I jam the iron against my throat. The hiss and the smell and the pain is too much and I know I’m going to black out, that all of this will have been for nothing. But, just as my eyes roll, the thing with my face grabs my arm, jerks me upright.
When I retch, dark sand pours out of my mouth.
* * *
The first breath is the worst. Pain flares through my chest as my lungs struggle, useless as empty sacks. Then air, laden with grit and smoke, but air all the same. I heave it in, sand spraying from my lips. Somewhere, a voice curses, saying my name.
‘—sake, Low!’
I open my eyes. One of them obeys, the other remains stubbornly closed. Darkness all around, lit by a strange, muted red light.
‘Low?’
I raise my head a painful inch. A small figure looms out of the shadows, smeared with blood and smoke. I try to say her name, but my mouth is too full of dust, the air too weak in my lungs. She unties my hands and hauls me up to a sitting position, even though I want her to leave me here, because I feel as if my body is going to snap.
‘Are you listening to me?’ She slaps at my face. ‘Low, we have to move. This ship is like a goddam beacon, and… I keep hearing things.’
My head is so heavy, but I blink and try to focus.
The craft lies wrecked on the sand, its nose buried in the dirt. Parts are scattered around it, like gobbets of flesh. The red light comes from its belly. An emergency light, I realise, growing dimmer and dimmer. And beyond it…
No stars, an endless black void. I shrink from it, cowering in fear of being sucked into that emptiness.
We are in the Edge.
‘Moloney?’ I whisper.
‘Dead.’
I close my eyes but the General will not leave me be. She slaps at my cheeks a second time.
‘That light is going to die any second,’ she pants. ‘And then—’
She doesn’t need to go on. Lost in the dark.
I haul myself to my knees, then to my feet, though the pain almost makes me vomit. One of my arms feels badly sprained, and I’m sure several ribs are broken. More besides. I have no mind to count the damage then. I lean on the General and feel her shoulders, stronger than any child’s should be, bearing my weight.
‘Why are you helping me?’ I gasp.
‘In crisis conditions two individuals are of more use than one. Even if one of them is a rat.’
We make it to the smoking carcass of the craft. Moloney slumps at the very front, still strapped in his pilot’s chair, like a figurehead on the prow of an ancient sea ship.
His skull is broken open. Blood drips from the end of his nose but his eyes are wide and blue and glassy. Just as I saw. Just as they promised.
I had hated him. In another time, another place, I would have killed him myself, but – confronted by the end of that ferocious life – something like grief surges through me.
‘He knew,’ I hear myself say. ‘He knew it was death to come here.’
‘He couldn’t have,’ the General wheezes. ‘Now stop gibbering and help me.’
She is searching through the wreckage for anything of use. I paw at the remains of the pilot’s seat with my good hand. Tools and old cans and disgusting rags tumble out of every pocket and compartment I search but, at last, I find what I’m looking for: an ancient, scratched tin box marked with a single red star. A guerrilla medkit.
I shove it inside my shirt. The emergency light flickers and dies.
In the darkness, something shifts, like a snake’s belly over sand.
When the light blinks back on, the General’s eyes are huge.
‘Water?’ I croak.
She nods, still staring about. ‘Half a canister. Stale.’
‘Rope?’
‘There are cables—’
‘Get one.’ My body threatens to give up, pain pulsing in waves, but there is one more thing I have to do. Clumsily, I reach down and drag the long, leather jacket from Moloney’s corpse. It is ripped and blood-soaked, but I persist, though my muscles are as good as useless.
The General returns and lets out a noise of disgust. ‘What are you doing?’
I thrust it at her. Her own jacket is ruined. ‘Night is cold.’ And we have a long way to walk.
Wincing, one hand clamped to her side, she puts it on. It swamps her, down to the ankles.
‘Now, tie us together.’
‘What?’
‘If one of us takes a wrong step…’
Her gaze flickers to the impenetrable darkness. She swears and loops the cable around her waist, teeth clenched.
‘Roped to a traitor,’ she mutters. ‘This is not how I’ll die.’ She squints ahead. ‘By my reckoning, that’s the direction we came from.’
I sway. The emergency light is little more than a faded glow, and beyond us, all around, is the unknown.
‘Low?’ the General says uncertainly.
In the last struggling flickers, I meet her eyes.
The light goes out.
* * *
The controls flash, the comms channel blares over and over as the hulk tries to reach me. The warden: she makes her voice soothing, makes it stern as she orders, entreats, bribes… Life, come back and we’ll be lenient, we’ll see that no more than another quarter is added to your sentence, we’ll overlook the assaults, come back now or we’ll have to give the Accord Forces permission to strike.
They’ll send out scouts faster than this pitiful escape craft. My hands are caked in blood as I paw
