One moment, it feels like I’ve got enough grip to keep myself walking; the next, my muscles run slack. It feels like I should be able to force my joints straight, but everything is slippery. The harder I fight to keep myself together, the faster I fall apart. Another knuckledragger rises into focus and pulls herself under my arm. She links hands with the first one, and we rise together as she takes my weight. They haul me across the hangar deck, down a line of wide eyes and wringing hands.

I don’t understand.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” is what I want to say, but it comes out limp and awkward. My head rolls loose on my shoulders; the hangar feel like it’s rocking in a storm. “I just need a second,” comes out a little clearer than before, but only a little. My feet drag on their toes, and my heels knock together.

“Let me go,” makes its way past my flapping lips. “Let me go,” again, and firmer this time. “I’ve got this.”

I try to shake the knuckledraggers loose, twisting in their grip. I get enough of a boot on the deck to force myself up and out of their hands. They round on me, trying to keep a hold, but they’re too slow.

My legs have punched out already. The floor pitches underneath me, and the ceiling spins, crowding with faces looking down on me. I hear someone calling for medical, others trying to get Tower on the line. I’m not listening to what they say, and I can’t find focus on their eyes.

I’m too busy staring up at the Juno.

It looks like it’s walked through a furnace. It’s missing paint in a hundred places, scratched away by clawing hands, burned where I drove my thumbs through a Decatur’s reactor case. I lost one eye to shrapnel, and another to a hooked finger. I lost feathers in both wings, and a band of solid armour across the chest. The right hand hangs loose at the wrist, a few narrow linkages all that’s holding on.

“I’m sorry, old bird.”

No, says a whisper in my ear. We will fly again.

Sixteen

SIXTEEN

“STEP ASIDE.”

I don’t need to see her to know it’s Hail. I wouldn’t even need to hear her words; the tone is enough. I know a shot across the bow when I hear one.

It cuts through the clutter, and this place has a lot of that. There’s the wheeze and whistle of infirmary machines, squealing heels on sterile floors, rattling wheels and clattering instruments, hushed discussions and a thousand things besides. Through all that, her voice carries, keeps its steel. It should. Every NorCol employee has been conditioned the same way: nightmares narrated by drill-instructors, cut short by roll-call and hop-to. Rise and shine, nuggets.