“So I was one,” he said. “Helped with Filipito. Took care.”
“Goo
d.”
“No,” Karal said. “Before that. Sometimes, he was with me.”
Naomi smiled. She’d been trying not to remember those desperate days after she’d told Marco she was leaving. The days after he’d taken Filip. To keep the boy safe, he’d said. Until she got her emotions under control, he’d said. A knot filled her throat, but she smiled past it.
“Those days. You had him?”
“Immer, no. But sometimes. Hijo moved, yeah? Night here, two nights there.”
Her baby passed around among the people she knew. The manipulation of it was brilliant. Marco using his child as a marker of how much trust he placed in them and at the same time painting her as the crazed one. The dangerous one. Making sure the story in their community was about how solid he was and how close to cracked she’d come. She had the sudden powerful memory of Karal looking in from the kitchen while she broke down in his wife’s arms. Souja, her name had been. What must her tears and profanity have looked like to him then?
“Kept it quiet,” Naomi said, “and I wouldn’t have known. So why say it here?”
Karal’s hands shrugged again. “New day. New start. Looking to scrape off some old rust.”
She tried to read from his face whether that was true, or if this was just another little cruelty in a form she couldn’t call out without looking like the crazy one. If it had been back on the Roci, she would have known. But here, now, the balance between fear and anger and trying to control herself swamped little things like truth. It was the beauty of the way Marco had set her against herself. Tell her she was broken as a way to break her, and here they were a decade and a half past, and it still worked.
Then, for a moment, Amos was there, stronger in her memory than the surrounding ship. It don’t matter what’s inside, boss. They only care what you do. She didn’t know if it was a memory or just her mind reaching for a place of certainty in an environment where nothing could be relied upon.
If Amos has become my personal touchstone for wisdom, I’m fucked, she thought, and laughed. Karal ventured a smile.
“Thank you for telling it straight,” Naomi said. “New start. Scrape off the rust.”
And if I ever get the chance to leave you behind in a fire, Karal, then good God you will burn.
A chime sounded, then the acceleration warning came on. She hadn’t noticed when the ship had made its flip. Might have been when she was asleep, or slowly over the course of hours so that the rotation was subliminal. It didn’t matter. She was cargo here. It didn’t matter what she knew.
“Strap in, yeah?” Karal said.
“On my way,” she said, launching herself gently to the ceiling, and then back to the deck at the crash couch between Cyn and Wings. It had turned out Wings’ real name was Alex, but that space was taken in her mind, so he was Wings forever to her. He smiled to her and she smiled back as she strapped herself in against the gel.
The warning went from an amber glow to a ten-count in soft amber numbers, and at zero the couch lurched up against her, folding her a few centimeters in. The deceleration burn had started. When it stopped, they’d be where Marco was.
After the passageway linked the airlocks, she’d thought there would be some kind of farewell. Hugs and lies and all the things people did at the parting after a long journey. When it didn’t happen, she understood that it had only been a long journey for her. The flight from Ceres to the empty space sunward of Mars and the Hungaria asteroids was like going from the couch to the head for them.
Filip emerged from the ops deck looking sharp and hard. No, that wasn’t true. Looking like a boy trying to look sharp and hard.
“Check her for weapons,” Filip said, biting at the words.
Cyn looked from Filip to Naomi and back. “Verdad? Knuckles been packing, she’s been for a long time. Doesn’t seem —”
“No prisoners on the Pella without a check,” Filip said, pulling a fléchette gun from his pocket and not pointing it at her in particular. “Way it is, yeah?”
Cyn shrugged and turned to her. “Way it is.”
Filip looked at her, his lips pressed thin. His fingers too aware of the trigger on his gun. He should have looked threatening, but he mostly looked scared. And angry. Sending a son on a kidnap job was the sort of thing Marco would do. It wasn’t that it was cruel, though it was cruel. It wasn’t that it would corrode any relationship that they might have had, though it did that too. It was only that it would work. Even putting Filip on Ceres looked like a manipulation now. Here is your son, where you left him. Come into the mousetrap and take him back.
And she’d done it. She didn’t know if she was more disappointed in Filip or herself. They were two very different kinds of disappointment, and the one pointed at her had more poison in it. She could forgive Filip anything. He was a boy, and living with Marco in his head. Forgiving herself was going to be harder, and she didn’t have much practice.
When the outer airlock cycled, she suffered a wave of disorientation. The passage was the usual design of inflated Mylar and titanium ribs. There was nothing about it that looked strange. It wasn’t until they’d nearly reached the other side that she recognized the smell of it: tangy and deep and probably carcinogenic. The outgassing of volatile organics from the cloth.
“This is new?” she said.
“We don’t talk about it,” Filip said.