The black-eyed children watched her as she went to their cage. Cara stood up, coming to meet her the way she often did. When Elvi undid the lock and slid the cage door open, Cara stared at it, confused. Her little brother walked to her side, slipped his smaller hand in hers. Elvi stood back, nodding to them. For the first time in decades, the two children stepped out of their cage freely. Xan’s little chest was heaving in and out with the emotion of it. A tear slipped down Cara’s grayish cheek.
“Really?” Cara whispered. She meant, Are we really free?
“There are some things I have to figure out,” Elvi said, and her voice was trembling too. “I hoped, if you’re willing, that you would help me.”
Epilogue: Holden
Holden lay strapped in the autodoc, his eyes closed. The ship was on the float, conserving the last of their reaction mass. He didn’t mind. Weightlessness was a visceral reminder that he wasn’t on Laconia anymore. He loved it for that.
The machine ticked and hummed in a vaguely disapproving way, like it was trying to tell him to exercise more and cut back on salt. There were voices in the background. There were always voices in the background these days. After so many years with a skeleton crew, having a full complement felt like having a party where too many people had showed up and no one was leaving.
A needle slid into his left arm, and the autodoc chugged to itself, pumping in his own peculiar cocktail of oncocidals and antiagathics and blood pressure stabilizers. And probably something for psychological distress. Lord knew he had that coming. The coolness gave him a pins-and-needles feeling on his lips, and he tasted something that his brain tried to interpret as peanuts. When it was done, the needle withdrew and a thin scanning bar on an armature came out and waved a wand along his face. An image of his skull and lips appeared on the screen, with the new growth in green.
“All the parts in the right place?” Naomi asked from the doorway.
“Most of them,” Holden said, and the scanner beeped at him, chiding. He stayed still while it finished. When the armature retracted, he said, “It does feel pretty fucking undignified to be teething at my age.”
“Well, they knocked your tooth out,” Naomi said. Her tone was mild, but he could hear the murder behind it. He played it all down, but she knew. All the time he’d been under Laconian control, he’d made light of things. He’d made rules for himself so that his powerlessness didn’t turn into despair. He’d plotted and planned and watched for opportunities. Now it was over, and everything he’d been careful not to feel was still waiting for him.
“My dad used to say something when he’d been traveling,” Holden said as the autodoc finished its run.
“Which one?”
“Father Caesar. He used to say that when you went too far too fast, your soul took some time catching up to you.”
Naomi frowned. “I thought that was how religious fanatics argued that Belters didn’t have souls.”
“Might have been that too,” Holden said. “Father Caesar was talking about jet lag. Anyway, I was thinking about it with just… change. You know?”
He didn’t talk about the day he’d been arrested much. Not with anyone besides Naomi. He’d been taken into custody on Medina Station, held for questioning. Not sure if he was going to live the rest of his life in a box or be slaughtered as a warning to others. And Governor Singh had shipped him back to Laconia for questioning about the aliens that had made the rings and the other aliens that had killed them. And through the first part of it, and then again on and off all the time he’d been gone, he’d had the sense that none of it was really happening. Or that it was, but not to him. He’d become someone else. Being a prisoner had driven him a little crazy for a while, and he still wasn’t right. Not really. But every day he woke up on the Roci with Naomi beside him and Alex in the pilot’s chair, he felt a little closer to sane. His soul a little bit nearer, in a wide and metaphorical sense.
Naomi pushed off, floating to him, and catching herself with the unconscious grace of someone born to it. She took his hand. She did that a lot these days. He liked it too. Especially when he woke up in the middle of the night, too groggy from sleep to know where he was, and started to panic that the guards were coming to beat him again. Her voice calmed him down, but her hand in his worked faster.
“We’re going to start the braking burn in about forty minutes,” she said.
“Hard?”
“Alex says about three-quarter g. We’ll be fine. But I thought I’d let you know anyway.”
“We won’t be trapped in the same couch for hours.”
“Well, not by that, anyway,” she said. He didn’t know if the sly sexual banter was sincere or just another way of telling him he was home. It soothed him either way.
“Just between us?” he said. “I’m going to be glad when it’s just us again. These are nice folks, but they’re not family, you know?”
“I do,” she said. “We might… we might need to talk about hiring someone on, though. With Clarissa and Bobbie both gone.”
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll look at it.” He meant, But not now. Later. When I can. She heard it all.
“I’m going to go check the coolant feed lines,” she said. “These kids all grew up on newer ships. They’re not used to our heat tolerances.”
“All right,” Holden said. “I’m going to finish this and head for the flight deck.”
“Sounds good,” she said, and pushed backward, keeping her eyes on him as she moved away to the door and caught herself without even looking.
After she was gone, the autodoc chimed, giving him permission to unstrap himself. He moved slowly not because he hurt, but because he liked the sensation of freeing himself. The report was on the screen when he got there. All in all, it was pretty solid. He pulled up a record going back to his return to the Roci, and all the trend lines were going the right way. So there it was in clean, glowing lines. His soul on its way back.
It would be good to feel like himself again. Naomi was stuck as the central planner for the underground as it transitioned to whatever came next. But she’d made it very clear that one run as captain of a gunship on campaign was more than a lifetime’s worth for her. The captain’s chair of the Rocinante was his. Though, since she was still nominally the admiral of the resistance fleet, his captaincy felt a bit like an emeritus title. Even so, there were responsibilities that came with it. If not now, then soon.