Retribution Falls - Chris Wooding [141]
“Two.”
He closed his eyes and, to his faint surprise, dislodged a tear. He felt it trickle down the side of his face, over the hump of his cheekbone, to be lost in his beard.
He’d worked so hard to be great. It had ended in ignominy, disgrace, and failure. What was a world worth that treated its inhabitants so?
“Thr—” Trinica began.
“Stop!” Frey snapped.
Crake’s eyes stayed closed. Hovering on the razor-blade edge between existence and oblivion, he dared not tip the balance with the slightest movement.
“Seven sixty-seven, double one, double eight,” he heard his captain say.
There was a long pause. His body shook with each thump of his heart. He didn’t even hope. He didn’t even know if he wanted to be left in the world of the living.
But the choice wasn’t his to make. He felt the chill metal of the revolver muzzle leave his forehead. His eyes fluttered open. Dracken had stepped back and was regarding him like a child who has just spared an insect. Then she turned to Frey and raised an eyebrow. Frey looked away angrily.
Crake felt detached from himself, clothed in a dreamlike numbness. He watched as Dracken’s crew carried Bess away from the Ketty Jay. Then, with obvious glee, they stood her on her feet. A hunched metal statue, a monument to their victory. He heard Dracken order the man with the steel ear to assign two men to fly the Ketty Jay behind them. Frey wouldn’t meet anyone’s eye: he’d been broken by Dracken and was burning with a hate and fury such as Crake had never seen him show.
But it all seemed far away and inconsequential. He was still alive, somehow, although he wasn’t sure he’d fully returned from the brink yet.
Someone patted his shoulder. Malvery. They were being urged toward the nearby passenger shuttle. From there they’d be taken to the Delirium Trigger’s brig. Crake sent a mental message to his feet to get them moving. Dazed, he stumbled along with the group, his boots scuffing up little gray clouds. They were herded up some steps and into the belly of the shuttle, where they sat, surrounded by armed guards.
Crake looked out through the shuttle door at the lonely figure of Bess. The crewmen had deserted her now and were attending to other tasks. The shuttle was powering up its engines, sending veils of dust to coat her.
Let her sleep, he thought. Good night, Bess.
Then the door slammed closed, and she was lost from his sight.
Chapter Thirty-two
AN AUDIENCE WITH DRACKEN—BRINGING UP THE PAST—THE UGLY TRUTH OF IT ALL
ut, you.”
Frey looked up and saw a thickset, bald man with a bushy black beard on the other side of the bars. “You mean me?”
“You’re the cap’n, ain’t ya?”
He glanced around at his crew, trying to decide whether there was any advantage in protesting. All six of them had been put in the same cell of the Delirium Trigger’s brig. There were five cells in all, each capable of holding ten men. The walls were metal, and the lights were weak. The smell of oil was in the air, and the sound of clanking machinery and distant engines echoed in the hollow spaces.
Silo met his eyes with a customarily inscrutable gaze. Malvery just shrugged.
“I’m the captain,” Frey said at length.
“Cap’n Dracken wants to see you,” the bald man informed him.
The gaoler unlocked the door and pushed it open, waving a shotgun to deter any attempts at a breakout. Frey walked through, and the door clanged shut behind him.
“Hey,” said Malvery. “While you’ve got her ear, ask if we can get some rum down here, eh?”
Pinn laughed explosively. Crake didn’t stir from where he sat in a corner, drowned in his own misery. Harkins had fallen asleep, tired out by being afraid of everything. Silo was silent.
And Jez? What was Jez doing right now? Frey had turned it over and over in his mind, but he still couldn’t work out how she had faked her own death convincingly enough to fool Trinica’s man. She’d refused to reveal how she was going to do it when she first told him of her plan. She just said, “Trust me.”
Still, he was beginning to wonder if she actually had died.
The bald