“Turn on them with what? Cannons?”
“I don’t know.”
She believed him.
“They’re going to get that pretty fleet sunk,” she said.
“I’m sure they have a plan. But they didn’t share it with me.” He was fidgeting his hands in his lap, head bent to watch as he ran fingertips over the ends of his fingernails.
“So Meran was right,” Talis said. Not unkindly. Just frustrated. “They really kept you in the dark.”
“I was a hit at dinner parties,” he said with a shrug. “Fens Yarrow’s heir. Everyone wanted to be seen with me.”
“And the rings?”
“Lower on their priority list than mine. I had to beg for the ship to search for them.”
Lovely. “Then what was their highest priority?”
He looked at her. “Save Peridot.”
She coughed a laugh. “Right. By attacking the gods who hold it together.”
Dug put a hand on her shoulder. “He admitted he does not know anything. We have better things to do with the time before we reach Nexus.”
Hankirk’s posture had turned to mud. His responses flippant. She could perhaps get answers from Meran or Scrimshaw. That thought did not ease the roiling in her stomach or the pain at her temple.
She nodded to Dug. “Fair enough.”
“Might want to put that ring on, Talis.”
She graced Hankirk with one last scathing look, then turned her back on him and stalked off.
“Should have killed him,” she said under her breath to Dug.
“You still can.”
She stayed silent. She’d already proven that she couldn’t.
Chapter 34
There was only one way to prepare herself for the conversation she knew she needed to have with Meran.
So Talis went to the galley and shoveled coffee grinds into the percolator. Not the good stuff that had hints of nut and berry. The strong stuff. The cheap scrap they kept for backup.
It was stale. She could smell that as she lifted the lid from the tin. It was acidic, and the scent that came off the pot as it brewed on the hob was a threat, not a promise.
Talis drank it like a martyr. Black.
Her stomach already protesting, she refilled the mug before leaving the galley.
One step away from the exit, she realized she didn’t know where the simula had gone.
She backed up to the intership mounted just inside the galley entrance.
“Meran, if you would meet me in the great cabin, please,” she spoke into the horn. Her voice echoed back from the tinny pipes, small and thin. Gods, I sound tired.
There was no answer, but she hadn’t expected one.
As she approached the door to her cabin, she remembered with an exhausted sigh that she hadn’t been by to straighten up since they took their sudden ascent earlier. She took a breath to prepare herself and pulled the door open.
Scrimshaw was waiting for her inside, sitting placidly at the table, surrounded by the chaotic spill of charts and equipment. Talis thanked the winds she’d steeled herself before entering. The alien placed xist hands on the table’s surface as if to push xist-self up when she opened the door, but she held out a hand and motioned that xe could remain seated.
It wasn’t that she thought xe might still side with the Yu’Nyun. Xe’d done right by them back at Fall Island, at the cost of xist entire crew. The gray-blue scar that crossed xist torso from one shoulder to the opposite side of xist waist seemed as symbolic of xist intentions as any promise xe might offer.
But xist sheer foreignness made it hard to trust her own instincts. Xe was difficult to read. Those dark eyes, that expressionless face. She was learning xist tells, but never one-hundred percent sure of what xe was thinking. Even though xe fidgeted or jumped when nervous, or twisted xist fingers when xe wanted to ask for something. Like xe did now.
“Got something on your mind?” she asked, and began to straighten up.
There were charts flung against the forward wall, which she stooped to retrieve as she entered. Aside from that, the cabin wasn’t as bad as it could have been, really. Chairs had tipped over, but with no notable damage. The lip on the table had caught her paperweights, and those had stopped her red and blue marking pencils from disappearing onto the floor. The parallel ruler had jumped the rail, though, and one of the chair backs had landed against it. She cursed herself five times a fool. The ruler’s metal arms had bent a little, but at least its joints hadn’t snapped. It could be bent back with the right tools and a good eye, but that wasn’t the point. A ship’s navigational tools were its lifeline, and no captain worth the wind in her sails neglected them so. If she needed confirmation of how badly rattled the recent events had made her, there it was.
Scrimshaw traced the pattern of the inlay on the table with the tip of one finger. “I heard your summons of the simula,” xe said in xist accented murmur. “I felt it would be prudent to warn you about certain aspects of her nature.”
Talis placed the ruler back in her desk drawer, where it ought to have been stowed in the first place, and frowned. “This the technological side of things, or something you learned in researching Peridot?”
“Perhaps it is both.”
The light from the windows along the aft wall was bright enough to turn the cabin green, though the view through it was entirely open sky. The edges were hazy, Nexus’s light so intense that it overpowered the brightness of distant stars. All Talis could see were the pinpricks of distant pumpkins.
She had never been this close to Nexus. Setting aside respect for The Five’s privacy, it was physically uncomfortable to be here. Her head pounded. Her chest ached, clutched in the
