A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe Read online

  She kept her focus on the track, reciting her practiced motions with little variance. The crowd might be thrilled by a half-second purple sector, but she knew to keep it even. With the increased tire wear, his car would become unpredictable.

  “Kristof is in the run-off! Repeat: He’s out in the kitty litter,” came Ash.

  “Well, that was quick.”

  She crested the hill to find her teammate’s car spinning into the gravel along the run of the curve. She only hazarded a minor glance before continuing on.

  “Switch to strat one,” said Ash, barely able to contain herself. “Push! Push!”

  “Tell Clowe he’s mine in ten laps.”

  Nilah sliced through the chicane, screaming out of the turn with her booster aflame. She was a polychromatic comet, completely in her element. This race would be her masterpiece. She held the record for the most poles for her age, and she was about to get it for the most overtakes.

  The next nine laps went well. Nilah handily widened the gap between herself and Kristof to over ten seconds. She sensed fraying in her tires, but she couldn’t pit just yet. If she did, she’d never catch Clowe by the end of the race. His fiery orange livery flashed at every turn, tantalizingly close to overtake range.

  “Put out the blue flags. I’m on Cyril.”

  “Roger that,” said Ash. “Race control, requesting blue flags for Cyril Clowe.”

  His Arclight flashed as he burned it out along the straightaway, and she glided through the rippling sparks. The booster was a piece of garbage, but it had its uses, and Clowe didn’t understand any of them. He wasn’t even trying anymore, just blowing through his boost at random times. What was the point?

  Nilah cycled through her radio frequencies until she found Cyril’s. Best to tease him a bit for the viewers at home. “Okay, Cyril, a lesson: use the booster to make the car go faster.”

  He snorted on his end. “Go to hell, Nilah.”

  “Being stuck behind your slow ass is as close as I’ve gotten.”

  “Get used to it,” he snapped, his whiny voice grating on her ears. “I’m not letting you past.”

  She downshifted, her transmission roaring like a tiger. “I hope you’re ready to get flattened then.”

  Galica’s iconic Paige Tunnel loomed large ahead, with its blazing row of lights and disorienting reflective tiles. Most racers would avoid an overtake there, but Nilah had been given an opportunity, and she wouldn’t squander it. The outside stadium vanished as she slipped into the tunnel, hot on the Hambley’s wing.

  She fired her booster, and as she came alongside Clowe, the world’s colors began to melt from their surfaces, leaving only drab black and white. Her car stopped altogether—gone from almost two hundred kilometers per hour to zero in the blink of an eye.

  Nilah’s head darkened with a realization: she was caught in someone’s spell as surely as a fly in a spiderweb.

  The force of such a stop should have powdered her bones and liquefied her internal organs instantly, but she felt no change in her body, save that she could barely breathe.

  The world had taken on a deathly shade. The body of the Hyper 8, normally a lovely blue, had become an ashen gray. The fluorescent magenta accents along her white jumpsuit had also faded, and all had taken on a blurry, shifting turbulence.

  Her neck wouldn’t move, so she couldn’t look around. Her fingers barely worked. She connected her mind to the transmission, but it wouldn’t shift. The revs were frozen in place in the high twenty thousands, but she sensed no movement in the drive shaft.

  All this prompted a silent, slow-motion scream. The longer she wailed, the more her voice came back. She flexed her fingers as hard as they’d go through the syrupy air. With each tiny movement, a small amount of color returned, though she couldn’t be sure if she was breaking out of the spell—or into it.

  “Nilah, is that you?” grunted Cyril. She’d almost forgotten about the Hambley driver next to her. All the oranges and yellows on his jumpsuit and helmet stood out like blazing bonfires, and she wondered if that’s why he could move. But his car was the same gray as everything else, and he struggled, unsuccessfully, to unbuckle. Was Nilah on the cusp of the magic’s effects?

  “What …” she forced herself to say, but pushing the air out was too much.

  “Oh god, we’re caught in her spell!”

