Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
Jacaranda
F our gray flashes of light on the forest floor told me where they were. Omen and the conduits had made it farther than I had expected on their journey to Faithless. When I landed my ship, Sovereign , in a meadow just ahead of them, Omen’s first words to me were, “Well, it’s about damned time.”
I laughed at her. “Glad to see you too.”
The four conduits piled in, but before the cargo bay door had shut, I heard, “Hey, wait up!”
Lowering it again, I grinned at their additional member. Gram Skir, Omen’s living brother, hopped into the cargo hold. He was short for a Ladrian, like his cousin, Drift. But he was spry and ran a black market for bone weaponry on Halla after we faked his death on Orhon.
I was glad to have him on board. “It is especially good to see you, Gram.”
He tipped his head curiously. “Why especially good?”
“I figured Omen had made good on that threat to feed you to her drecks for telling me where she lived not long ago,” I pointed out.
He chuckled. “I had to talk Omen out of it.”
I laughed, too. “As if you could talk your sister out of anything.”
“Pleasantries later, men, we have a queen to save,” Omen insisted, pointing toward the cockpit.
I would have balked, but she was right. “Later, Gram.”
I jogged there, unsure what conduit ability she might decide to turn on me if I didn’t move my ass. Of all the conduits I had known, Omen was the most secretive about her gifts. She might have turned me into a cina, for all I knew.
We took off and I was surprised when Omen knocked on the cockpit doorway. “May I join you?”
I glanced back at her. “Since when do you ask permission for anything?”
“I have known some pilots to be sensitive about their cockpits. No sense in starting a riot when I don’t need to.”
“Come in, Omen,” I said, welcoming the company. “Co-pilot seat is open.”
She sat to my right, where Sarah had once sat. The terrible day I had taken her home when life on Halla had overwhelmed her. The memory of driving back without her was still fresh in my mind, especially in her absence now.
I cleared my throat and asked, “What can I do for you, Omen?”
“It’s not what you can do for me, Jac. I…” She paused, and her eyes were unsure, which was unsettling. I had never seen Omen unsure about much of anything.
“What is it?” I persisted. “Is Gram okay?”
“My brother is a weasel, but he’s fine otherwise.”
I snorted a laugh. “Yeah, but he’s your weasel.”
She almost smiled, but the sentiment faltered. “I’m worried for Sarah.”
“Of course you are. That’s why we’re going to save her.”
“It’s not only her absence that disturbs me, Jac,” she said, frowning. “It’s what she did. What she’s doing.”
Confused, I asked, “How do you mean?”
Omen sighed before she spoke, like she had to gather her thoughts one more time before she could say them out loud. “Sarah’s powers have steadily, exponentially increased since I met her. She is the contra, the thing all conduits feared, the one who can rule us all. She should have a lot of powers, but,” she swallowed, “there is nothing in the holy text about the contra being able to possess a ghost.”
“It’s a holy text.” I shrugged. “It can’t account for everything—"
“It does. The holy text tells us everything that has ever happened since creation. It is an evolving, self-editing book written by the gods, Jac. There is nothing in it about anyone who can possess a ghost.”
I thought for a brief moment. “If it’s writing about everything that has ever happened, then I bet it says something about that now.”
She grabbed my forearm—not an insignificant gesture from a ghost. They had to concentrate all their energy to touch anything that wasn’t bone. “Jacaranda Cozz, I need you to hear me,” she said imperatively. “Sarah is off the map with her powers. She is not just the contra. She is something else .”
“Some one else, Omen,” I corrected her. “She is a person.”
“Forgive me, but I don’t know if that’s true anymore.” She sat back, crossing her arms. “The thing about possession, if it goes on for too long, it can work like an addiction or an infestation.”
The thought made my muscles tense, but I needed her to clarify her meaning. “In what way?”
“A thousand different ways. When you make room in your mind for a whole other person with a history and memories, it is strenuous. It’s killed people to be possessed, just by virtue of trying to make that room for them,” she explained. “For the people who get possessed and survive the initial possession, the ghost who possessed them can become a part of them, if the possession lasts for too long. Depending on the ghost possessing them…” She shook her head and stared into the night in front of my ship. “They can make things very pleasant for their host.”
“Pleasant in what way?” I asked, not caring for the sound of that.
Omen glanced back at me. “Skilled ghosts, the ones who know what they’re doing, they can trigger chemicals in the host’s brain, provoking an addiction to the possession. Or they can even trigger sneezes, seizures, orgasms—"
“Orgasms?” I echoed.
She exhaled a frustrated breath. “How did I know you were going to latch onto that part of the conversation?”
I shrugged. “When you were alive, you once said I was a vile life support system for the best dick you ever had, so—"
She laughed. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
“It was hard for me to forget.” I gave her a mischievous grin. “I’m the best dick you ever had.”
“I also called you vile.”
“I tend to look on the bright side of things when I can.”
“One of your better qualities.”
