Sengupta’s screams ended.
He tried to ignore the other voices, the ones in his head saying Go back, you idiot. Let Jim handle it, he’s a soldier for chrissakes, what are you gonna do against a goddamn vampire? You’re collateral. You’re lunch.
That’s right, Backdoor. Just turn around and run away. Again.
The conveyor, insensitive, drew him forward into battle.
He emerged into the southern hemisphere, knees shaking. There were no calm voices. There were no voices at all.
There was no reconciliation.
The vampire clung one-handed to the grille. Her other hand held Sengupta by the throat, right at eye level, as if the pilot were a paper doll. Valerie looked impassively into her victim’s eyes; Sengupta squirmed and choked and didn’t look back.
The south pole was a bright gaping pit to stern. Its reflection smeared across the mirrorball like a round toothless mouth. An image flashed across Brüks’s forebrain, courtesy of his hind: Valerie tossing Sengupta into that maw. The Crown of Thorns closing its mouth and chewing.
Moore edged along the Tropic of Capricorn, feet just above the deck, hands open at his sides.
“Okay, we can take it from here.”
Not Moore. Lianna’s voice, ringing calm and clear from the back of the Crown’s throat. A moment later she sailed forth from its maw, fearless, light as air, heading directly for Valerie & Victim.
What’s wrong with her? “Lianna, don’t—”
“S’okay.” She spared a glance. “I’ve got it under—”
And was cut down with the sudden crack of bones snapping under the impact of Valerie’s foot, an obscene and elegant en pointe fired like a piston into Lutterodt’s rib cage. She spun back toward the south pole, a rag doll with no fixed center of gravity; the Crown caught her spine in passing, bent it the wrong way, tossed her back down its throat from whence she’d come.
Fuck fuck fuck—
“Let her go,” Moore was saying, his eyes still on Sengupta, calm as death. As though Lianna Lutterodt had never even made an appearance, as though she hadn’t just been swatted like a mosquito. As though she couldn’t possibly be bleeding out against the bulkhead a hundred meters to stern.
I have to help her.
Valerie kept eyes on Sengupta, head cocked like a predatory bird sizing up something shiny. “She attacks me.” Her voice was distant, almost distracted: voicemail from a monster with other things on its mind.
Brüks crept forward, belly against bulkhead: a strut here, a cargo strap there, hand over hand toward the south pole.
“She’s no threat.” Moore was behind Valerie now, looking past her shoulder to her prey. The prey croaked softly. “There’s no reason to—”
“Thank you for your tactical advice.” A faint white smile ghosted across her lips.
Was that a faint moan sighing up through the Crown’s throat? Still conscious then, maybe. Still hope.
“Trade,” Valerie said.
“Yes,” Moore replied, moving forward.
“Not you.”
Suddenly Brüks was off the deck and yanked into the air; suddenly Valerie’s hand was around his throat, gripping him just below the jaw with fingers cold and sinuous as tentacles while a distant irrelevant Rakshi Sengupta bounced off the southern hemisphere, hacking, doubled over.
And when Valerie looked at him with that bemused and distant stare, he looked back. He tried not to. Over the slow burning in his lungs, over the casual pain of a larynx compressed just this side of strangulation, he would have given anything to turn away. Somehow he didn’t have the will. He couldn’t even close his eyes against hers.
Her pupils were bright bloody pinpoints, red stars clenched tight against the light of day. Behind them, the bulkhead rolled past in lazy slow motion.
The Hub dwindled to the wrong end of a telescope. Sengupta was shouting somewhere, her voice raw and tinny and barely audible over the white noise of distant pounding surf: She killed one of them she killed one of her zombies one of her people he’s not on the board I can’t find him anywhere—
There was nothing in Valerie’s face but that spectral half smile, that look of dispassionate appraisal. She didn’t seem to notice Moore slipping up from behind, or Sengupta screaming headlong back into the fray with claws bared. She didn’t even seem to notice her own left hand flicking back of its own accord to casually slap the pilot into the soldier, all that momentum spun impossibly on the head of a pin and redirected a hundred eighty degrees. Fucking monster fucking monster fucking monster, Sengupta shouted from across an ocean and Brüks could only think: Cats and dogs cats and dogs…
But none of that mattered. All that mattered were he and Valerie, alone together: the way she let just enough air past her fingers to keep him awake, the way she reached out with her free hand and tapped that light arrhythmic tattoo across his temple; the things she whispered for his ears only, intimate secrets of such vital importance he forgot them even as she breathed them out along his cheek.
Behind her, Jim Moore grabbed a cargo strap and braced his feet against the wall. Valerie didn’t even bother to keep him in view.
“Is it true?” he asked quietly.
“Of course it’s fucking true she’s a vampire she’d kill all of—”
Moore, eyes locked on Valerie, raised a palm in Sengupta’s direction. Sengupta shut up as if guillotined.
“You think this matters.” There was distant amusement in Valerie’s voice, as if she’d just seen a rabbit stand up on its hind legs and demand the right to vote.
“You think so, too,” Moore began. “Or—”
“—you wouldn’t have reacted,” he and Valerie finished in sync.
He tried again: “Were they under formal con…” they chorused. He trailed off, an acknowledgment of futility. The vampire even matched his ellipsis without missing a beat.
Sengupta fumed silently across the compartment, too smart and too damn stupid to be scared. Brüks tried to swallow, gagged as his Adam’s apple caught between the vice of Valerie’s thumb and forefinger.
“Malawi,” Valerie said quietly, and: “Not mission-critical.”
Brüks swallowed again. As if there’s anyone on this goddamn ship who’s less mission-critical than me.
Maybe Moore was thinking it, too. Maybe he decided to act on behalf of Daniel Brüks, the Parasite That Walked Like a Man. Or maybe he just took advantage of his adversary’s distraction, maybe it didn’t have anything to do with Brüks at all. But something—changed subtly, in Moore’s stance. His body seemed looser, somehow, more relaxed, incongruously taller at the same time.
Valerie was still eye to eye with Brüks, but it didn’t matter. It was obvious from the way her smile widened and cracked, from the tiny click of teeth against teeth: she could see everything that mattered about Moore’s face, reflected in his own.
She turned, almost lazily, tossed Brüks aside like a cigarette butt. Brüks flailed across the open spine; he barely missed a figure blurring past in the opposite direction. A cargo cube caught him and slapped him back off the deck. He doubled over, coughing, while Moore and Valerie danced in fast-forward. The monster’s arms moved as though spun by a centrifuge; her body rebounded off the deck and shot through empty space where Jim Moore had existed a split-second before.