I argued. He’d gone into the Black Widow with us. He’d kept me on my feet. He’d fixed the lights in the central cargo bay. And I had a feeling he’d keep my secrets. “He had no bodily functions. How cool is that?”
Miko’s brow wrinkled in thought as she leaned against the other side of the open doorframe. “Maybe he was a cyborg or something.”
“My vote’s for super soldier,” I said. “They must have tested that enhancer on someone.”
“If that’s the case, I don’t think he was a willing lab rat,” Fiona said. “One time when I checked on him in the lab, he was glaring at those syringes like he wanted to destroy them.”
Odd then, that he’d just walked away from them.
“Maybe the Sky Mother sent him to us,” Jax said in a low voice.
My immediate denial died on my tongue. Jax was the spiritual one of the two of us, although he’d never tried to convert me or anything. I still usually naysaid him right away. This time, I couldn’t. There had been a lot of inexplicable things about Big Guy. Still, I had trouble believing the Sky Mother was anything other than a big fat sun.
“Sent him for what?” I asked.
Jaxon looked at me, a challenge in his coffee-dark eyes. He rarely pressed these points, but I could tell he wanted to now. “Maybe to keep the Black Widow from crushing us into nothing.”
There was no denying that something strange had happened in Sector 14. Going into the Widow, I’d fully expected to become less than dust. And yet here we all were—alive. I was more likely to look for a scientific explanation, though. Something involving physics, not religion.
“The Sky Mother is all-powerful,” Shiori said from just behind Miko in the shadows of the ship. Stepping forward, she emerged into the sunlight next to the others, turning her sightless eyes toward its warmth.
Miko stopped her grandmother when Shiori got too close to the edge, the blunt end of her severed hand crossing the older woman’s middle as she cautioned her to be careful.
Shiori clearly wanted off the ship, if only for a few minutes, so Jaxon jumped down and then lifted her to the platform. We almost never put down the stairs. Waiting for them to fold and unfold never seemed worth it.
As soon as she was steady, Jax let go of her, and Shiori lifted her face to the sun. She breathed deeply through her small, somewhat flat nose. The white hair that had escaped the bun at her nape fluttered on a breeze I’d hardly noticed before, reminding me of the images I’d seen of the tattered flags of the old nations as they’d been ripped down and the galaxy burned into one.
Shiori spoke again, her soft, musical accent lending an almost prophetess quality to her words. “The Sky Mother balances everything. From the center of the galaxy, She sends out Her rays of light.”
Yeah. That’s because it’s a freaking star, and they’re bright.
And if She and Her Powers really balanced anything, they would have kicked my father off his throne a long time ago—maybe before he’d murdered millions in the night.
“I’m off, then,” I said, slicing through a conversation I wasn’t entirely comfortable with. Besides, there were more pressing matters than debating theology—like finding someone to repair the Endeavor. And I loved both Jax and Shiori too much to try to rattle their faith with my own bitterness and doubt.
“Watch your back out there, partner,” Jax said with a single, solemn nod.
My heart clenched a little in my chest. Jax didn’t use that name for me much anymore. Partner. That was what we’d been back in the mines, when there’d been a different type of overseer with a whip at our backs.
I nodded to him, but as I walked toward the elevator tube, hiking the strap of my bag up over my shoulder, I couldn’t help remembering that first day on Hourglass Mile, when rough hands had thrown me at Jax. He’d been a man already, thirty years old and no mistaking it. I’d been nineteen and scared to death.
They’d brought us in on the same day, Jax half insane with grief and me still stunned that I’d been caught, neither of us having any idea that the warden’s bright idea was to pair male and female inmates off together for daily work in the mines. The warden had figured the fraternization would help keep the peace, which it did, I supposed. Once pairs