Page 2 of Reaper's Brat

"She lives," I say.

Vasha is at my shoulder. "She's a breach." Our tongue, fast and quiet. "Out the lock and we're clean. You taught me that."

"She lives." It comes out wrong, with something in it I can't file down in time, and Vasha hears it. Fifteen years at my side has left her very little I can hide. Her ruined horn turns toward me.

"What is wrong with you," she says. It isn't a question, only an accusation still looking for its shape.

I switch to the common tongue so no order can be mistaken. "Aft store. Guard rotation. She speaks to no one and touches nothing. We make the neutral station in nine days, we leave her, and we forget this."

Theryn's horns swing forward. "We have never kept a stranger past the hour we found them."

"And we've never once been wrong to space one," I say. "We can afford to be right slowly. Once."

It's a thin answer. They know it's thin. I watch them weigh whether the captain who has never given them a reason to doubt him has finally cracked, and a lifetime of being right buys me this — one order I can't explain, before the questions start in earnest.

They take her. She fights, which is stupid, and which I respect before I can stop myself. As they drag her up she finds my eyes again, and there's no thanks in her, only fury and a creature already counting exits.

Good, I think. Count them. Get out before I learn the shape of you.

The store hatch seals. The bridge breathes again. I give the watch to Vasha and I go down into the ship's spine, to the relic hold where the carved plates stand racked like the ribs of something drowned, and I set my back to the coldest of them and let my hands shake where no one can see them do it.

We are dying. Every Reaper knows it the way you know a tooth is going bad. Fewer of us each year, fewer daughters, and the ones born too often born wrong. We made our peace with ending by deciding ending is what monsters are owed, and there's a terrible rest in that, the rest of a debt you've stopped pretending you can clear.

Now the dark has put a human on my deck and told me, in a dead world's voice, that there is hope.

I learned young what hope costs a Reaper. It is the one weight that has killed more of us than hunger ever did.

The carving under my brow, when I open my eyes, is a face. Some old artist's idea of a mother, maybe. Whoever cut it gave her an expression I have spent years refusing to name, and I name it now because there is no one here to see me do it.

She goes to the station, I tell the face. I let her go.

The face has heard better promises. It keeps its hope anyway. They always did.

CHAPTER 3

ALTHEA

They feed me on the second day, and that's how I learn I'm worth more alive than dead. For now.

A meal is information. On Armstrong, who eats and who starves tells you the shape of a place faster than any map, so when the thin one slides a bowl through the gap in the hatch I read it like a contract. Real grain. A strip of something smoked I decide not to ask about. They haven't decided to kill me. They've decided to wait.

"You're not supposed to talk to me," I say, because his ears flatten the second I look at him.

"I'm not talking. I'm leaving food." He sets the bowl down like it might go off. His eyes aren't the furnace I expected up close; they're soft, almost shy, lit like a coal you could warm your hands at. "Eat it. Vasha checks the bowls. If yours comes back full she'll decide we poisoned you, and then she'll want to do it right."

"Is that a joke?"

He's already gone.

So I eat, and I watch, because the hatch has a grille and the grille looks onto a junction, and over the days that junction tells me everything they'd never say.

Here's what the stories on Armstrong promised: cruelty as a hobby, blood on the walls. Here's what I get instead. Guards who are bored. Guards who carve while they sit, peeling curls off scrap with knives as long as my arm and turning out small careful shapes — a bird, a leaf, a face. Two big ones arguing an hour over a coolant line and sharing a flask when it's fixed. The snapped-horn female stopping every shift to press her hand flat to a stretch of carved wall, eyes shut, three breaths, before she moves on.

Monsters don't carve birds. Monsters don't keep soup on the burner. I keep waiting for the kindness to turn into the cage I'm being fattened in, and it doesn't, and that's worse, because now I've got nowhere to file it.

On the fourth day the captain comes. I hear it before I see it — the guards straighten, the air seems to make room — and then he fills the grille and the store-room shrinks around me.

He doesn't crouch the way the thin one does. He stands and lets me crane up at him, and I work out it isn't arrogance. It's distance. He's keeping the whole length of himself between us on purpose.