I thought about what she had just told me about the possible addiction, which I found unnerving. I didn’t like the question I was about to ask, but I needed to know what we might be dealing with. “Do you really think that Sarah is going to end up hooked on Rex?”
Omen fidgeted in her seat. “I would like to say no. But I truly don’t know. This concerns me for two main reasons: one—I like Sarah and she possessed Rex to save all of us, so the thought is terrible, but also, two—if she were to become addicted to him and not want to separate, and her powers keep growing the way they have been—"
Oh, fuck. “Then Rex could become the most powerful tyrant we’ve ever seen,” I whispered. The words echoed in my heart and scared the shit out of me. “Deacon and I could lose the woman we love to the man we hate. Rex could destroy Halla…oh gods.”
“Which is why I’ve been a bit testy.”
I increased the ship’s speed by triple, testing the belief that a faster trip through atmo could cause harm to a planet. It had always been just a theory, as far as I knew, but Omen shouted, “Slow it down, Jac.”
“What? Why?”
She pointed to a rear monitor. Treetops behind us were on fire from the discharge of fuel shooting out of my ship’s turbine.
“Shit! What do we—"
“I’ll get Abyss on it, don’t bother to stop.”
She left for wherever the conduits were. I slowed down to avoid expanding the forest fire I’d ignited. A moment later, I watched on the rear monitor as rain came out of nowhere and doused the flames.
Omen rejoined me once it was over. “Fast is good. Fast enough to light the trees—"
“Not good,” I said sheepishly. “I know.”
Hours into the journey, I saw smoke rising ahead. “Okay, that fire is not mine.”
I slowed on our approach to the smoke. Something metal shone at the treetops when I flashed our lamps at it. Dark blue metal. My stomach flipped with terror.
“Fuck, hang on,” I snarled, and drove us straight toward the nearest opening in the trees, some thirty meters away. Nearly a crash landing. I was out of my ship and running before I had a chance to tell anyone what was happening. Thankfully, they all knew enough to follow me.
I roared in the dark, “Sarah!”
But there was no answer. As the others caught up, they started shouting for her, too.
The wreckage of Rex’s ship smoldered as we ran to it. There were dead bodies in every direction. The bones had already been picked over. Most were completely stripped of flesh. One skeleton in particular was distinctively petite.
“Sarah!” I shouted before all my strength left me and I collapsed to my knees in anguish next to the smallest set of bones.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t believe this had happened to Sarah—my mind fought against it, struggling to keep myself tethered to my body. I retched on the ground, unable to hold anything back. Something screamed inside of me before I heard that scream with my ears. Heat poured down my face for her. I dug my fingers into the ground, searching for anything to keep the world from spinning without me.
Someone slapped my face.
Instantly, my bone knife was in my hand, and I leapt for them, knocking them to the ground. The blade was pressed to their throat before I was kicked off of my attacker. I landed on my back, meters away. The wind was knocked out of me, but I still tried to get to my feet. But then Fan and Bell held me back as my vision cleared. I dropped my knife.
Tiny Gram was on his back, while all four conduits stood next to him. My victim and my kickers. Panicked, I asked, “Is he—"
“I’m fine,” Gram grumbled as he got back to his feet. “Sorry for slapping you. I just—you need to see this.”
I nodded toward Fan and Bell, and they released me. “Sorry, guys. Everyone. I’m…” but then a wave of grief washed over me and nearly knocked me off my feet again. “I can’t…I can’t believe any of this…is happening.”
Bell merely pointed at Gram and said, “Look.”
Gram held up a single silver feather. “Omen said Sarah can control the jem’hora. This is a one of their feathers. I use them to decorate the fancier knives I make sometimes. These feathers are all over the place. It’s molting season, so they lose them easily right now, but not the point. Point is, look at the hull of the ship, Jac.” He pointed to a crusty bit of hull next to a tree. It had been burnt out, but the talon marks were obvious. “If the jem’hora were involved, then maybe Sarah did this on purpose.”
“They’re scavengers, Gram,” I rasped in a hoarse voice. “The talon marks were probably from when they retrieved their…meals.”
“But the talon marks are burned, too,” Omen pointed out. “The jem’hora are not going to scavenge from the ship while it’s on fire, Jac. They attacked the ship. They are probably the reason why it went down in the first place. Sarah did this. It’s the only thing that makes any sense.”
“I want to believe that, Omen.” I stared back at the smallest set of bones, my heart feeling as though it was slowly dying. “I want to believe that’s not her—"
Omen laid down next to the bones, giving me a better look at the size of the skeleton. “It’s definitely not her. This one is too tall.”
“And look at the pelvis,” one of the conduits said, “too male.”
A glimmer of hope shot through me. “You mean that?”
Omen kicked the bones over. “That right there, the shape. That’s a male. Female pelvises have room for fetuses. There aren’t any dead females here for me to show you the difference but—"
“How do you know all that?” I interrupted her.
She smiled up at me. “Before I knew about my conduit abilities, I was a nurse.”
I gulped and hoped she wasn’t snowing me. “Then everyone, back on the ship. We’ve got a queen to rescue.”