the paint on her fingertips. The look on her face when she realizes this was her—or at any rate, that she did it, even if it wasn’t her—kind of breaks my heart. At least, I assume that’s what the ache and contraction in the center of my chest is.
Doesn’t happen too often.
“I don’t …” Her whisper trails off.
Kal drops down silently from the topmost bunk to peer at the design. He turns his eyes on Aurora, a small frown between his brows.
“Why do you fear?” he asks, his voice cool. “This is a sign. We are in the place we are supposed to be. And now we know something of what we seek.”
It’s definitely the most practical thing anyone’s said so far, but his tone doesn’t help calm Auri down any. She’s got her jaw clenched, eyes wide, and I can see her fighting the urge to scream. Cry. Break. Which is exactly when Dariel opens the door. Without knocking.
He pauses halfway in, blinking slowly. “I see you’ve redecorated,” he says eventually. “I’ll put the cost of that paint on your tab.”
Nobody says a word, because really, what are we going to say? But my