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  “You’re right.” I wrestle my voice back to a whisper and jog to keep pace with her. “Do you want to tell me why we need your pet to help us steal a shuttle?”

  “He’s not a pet.” She ducks beneath the nose of the shuttle we’ve chosen and wheels around on me. In a split second, her expression flips from annoyance to shock.

  “Miyole . . . ,” she chokes out, before something cold and hard presses against the back of my neck.

  “Don’t move, memsahib.”

  I freeze. Rubio.

  Rubio circles around, keeping his stunner trained on my chest. He looks from me to Cassia. “Either of you care to repeat that part about stealing a shuttle?”

  “Rubio, listen . . .” My mouth has gone dry. I glance at Cassia, who is slowly pulling open the zipper on Tibbet’s bag now. I shake my head. What is she playing at? “I don’t think you heard us right. You must have misunderstood.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I heard right.” He glances at Cassia, who stops unzipping, then back at me. “You’re not as sly as you think, memsahib.”

  “Rubio, please.” I’m pleading now, even though it kills me to grovel in front of him. Flashes of my own ruined future play in my head—Cassia and me in the brig; the inevitable investigation; “Who changed your records for you?”; returning to Earth empty-handed, Cassia’s brother as lost as a grain of sand on a beach.

  “You don’t understand,” I say. “Commander Dhar didn’t leave us any choice. We had to.”

  “The only thing any of us has to do is call this in.” Rubio raises his wrist com.

  “Wait!” I say, in the same moment Cassia chucks Tibbet’s bag forward, straight at Rubio’s chest.

  The cat springs from the satchel and lands on Rubio. Rubio lets out a yelp and steps back, his face registering more surprise than pain, even though a fine hatchwork of red lines has sprung up on his neck and face where Tibbet’s claws have raked him. Cassia swings her other bag at his head.

  Rubio’s eyes pop wide. He falls like lead, smacking his head on the floor with a sickening thud.

  Not good. Very, very not good.

  We both stand over him in stunned silence.

  Cassia covers her hand with her mouth. “Is he dead?”

  I kneel beside Rubio and press my fingers against his neck. His pulse flutters. “No. Concussed, maybe.”

  She lets out a breath. “Good.” She lunges for his legs and pulls him few steps, his jacket bunching up under his head. “Help me.”

  “Cassia—what are we doing?” I ask, lifting his arms and shuffling after her. Rubio hangs limp between us.

  “We can’t leave him here.”

  I glance up at the cameras. Maybe no one is watching now, but they’ll play it all back once we’re gone and see what we did. “I think we can.”

  “We don’t know how much he overheard,” Cassia says. “He could tell them where we’re going.”

  “You don’t mean . . .” I glance at the shuttle. “We can’t take him with us.”

  Cassia grunts and repositions her grip on Rubio’s ankle. “I don’t see how we have much choice. He’s going to wake up and raise the alarm.”

  Rubio moans. His head lolls back.

  “And us overriding the security doors on a research shuttle won’t?” I say.

  “I guess we could hit him over the head again, if that’s what you want.”

  “No!” I say, louder than I mean to. The word echoes across the hangar. I frown at Cassia. We’ve lost too much time already. We can’t afford to argue anymore. “You’re right, okay?”

  She drops Rubio’s feet as I gently lower his injured head to the floor. I slide my crow from my pocket, thumb through to the right screen, and connect my small device to the shuttle’s hatch controls. The latches give way with a muted thunk, the hydraulics whine softly, and the hatch unfolds.

  Cassia grabs Rubio’s feet again and starts pulling him up the loading ramp. “I’ll take care of him and Tibbet. You go power up.”

  “You’re sure?” I hesitate. “You can do it alone?”

  “Go,” Cassia almost shouts. “That guard’s going to be back any minute now.”

  I nod and race up the ramp, through the shuttle’s small storage and maintenance access compartment, the cramped living quarters not meant for more than a few nights away from the Ranganathan, and up the short ladder to the cockpit. I crawl into the pilot’s seat, plug my crow into the controls’ line-in, and flip on the auxiliary power. The ship’s panels flare to life, candy bright and new beneath my hands. A hint of fresh-soldered metal hangs in the air. I doubt if anyone has ever flown this shuttle before. It would have been made special for the research mission.

