Icebreaker by Lian Tanner

Author:Lian Tanner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250080172
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

CHAPTER 15

SOME MAY CALL US CRUEL

The ship was in a purposeful mood. It was there in everyone Dolph met—the same furious intensity, the same sense of comradeship and anger. Officers she had barely spoken to in the past gripped her hand and said, “We’ll find him, never fear. He’ll regret the day he murdered your mam!”

This feeling went from bow to stern, and from the heights of the wind turbines to the depths of the bilge. The first time Dolph stepped off the Commons ladderway into Grease Alley, she was anticipating trouble. But the border guards merely nodded and let her pass. Behind her back, they murmured, “How dare he? How dare the stranger attack us?”

Dolph had never in her life expected to walk through Grease Alley without having to fight every inch of the way. But today no one tried to stop her, not even Skua. They thought she was searching for the stranger, and so she was. But she was searching for someone else too.

Because Dolph had been thinking. How could a stranger have found his way right into the middle of Braid, and killed Orca, who was the cleverest person her daughter had ever known, and one of the wariest? It didn’t make sense.

Now if the stranger was the one who had died, Dolph could’ve understood it. But the other way around?

Impossible.

Which meant the boy must’ve had help. Someone to show him the trip-ups and traps in both Grease Alley and Braid. Someone to guide him from the bottom of the ship to the top. Someone to ease him into Orca’s cabin as slick and sly as a rat.

And who was the slickest, slyest rat Dolph knew? Who was the only person on the ship to know her way around Braid as well as she knew it around Dufftown and Grease Alley?

The Nothing girl.

“If I find her, I’ll find the stranger,” Dolph whispered, and she fingered the knife in her pocket.

She knew the sort of places that the Nothing girl made her nests—Dolph had chased her out of them often enough. And so, while the Engineers tore open lockers and poked behind the digester, Dolph climbed into darker corners, looking for scraps of cloth and whispering through her teeth, “I’m going to find you, Nothing Girl. Going to find you.”

But for all her efforts, there was no sign of either the girl or the stranger. And so, after three days, Dolph turned her attention to Dufftown.

* * *

When the boy woke at last, stripped of both fever and nightmares, he was dreadfully weak. All he wanted to do was lie still in his rope cot. But weakness was dangerous for an Initiate of the Circle. If the other Initiates knew that one of their members was weak, they would beat him, to prove their own strength.

It was harsh but fair. As Brother Thrawn said, “Weakness does not win wars. And never doubt it, my friends, we are at war for the soul of humanity.”

The boy tried to sit up, but his limbs felt as if they belonged to someone else.

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