Her grip around him tightened as if she sensed his nervousness. He hadn’t been this overwhelmed since the first time he left the Tranquility House.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked louder.
“Not yet,” she said, “but I will.”
He read her lips as much as he understood what she was saying.
They moved through the door and into the crowd. He felt a little dizzy, but he always did in crowds this large. He could see the tops of their heads, and that made the crowd seem more like a single entity rather than a bunch of human beings. The heads became a unit, like water through a conduit, with other conduits coming into it, changing some of the flow. He could see everything as a unit, but individuals were hard to see at all.
“Must be nice for you,” Skye said. “You can see over everyone.”
And she couldn’t. He hadn’t realized that. To her, it probably looked like the worst kind of obstacle course.
“Tell me where you need us to go and I’ll get us there,” he said.
He needed a purpose to get through this crowd, and leading them forward would give him that purpose.
“The maps I looked at on the ship showed that there was an entire section devoted to spaceship sales not too far from here.”
Of course it would be near the port. That way people could see the ships.
He scanned over the sea of heads, noting that his eyes had grown used to the brighter lights. The music sounded tinnier in here, maybe because he caught echoes of so many different strains.
He could see signs, but he couldn’t read them even though they appeared to be in Standard. They were too low, eye-level for people like Skye.
Then he saw a ship in the distance. It seemed to be made of yellow light, and it floated over the crowd. He saw some hands pointing upward. Alongside the ship was a banner, also in the shape of a ship, informing anyone who wanted something like that to go to Pavilion Fifty-three.
Fifty-three pavilions. He suspected where they stood was considered a pavilion. His stomach clenched. He was starting to get a sense of scale here, and it was unbelievably huge.
All of Krell could fit into this pavilion or whatever the hell it was. And there were fifty-two more of them?
No wonder Skye had been confident that no one would care about them.
Hardly anyone was looking up at him, no one commented on their appearance, and as they made their way through the crowd, they had to shove just like everyone else.
He was glad he didn’t have a bag or his usual equipment with him, just the chips with information embedded in his hand. His default was to shut all of that off, so no one could lift information as he passed.
Good thing, too, because he hadn’t even thought of pickpockets until now.
He kept a tight grip on Skye, their bodies glued at the sides. Even so, she nearly lost hold of him once or twice as people continually banged into her.
He steered her toward that ship, and she didn’t seem to care. She seemed relieved that he knew where he was going.
He only knew what he could see, and he could see just a bit more than she could.
They used their bodies almost as a battering ram to get through the crowd. People of all shapes and sizes passed them, some slamming into them, some carefully avoiding them.
He could see dozens of businesses, but could barely read the signs. Most of the signs, he realized after a few minutes, were on the ground, in bright lights, with arrows or maps leading to the storefront.
“I’ll get us to the ship area,” he said to Skye, “but you might have some luck getting us to the right store.”
He nodded at the floor in front of them. Her mouth opened a bit—she hadn’t noticed that—and then she nodded.
They had become a strange team, him looking up and her looking down.
It took nearly fifteen minutes to cross this part of the Pavilion. They finally got close to that floating ship which, Jack realized, was
What kind of money maintained a place like this?
As soon as he asked himself the question, he realized he didn’t want to know.
Skye’s fingers dug into his side, pulling him to the left. He glanced down at her.
“Over there,” she said.
He looked toward the thing she nodded at. Rows and rows and rows of storefronts, all advertising ships at cheap prices.
“Crap,” he said. “How do we know where to go?”
“We guess,” she said, and pulled him forward.
Chapter 31
It felt like slogging through a space walk in the bulkiest space suit ever invented.
Skye had not expected so many people here on Zaeen. If she were honest with herself, despite what she said to Jack, she hadn’t expected the place to be so big.
She had been doing her research, of course, but knowing that a place was the size of a small planet and actually
Regulations barely existed here, and what ones did exist could be bribed away.
That thought was one she chose not to share with Jack. Despite his “glass-half-full” thing, he seemed like a bit of a worrier, and anyone with a brain would worry about the fact that Zaeen did not regulate anything.
Parts of the station could fall off at any time.
For all she knew, parts had.
She had initially toyed with the idea of buying Jack his own ship and getting him out of here. She didn’t want to be separated from him which, she knew, was more the lust and loneliness talking than anything else. She had helped him a great deal, and if he would take her money (with the promise of paying her back; she already knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t want anything else), then they could go their separate ways.
She had initially planned to stay here to find some trace of her mother.
But the whole Rover thing was bothering her, as was the involvement of Liora Olliver. Something was up, and Skye wasn’t sure she could spend time here without losing what little lead she had.
She also knew that her reaction to all of this might simply be a rationalization so that she could stay with Jack.
She didn’t want to examine that.
There had to be fifty shops purporting to sell spaceships ahead of her. If she logged into Zaeen’s network this close to the shops, she would find positive information on all of them, with the most positive on the shop that could afford the most advertising.
She should have researched ships before abandoning theirs.
As if she had had time.
She knew what she wanted, though, so she pulled Jack toward a kiosk that had lots of information on it.
“Is that wise?” he said when he saw what she was about to do.
“You have links that can access the public networks?” she asked. “Because I have nothing internal.”
He smiled at her. “Me, either. And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t do so here.”
He was right: credit rip-offs, identity theft, tracer software, everything she worried about and more would come into a person’s internal links through the Zaeen network.
