face in brittle silver. It fell also onto the two bodies on the cockpit floor, and glittered in their blood. Dracken’s men. The iron pipe that had stoved in their heads lay between them.
Jez’s jaw was set hard. Navigation charts were spread on the dashboard next to her. She stared through the windglass at the world below, eyes fixed. The Ketty Jay slid through the darkness, high above the clouded mountains, a speck in the vast sky.
She could see the lights of other craft, visible at great distance. A flotilla of fighters surrounded a long, rectangular freighter. A prickle of shining dots signified a Navy corvette, cruising the horizon. And in between, there were the invisible vessels, like the Ketty Jay, that had reason to stay hidden and wanted to move unobserved. Stealthy shadows in the moonlight. A pilot wouldn’t see them unless they were very close, but Jez saw them all.
Even hours later, she was still trembling with the aftershocks of murder. Had there been a gun to hand she might have used it to threaten the men, then tied them up and kept them prisoner. But they had the guns, and she only had a length of pipe. She crept into the cockpit and brained the navigator before he even knew she was there. The pilot turned in his seat in time to receive the second blow across his forehead.
She’d told herself that she was only going to knock them out; but as with Fredger Cordwain, the Shacklemore man, it only took one blow to kill them. She was far stronger than her small frame suggested. Just another aspect of the change, along with her penetrating vision, her ability to heal bullet wounds in hours and the frightening hallucinations.
And the voices. The dissonant voices, the crew of that terrible craft, which loomed out of the endless fog of the Wrack. She could hear them now, their faint cries blowing on the wind that rushed past the hull of the Ketty Jay. Calling her. Calling her home.
Why not? Why not just go to them? Turn this crate to the north and get it all over with.
She was tired of this life. The last three years had been spent discarding one crew and joining up with another, never putting down roots. She kept her distance from the men and women she worked with because she knew, sooner or later, they’d find her out. It had been the same with the crew of the Ketty Jay. Eventually, she always had to run. Now that moment had come again.
Why stay in a world where you’re not wanted?
Every day, it got a little harder to resist the call of the Wrack. Every day eroded her willpower a little more. Was it only stubbornness that made her stay among people who would kill her if they knew what she was? Was it simply fear that prevented her from going to the north, where they lamented her absence, where she’d belong? Like the distant howl of a wolf pack, their cries stirred her, and she ached to go to them.
What’s stopping you, Jez? What’s stopping you?
What, indeed? Where else could she go from here? Did she imagine she could effect some kind of daring rescue in the Ketty Jay? No, that would be suicide. She wasn’t even very good at flying her. It would take a long time to get used to the many quirks of a craft as patched together as this. And even if she did somehow save Frey and the others, what then? How would she explain how she’d convinced Dracken’s crewman that she was dead?
It was just like all the times before, with all the other crews. The small things were adding up: her fantastically sharp eyesight; the way she never seemed to need sleep or food; how animals reacted around her; the uncanny healing after she got shot in Scarwater; the way she’d been unaffected by the fumes in Rook’s Boneyard.
And now there was this new ability to convincingly imitate a corpse. The first time, only Crake had seen it, and he hadn’t said a word. It could have been passed off as the Shacklemore man’s mistake. But twice?
Now the suspicious glances would begin. She’d start to hear that wary, mistrustful tone in their voices. Even on the Ketty Jay, where you didn’t ask about a person’s past, questions would be raised. They could accept a daemonist, but could they accept her? How long before Malvery insisted on giving her a check-up to solve the mystery? How long before they found her out?
