“No, we don’t,” she agreed.

  “What about me?” Druck asked.

  Keep shrugged. “Other than Bennie, the rest of you are pretty much just here because we’re here. There are quarters on the other side of the facility, along with showers, a recreation room, and some food that’s probably mutated into a killer tomato by now. Go do something that doesn’t include you being here for now, while the adults figure all this hee-haw out.”

  “You need me for something?” I asked.

  “We need you to rest,” Keep replied. “Stay as healthy and alive as you can.”

  “What do we do once you’ve figured things out?” Quasar asked.

  “That’s when we can get out of here. Track down the prince, kill the duke, save the universe. Badabing badaboom.”

  “For once, I like the sound of the words coming out of your mouth,” Matt said.

  “I want to stick around for a little while,” I said. “An hour or two maybe. David, I’d like to see the progress you’ve made.”

  “Sure, man,” David replied.

  “Whatever,” Druck said. “I’m gonna go look for those killer tomatoes. Zar, you coming?”

  She shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

  Shaq scampered into the room between their feet as they headed out the door, coming to me and scaling my space suit to my shoulder.

  “I guess this is home for now,” Matt said. “I’ve come close to being homeless before. I never thought I would wind up living inside a robot head and an asteroid shaped like a dog treat.”

  “Pretty awesome, huh?” I said.

  “If everything goes the way we hope and you make it back out of here alive? Yeah, that will be very awesome.”

  “Come on, Davie,” Keep said, the door to the lab section opening as he approached it. “We’ve got work to do.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Already accustomed to living aboard Head Case, it didn’t take long for me or the crew to adjust to living on Omega Station. The place had clearly been abandoned in a hurry. Beds were unmade. Clothes were spilled out of lockers and onto the floor. Half-eaten food had been left on tables. While there were no killer tomatoes, there was some type of fungus or mold that had prospered and spread across the floor which Druck and Quasar donned their space suits again to clean up.

  The assembler was functional but ancient, only able to accept a limited number of ingredients and likewise able to produce a limited number of culinary options. For the most part, we strayed back to Head Case to eat. We transferred some of the water from Head Case to tanks on the station, which had gone dry nearly nine hundred years ago. That got the showers running again. The individual bedrooms were cozy and comfortable, the sleeping surface of my bed one of the softest I had ever felt.

  Not that we planned to stay for long. Only until David created a sigil or I died. Once one of those things happened, David would turn his attention to helping Gia track down the source of the blueburn’s thrusters or hull, and from there hopefully come up with a lead on Prince Hiro. I tried not to think about what I had heard about abductions on Earth. Either locate the person within forty-eight hours or there was a very high probability they would never be found. But nobody stole the heir to the Hegemony just to kill them. Whoever was responsible wanted them for a reason. They had a plan, and I didn’t think that included murdering a child. That’s why I firmly believed either Sedaya or Sucaath had done it, and since they were working together they were both responsible.

  We could have maintained everything on Head Case, but it was good for morale for the others to have something to do, and they seemed to enjoy both the change of scenery and the opportunity to fix the place up. They especially appreciated the recreation room. Despite its age it turned out to have a pretty solid collection of movies, music, and virtual reality games.

  I didn’t get to enjoy any of that. I spent most of my time sleeping, spending maybe four or five hours a day out of bed. After the first few days, I pretty much felt like shit whenever I was awake. My appetite was just about gone, my strength dwindling, and I was getting dizzy more easily than before. While Alter had originally given me a month, I honestly wasn’t sure I would make it that far.

  “You should be resting, kid,” Keep said as I made my way into the lab, keeping a hand on the glass walls just in case I lost my balance.

  “I can’t stay in bed all the time,” I replied. This had quickly become our typical greeting. “Any progress?”

  Keep shook his head, expression dimming. “The usual.”

  Which meant David was still working hard on solving the mystery but had yet to come up with a breakthrough. He had progressed to a certain point with the sigils, even going so far as to create an enhanced calm sigil that his simulations suggested would pretty much kill any living organism by stopping all of its bodily functions. The accidentally offensive potential of the sigil had caused Keep to gloat over his apparently correct belief that David’s work was too dangerous to allow to continue. Except he allowed it because without it I would die, and he needed me in the fight. I wasn’t so sure anymore that was the only reason. He seemed sincerely worried about me whenever I hobbled into the lab.

  Anyway, calmed-to-death, as David called it, seemed more dangerous than it probably was. After all, Shaq could do the same thing naturally.

  “Clock’s ticking,” I said, falling into the closest seat. We were in the first of the glass-partitioned rooms, David hunched behind the terminal, staring at the display and occasionally scribbling something onto the same slab that held the Grimoire. Having watched him work a few times, it was probably another equation or a value for a variable. When he said he was close, I think we all thought he would solve the puzzle in a day or two.

  That was ten days ago.

  “Good news," Keep said, "is that Gia’s made progress on identifying who built the blueburn’s hull. According to her search algorithm, the tolerances suggest it’s a modified version of an SR-90 Star Racer.”

  “Star Racer?”