  Jyotsana’s codes cut through the ship’s security wall like butter. One by one, the systems come online—environmentals, telemetry, navigation, repulsion shields, gravity. The sound of clanging metal and a grunt from Cassia echo up from the shuttle’s berth. I slide back the blinders on the viewport and gaze out over the hangar. On the far side, the silhouette of a guard passes under the entryway and stops dead.

  Vaat lag gayii.

  “Cassia!” I shout. “Time to go!”

  She appears at the bottom of the ladder to the cockpit. “But Tibbet . . .”

  “Will you forget about the chirkut cat?” I snap.

  She scowls at me. “That . . .” She struggles with the word. “Chirkut cat saved us both.”

  I unlock the propulsion controls and feed power to the engines. A low thrum pulses through the ship’s frame and a roar of wind licks in through the open hatch as the engines wind up.

  “We can’t!” I yell over the throbbing air. “We have to go!”

  “I’m not leaving him!” she shouts back, and disappears.

  I grip the propulsion bars and force myself to stay still. I may have the controls, but I can’t leave without her. Across the hangar, the guard strides in our direction, stunner out, coms raised. This whole thing is going sideways, fast.

  “Cassia!” My voice rattles in warning.

  In answer, the hatch’s hydraulics whine again, and the rushing chaos outside falls silent.

  “Got him!” She appears again, breathless, at the base of the ladder. Tibbet stares up at me, moon-eyed and ruffled.

  “Strap in,” I call, and open up the thrusters without waiting. The shuttle lurches forward at an uneven pitch. Its nose dips and scrapes along the dock with a tooth-turning screech. Chaila. I strain against the push bars, trying to keep us level. Flying under gravity is always the trickiest part, and this ship is heavier than my mother’s old sloop, the one Ava inherited. It’s the difference between riding a horse and an elephant. I wrestle the ship’s nose up and edge us out over the hangar floor, the wind from our thrusters buffeting the guard below. He shouts soundlessly into his coms and points his stunner at our shuttle’s belly.

  I engage the shuttle’s communications line and transmit the command to unseal the air lock. The immense bay doors on the outer end of the hangar jolt and begin to unwind in a slow rotation. The warning system lights flare to life, washing the dock in red. The shuttle muffles all the outside sound, but our communication line relays the warning claxon and the calm voice intoning instructions.

  “ALL PERSONNEL, CLEAR HANGAR Q-17 FOR TAKEOFF. WARNING: AIR LOCK DEPRESSURIZATION IMMINENT.”

  Below, the guard runs for the exit. A pinhole opens in the center of the inner air lock doors, then widens enough to admit our ship. I guide us forward, hands shaking, until we reach the opening. The hull scrapes against the aperture, sending a tremor down the length of the shuttle, but then we’re through, into the darkness of the air lock.

  For a blind second, I wonder if we’re trapped, our override codes revoked.

  The voice comes back: “DEPRESSURIZING.” Our ship judders in the current as the pneumatics suck all the air from the chamber, but I grip the push bars and hold us steady.

  “Miyole?” Cassia calls from below, and I remember she’s blind down there with Rubio and the
cat.

  “Hold on,” I shout back. “We’re almost through.”

  The outer air lock door whirls open on a glittering bank of stars and the stark, pale expanse of the Ranganathan’s spiraling hull. Vertigo takes me. The sky pitches, and my eyes fight to track its path. I lean against the push bars, dizzy, and the shuttle dives down, smacks against the air lock’s outer rim, and then skips forward, out into the emptiness.

  The Ranganathan’s gravitational pull breaks, and my stomach flies up to meet my heart. In the small, endless stretch of time it takes the shuttle’s own weaker gravitational field to flip on, I remember the time I went jumping from one of the lower levels of the Mumbai levee with Vishva and some other girls from Revati. We had heard some of the older girls at school talking about a place where you could jump down into a retention pool and climb back out again. It didn’t look so bad from below, but when I stood on the ledge, bare toes gripping the hot metal, the fall seemed bottomless. But I had to jump, because I had teased Miranda Jae about being scared. Until this moment, I had never known anything could match the terror of momentarily freeing yourself from the universe’s grip, only to have it reclaim you at terminal velocity.

