The Dark Reaches Read Online Free PDF Page B

you’re—you’re letting too much in. You’re too open.”
    Make him say it. “What are you afraid of, Iain?”
    “Sometimes,” Iain said reluctantly, “pilots like that—they jump to otherspace and—never come back.”
    She got to her feet. “You think I’m weak. That I’m going to fail. After all this time.” She let him hear the anger in her voice.
    “I know your strength,” he said with obvious pain. “More than I ever would have believed, in the beginning. I trust you, Linnea.” He took a breath. “But you’re not well. You may need—rest.”
    The breath left her body. Rest. He meant not piloting. Maybe never piloting again. Panic caught at her throat, and she breathed carefully, mastered it.
    She set her hand on the piloting shell. He must not see the fear that filled her mind at the thought she might be grounded, cut off forever from otherspace, beyond the reach of—of whatever it was that spoke to her there. Tell him what he needs to hear. “Iain, what can I do? How can I show you that I’m all right?”
    “You and I will review some of the techniques Line pilots learn, for lessening the impact of otherspace.” The patient compassion in his voice only frightened her more. He was speaking to her as he would speak to a child. Or to a person with a deadly illness. “I went over them with you in training, but obviously not well enough.”
    She remembered that part of the training. “You want me to deliberately close myself off from otherspace,” she said. “Blind myself to everything but my course, the timing of the jump. Is that it?”
    “Otherspace is too much,” Iain said. “Too much for anyone. You don’t look directly at the sun.”
    She smiled stiffly. “I can’t say that came up very often, growing up here.”
    The worry in his face did not ease. Keep pushing. She went to him, set her hands on his arms. “Iain. I’ll be all right. It’s just—worry over Marra, over coming back to Santandru, that’s all. But we’ll review those techniques if you want, and I’ll try to learn them.”
    At last his tense expression eased, and he set his hands on her waist. “And you’ll use them,” he said, giving her a gentle shake. “Promise me.”
    Her heart gave a thump. “I will try.”
    He looked down at her searchingly, then seemed to realize that this was the only promise he would get. He leaned down and kissed her, and she tried to make the kiss another promise.
    Because she was not sure, not sure at all, that she wanted to close herself off from the experience of otherspace.
    Or that she even could.

THREE

SANTANDRU NEARSPACE
    As Linnea guided her ship out to jump radius, with Iain’s ship pacing her own, she let herself look back at Santandru. Through the close neural connection to her ship, she saw her home world slowly receding, a thin sunlit crescent of blue and gray and white. Even the ship’s sharp “eyes” showed her no visible lights on the nightside of the planet: The tiny fishing villages were lit by fading power plants, or only by oil.
    That was her world. And she might never see it again.
    With an effort, Linnea turned her eyes and her thoughts away, remembering Iain’s words this morning: Do nothing that makes you feel emotion. You must always be calm when you face otherspace.
    Linnea’s mouth twitched in a bitter smile. She knew Iain had not followed that rule last year, when they finally made their escape from the contaminated ruins of Nexus. He’d tried to hide his grief, then and in the long months since. Don’t feel—always safer not to feel. The custom of the Line, the custom his father had taught him. That she’d hoped she was finally beginning to break through.
    She’d tried that way of living for a while—she’d thought it would numb her to the pain of memory, of what she had suffered in Rafael’s hands. But, in the end, only Rafael’s death had let her do that. That and time.
    And her happiness with Iain.
    She checked her distance from