Finally, the sleepyhead sat up, light through the window—from my light-line—outlining his pale face and bleary eyes. He blinked at me, but didn’t seem the least bit surprised as he walked over and slid the window open to the side.
“Hey,” he said. “Took you long enough.”
“Long enough?”
“To come try to talk me into coming back. Which I’m not going to do. I don’t have everything figured out, but I’m still sure that my decision to—”
“Oh, shut up about that,” I whispered. “Grab your jumpsuit. I need to show you something.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“This is serious.” I said. “You’re going to flip your boots when you see it.”
Infuriatingly, he just leaned on the windowsill, looking out at me as I was hanging there upside down—which was not easy, mind you. “It’s almost midnight, Spin.”
“This will be worth it.”
“You’re going to drag me off to some cavern, aren’t you? I won’t be back until like two or three.”
“If you’re lucky.”
He took a deep breath, then grabbed his jumpsuit. “You do realize that you’re the weirdest friend I’ve ever had.”
“Oh, come on. Let’s not pretend you have other friends.”
“Strange,” he said, “that my parents never managed to give me a sibling—but I still somehow ended up with a sister who gets me into trouble all the time.”
I grinned. “Meet you down below,” I said, then I paused. “Flip. Your. Boots. Rig. Trust me.”
“Yeah, yeah. Give me a minute to sneak past my parents.” He pulled the drapes closed, and I let myself down to the street below, where I waited impatiently.
Igneous was a strange place at night. The apparatus worked all hours, of course. Day and night were just words here, though we still used the terms. There was a mandatory quiet cycle—during which the cavern loudspeakers didn’t play any announcements or speeches—and a curfew for those who weren’t on last shift. But nobody paid attention to you as you walked the streets if you kept to your own business. The default assumption in Igneous was that everyone was going about something useful.
Rig met me down at street level as promised, and we walked through the cavern—passing the mural of a thousand birds in flight, each one divided in half by a line, the two halves slightly offset from each other. The birds soared from a red-orange sun, which you couldn’t even see up above.
Our cadet’s pins got us past the guards and into the tunnels. As we walked one of the easier paths, Rig filled me in on what he’d been doing the last few weeks. His parents were happy he’d washed out; everyone knew how dangerous being a pilot was.
“They’re proud, of course,” Rig said, grunting as he climbed some rubble with me. “Everyone treats me really strangely once they see the pin. Like, they listen to what I say, and tell me my ideas are good—even if they aren’t. And people make way for me, like I’m someone important.”
“You are.”
“No, I’m the exact same amount of important I was before.” He shook his head. “But I’ve got a dozen different job offers waiting for me, and I’ve got two months to decide.”
“Two months?” I repeated. “Without a job or school? Just free time?”
“Yeah. Mrs. Vmeer keeps trying to push me toward politics.”
“Politics,” I said, almost stopping in the tunnel. “You.”
“Tell me about it.” He sighed and sat down on a nearby rock. “But what if she’s right? Shouldn’t I listen to her? Everyone else thinks politics is the best thing you can do with your life. Maybe I should do what they say.”
“What do you want, though?”
“Now you care about that?” he asked.
I winced, and Rig looked away, blushing deeply. “I’m sorry, Spin. That wasn’t fair—I haven’t been fair. To you, I mean. I chose to study for the pilot’s test; you didn’t make me. And yes, your dreams kind of consumed my own—but that’s mostly because I didn’t have any dreams. Not really.”
He slumped on his rock, back to the wall, looking up at the tunnel ceiling. “I keep thinking, what if it happens again? What if I let myself get excited about a job, then discover I’m completely unsuited to it? I’ve failed at flying, right? So maybe I’ll just keep failing?”
“Rig,” I said, taking him by the arm. “The problem isn’t that you’re going to be unsuited to what you pick. The problem is what it’s always been. That you’re simply too scudding great at too many different things.”
He looked up at me. “Do you really believe that, Spin?”
“Sure do. I mean yeah, you decided flying wasn’t for you—but I think if you have a flaw, it’s not that you fail too often. It’s that you refuse to admit what everyone sees. The fact that you’re incredible.”
He smiled. And seeing Rig smile felt good. It reminded me of our days as kids, when an outcast and a kid who was bullied had made friends against the odds.
“You’re going to drag me into something again, aren’t you?” he asked. “Something ridiculous?”
I hesitated. “Yeah . . . Probably.”
“All right,” he said, standing up. “I guess I’m in. Let’s go see this surprise of yours.”
We continued on, climbing until I led him, finally, out a gap onto the surface. I pulled him over to the entrance to my improvised home, then made him hold on to me as I lowered us down inside, as—well—the chances that he’d slip and fall were pretty good. He really was amazing at a ton of things . . . but I’d seen him drop no fewer than eight books on his toes while studying this past year.
“This had better not be something to do with rats, Spin,” he said as we landed. “I know you go crazy for them, but . . .”
I turned up the light on my light-line, illuminating the ship. As if in coordination with my reveal, M-Bot turned on his dash and running lights. I’d cleared away much of the rubble, and with the lights, the ship didn’t look half bad. Broken, yes, with a bent wing. But distinctly different from anything we had in the DDF.
Rig gaped at it, his jaw dropping practically to the floor.
“Well?” I said. “What do you think?”
In response he sat down on a nearby boulder and—still staring at the ship—pulled off his right boot, then flipped it over his shoulder.
“Well,” I noted, “I said boots. plural. But I’ll take it.”
18
I didn’t get much sleep that night.
I spent a few hours helping Rig look over M-Bot—he wanted to check each bit of damage. Eventually though, I started to get bleary-eyed. Rig was still going strong, so I rolled out a mat and used Bloodletter for a pillow.
Every time I dozed off, I’d eventually wake to hear Rigmarole speaking to the ship. “So . . . you’re a machine, but you can think.”
“All machines ‘think,’ in that they execute responses to input. I am simply far more complex in my executable responses, and in the inputs I can recognize . . .”