  Keep smiled. “Oh, you haven’t seen the star races yet. You’d actually make a good racer pilot. It’s pretty much what it sounds like, except there’s a set course and obstacles along the way. Not that unlike what we went through getting here. Racers are faster and more agile than most ships.”

  “And we needed an algorithm to make that guess?”

  He chuckled. “Racers are also about a quarter of the size of the blueburn. I probably should have said custom built instead of modified. They used the same basic principles and Gia thinks only an experienced racer builder could have made the ship.” He shrugged. “But what do I know? Any ship that gets me where I need to be is a good ship. Bad news for our lollipop queen, though. The Royals traced her traffic redirection trick back to her servers. They don’t think she’s responsible yet, but they’re trying to get in touch with her to ask some questions. And they want physical access to her systems to investigate. Obviously, she can’t do either of those things from here, which only makes her look more guilty.”

  “And she did that for us,” I said. “She’s giving up a lot.”

  “For you,” he corrected. “Because she cares about you. All of us do.”

  “You included?”

  “You’ve always been something special to me, kid.”

  “And you always answer similar questions with a generalized statement that could have multiple meanings, depending on the context in which you made it.”

  “Bingo.”

  “So you think Gia will get us a lead without David’s help?” I asked, not pressing him for a direct answer I knew he would never give.

  “Sure seems that way. You may need to make a choice, Bennie.”

  “What choice?”

  “You have a few options. We could pack up early to go after her lead while David keeps working on Head Case and hope for the best. Or Matt could take the others and head off in that direction while we stay behind. Or we could all continue waiting.”

  “Matt’s in charge when we’re not on the ship,” I said. “That would be his call.”

  Keep laughed. “Since when is Mattie in charge of anything? The crew follows him when you do, but if you ever countered him they’d all fall in line behind you and leave him sitting wherever with his thumb up his butt. It’s not his fault. Don’t tell him I said this, but he’s got a lot of great qualities, especially with a rifle in his hands. But he ain’t you, kid. Like I said, you’re something special.”

  I leaned back in the chair, putting my hand over my mouth to cough and doing my best to ignore the burning in my lungs and the blurriness in my vision. “I’d choose the first option. I don’t want us to split up. And if we have a chance to catch up to Prince Hiro, we need to take it, even if it costs me my life.”

  He smiled, his voice more serious. “I knew you’d say that. You’ve grown up a ton since we were stuck in Sedaya’s dungeon together, Ben. Honestly, no matter what happens, it’s a privilege to know you.”

  The statement caught me off-guard, enough so that tears welled into my eyes in response to his kindness. Subconsciously, a part of me had come to see him as the father I never had growing up, and his acceptance and friendship meant more to me than I knew how to express.

  David burst into the room anyway, before I could reciprocate. “Hey Ben,” he said offhandedly, focusing on Keep. “Mr. Keep, you need to see this.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Keep and I followed David back to his workstation. He had set up his laptop on one corner of the table. A wire that Alter had made connected it to the network interface for the station’s mainframe, allowing him to run his simulations and calculations. I expected to see his software up on the display, showing the sigil he was working on that he hoped would be the equivalent of purify. Essentially, a passive sigil that would return my cells to their natural, unmutated state. I knew it built on the lines used for calm, which is how he came up with calmed-to-death. But of course, it wasn’t that simple. Not that any sigil was simple.

  There was no sigil on the screen. No running simulation of the possible effect of the action. Instead, a slightly heavyset woman with dark olive skin and dark hair stood frozen on the screen. The same lab we were standing in was in the background.

  “Priya,” Keep whispered beside me, his huge bag of emotions giving off a charge that brought goosebumps to my skin. “Where—”

  “I needed a break from the equations,” David said. “So I started digging around in the station mainframe. I know you said everything was erased, but on Earth, data that’s wiped is sometimes still recoverable. I thought maybe if I could get back some of what was lost, it would give me a clue to what I was missing. Especially the restore sigil your wife gave you.”

  “The data was supposed to be encrypted and then wiped,” Keep said, looking at him. “How did you recover this?”

  “That’s the thing. I didn’t. I found it hidden with the operating system files. Oh, yeah, I did root the OS. I can’t believe you’re still using Linux all these years later.”

  “David, you could have crashed the entire mainframe,” I said.

  He smiled and shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “You do realize the mainframe controls life support, right? Our air supply? Keeping the airlocks sealed so outer space doesn’t come in?”

  The smile vanished, face paling. “Uh. I wasn’t thinking about that. I should probably back out—”

  “No,” Keep snapped. “You didn’t break anything.”

  “Yet,” I said.

  “I won’t touch it anymore,” David said. “I promise.”

  “She left a video for me,” Keep said. I had never seen the expression he wore before. He looked like he had just been kissed for the first time. “Play it.”

  “I already did. She says—”

  “Play it,” Keep repeated more forcefully.

  “Sure,” David replied, tapping the enter key on his laptop.

