If Aric wasn’t already aware that someone out here had a deepship—regardless of whether or not it had been the only one to ever survive—they weren’t about to tell him. That kind of information was power. And if they reported the location of the downed deepship, Aric would send a recovery team before they’d even reached Slipmark. He’d take that tech and make it his own. This way, the ship remained a secret for at least a little while longer.

Silence filled the small room. There was a lag between each message, but this one stretched longer than the others. If this didn’t work, they’d have tipped their hand and the road before them would get considerably steeper.

Finally, the radio crackled to life.

“Hold position, Beacon,” the voice on the other end replied. “We’re on our way.”

Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Pine was staring at her.

He had been for several minutes. At first, Caledonia ignored him, but as his gaze grew steadily more onerous, she found herself wanting to squirm beneath it. And she would not give Pine the Sullen the satisfaction of seeing her squirm.

“Speak or avert your eyes,” she growled.

“We need to do something about your hair,” he said from his perch atop a table in the galley, feet propped on a chair, where he’d been supervising the transformation of Blades to Bullets.

It had been half a day since contacting Slipmark, and they expected to be intercepted by Bullets at any moment. When they arrived, the Blades would have to convince them that they were the rightful crew of the Beacon and had been sidelined from their recruitment mission by an attack from a rogue ship. From there they would be towed into the infamous Slipmark harbor. But that was only the first stage of their plan. After that, things got a little more complicated.

Though every single one of the Blades had been in Slipmark as children, only a handful had been there in the last two turns. Harwell was the one with the most recent experience, and they’d spent the past few hours listening to him outline everything from port procedures to meal schedules. The more he spoke, the more dangerous this seemed. From the outside, Bullet society was a violent, faceless roar, all chaos and fury. But from the inside, it was the picture of order. A single misstep would raise suspicion.

“The harbor keeps a rigid schedule,” he’d said, delivering the only scrap of welcome news in the lot. “Barracks are reserved for stays of more than six nights. As long as we have a crew manifest to hand over, our—”

“Clip,” Pine corrected him.

“Right, yes. Our repairs, all things considered, are minimal and should only take a day or two, so our clip will be kept on board the Beacon. We just need to make sure our papers are in order, which we can do.”