  Whose spell, you git? “Stay … calm …”

  She couldn’t reassure him, and just trying to breathe was taxing enough. If someone was fixing the race, there’d be hell to pay. Sure, everyone had spells, but only a fool would dare cast one into a PGRF speedway to cheat. A cadre of wizards stood at the ready for just such an event, and any second, the dispersers would come online and knock this whole spiderweb down.

  In the frozen world, an inky blob moved at the end of the tunnel. A creature came crawling along the ceiling, its black mass of tattered fabric writhing like tentacles as it skittered across the tiles. It moved easily from one perch to the next, silently capering overhead before dropping down in front of the two frozen cars.

  Cyril screamed. She couldn’t blame him.

  The creature stood upright, and Nilah realized that it was human. Its hood swept away, revealing a brass mask with a cutaway that exposed thin, angry lips on a sallow chin. Metachroic lenses peppered the exterior of the mask, and Nilah instantly recognized their purpose—to see in all directions. Mechanists had always talked about creating such a device, but no one had ever been able to move for very long while wearing one; it was too disorienting.

  The creature put one slender boot on Cyril’s car, then another as it inexorably clambered up the car’s body. It stopped in front of Cyril and tapped the helmet on his trembling head with a long, metallic finger.

  Where are the bloody dispersers?

  Cyril’s terrified voice huffed over the radio. “Mother, please …”

  Mother? Cyril’s mother? No; Nilah had met Missus Clowe at the previous year’s winner’s party. She was a dull woman, like her loser son. Nilah took a closer look at the wrinkled sneer poking out from under the mask.

  Her voice was a slithering rasp. “Where did you get that map, Cyril?”

  “Please. I wasn’t trying to double-cross anyone. I just thought I could make a little money on the side.”

  Mother crouched and ran her metal-encased fingers around the back of his helmet. “There is no ‘on the side,’ Cyril. We are everywhere. Even when you think you are untouchable, we can pluck you from this universe.”

  Nilah strained harder against her arcane chains, pulling more color into her body, desperate to get free. She was accustomed to being able to outrun anything, to absolute speed. Panic set in.

  “You need me to finish this race!” he protested.

  “We don’t need anything from you. You were lucky enough to be chosen, and there will always be others. Tell me where you got the map.”

  “You’re just going to kill me if I tell you.”

  Nilah’s eyes narrowed, and she forced herself to focus in spite of her crawling fear. Kill him? What the devil was Cyril into?

  Mother’s metal fingers clacked, tightening across his helmet. “It’s of very little consequence to me. I’ve been told to kill you if you won’t talk. That was my only order. If you tell me, it’s my discretion whether you live or die.”

  Cyril whimpered. “Boots … er … Elizabeth Elsworth. I was looking for … I wanted to know what you were doing, and she … she knew something. She said she could find the Harrow.”

  Nilah’s gaze shifted to Mother, the racer’s eye movements sluggish and sleepy despite her terror. Elizabeth Elsworth? Where had Nilah heard that name before? She had the faintest feeling that it’d come from the Link, maybe a show or a news piece. Movement in the periphery interrupted her thoughts.

  The ghastly woman swept an arm back, fabric tatters falling away to reveal an armored exoskeleton encrusted with servomotors and glowing sigils. Mother brought her fist down across Cyril’s helmet, crushing it inward with a sickening crack.

  Nilah would’ve begun hyperventilating, if she could breathe. This couldn’t be happening. Even with the best military-grade suits, there was no way this woman could’ve broken Cyril’s helmet with a mere fist. His protective gear could withstand a direct impact at three hundred kilometers per hour. Nilah couldn’t see what was left of his head, but blood oozed between the cracked plastic like the yolk of an egg.

  Just stay still. Maybe you can fade into the background. Maybe you can—

  “And now for you,” said Mother, stepping onto the fibron body of Nilah’s car. Of course she had spotted Nilah moving in that helmet of hers. “I think my spell didn’t completely affect you, did it? It’s so difficult with these fast-moving targets.”

  Mother’s armored boots rested at the edge of Nilah’s cockpit, and mechanical, prehensile toes wrapped around the lip of the car. Nilah forced her neck to crane upward through frozen time to look at Mother’s many eyes.

