She pelted past Jayce without slowing, out of the medical department and along the blood-lit corridor, tears in her eyes, desperation in her heart, and a dark, swelling certainty bubbling along beneath it all. She couldn’t — as yet — bring this certainty out into the forefront of her mind, where the light of reason shone brightest, and examine it. Instead, she let it simmer down there in the darkness, aware of its existence, letting it guide her body to its goal like an autopilot system, driving her towards the hangars once again.
She supposed she knew what she’d been looking for the first time now, when Ella had stopped her. She just hadn’t known then — not really. Or rather, she’d known, perhaps, but she hadn’t known she’d known — she hadn’t wanted to know. But she had to have proof. She knew, but she still didn’t believe — couldn’t believe, not without proof. His eyes! Not Eli’s eyes — the eyes of a grieving, damaged man — but the eyes of something mindless and hungry and reptilian.
She rounded a corner at a full sprint and skidded to a stop, almost pitching herself onto her face, hands outstretched for balance. The corridor was filled with people, clearly in two opposing groups. Somebody was on the floor in the middle, and they looked hurt. One man — Lina thought it might have been Tryka from the refinery — was shoving another man, whom she couldn’t identify, and voices clamoured, competing for dominance.
Without waiting to see if whatever was going on here would turn into an all-out brawl, Lina spun around and bolted off, back the way she had come. She took a right, down a floor, past aeroponics — where she briefly saw worried, scampering figures in the darkness, desperately administering to the doomed crops that dangled in the darkness like hanged men — and right again, into the warehouse, that towering mausoleum of machine spares and oil-stains, where the stark architecture angled up into invisibility above her.
She wondered what she would do if Ella tried to stop her again. She didn’t think she’d be able to explain herself verbally, the way her mind felt at the moment, so she supposed she would try her best to fight her way into the hangar, if need be. The idea sounded ridiculous, especially when you considered Ella’s size, strength, and martial talents, but Lina just couldn’t imagine herself reacting in any other way. The beating of her heart had become a frantic buzz, a hummingbird trapped inside her.
As it happened, though, it wasn’t necessary to fight Ella Kown, because Ella Kown was nowhere to be seen this time. Neither, for that matter, was anybody else. Lina searched around the hangar door for a manual crank-handle. She found a slot, intended to receive a key that wasn’t there. She ran into the side room where she had sat drinking moonshine with Ella, what seemed like years ago now. She searched through the desk, turfing objects out onto the floor behind her, and was genuinely amazed when she found exactly the item she was looking for. She held it up in the rusty light for a moment, staring at it as if it might melt into shadow and simply bleed away. It was a heavy, dog-leg spanner with a star-shaped business end and a bare metal handle. She dashed back to the hangar door, shadows lapping at her heels.
She inserted the spanner into the access panel, where it snicked smoothly into place as if it had been used a thousand times before. She tried to turn it, expecting it to move with some difficulty, but was surprised when she couldn’t budge it at all. She adjusted the position of her feet, bracing herself to apply greater force, and tried again. Nothing. She swore softly to herself and stood back, chest hitching and heaving. And then she realised: she had been turning the damn thing the wrong way!
She stepped forwards again, getting a good grip on the spanner, and turned it the opposite way. This time it moved easily — almost too easily — and she stumbled and came close to falling. As she continued to turn the spanner, the massive door began to inch its way open, its motion accompanied by a hideous metallic screaming which made Lina’s teeth hurt. Once the opening was a half-metre wide, she dropped to the floor and wormed her way into the hangar on her chest, pushing herself through with her feet and clawing at the sticky, oily floor with her hands.
The hangar was clotted with shadow, utterly silent and still. Lina had never seen it like this before, and she was more than a little spooked, painfully aware that she was not supposed to be here. She crossed the floor in a rapid skulking crouch, half expecting somebody to grab her at any moment, eyes darting left and right as she attempted to check in every direction at once. The Kays lurked in the shadows, watching her with their dead-eye canopies.
She went to the wall beside the control room and opened the emergency cabinet. There was only one torch left in there, and she removed it from its clip to check the battery. Its charge indicator showed only fifteen percent, which was probably why it had been left. Still, that should be plenty for her purposes. She didn’t expect to be long. Deep inside, where that stream of certainty bubbled darkly, she already knew what she’d find.
She moved down the ranks of Kays, the yellow beam of her torch washing over rusted machinery and muscular bunches of cable. She stopped in front of K6-10, trying to summon the willpower to continue. Her breathing was a torn, rasping sound, loud in her own ears. She stood for a moment, trying to summon the will to actually carry through with her task. Truth be told, she didn’t want to. She didn’t want proof, didn’t want to make that certainty into fact. Really, she just wanted to go home and crawl back into bed, where she would lie in a foetal ball until either the air became finally unbreathable or the crisis had passed her by. But she had to, damn it, she had to. . .
She stepped towards Eli’s ship, letting the torchlight wash across its blistered surface. That surface was pocked and scuffed in probably a hundred places, mostly from micro-impacts in the belt, lending it the unwell appearance of a patient in the late stages of smallpox. Here and there, it was also marked by the distinctive rectangular dents left by the dead-lifter’s forks. Several of these were so deep that Lina was surprised they hadn’t pierced the hull, but she supposed the Kays were actually tougher than they looked.
She crouched down, checking the underside of the ship, moving around it with her heart high in her throat. And then she saw it: a crumpled patch of metal about the size of her hand. It looked like nothing, really, the sort of thing that one could easily glance at and not even see, especially on the cratered surface of K6-10. But Lina knew it for what it was. She reached out one trembling hand, watching it as if it belonged to somebody else, and touched that damaged area of wrinkled metal, trailing her fingers across the sharp little waves and jags.
That damaged area was where Eli had bumped Sal’s ship out in the belt. It was the mark of death, the black spot, the proof — the dreaded proof that she had needed.
‘Oh no,’ she sighed, her fingers caressing that crinkled patch of metal. ‘Oh no. . .’ She had never felt less happy to be vindicated in all her life. But that was what it had to be. It couldn’t be a coincidental impact from a micro-asteroid — it was too big, and a ding of that size would have been reported and known about. It wasn’t a scar from the lifter. It was what it was. Proof.