Page 130 of Dead Silence
“Claire.” Kane fumbles with his restraints and manages to get free to kneel next to my chair.
He sucks in a breath sharply at the sight of my arm. I can’t look at it, but it must be bad if he can tell just by looking.
I hold my good hand up, my broken arm protectively against my belly. Cold sweat breaks out over my skin with the movement. “I’m fine.”
A lie I promptly prove by leaning over and vomiting all over my bridge.
“No navigation. No comms. Limited life support and supplies. Maybe we should have just stayed on theAurora. Dying would have been quicker.”
I’m talking mainly to distract myself from Kane splinting my arm. After helping me out of the chair and moving me to the galley, where I can sort of lie down on one of the bench seats, Kane gave me an injection of something. But whatever it was, it’s not enough.
He’s gentle, but I’m gritting my teeth against the pain.
At least the smoke has cleared, and so far, our battered hull seems to be holding. The two Tratorelli sculptures are in heavy marble chunks on the floor where they fell, and the emergency beacon is tipped over onto its side. In any other circumstance, a damage assessment would be a top priority, but right now, I’m not sure if there’s a point.
“No,” Kane says to me, his brow furrowed with concentration as he wraps a stabilizing bandage around my arm. “At least here, we have a chance.” He looks up at me. “You did the right thing.”
His words tear a hole right through me, right through any defenses I have left.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt. “I’m sorry for dragging us into this. I’m sorry for leaving. I don’t even know why I did. Why didn’t I bring you and Ny with me on the escape pod? Or each of us in our own, I don’t… I just don’t understand.” I shake my head in frustration. “I don’t remember.”
His movements slow and then stop. “You didn’t drag any of us into it. We all agreed, remember?” Apparently he does. That part, at least.
“Over objections,” I remind him.
“When has any group of five people agreed to do anything without objections?” he points out.
“Still, I’m responsible, I shouldn’t have—”
“Claire, I don’t mean this in a cruel way, but you’re not that good of a team leader,” he says, a tired smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. “If we hadn’t thought the risk was worth it, we wouldn’t have gone. Period. Each of us had our reasons.”
“But I left.”
“You did? I don’t… None of it seems real.” He pauses, pain flashing across his face. I don’t know who he’s remembering, Lourdes, Voller, or Nysus. But it’s someone we’ve lost. “It was, though?”
I nod and then clear my throat to say, “Yes. It was real.”
He’s quiet.
“A ship found me in one of the escape pods from theAurora,a little over two months ago. The last thing I remember is waking up on the bridge next to Lourdes’s…” I can’t say it. “Next to Lourdes,” I finish. “I don’t even remember leaving.” Shame wells in me at the confession. “I had a skull fracture, but it’s healed, I should be able to remember, but I can’t. That time is just… gone.”
He resumes wrapping my arm. “And you think you left us to die. That you ran to save yourself. And you blocked the memory because of that.”
A tear leaks out from one of my eyes, and I turn away so he doesn’t see. “Yes.”
He makes a thoughtful noise. “Has it dawned on you yet that you probably left to save us? To get help?”
I lurch upward, or try to. He puts a hand on the center of my chest to push me flat. “Why didn’t I take you and Nysus with me, then?” I demand. “We all could have fit, easily.”
He’s silent for a long moment, and I feel a surge of gritty satisfaction. Finally, he believes who I am.
“I don’t remember everything,” he says finally.
And the little bit of hope left in me dies, turns to ash.
“But I know at that point it would have been hard to tell which situation was riskier,” he says. “The ship with food, oxygen, water, and functioning engines, or a twenty-year-old escape pod with limited capabilities and supplies, and no maintenance for more than two decades?”
As soon as he says it, I can see his logic. I can almost hear the discussion. In my mind, I would have been the logical one to take the risk and go for help, the one without the technical or mechanical know-how needed to keep theAurora(mostly) functional until help arrived. I would have argued for that.
