“I’ll keep trying,” Alanik said.
Arturo stood behind her in the doorway. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll find you someplace quiet where you can concentrate.”
Alanik nodded and turned to follow Arturo out.
I was being too hard on her, probably. It wasn’t her fault Cobb disappeared.
I’d apologize after we found him.
“Jorgen,” FM said. I knew what she was going to say. She’d said it several times.
“What I need,” I said, “is to find Cobb. Are any of the slugs familiar enough with the admiral to hyperjump to him?”
“I don’t know,” FM said. “We haven’t tried to get them to recognize him, but some of them might…” She looked like she was going to go back to arguing that I should sit down and stop for a minute, but I didn’t want to stop. I was outrunning the storm right now, and I was going to keep running as long as I could.
“Find out,” I said. “Get Rig on it too.” I turned and strode down the hall into Cobb’s office, closing the door behind me.
I didn’t know what to say to any of them, not about what happened, not about what had to happen now. Cobb would know what to do with all of this.
But he wasn’t the one I missed most at the moment. In my mind, I watched the Superiority ship explode over and over again. Some of that image must have leaked into the nowhere, because Snuggles and Boomslug appeared on my shoulders, and Boomslug slid down my arm into the crook of my elbow and softly trilled, “Boom.”
“Can you find Cobb?” I asked Snuggles.
She responded by nuzzling my ear, but she didn’t take us anywhere. I pressed my back against the door, closing my eyes.
More than anything, I wished Spensa were here.
Two
Two days later, we still hadn’t heard a word from Cobb. Alanik tried her best, but no matter where she looked she couldn’t find Gran-Gran. They’d simply disappeared, she said.
At this point, I was the only cytonic from Detritus who hadn’t mysteriously disappeared. Spensa was stuck in the nowhere, but she’d at least managed to get in contact with me twice. It had been several days now, and I was anxious to hear from her again.
But from Cobb and Gran-Gran, there was only silence.
I sat at a conference table with Alanik, FM, and Minister Cuna, the dissenter Superiority bureaucrat. Boomslug and Snuggles snuffled around under my chair like they expected someone to have spilled some caviar down there, though the floor was swept twice a day as per Mandate 27 of the Facilities Regulations. Alanik had just returned from ReDawn with half the flight—I’d sent Arturo, Nedd, and Kimmalyn to finish solidifying the alliance.
“Rinakin is prepared to send a flight of ships to Detritus as a symbolic gesture,” Alanik said. “And more, certainly, if there’s a need for them here.”
I struggled to focus on what she was saying. I’d barely been sleeping—every time I closed my eyes, that ship exploded in the darkness. In my dreams, I watched my mother mouth those words at me through the glass: Do better than we did. The ship tore to pieces before my eyes, sometimes while I watched from the platform—sometimes with me still inside it, somehow conscious of everything as it shredded me.
In the very worst nightmares, it was Spensa on the other side of the glass.
“ReDawn is more vulnerable,” I said. “We have the planetary shield to protect us. We should be sending flights to defend you.”
“The taynix will help with that,” FM said.
We’d given Rinakin a single taynix of each type, and we already had people from the ground crews scouring the caverns of Detritus for more. We’d lost many in the trap set by the Superiority, and we were going to need all the hyperdrives we could find in the coming days.
“Do you think Stoff will let us take flights to ReDawn if the Superiority attacks again?” FM asked.
“Maybe,” I said. I’d stayed behind while the others went to ReDawn, because I’d wanted to be here to keep an eye on things until we found Cobb. “He’s been weirdly receptive to my suggestions.”
“Do you think it’s because he agrees with you?” FM asked. “Or because he sees an opportunity to escape blame if all this goes wrong?”
“It’s the second,” I said. Once Stoff got over the idea of me challenging him, he’d become almost too accommodating. If things went well, I fully expected him to take credit for all of it. If we crashed and burned, he was going to pin it all on me. “But I don’t think Cobb is going to reprimand me for trying to protect our people in his absence.”