  “Dear lamb, I am so sorry you saw that. I hate to be so harsh,” she sighed, placing her bloody palm against Nilah’s silver helmet, “but this is for the best. Even if you got away, you’d have nowhere to run. We own everything.”

  Please, please, please, dispersers … Nilah’s eyes widened. She wasn’t going to die like this. Not like Cyril. Think. Think.

  “I want you to relax, my sweet. The journos are going to tell a beautiful story of your heroic crash with that fool.” She gestured to Cyril as she said this. “You’ll be remembered as the champion that could’ve been.”

  Dispersers scramble spells with arcane power. They feed into the glyph until it’s over capacity. Nilah spread her magic over the car, looking for anything she could use to fire a pulse of magic: the power unit—drive shaft locked,
the energy recovery system—too weak, her ejection cylinder—lockbolts unresponsive … then she remembered the Arclight Booster. She reached into it with her psychic connection, finding the arcane linkages foggy and dim. Something about the way this spell shut down movement even muddled her mechanist’s art. She latched on to the booster, knowing the effect would be unpredictable, but it was Nilah’s only chance. She tripped the magical switch to fire the system.

  Nothing. Mother wrapped her steely hands around Nilah’s helmet.

  “I should twist instead of smash, shouldn’t I?” whispered the old woman. “Pretty girls should have pretty corpses.”

  Nilah connected the breaker again, and the slow puff of arcane plumes sighed from the Arclight. It didn’t want to start in this magical haze, but it was her only plan. She gave the switch one last snap.

  The push of magical flame tore at the gray, hazy shroud over the world, pulling it away. An array of coruscating starbursts surged through the surface, and Nilah was momentarily blinded as everything returned to normal. The return of momentum flung Mother from the car, and Nilah was slammed back into her seat.

  Faster and faster her car went, until Nilah wasn’t even sure the tires were touching the road. Mother’s spell twisted around the Arclight’s, intermingling, destabilizing, twisting space and time in ways Nilah never could’ve predicted. It was dangerous to mix unknown magics—and often deadly.

  She recognized this effect, though—it was the same as when she passed through a jump gate. She was teleporting.

  A flash of light and she became weightless. At least she could breathe again.

  She locked onto the sight of a large, windowless building, but there was something wrong with it. It shouldn’t have been upside down as it was, nor should it have been spinning like that. Her car was in free fall. Then she slammed into a wall, her survival shell enveloping her as she blew through wreckage like a cannonball.

  Her stomach churned with each flip, but this was far from her first crash. She relaxed and let her shell come to a halt, wedged in a half-blasted wall. Her fuel system exploded, spraying elemental energies in all directions. Fire, ice, and gusts of catalyzed gasses swirled outside the racer’s shell.

  The suppressor fired, and Nilah’s bound limbs came free. A harsh, acrid mist filled the air as the phantoplasm caking Nilah’s body melted into the magic-numbing indolence gasses. Gale-force winds and white-hot flames snuffed in the blink of an eye. The sense of her surrounding energies faded away, a sudden silence in her mind.

  Her disconnection from magic was always the worst part about a crash. The indolence system was only temporary, but there was always the fear: that she’d become one of those dull-fingered wretches. She screwed her eyes shut and shook her head, willing her mechanist’s magic back.

  It appeared on the periphery as a pinhole of light—a tiny, bright sensation in a sea of gray. She willed it wider, bringing more light and warmth into her body until she overflowed with her own magic. Relief covered her like a hot blanket, and her shoulders fell.

  But what had just murdered Cyril? Mother had smashed his head open without so much as a second thought. And Mother would know exactly who she was—Nilah’s name was painted on every surface of the Lang Hyper 8. What if she came back?

  The damaged floor gave way, and she flailed through the darkness, bouncing down what had to be a mountain of cardboard boxes. She came to a stop and opened her eyes to look around.

  She’d landed in a warehouse somewhere she didn’t recognize. Nilah knew every inch of the Galica Speedway—she’d been coming to PGRF races there since she was a little girl, and this warehouse didn’t mesh with any of her memories. She pulled off her helmet and listened for sirens, for the banshee wail of race cars, for the roar of the crowd, but all she could hear was silence.