  Pressure on my shoulder. “Miyole.”

  I start. The universe’s swing slows. I follow Cassia’s furrowed gaze to the viewport.

  “We have to move.” She squeezes into the copilot’s seat beside me.

  Right. I blink, trying to will away the last of my vertigo. We can’t linger around like a drowsy peacock. We have to move before the Ranganathan sends its fighters to haul us back in.

  Movement in the rear relay screens. As if I’ve summoned them, the air lock dilates again, and a trio of matte black birds darts from the hangar behind us.

  “Vaat!” I curse, and slam the push bars forward. The shuttle shoots off, jerking Cassia and me back against our seats and leaving the Ranganathan a shrinking shell in our rear viewport relays. Unhobbled by gravity and atmospheric resistance, the engines sing and the bars respond to my fingers’ lightest touch.

  Cassia glances over at me, half terrified, half awed.

  “Chaila,” I whisper appreciatively. This is a ship made for the Deep.

  A warning flare strafes over our bow.

  The shuttle’s com lines spit to life. “Research shuttle 49-Q. You are not authorized for departure. Return to dock immediately.”

  Cassia gives me a worried look. I raise our shields in answer and lock the push bars forward. We have nothing to hide behind this far out from Ceres Station—only a fine grit of asteroid dust and radiation. Our best hope is to push for speed and trust the Ranganathan won’t authorize its fighters to fire on us.

  Another flare explodes before our front viewport, blinding me.

  “Research shuttle 49-Q,” the coms repeat. “Desist from your present course or we will be forced to disable your craft.”

  Cassia presses her back against the copilot’s chair. Her eyes pop wide.

  “They won’t,” I say, half to her, half to myself. “They won’t.”

  I press the bars to their limit. The shuttle surges forward, and the Ranganathan fades to a bright speck behind us, but the fighters keep pace. Blood pounds in my ears. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.

  “Research shuttle 49-Q,” the coms start again, and then, as abruptly, they stop. Their silence unnerves me more than the flares or warnings. The birds continue by our sides, black shadows flanking us through the perfect night.

  Keep going, I tell myself. I swallow the bile creeping up the back of my throat. Keep going.

  Silence stretches out around us, heavy and oblique as dark matter. Then, when my lungs feel as if they are about to burst, the fighters drop away. I watch them recede in the aft relays. They blend into the darkness, and the Ranganathan itself becomes only one among a million stars.

  Chapter 9

  “You can’t do this, memsahib.” Cassia has Rubio tied to the shuttle’s medical gurney. She and Tibbet watch him warily from the passenger lounge on the far side of the shuttle’s berth.

  I drop down the last rung of the access ladder. “I think you might want to stop calling me that now.”

  Rubio glares at me. “You’re in deep. Don’t you get that? There’s no going back. . . .”

  “Yeah, we had pretty much figured that out.” I wave an arm at the stolen shuttle and start shuffling through the cabinets to find the medical kit.

  “No.” He shakes his head and winces. “Maybe you’d get off light for stealing a ship, but kidnapping? You’re going to spend the rest of your lives in a prison camp once the DSRI catches up to you.”

  Cassia looks spooked. “Is that true?”

  I shrug, even though Rubio’s words make me queasy. “So he says.”

  “I’m not just saying it, I know it.” Rubio twists on the cot to look at me. “And if the higher-ups don’t get you, my flight crew will make it a personal job.”

  I make a show of rolling my eyes and pop open the medical kit. “I guess we’d better take care of you, then.” I pull out a penlight and click it on.

  He shrinks back on the bed, pulling the nylon strapping Cassia used to tie him taut. “What are you doing?”

  “Checking you for a concussion, badirchand.” I reach for his head, but he jerks away again. “Hold still, would you?”

  “Only if you untie me.”

  I raise my eyes to the ceiling. “We both know that’s not happening. Now, would you like to let me look at your head, or would you rather not know if your brain is hemorrhaging?”

  Rubio gives his bonds one last tug and then leans back on the cot, sullen. “Fine.”

