Leviathan Wakes - James S. A. Corey [224]
“Julie. You need to wake up now.”
She moaned and lifted an ineffectual arm to push him away.
“Come back to me,” he said. “You need to come back now.”
Her eyes opened. They weren’t human anymore—the sclera etched with swirls of red and black, the iris the same luminous blue as the fireflies. Not human, but still Julie. Her lips moved soundlessly. And then:
“Where am I?”
“Eros Station,” Miller said. “The place isn’t what it used to be. Not even where it used to be, but… ”
He pressed the bed of filament with his hand, judging it, and then rested his hip at her side like he was sitting on her bed. His body felt achingly tired and also lighter than it should. Not like low gravity. The unreal buoyancy had nothing to do with the weary flesh.
Julie tried to talk again, struggled, stopped, tried again.
“Who are you?”
“Yeah, we haven’t officially met, have we? My name’s Miller. I used to be a detective for Star Helix Security back on Ceres. Your parents contracted with us, only it was really more a friends-in-high-places thing. I was supposed to track you down, grab you, ship you back down the well.”
“Kidnap job?” she said. Her voice was stronger. Her gaze seemed more focused.
“Pretty standard,” Miller said, then sighed. “I kind of cocked it up, though.”
Her eyes fluttered closed, but she kept talking.
“Something happened to me.”
“Yeah. It did.”
“I’m scared.”
“No, no, no. Don’t be scared. It’s all right. In an ass-backward kind of way, but it’s all right. Look, right now the whole station is heading back for Earth. Really fast.”
“I dreamed I was racing. I was going home.”
“Yeah, we need to stop that.”
Her eyes opened again. She looked lost, anguished, alone. A tear streaked down from the corner of her eye, glowing blue.
“Give me your hand,” Miller said. “No, really, I need you to hold something for me.”
She lifted her hand slowly, seaweed in a soft current. He took his hand terminal, settled it in her palm, pressed her thumb to the dead man’s switch.
“Just hold that there. Don’t let it up.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“Long story, just don’t let up.”
His suit alarms shrieked at him when he undid his helmet seals. He turned them off. The air was strange: acetate and cumin and a deep, powerful musk that made him think of hibernating animals. Julie watched him as he stripped off his gloves. Right then, the protomolecule was latching on to him, burrowing into his skin and eyes, getting ready to do to him what it had done to everyone on Eros. He didn’t care. He took the hand terminal back and then laced his fingers through hers.
“You’re driving this bus, Julie,” he said. “Do you know that? I mean, can you tell?”
Her fingers were cool in his, but not cold.
“I can feel… something,” she said. “I’m hungry? Not hungry, but… I want something. I want to go back to Earth.”
“We can’t do that. I need you to change course,” Miller replied. What had Holden said? Give her Venus. “Head for Venus instead.”
“That’s not what it wants,” she said.
“It’s what we’ve got on offer,” Miller said. Then, a moment later: “We can’t go home. We need to go to Venus.”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“You’re a fighter, Julie. You’ve never let anyone call your shots for you. Don’t start now. If we go to Earth—”
“It’ll eat them too. The same way it ate me.”
“Yeah.”
She looked up at him.
“Yeah,” he said again. “Like that.”
“What happens on Venus?”
“We die maybe. I don’t know. But we don’t take a lot of people with us, and we make sure no one gets a hold of this crap,” he said, gesturing at the grotto around them. “And if we don’t die, then… well, that’ll be interesting.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“You can. The thing that’s doing all this? You’re smarter than it is. You’re in control. Take us to Venus.”
The fireflies swirled around them, the blue light pulsing slightly: bright and dim, bright and dim. Miller saw it in her face when she made the decision. All around them, the lights went bright, the grotto flooding in soft blue, and then dimmed back to where they had been before. Miller felt something catch at the back of his