  “This is a message for my husband, Orban Card. If you aren’t Orban, you might be watching this hoping for some clue or information about this place or about my work. You won’t get that here. What you will find instead is something much too lacking in the Hegemony right now. Love. More specifically, the love of a wife for her husband, even though that husband is on the opposing side in a war that never should have happened. A war whose foundation is built upon technology that never should have existed, and has no place in this universe or any other. I’m responsible for creating some of this technology, and now I’m also responsible for helping to destroy it. You won’t find any of the answers you seek here.”

  Her expression and voice softened, her eyes latching onto the camera as though she were looking her husband, whom she called Orban instead of Avelus, in the eyes. “Orban, I don’t know how many years may have passed before you returned to this place. I don’t know what trials you’ve endured as a result of the experiments we undertook together. I know you never wanted us to be parted and you always hoped we would find our way back together one day. No matter what has become of me, today is that day when we are reunited, in spirit if not in physical manifestation.”

  She paused, eyes welling with tears. “Whatever has happened to you, I always knew you would return one day. I always knew you would see this. I want you to know that I’m sorry for the burden I placed upon you. For the lives we were forced to live. My entire life has been a series of mistakes, taking something beautiful and making it into something grotesque. I’ve spent all of our last days apart fearing I’ve done the same to the only thing that has truly ever made me happy and whole. You. By your return, I know you haven’t forgotten me. I know you still care for me. And I beg your forgiveness for the decisions we made.

  "Just standing here, thinking about you seeing me again, as you last knew me, brings me a joy I can’t describe. As you’ve heard me say so many times, all of the energy in all of the universes is connected, which means even in death we are connected. If you feel the same joy that I do, wherever my energy is, I will feel it. I will know you. And when your journey at last comes to an end, I will be here waiting. I love you eternally, my darling husband.”

  The video stopped on a frame of her smiling brightly at the camera, moist eyes filled with emotion. Glancing at Keep, I could tell he was struggling to keep his own emotions in check.

  David sighed. “That is so touching. I almost cried the first time I watched it, and look at me.” He wiped his eyes with his shirt. “Waterworks now. Damn.”

  “Could you shut up?” Keep growled. “I’m having a moment.”

  “A beautiful moment,” David agreed. “It kind of makes everything I went through to be here worthwhile.”

  “David!” I snapped.

  “Sorry. I talk when I’m emotionally uncomfortable.” He clamped his lips together and wiped his eyes again. Keep just stared at the last frame of the recording, tears running down his cheeks. I’d never seen him cry before. Not even a hint. He stayed that way for nearly a minute.

  “Can you copy that to Head Case’s datastore?” he asked.

  “Sure,” David replied.

  “Are you okay?” I asked Keep.

  He nodded. “Better than ever, kid.”

  “I guess your real name is Orban? Orban Card? Not Avelus Keep?”

  “When you’re a thousand years old, you need to keep reinventing yourself. Otherwise people get suspicious. I’ve had plenty of names before Keep. But my given name is Orban Card.”

  “It’s too bad she didn’t leave us anything we can use,” David said. “Like her equations for restore. That would have been helpful.” Keep glared at him. “Right. I don’t mean it like that. You know, I’m just saying.”

  “Some things are more important than sigils,” I said. “Some things are more important than life. You’re lucky you got to have that.”

  “Exactamundo,” Keep replied. “I am lucky. Luckier than I even knew.”

  “That’s all I found,” David said. “I’ll get out of the operating system now before I kill all of us.”

  “Wait,” Keep said, eyebrows crinkling in thought.

  “Why?” David replied.

  “Maybe she did leave us something more that we can use.”

  “I heard the message twice, Mr. Keep. It’s very emotional. No math whatsoever.”

  “All of the energy in all of the universes is connected, which means even in death we are connected,” he answered. “You told me the base sigil is used to allow the catalyst to draw in energy. Every sigil contains that simple geometry.”

  “Sometimes it’s more hidden, but yeah. So?”

  “So take what I just said and turn it into a sigiltech equation.”

  David raised an eyebrow. “But she said death. We want the opposite.”

  “Do we? How far has that gotten you?”

  David shook his head. “How could your wife leave a message for you a thousand years ago that’s relevant to our specific situation today? That’s impossible.”

  “She didn’t. She left me a clue on how to reverse the sigil she put in my head. A way to end the restore so I could die naturally. You’re already close with calmed-to-death. Let’s call the target sigil decay. If you can reverse that, then you’re back at restore. Badabing badaboom.”

  “It doesn’t exactly work like that.”

  “But it’s something, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it’s something. But how would your wife know that you would know that’s a clue? Or that you would be able to make a new sigil?”

  “Why else would I come back here? To reminisce about her untimely demise?” He smiled. “She thought I would come back here to die. She was trying to offer me a softer way out. I’m sure of it.”

  David shrugged. “If you say so. I mean, I can try it. It’s not like I’ve had so much success with the path I’ve been on.” He looked at me. “But if it doesn’t work, I might not be able to backtrack in time to save your life.”

  I looked from him to Keep, meeting his gaze. I could see the resolve in his eyes, certain that was the message she was trying to send. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around, but I’d never loved anyone the way she seemed to love him. So what did I know?