‘You gonna be you no matter what,’ he said. ‘It’s just that time makes a different you. Seems stupid that people try ’n’ improve ’emselves the whole time, yet they don’t never want to change. ’ He studied her, and there was an intensity to his gaze that unsettled her. ‘Like it or not, they your people now. Ain’t easy to turn your back on your people. You don’t never stop wantin’ to be with ’em, no matter what it might cost.’
He began tinkering with the panel again, as if the conversation was over. Jez chewed over what he’d said. She might have told him more, but his face suddenly took on an expression of disgust and he threw down his spanner, making her jump.
‘This damn engine!’ he said. ‘It don’t need fixin’. There ain’t no call for me to be here no more. Man ain’t nothin’ if he ain’t useful.’
He got up, rising to his full height, and strode off down the walkway towards some steps.
‘Where are you going?’ Jez asked, bewildered.
‘I’m goin’ to tell the Cap’n how he can find what he’s lookin’ for,’ Silo threw over his shoulder.
Jez sat there for a moment, frowning. The cat regarded her with feline inscrutability. Then she scrambled to her feet.
‘Hey!’ she called as she chased after him. ‘How do you know?’
Twenty-Three
The noise, the damned noise.
Frey remembered that sound. He remembered hearing it as he lay dying on the tilted floor of the Ketty Jay ’s cockpit. Through the cracked windglass, through the metal hull, he’d heard it, endless, dipping and swelling but never, ever stopping.
That day, he’d lain for hours in the punishing heat, while his life leaked slowly through the bandage around his waist. The blazing Samarlan sun was made green by the foliage pressed up against the windglass. He sweated, and breathed, and the tiredness in every muscle seemed to multiply with every breath until it felt like he was being smothered with heavy blankets. His eyes wouldn’t stay focused, and the edges of his vision had gone dark.
He’d listened to the insects. The nameless, invisible monsters, who existed in their millions but could never be seen. They sawed and creaked and chirped and whirred and chattered in a maddening cacophony.
That’s the sound of living, he thought that day. One big, confused and messy blare, nothing matching or making sense, and nothing of it meaning shit all. Just everyone trying to yell louder than everyone else. I’m better off out of it.
It was a rare philosophical moment, but he’d reckoned he was due one, since he considered himself dead meat at that point. He’d crash-landed his aircraft in the trackless mountain jungles of northern Samarla with a bayonet wound in his guts. The rest of the crew was gone, butchered by the Daks in an ambush when they set down to deliver supplies for Vard infantrymen. When he finally blacked out, he never expected to wake up again.
But Silo found him, having crawled in through the cargo ramp, which had fallen ajar during the crash. The Murthian nursed him back to health, using the medical supplies and food that had never been delivered. In return, Frey flew him out of Samarla.
Nine years since that day, give or take a few months. And now they were back. Back to the same sweltering jungle. Back to the same spot where he’d crashed, more or less. It was just inside the Free Trade Zone now, which had been set up after the last war, but its new status hadn’t changed it a bit.
Nine years, and those bloody insects still hadn’t shut up.
Frey pushed through the undergrowth, his trousers damp and his shirt sticking to his back. Silo was ahead of him, clambering up a slope, picking his way through the trees. The jungle was menacingly foreign to Frey’s eyes. The trees that grew here were not like the trees of home. Their strange forms, scaly bark and towering size made him uneasy. Almost as uneasy as the stranger he followed.
Nine years, and he’d never asked who Silo really was.
It seemed ridiculous, when he put it like that. He’d always just assumed that he was naturally incurious. He respected a man’s privacy, and it wasn’t his business what Silo’s life had been like before they met. But after nine years in each other’s company, well, there had to be more to it than simple idleness, on both their parts. Silo didn’t want to tell him. Frey didn’t want to know.
Or was it that he didn’t want to care?
And it wasn’t only Silo, either. He found himself actively switching off on the rare occasions when the less close-mouthed members of his group started talking about their past lives. Usually they were drunk at that point, so he had an excuse to forget it, but still… strange behaviour, really.
He supposed it was because their past lives didn’t involve him, and anything that didn’t involve him was by definition unimportant. Each of them existed only from the moment he met them, as far as he was concerned. Past experience suggested that they’d fade just as quickly after they were gone, although that wouldn’t make the parting hurt any the less. He didn’t feel bad about that; he thought it an honest appraisal of his character. He’d been that way since he could remember. Growing up in an orphanage meant a lot of goodbyes and a lot of new faces. Impermanence was the defining quality of Frey’s life.
But it bothered him that Silo knew how to find the place where Ugrik was being held, and he’d waited almost a half a day to tell him. And it bothered him that he still didn’t know where they were going.
Not for the first time, he wondered if he should have come at all. Silo hadn’t wanted him to, saying it was far too dangerous. But Frey had insisted. He was buggered if he’d sit back and let another member of his crew risk their lives in his stead. The least he could do was get himself killed alongside them.
In the end, Silo relented. ‘Just you,’ he said. ‘Not no one else. And you gonna regret it.’
Frey was already regretting it. The heat, the exhausting climb, the bloody noise!
And the memories. Because somewhere not far from here was an old ruined village where his last crew had died. Where he’d closed the Ketty Jay ’s cargo ramp in the face of his hapless navigator, Rabby, trapping him outside to be carved up by the enemy.
‘ Don’t you leave me here! ’
He’d heard that same cry in Thesk, when the Iron Jackal had lured him into an alleyway. A cry from the past, the sound of all his guilt and shame. He’d been trying to secure his own extinction, but he hadn’t been brave enough in the end, and he’d only ended up securing everyone else’s. They might have been a worthless bunch, that crew, but they didn’t have to die for it.
Yet the daemon that haunted him knew about that day.
There were other things it knew about him, too. When he first saw it, it had been fighting its way free of an amniotic sac, and he’d been powerfully reminded of the unborn child that had died in Trinica’s womb. The bayonets that it had as fingers were the same kind that almost took his life, that day when his crew were killed. One of its eyes was Trinica’s, or rather the eye of the pirate queen she disguised herself as: a pupil black and huge in its orbit.
And the armour plating that sewed itself in and out of its skin. He’d thought there was something familiar about it. It had come to him suddenly during the night. It was the same colour and texture as the hull of the Delirium Trigger.
It builds itself from everything you’re most afraid of. That’s what the sorcerer had said, back in the Underneath. The daemon came from him. He’d constructed it with his own fears and flaws.
Great, he thought mordantly.
Death and Trinica. Trinica and death. The two were inseparable. It frightened him that she should figure so large in the dark churn of his subconscious. Almost as large as the day Rabby died.