Page 57 of Last of Her Name

But Mara ignores the water, instead shoving off the sofa to teeter on her feet. She looks around a moment, and then her face freezes. Her eyes go flat.

“No,” she whispers. “Tell me he didn’t go back.Tell me he’s alive.”

Riyan and I exchange looks.

“Mara … I’m sorry,” I whisper.

“This is your fault,” she says.

I stiffen, my mouth opening but unable to form a reply. She’s right. I’m the reason her father is dead. And now she’s stuck with me, at least until we reach Diamin. She didn’t ask for any of this. Shame clogs my throat; I look away, unable to meet her eyes.

She limps past me, her jaw set. The door to the back cabins is open, and she disappears through it, clearly wanting to be alone. I rub my face, wishing I’d never dragged her or her father into this. But then they’d just be prisoners of the Committee now, also thanks to me. It seems I can’t leave a place without first destroying it.

“She’ll need time,” Riyan says. “Let her be.”

I nod, and he heads off to the galley, saying he’ll make coffee for us both.

With a sigh, I lie on the floor beside Pol. His hand dangles over the side of the stretcher. I reach up and hold it tight. I can’t even feel his pulse in his wrist.

“Oh, Pol,” I whisper. “Come back to me.”

When I open my eyes sixteen hours later, groggy with sleep, the bridge is quiet, lights dimmed. Pol is still unconscious, but his breathing is steady. I gently extricate my fingers from his. Rising to stretch, I study his face, searching for any sign of improvement. If anything, he seems even paler.

Mara and Riyan are in their cabins, presumably asleep. The ship is quiet, frozen while the universe flows around it, a stone in an infinite river. The hum of the Takhdrive pulses steadily, and up on the control deck, the spinning Prism throws beads of light that dance across the ceiling.

I climb to the upper deck and sit in front of the control board, my feet drawn up so my knees tuck under my chin. Staring at the spinning crystal until my eyes burn, I feel a stab of anger.

“All this,” I whisper, “because ofyou.”

The Prism spins on, uncaring and indifferent, churning out the energy that threads through every circuit and wire on theValentina. And if Zhar is right, the crystal is still connected to its source, the great, mysterious Prismata lost somewhere in the cosmos. Zhar wants it, Volkov wants it, and both of them are willing to kill everyone I love to get it.

I lean forward, the brightness of the spinning shard burning itself onto my eyes, so that even when I blink, I see it shining on the backs of my eyelids. There are more colors in it than I’d first thought; instead of just gold, it’s orange and violet and red, a stormy sunset bound in exquisite, hard-edged symmetry.

Stacia.

My spine tingles and I jerk back, blinking hard.

For a strange moment, I could have sworn I felt …something. A whisper, a tendril in my mind, a ghostly caress on my shoulder.

My own name uttered.

“I’m losing it,” I mutter, looking away from the Prism so my eyes can clear.

My brain is scrambled, and no surprise. I’ve been running on panic and dread for the past two weeks. Maybe Diamin is just what I need—a safe, peaceful harbor to catch my breath. If everyone there moves as silently as Riyan does, it has to be the quietest planet in the galaxy.

I flip through the nav system, studying the warp path. It’ll be sixteen days till we reach the moon of Diamin. Will Pol last that long?

Pulling up a holo of the moon, I study the spinning orb. It hovers beside its larger, uninhabitable planetary companion. The pair is so distant from its sun that Diamin only exists in twilight, and that only a quarter of the time. Mostly, it’s dark. All I know about it from my studies is that it’s cold, forested, and unwelcoming. Our lessons always rushed through the Diamin chapters, with an almost superstitious fear of the little moon. The Cold Moon, it’s been called, both for its extreme temperatures and for its secrets.

I’d always thought Amethyne was as far from anywhere as you could get. Turns out, Diamin is twice that. Maybe that’s part of the reason tensors always had so much trouble fitting in with the rest of the Belt—besides their ability to manipulate the fabric of space-time, of course.

Riyan startles me when he sets a cup down on the board.

“Riyan!” I groan.“Warning.”

“Sorry. I brought coffee.”

I take the cup, holding it with both hands and letting the heat sink into my palms. Riyan sits in the next chair and runs a brief system check.