  I shine the light in one eye, then the other. His pupils shrink in their pools of blue. Good. “Are you feeling nauseous?”

  Rubio laughs. “Are you kidding? No, I feel perfectly fine about being shanghaied and tied to a gurney.”

  I glare down at him. “Be serious. Are you dizzy at all? Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?”

  Rubio sighs. “No. My head hurts like hell, though, thanks to her.” He glares at Cassia, who pretends she hasn’t heard and goes on stroking Tibbet’s head.

  “Right. And we’ll forget all about how you pulled a stunner on us, shall we?” I pocket my light, pop an anti-inflammatory from its foil pouch, and hold it up to Rubio’s mouth. “Here, take this.”

  He narrows his eyes at me. “What is it?”

  I let out a sigh. “It’s a painkiller. What do you think it is?”

  He raises his eyebrows in answer.

  “Fine.” I slap the pill down on the medical kit’s lid, out of Rubio’s reach. “Cassia?”

  She looks up, and I nod at the cockpit. We need a place where Rubio can’t overhear us.

  “What, you’re going to leave me here like this?” Rubio squirms on the gurney.

  “Spot on, brain trust.” I pull myself up onto the ladder. “You’d better rest if you’re not planning on taking any medicine.”

  Cassia follows me into the cockpit and seals the door behind us.

  “Was he serious?” Worry pinches the skin between her brows. “Are you sure no one’s going to come after us?”

  “He’s bluffing,” I say. I hope I’m right.

  “And if he’s not?” She hugs herself.

  “Then it’ll be me they’re after. They won’t do anything to you.”

  She frowns. “How do you know?”

  “Because I won’t let them.”

  Cassia smiles and sinks down into the copilot’s seat. “Now who’s bluffing?”

  “I mean it.” I say. But something is wrong. Cassia won’t look at me. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.” Her voice bobs up, too cheerful. “Everything’s going according to plan.”

  I lean over the control panels, trying to ignore the false buoyancy in Cassia’s voice so I can make sense of the flashing lights and readouts scrolling thick with numbers. The shield indicators flicker yellow to green as we plow through th
e fine dust of the outer asteroid belt.

  “We’re six hours from Ceres Station.” I pull my crow from my pocket and hand it to Cassia. “I made a list of everything we’ll need to retrofit the shuttle for deep travel. You think we can find it all?”

  “Have you ever been there?” Cassia scrolls through the list. “Ceres?”

  I shake my head. I’ve heard of the station, but beyond the fact that it’s built on a dwarf planet in the middle of an asteroid belt, I don’t know much. “I’d never been deeper than Bhutto Station before I signed up for this mission.”

  Cassia leans back. “If it’s not welded down, you can sell it on Ceres.”

  “What are we going to sell? Rubio?” I joke.

  She looks at me, solemn, and I realize how not funny that is. I drop my eyes. “Sorry.”

  She rubs a finger over the telemetry readouts. “Actually, I know someone who’ll give us a fair deal on this ship.”

  I blink. “You want to sell the shuttle? But . . . I thought you said—”

  “I said I needed to get to Ceres. We can get a junker that’s fitted out for Deep travel there.”

  “A junker?” I make a face.

  “Sure,” Cassia says. “What, did you really think we were going to take the time to retrofit this thing? Your people will be looking for it anyway.”

  “Why not?” I glance around at the bright new controls, the pristine seats in dove gray. It’s not exactly spacious, but it has to be better than any junker.

  “That’d take too much time.” She scowls out the front viewport. “They already have several days’ head start. The longer they have Nethanel, the less likely we are to find him.”

  I chew my bottom lip. “So, this person who’ll trade us . . .”

  Cassia nods. “Sweetie.”

  “What?” A complicated combination of embarrassment and pleasure tumbles through my stomach. Why is she calling me that?

  Cassia flushes boiled lobster red. “No. Sweetie, he’s . . . well, he’s sort of my uncle.” She looks sheepish.

  “Sort of your uncle?” My face feels as hot as Cassia’s looks.

  “Well, not really.” She hesitates, trying to find the words. “He and my father looked at each other like brothers, except they weren’t really. But they’d do anything for each other.”