Page 157 of The Space Between Stars

“Oh—I—” What a convenient excuse for her being intolerable. “Suit yourself.” She wiped her mouth on her sleeve and pretended it didn’t sting that he would choose his abuser over kissing her. “I’ll return you, then.” She hadn’t intended for the edge in her voice. She wasn’t sure what she’d intended to begin with.

Attilatia started for the tunnels back into the legislative chambers. She remembered, too late, the pilfered bag of nuts, still sitting at her workstation. She didn’t turn back for them. She didn’t want to look him in the eye.

Behind her, she heard the boy stop, and the undeniable crunch that meant he had taken a bite.

THIRTY-SEVEN

NIKLAUS

Year: 748 Post Cataclysm: Present Day

Location: Jiradesh Desert

The sunrise was the color of piss.

When Niklaus woke and rolled back the canvas of his tent, the space where Dex usually set his tent was vacant. An empty square of gritty sand that sat too bright, too yellow for the likes of his throbbing head, was all that stared back. That made the morning taste like piss, too.

The day following the rally and the meeting with the Masticos slipped by in a blur. The hours were both long and short, passed without conversation, without company, but ripe with self-loathing. Niklaus made it through them without moss or liquor. The itch was there at the corner of his mind, but he could finally tolerate it. He hadn’t been clear of the moss in two years.

He returned to his station during the evening mess, feet throbbing and mouth dry from a day of walking. He scrubbed in silence for nearly an hour, wishing time were a needle he could turn. This was how the rest of the journey would go for him: wake, clean, walk, clean, sleep.

Only another moon, and this would all be over. If he didn’t die in a horrific, contrived explosion he couldn’t prevent, if it had all been a lie, he could go back to life as it was before. Back to the same old misery of people who weren’t present. He…

He had made a mistake and there wasn’t any fixing it. Calver had believed him. He’d endangered himself, trying to help him. And Niklaus had been a pissing idiot—so sure he was being deceived again, he couldn’t separate fact from fiction.

“Meyernes.” It was the chef. Niklaus blinked at the obtuse man, hardly believing he’d addressed him. “You, ah. You’ve already finished those.” He pointed at Niklaus’s stack, which he’d started for a second time. “Those are clean.”

“Right.”

“Someone’s here. Been asking for you.” The chef jerked his chin over his shoulder.

Niklaus followed the motion until he came gaze to gaze with the same hard-eyed recruit from after the first rally. Chevek Balfida.

“Meyernes.” Chevek nodded.

The chef lumbered away, past a now-empty mess tent in the direction of the merchant’s quarter.

Silence pressed down in his wake until Niklaus sighed. “I don’t think I can help you.”

“Neither can anyone else. So here we stand.”

“I, ahm, take it you want to talk to the mute?”

“He and I can help one another.”

A subtle pinprick of realization quickly compounded into a yawning gap of opportunity. Niklaus’s chest inflated with it. Chevek might be the linchpin they needed to prevent disaster. He might still have agency to do something. “Your brother. He’s the founder of the Groundling movement in Seraphinden, eah?”

Chevek’s head swiveled, and he gave Niklaus a glare that might have turned sand into glass. “That he is.”

“I know more than one oligarch who’d love to see his head on a plate.” Chevek stiffened, but Niklaus waved a hand. “Easy. It would only be as a garnish after eating me alive.”

“Why?”

“Because you have some influence here, don’t you?”

Chevek’s face was stone. “I’m entry level. Same as you.”

A lie Niklaus could see clean through. “I don’t mean in the Red Wing. I mean with the Groundlings. I knew Latouda. I know how deep your people run.” Not to mention the team of other recruits that seemed to hover around Chevek, just out of reach whenever they spoke. “How many men are here under your command?”