“Your foot’s gone,” she said.
“I know. But I’m okay,” he said, and closed his eyes. Elvi stumbled to the console that looked most nearly intact. It was hard to walk, and she didn’t know why until she looked down and saw that a scoop of her thigh the size of a softball was missing. As soon as she saw it, she felt the pain.
A lesser ship would have been dead a hundred times over, but the Falcon was hardy. Its skin had been cut a hundred times, and it had regrown fast enough to keep in air. The reactor was throwing errors and emergency corrections, the log spooling so fast she couldn’t keep track. She pulled up the sensor arrays, and stars appeared on her screen. The ship was out of the slow zone. Free of the rings. The system identified Laconia’s sky. She turned the ship’s attention back to the ring gate falling away behind them. It looked calm. As if nothing at all odd had just happened. She felt laughter burbling up in her throat and tried to keep it down, uncertain whether it would stop once it got started.
She opened a broadcast channel and prayed that enough of the Falcon still existed to get the signal out. For a moment, the system didn’t respond and her heart sank. Then the transmitter hauled itself to life.
“Thank you,” she told the ship. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
She gathered her strength, wondering how much blood she’d lost. How much she had left.
“To any ship in range. This is Major Elvi Okoye of the Laconian Science Directorate. I am in need of immediate aid. We have mass casualties—”
Chapter Twenty-Two: Teresa
I’ve never seen anyone that angry before,” she said. She was telling the story of little Monster Singh and her mother. “I mean, I’ve probably been mad, but this was different. This girl was…”
“Seriously? You’re one of the angriest people I know, Tiny,” Timothy said.
His food recycler was in pieces laid out on a blanket, everything carefully in place like an exploded drawing of itself. Only the built-in power supply was still inside the frame. Timothy was going through the components now, cleaning and polishing each one. Looking for the signs of wear. Teresa sat on his cot with her back against the cave wall, her legs pulled up in front of her and Muskrat snoring contentedly at
her side. A repair drone lurked at the edge of the light, its bulbous black eyes looking vaguely hurt that Timothy wasn’t letting it take care of the equipment.
“I’m not an angry person,” she said. Then, a moment later, “I don’t think I’m angry.”
Timothy tossed her a pair of dark goggles and motioned for her to put them on. She did, and put a hand over Muskrat’s eyes so that she wouldn’t be blinded. After a few seconds, the light of a welding torch burst in her vision like a tiny green star. The smoke was acrid and metallic and she liked it.
“Thing is,” Timothy said, loud over the roar of the torch, “there’s only a couple kinds of anger. You get angry because you’re afraid of something or you get angry because you’re frustrated.” The torch turned off with a pop.
“Safe?” Teresa asked.
“Sure, you can take ’em off.” When she did, the cave seemed brighter than when she’d put them on before. Even with the intensity of the light, her eyes had adapted to darkness. She scratched Muskrat’s ears as Timothy went on. “If you’re… I don’t know. If you’re scared maybe your dad isn’t the kind of guy you thought he was, you might get angry. Or you’re afraid no one’s got your back. Like Nutless.”
“His name’s Connor,” Teresa said, but she smiled when she said it.
“Yeah, him,” Timothy agreed. “Or maybe you’re afraid he made you look stupid in front of your crew. So you get angry. If you didn’t give a shit whether your old man lived or died? If Nutless and your crew didn’t matter to you? Then you’re not angry. Or the other way? You’re trying to get something to work. A conduit to fit. Been working at it for hours, and just when it’s looking about right, the metal bends on you and you gotta start over. That’s angry too, but it ain’t scared-angry. It’s the other one.”
“So you look at me,” Teresa said, derision in her voice, “and you think I’m scared and frustrated?”
“Yep.”
Teresa’s mockery died, and she hugged her knees. It didn’t fit at all with who and what she thought she was, but something in her leaped toward his word. It felt like recognizing someone. Like catching a glimpse of herself from an angle she’d never seen before. It was fascinating.
“How do you deal with it?”
“Fucked if I know, Tiny. I don’t do those.”
“You don’t get angry?”
“Not out of fear, anyway. I don’t remember the last time I was afraid of something. Frustration was more my thing. But I had this friend, and I watched her die slow. I couldn’t do anything about it. That was frustrating, and I got angry. Started looking for a fight. But I had another friend who straightened me out.”
“How?”
“She beat the living shit out of me,” Timothy said. “That helped. And ever since then, nothing has seemed like it was worth getting too bent out of shape over.”
He rolled a bright silver cone about the size of a thumb in his palm and scowled.
“What is it?” she asked.