Razors, each and every word, bursting out of the black space she’d hidden them in, filling her mouth. She screamed. The sound rose up out of her diaphragm and engulfed her. Hands clamped around her face. Someone was shouting, their words muffled beneath the weight of the terrible cries jackhammering her ribs. A sting at her elbow and her mouth clamped closed. Blake slumped against Cym. The Syranian wrapped his long limbs tightly around her, muttering soft reassurances against the back of her head.
Tamas crouched on his knees by the window. With one hand pressed to the glass, he rose to unsteady feet. ‘We are done. I will inform the captain. Take the time you need, tidy her up. Get her back on her feet.’ Tamas moved as though to approach, but reconsidered and stopped in the middle of the space dividing them. Blake blinked through the tears that still fell unbidden. If not for Cym’s support, she would slither to the floor, her legs jelly.
‘We have become so much more than we’ve ever been, Blake.’ Tamas echoed his earlier words. ‘I want you to truly see that. You’ll finish what you’ve started. I need you to . . . you will be there at the Final Meld. You are the Technician, and your expertise will be required. What becomes of you after that, I can’t say. You’ve taken that out of my hands, but you will fill your role at the Meld. You will do it. If you don’t want Kira hurt, you’ll do it.’
Blake fought to place her lips around a reply. Tamas was halfway out the door when she finally managed to slur a response.
‘We are less than . . . we’ve . . . ever . . . been.’
Kira - 16
Kira’s head was full of questions, and her bladder full of champagne. If Leona-the-bubble-wonder drove over another pothole, chances were the newspapers and magazines filling the footwells of the car were going to get a soaking. The baby-blue Datsun station wagon’s suspension was nonexistent. And, judging by the way Kira’s butt sagged into the crease between the backrest and the cushion, so were the springs in the back seat. Az rested his feet on a pile of old papers so high it raised his knees above his waist. He clutched the seat in front, which, considering the snail’s pace they drove at, seemed overly cautious.
‘Where exactly are we going?’ Kira asked for the third time in about as many minutes.
Leona had spent the better part of the drive trying to get a word out of the kid with the terrible bowl cut. But Vail wasn’t talking. At least he wasn’t bawling his eyes out and dribbling words anymore. There was a little damp patch just above Kira’s left boob where the kid had huddled against her all the way down to the car. He was taller than Kira, which meant he’d kind of hunched over her. Couldn’t have been great for his neck but it had taken a few tugs to get him to let her go when they’d reached the car. His pockets jingled as he moved. Each one seemed to be full of coins. All the way down in the elevator he’d kept babbling about something called ‘workings’. His workings had been too strong. They had never been too strong before apparently. He hadn’t meant to hurt her.
The girl, not Kira.
Well, his fault or not, the girl who’d hurtled out the window was dead as a fucking dodo. Kira twisted in her seat, staring out over the flat back of the wagon. It was filled with crap, too: papers, boxes, a pair of hiking boots, a few folding chairs, a couple of bundles of sticks, an empty fish tank. Great. They were on the run with the world’s greatest car hoarder. Something smelled weird, like burnt Christmas cake. No one liked fruit cake, especially in a car with no air-con. This day was just getting better and better. Kira peered over the piled-up junk to the road behind them. If she saw flashing lights, she really was going to piss herself.
‘We’re not being followed.’ Leona said. ‘No one will recall us, not for a little while.’
‘You sound pretty sure.’
‘I am more than pretty sure,’ Leona sniffed. ‘It’s not my first indifference incantation, girl.’
It wasn’t her first missed gear change, either. The crunch sounded like a metal alligator taking a bite out of the engine. One more of those babies and this pile of shit would give it up. This crazy bitch ain’t driving us any further, the car would say in Car-talk-ese. Wow. Kira blinked – she was tired.
Crunch, screech, fucking crunch.
‘Jesus, you’re killing this thing, lady,’ Kira said.
‘Would you like to drive?’
‘No. No I wouldn’t.’ Few things in life were certain. Kira not ever getting behind a wheel again sure as fuck was.
‘What’s your name, girl?’ Leona stared straight ahead, keeping an all-too-polite distance from the car in front.
‘Kira.’ Shit. So much for super-undercover secret squirrel.
‘Well, Kira, I’d like you to shut your ungrateful mouth if you wouldn’t mind.’
Kira considered using her ungrateful mouth to tell the tan queen where to shove it. But quickly decided against it. Whatever that bullshit was back at the hotel, Tan Queen and Bowl-cut boy might have just saved her ass.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But can this ungrateful mouth ask you where we’re going?’
‘It can, but I don’t have any answer. Didn’t exactly plan on this.’
‘You and me both, sister,’ Kira said.
Sister.
Blake.
Jesus. Now that was a call Kira didn’t want to make. And right now, it was a
