Crake had shaken off his drowsiness and was sitting up, fascinated. ‘So it’s highly flammable and yet it insulates you from the heat,’ he said. ‘That’s actually quite astounding, Pinn. How did you make it?’
‘Ah!’ said Pinn, preening. ‘That’d be telling.’
Malvery studied him for a moment and then said confidently, ‘He doesn’t know.’
‘I do!’ Pinn protested.
Malvery scoffed. ‘Aye. I bet you were keeping met- ic -ulous records all the way through.’
‘Well, what kind of inventor bothers with all that boring stuff when there’s inventions to be… er… invented?’ Pinn protested. He looked slightly worried now. No doubt it was the first time it had occurred to him that he might not be able to make it again.
‘You mean you’ve invented this Incredible Flame-Slime and you’ve no idea how you did it?’ Crake asked in astonishment.
‘I made a whole pot of the stuff,’ Pinn said lamely, with a helpless shrug. ‘I mean, I…’ An expression of alarm crossed his face and he stared at his burning arm. ‘Wait a minute. This is getting pretty hoaaa aaaaaaaarrrgh!!!! ’
‘Oh, come on. You pulled that trick once already,’ Harkins sniffed, as Pinn flapped at himself, screaming.
‘Don’t think he’s faking this time,’ said Malvery, surging to his feet and pulling his coat from the back of his chair. He bundled into Pinn, knocking him to the floor and smothering his arm. Pinn rolled around shrieking beneath the doctor’s not inconsiderable weight, but finally came to rest, panting, his face white and sweaty.
‘It’s out?’ Malvery asked.
Pinn nodded weakly.
‘Come on, then. Let’s get you to the-’
Malvery never finished, because at that moment Slag, sensing vulnerable prey, leapt from his perch atop the cupboard and launched himself at Pinn’s head. Pinn howled and twisted as the cat savaged his scalp. Malvery swore and tried to beat Slag away, but the cat hung on tight, and Pinn’s thrashing mea th Pinn saidnt that Malvery hit him more often than not.
‘Somebody get that cat off him!’ Frey cried in exasperation.
‘Right you are, Cap’n,’ said Jez. She went down to one knee and held out her arms. Slag disengaged from his bloodied foe and bolted across the mess towards her. She picked him up and held him protectively against her chest, while he groomed himself in satisfaction.
‘I thought that cat hated you!’ Harkins accused, feeling somewhat betrayed at the sight of his old enemy showing such affection towards the object of his desire.
Jez ignored him, which hurt. She looked at Pinn instead, who was being helped to his feet by Malvery. ‘I think he had a grudge about the whole rum and toast thing.’
‘Infirmary. Now,’ said Malvery to Pinn, who was amusingly close to tears.
‘I can’t get up the ladder,’ Pinn whined, holding up his arms: one mildly burned beneath the tatters of his coat sleeve, the other still in a sling.
Ashua was shaking her head in despair. ‘How you lot managed to hijack a train, I’ll never know.’
Frey clapped his hands together. ‘Well, then,’ he said brightly. ‘That was fun. Now if Pinn’s done being an idiot, let’s get airborne, shall we?’
Jez liked the engine room of the Ketty Jay. It reminded her in some way of her father’s workshop: the smell of grease and oil, the heavy presence of machinery, the sticky warmth in the air. And it was certainly warm now. The Ketty Jay had only recently put down near the edge of the Free Trade Zone, and the residual heat from the prothane engine, combined with the baking afternoon sun, had driven the temperature to sweltering.
She picked her way through the tight mesh of walkways and steps that surrounded the engine assembly, following the sounds of movement, the occasional clank of a spanner. Silo was around here somewhere, as usual. In fact, she’d been counting on it. She needed to talk to someone, and there was only one man on the crew she thought would understand.
She found him kneeling in front of a panel, tinkering with the engine. Slag was there, too, lying on top of a warm pipe. The cat gave her a steady gaze as she approached.
‘Hey,’ she said to Silo.
He didn’t reply. Beads of sweat were trickling from his shaven head as he worked.
‘Can I talk to you?’
‘You talkin’, ain’tcha?’ he replied.
Jez hunkered down next to him, undeterred. He’d been in a dark mood for several days now, and she didn’t reckon he’d come out of it soon. She briefly considered asking him what he was doing, but Silo wasn’t much for smalltalk. Besides, she could see that he wasn’t really doing anything. There wasn’t much to be done: the new engine needed very little maintenance. Not that it stopped Silo constantly looking for something to fix.
‘I had this dream,’ she said. ‘Well, more like a vision, I supposed you’d say.’ And she told him about it, how she’d gone back to the day she died, and looked down on her body in the snow, and how she’d stood beneath the dreadnought and listened to the cries of the Manes.
‘And I was drawn to them, you know?’ she said. ‘Damn, it was like
… Well, I suppose you’ve not heard anyone speaking Murthian for a long time now, but I bet it’d be music to your ears if you did.’
Silo glanced at her, and then away. He’d stopped messing with the engine and was paying attention now. ‘Reckon it would.’
‘I mean it felt familiar, like I missed it or something. And there were chains and ropes and things hanging off the side of the dreadnought, and I thought… I felt this compulsion to climb up there and join them.’
‘But you didn’t, huh?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘At first… When I first got caught by the Manes, for a long time after I was scared that I was turning into one of them. That nothing could stop it, and it wasn’t my choice.’ She picked at the toe of her boot awkwardly. ‘But then I faced up to them, right? You helped me with that.’
‘I recall,’ he said.
‘And they let me go. They stopped calling to me, they accepted my decision. I didn’t want to be with them; I wanted to be with you lot.’ She sat back against the rail of the gangway. ‘But ever since then, all I’ve done is wonder what I was missing out on. I mean, they can do things. I can do things.’
Silo looked at the cat. ‘Noticed that,’ he said.
She caught herself, fearing that she’d said too much. The crew could tolerate or ignore the fact that she was half-Mane because her daemonic side rarely ever got loose. But she couldn’t let anyone suspect she might be able to hear their thoughts, even if it was in an uncontrolled and random fashion. On a craft full of secrets, it would be the final straw.
‘I want to know who they are,’ she said. That, at least, was something she could admit. ‘But I can’t get close to them. I know they’re out there. I can hear their voices. But I can’t be a part of their conversation.’
The Manes were bonded by mutual understanding. Each was connected to the others in a thousand subtle ways through the daemon that united them, yet each was an individual, capable of privacy of thought. It had to be that way, or else why would the book in her quarters exist? Manes read, for enjoyment or education. It all seemed a far cry from the feral ghouls of legend.
But she’d chosen not to be a part of that, and they, in turn, had withdrawn from her. She didn’t know the plans and mysteries of the Manes. She wouldn’t be allowed to know, unless she was one of them. Humans were enemies to the Manes, and she was half-human. Until she wasn’t, until she was indisputably, entirely, a Mane, she would always be a foreigner to them.
But she’d never go that far.
‘I’m not scared of being turned into a Mane against my will any more,’ she said. ‘I’m scared that I’ll want it. I’m scared that the more I learn about them, the more I’ll learn to be like them.’ She looked into his dark eyes. ‘And the less I’ll be like me.’