Into the No-Zone. Eugene Lambert

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      ‘Kill it, will you?’ I say. ‘My head’s hurting enough as it is.’

      She points the device away from the cage and it calms down.

      ‘Look!’ She shows me the screen on top of it.

      ‘What’s it show?’ Colm says.

      ‘Promethium-148,’ I read, slowly. ‘What’s that then?’

      One of the techs looks around. ‘The old Earth name for darkblende. Those kids you rescued from that Slayer Facility – it’s the stuff they had them mining. Lethal stuff, toxic and hot. Pumps out loads of nasty gamma radiation.’

      I scramble away from the cage triple-quick.

      Tech guy sniggers. ‘Relax. We’re safe enough. The counter’s only showing raised rad levels. Nothing hard enough to burn us.’

      I stare at him. He looks cool so I quit backing up.

      And now I take in the eyeglasses, the tangle of headphones around his neck, the flame-red hair. I know this smart-arse from Bastion, the Gemini base hidden beneath the Blight shanty town. He’s the guy who picked up Rona’s distress call.

      ‘Hey, Ness, it’s me, Kyle.’

      ‘Oh yeah.’ He peers at my face. ‘What happened to you?’

      I wipe my mouth. My hand comes away smeared with blood.

      ‘Forget that,’ Sky snaps, waving the counter-thing under my nose. ‘Darkblende gamma readings only show up inside the cage, and nowhere else. So this cage held prisoners contaminated from mining the stuff. Tarn’s tag tells us she was one of them.’ She grabs my hand and squeezes it. ‘This Slayer transport has to be the one they shipped my sister out of the Facility in!’

      I try to share her excitement, honestly I do. Only I’m hurting and my head’s still full of nasty thoughts from the fight.

      ‘That’s great.’ I force a smile. ‘But –’

      ‘But what ?’ she says, real low.

      ‘Look, I get it,’ I say. ‘This freighter here flew your sister out of the Facility. So what? I don’t want to piss on your fire, but without the crew to ask we can’t know where it took her.’

      Sky turns her gaze on Ness. ‘Tell Kyle what you told me.’

      The tech’s eyes go extra big behind his glasses. ‘Hang on, Sky, I only said I’d take a look. I’ve got lots of other work to –’

      She sighs. ‘Just tell him.’

      Ness glances around, as if making sure his tech mates aren’t listening. ‘Okay, okay,’ he whispers. ‘So, like I said, I ran a scan on this jammer’s nav-track and the crew didn’t scrub its memory before our guys got to them. The data’s scrambled, to level seven at least. It’ll take some time, but I should be able to break it.’

      We must be towed over a ditch or something because the floor leaps up under us. Ness staggers into me.

      I push him away, harder than I need to. ‘What’d he say?’

      ‘He can hack into the transport’s navigation system and track where it’s been,’ Sky explains. And Ness nods.

      Colm, watchful and quiet up to now, mutters something under his breath that sounds to me like a disgusted: ‘Great.’

      Sky takes a deep breath and lets it out. Her green eyes drill into me. ‘So we can find out where the Slayer bastards took Tarn. Then go bring her back, like we agreed.’

      Even though I saw it coming, I still twitch. ‘Just like that?’

      I expect Sky to blow up at me. No. She just pulls her hand away and looks hurt. I’ve seen that expression a lot lately. Feeling guilty, I pick up the rad-counter from where she put it down.

      Ness makes a grab for it. ‘That’s no toy.’

      I fend him off, press the trigger and it starts ticking. Ness makes another lunge and knocks my hand. I end up accidentally aiming it at Sky. Only I must have the thing set wrong, because it howls so loudly I drop it. It hits the deck, squeals and cuts off.

      Ness picks it up. ‘Look what you’ve done. You’ve broken it!’

      Sky gives me her best scowl. ‘You’re such a gom, Kyle.’

      The Deeps are a maze of narrow canyons between sheer cliff walls. In this main canyon we now call home, the cliffs to the east overhang a rocky shelf, forming an immense natural amphitheatre. That’s where all our tents and shacks are. The rocks below the shelf are riddled with caves and tunnels. These are too regular to be natural, but nobody knows who dug them out in the way-back-when before Wrath became a dump world and humans started arriving. Nobody cares much either. We just use them. Like this healer chamber I’m in now.

      Shirt off, I’m sitting on an icy-cold metal table with my chest all strapped up. Rona’s bandage is wound so tight around me that breathing is a battle. Just my luck that it was my foster-mother on duty. I figure she’s strapped me extra-tight because she’s so mad at me.

      I hate this room’s stink of soap, antiseptic and blood. It reminds me too much of the Facility lab where Slayer medics kept me prisoner, pumping my blood into my father, the Saviour.

      Now she’s stitching a gash above my eye.

      ‘Kyle!’ Rona scolds. ‘Quit wriggling about, or I’ll give you a mirror and you can stitch the damn thing yourself.’

      ‘It hurts,’ I say, staring at the curve of needle she’s holding.

      ‘Course it bloody hurts. Taking on a combat instructor . . . you’re lucky he didn’t kill you.’ She frowns and leans in again. I feel the sting of the needle, a plucking at my forehead as she tugs the thread through. ‘What were you thinking?’

      ‘I lost my temper.’

      ‘Your mind more like.’

      ‘The guy was giving me a hard time,’ Colm says.

      ‘He doesn’t know you’re –?’ Rona lets the question hang.

      We never talk about Colm and me being the Saviour’s sons. Apart from us, I think only Ballard knows. We leave that little detail out of the speeches he makes me give. Could be awkward, he says. Awkward? Colm reckons we’d be torn limb from limb.

      It’s a constant worry that we’ll be found out.

      ‘If he knew that, you’d be sewing me into a body bag,’ I say.

      Rona breathes out sharply, warming my ear with a tut. Six more stitches and she ties a knot and bites the end off. I brace myself to be bitched at – it isn’t the first time she’s had to fix me up.

      ‘Oh, Kyle,’ she says, sounding tired. ‘I know it’s tough with the grief you both get. But fighting will only make things worse.’

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