  Chapter Two

  Memory and Debt

  Rule number one when crafting a compelling salvage map: magic must always be the point. Of the almost fifty legends Boots had cobbled together and put out for sale that year, thirty-two of them had been focused on the arcane. Star charts for ancient artifacts or sites of incredible spiritual energy commanded a high price, bringing in almost a week’s worth of living expenses apiece. Treasure hunters would scramble to snatch them up far more often than the charts for mundane prizes. Maybe it was because no one knew the limits of what magic could do. Maybe everyone fancied themselves grand magi in the making.

  Elizabeth “Boots” Elsworth had a pedigree. Once in her past, she’d been right about a treasure. Even after all this time, that was still worth something.

  Boots thought on this as she looked over the ephemeral screen that contained her bank account information. She wasn’t broke. Broke would’ve been good—comforting, even. She was less than broke, and soon, debtors would come calling.

  “You have some new messages,” Kin’s tinny voice echoed through Boots’s firetrap studio apartment.

  She pushed the projected screen away, where it wafted into nothingness, then stretched as she made her way across the room, a new pop in her shoulder the latest in a host of recent bony creaks. Her gait had a drunken limp this morning, and she supposed she shouldn’t have tied on her sixth glass the previous night.

  Rule number two: a good legend is a fluffy story wrapped around a piece of hard evidence.

  Boxes of binders leaned on shelves of books, which were piled atop towers of sheaves. Loose leaves stuck out from every edge, and hundreds if not thousands of scroll tubes stood precariously on top like crenellations on her makeshift fortresses.

  Of all the people on Gantry Station, she imagined she had the most paper at any one time. The rubes loved paper, and the older the print, the more true something became—even if it was just a census chart or loose page from a catalog. She told herself she read the papers to craft legends, but she couldn’t deny that part of her hoped to find another truth.

  She bought the pages where she could, particularly favoring anything from Origin, but she couldn’t afford first editions—only copies. As long as she could point to some shred of hard copy as evidence, her customers would happily snap up a star chart for a few thousand argents. After operating expenses, archival purchases, paid searches, and maintaining her office lease, that didn’t leave much.

  “It looks as though you might have some new clients,” said Kin.

  She scoffed at the word “client.” There was nothing reputable about her remaining fans. They were fools at best and insane at worst. Still, if they wanted to show up and buy star charts, she’d make sure there were a few for sale.

  Safely arriving at the dispenser, she dropped a cube of coffee into a mug and filled it with hot water. “Just read the messages.”

  “Sure thing, Lizzie.”

  She gingerly took a sip, waking up a tiny bit of her whiskeyed brain. Kin began to read: the landlord had no intention of fixing her lock and suggested she buy her own (no cash). Some guy named Cameron wanted to partner up for a salvage run (probably a scam). Her neighbor Arty wanted her to stop slamming her door if she was going to be out late drinking (nope, not happening). There were an additional eight messages from various conspiracy theorist whackadoos who saw her ads but couldn’t afford her products.

  “Oh boy,” Kin sighed. “Let’s just skip this one.”

  “Let’s not,” said Boots. “What is it?”

  “Voice message. Death threat from Rocco.”

  “So? I get those all the time. Play it.”

  “Lizzie, I don’t think—”

  She rolled her eyes. “I said play it, Kin!”

  After a short hiss, the message began. Rocco’s voice had a musical quality—like an accordion being kicked down some stairs. Boots winced as he barked the first sentence: “Boots, I been using your maps for years. I believed in you. But this is the fifth run with no treasure, you short, ugly, double-crossing, sparkless, dull-fingered—”

  And that was all Boots heard before her cottony skull awoke to a new fire. Her nostrils flared, but she managed to stop herself from smashing her mug into the floor.

  One in five million people: those were the odds of being born without magic—arcana dystocia. Most people would never meet a spell-less person, yet everyone had a word for her condition—“dull-fingers,” “nulls.” “Sparkless” was a particular favorite, because she didn’t have a cardioid like every other human. It was a tiny little nub of an organ nestled next to the amygdala—but it left a big hole in Boots’s life. Without it, she’d never spark her fingers to cast a spell.