Silas steps back, holding the helmet from a flight suit. ‘Put it on you for the oxygen. We didn’t know…’ He stops.
I blink, my head pounding. Silas hands me a tin cup and I drink without tasting, coughing out most of it.
‘What…?’ The only word I have.
‘Good question.’ He shows his teeth in a smile, but looks nervous, hunting through his pockets. ‘You’re back on the Longrider. We found you and the General last night, a quarter mile from the Edge. Just lying there. No tracks, nothing. Thought you were dead.’
I look down at the body the Suplicio had broken. My arm is bound in a clumsy sling, my wounds swabbed with iodine. My hand goes to my chest. A dressing is plastered there, my tank top stiff with dried blood.
‘Yeah, sorry about that.’ Silas gestures at the bandage. ‘I’m no medic.’
I touch the edge of the dressing. The memory of the thing cutting into me returns.
‘Don’t.’ Silas reaches to stop me.
Too late. I rip the bandage free. Scored into my flesh are two sloping lines, forming a deep V from collarbone to breastbone and a horizontal line that crosses the middle. Even swollen and crusted with blood and iodine I see the cuts are precise, sharp-edged. Deliberate.
‘Didn’t want the others to see,’ he mutters, not looking at me. ‘They’re already spooked. Heard the Edge can do things to your mind, make you crazy. Wasn’t sure if you…’
I shudder. Had I done it? The Suplicio, the dead beneath the sand, Moloney. Had any of it been real? I press the dressing back down.
Silas holds out a pouch of breath. Very few left, I see. I take one, trembling. He waits a while before speaking again.
‘What do you remember?’
I crack the bead, allowing the shards to melt before I speak. ‘I remember the ship. The one that hailed us. It wasn’t the Accord. It was the Seekers.’
Silas gestures at his bruised face. ‘No shit. They were on us too. We fought them off and eventually they just… turned around.’ He pauses. ‘Never heard of them doing that before. Crazy as it sounds, I think they were more interested in you.’
‘They opened fire.’ Charges strafing, the craft falling apart around us. ‘Moloney flew straight into the Edge, said it was our only chance. But it was too dark, too fast. We crashed—’
‘Moloney’s dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then where is he? His body?’
I see it again, Moloney’s grim expression as he watched his corpse borne silently away across the wastes. Something inside my mind shudders and threatens to give.
‘We left it in the wreckage.’ With a groan, I straighten and swing my feet to the ground, the breath doing its work, giving me a spike of energy. I have been lying on a stack of crates, I see, covered with a blanket. ‘The General?’
‘Alive. Though she hasn’t come to yet. From her clothes it looks as if she lost a lot of blood.’ He stops, worrying at his split lip.
‘What?’
‘She should be dead. Both of you should.’ When I look at him again, his face is almost imploring. ‘You really don’t remember anything else, after the crash?’
I move my toes on the floor. It feels solid, greasy. Real.
‘I remember walking.’
‘And the Seekers? They didn’t find you?’
‘If they had, would we be here?’
I push myself to my feet and when I stumble, Silas catches me. Up close, I see how exhausted he is. ‘You shouldn’t go out there, Ten.’
‘Why not?’
‘Rooks didn’t want to bring you aboard. They’re only alright with me because I helped them fight. They think you killed Moloney. And they think you’re cursed. Keep saying no one comes out of the Edge alive.’
‘I am not sure I did.’
Outside the storeroom, the Longrider is in disarray. It bears the marks of a brutal fight; holes blown in walls, wiring hanging loose like entrails, badly bandaged with tape and rags. Blood too, embedded in the grooves of the metal floor that no one has yet washed out. Looking down into the hold, I see the shapes of bodies wrapped in blankets. Five altogether. Though Silas tries to dissuade me, I have to see for myself whether the General has come through alive, as they say.
There are three Rooks on the flight deck, survivors of the attack. From their expressions, I know that Silas is right. They are afraid of me.
Moloney’s second-in-command pulls out a pistol. There’s a dressing taped to his bald head. ‘Get back in there,’ he says.
I ignore him and limp on, towards the bunk room. No one stops me.
The General lies on one of the lower bunks, covered in a blanket. No storeroom prison for her. Her face looks terrible, sun-scorched and drained of blood, but when I feel for her pulse it’s strong, almost violent. Pulling back the blanket, I search for the wound in her side that should have killed her, bleeding out as she did across the sand. Someone has placed a dressing there and, carefully, I peel it away.
The wound has been cauterised with brutal efficiency, as if by a field medic. Someone, or something, treated us; preserved us and left us to be discovered. But the only people in the Edge are the Seekers, and Seekers… My hands go to my chest again, to the carved mark. They had been there, in whatever darkness I had thought was death. Them, and the thing that wore my face.
I return to the flight deck.
‘How long were we gone?’ I ask.
Silas takes the pipe from his mouth. ‘Four days. We had to land, after we shook the Seekers, and repair the ship. Then we went to Depot Twelve and waited, but Moloney never showed. So we came back, flew patrol near the Edge and,’ he glances at the others, ‘saw you.’
‘Moloney’s gone,’ I tell the Rooks. ‘He flew us into the Edge and crashed. That was what killed him, not me.’
The oldest
