Page 10 of Reaper's Brat

ALTHEA

"It's open," Caelis says, and from his face I can tell he wishes it weren't.

We're alone in the engine bay with the stolen core, which Saren ordered sealed and which I asked Caelis to crack the rest of anyway, because I have spent every year I can remember being kept in the dark for my own good and I am done being a box.

The full map blooms above the core. Not just coordinates now — a route, threading the dead zone, terminating at a cluster of structures the core labels in the old Ishani script Elsyn's been teaching me. I can read three words of it. One of them isarchive. One of them ishome.

"That's not a treasure map," I say slowly. "It's a directions-home map. Somebody on Armstrong had the location of a piece of Saren's whole dead civilization sitting in a data core, and they slid it into the bag of a scavenger they expected to die in a ditch, so that if anyone ever traced it, it'd trace to me. Not them." The shape of it makes me feel sick and clear at once. "I wasn't a runner. I was a fuse. They lit me and walked away."

Caelis is quiet. Then: "Does the captain know what's at the end of it?"

"He knows. That's why he wanted it sealed." And I understand, finally, why Saren looked the way he did on the bridge — not afraid of the map, afraid of what wanting it would do to a man who has trained himself not to want. Those ruins are the one thing that could give his people back their history. They are also bait, and a battlefield, and a way to get everyone he loves killed chasing a ghost.

I copy the decoded map onto a chip before I seal the core back up — insurance, because I have watched too many irreplaceable things vanish into the dark on someone else's say-so, and I will not let the only road home to a murdered history exist in a single copy that one frightened man can decide to delete.

When Saren comes looking for me that night, I don't hide it. I've spent my whole life being handled for my own good, kept in the dark by people who swore it was kindness, and I'll be damned before I do the same thing to him. So I tell him I had Caelis crack it. I tell him I made a copy. I put the chip in his hand and fold his fingers over it before he can argue. "I'm not asking you to fly us there tonight," I say. "I'm asking you to stop pretending the choice isn't yours to make. You don't get to seal your own people's history in a drawer and call it safety. Not anymore. Not with me aboard."

He doesn't thank me. He doesn't argue, either. He closes his hand around the chip and the map home both, and something in the careful set of his shoulders shifts — a weight redistributing, maybe, now that he isn't the only one holding it. It's the first time I make him share a burden instead of swallowing it whole.

I already know it won't be the last.

CHAPTER 16

SAREN

Deep in the ship there is a corridor we do not use, and on the night everything is still almost good, I take her down it.

I tell myself it is because she has earned the truth of us, the whole truth, not the fragments she has gathered. The honest reason is smaller and worse: I want to show her something beautiful that I made, before the part of the story that has no beauty in it arrives.

The corridor opens on the oldest section of the hull, salvaged whole from a drifting Ishani lifeboat my grandmother's grandmother rode out of the fall. The murals here are not painted. They are cut, line by line, by hands dead three hundred years, and I have tended them in secret for years, replacing a failing light, easing a buckling plate, the way you tend a grave you cannot bear to let weather.

"This is the rest of it," I tell her. "What we were. Before the larger powers in the war decided a peaceful world sitting on old technology was a resource that would be more cooperative if it were on fire."

She walks the length of it slowly. "Tell me," she says. "All of it. Not the version you give the crew."

So I tell her. How Ishana made nothing that could kill, and so trusted that nothing would kill it. How factions in the early war — I do not even know all their names; the names did not survive, only the wound — fed both sides of an old internal dispute until the dispute became a slaughter, and then arrived as peacekeepers to a world too broken to refuse them. How the survivors fled into the Badlands and the Badlands finished what the war began, changing our bodies one starving generation at a time into the gray armored things that frighten human children into sleep.

"We did terrible things, after," I say, because she should have this part too, and because I will not let her love a lie. "When we were starving. I will not pretend the Reapers were only victims. Some of what the galaxy fears, we taught it to fear, with our own hands. I have done some of it myself."

"I know," she says. "I watched you fly us out of that current. I know exactly what you're capable of." She comes to stand in front of the oldest carving, the one of the mother with hope cut into her face, and she reaches up — not to my horns this time, to my face, her thumb along the bone ridge there. "I'm not asking you to be only the gentle thing. I'm asking you to stop believing the rest of it is all you're allowed to be."

I have been alone with this grief my whole life. I open my mouth to tell her she is not alone with hers anymore either, that I love her, that I have loved her since the asteroid current and probably before — and I stop, the way I always stop, because the moment I say it aloud the galaxy will hear, and the galaxy takes what I love.

and we stand in the light of everything my people used to be, almost saying it. And even here, even now, I cannot fully silence the cold voice that has not left me since the relay room — the one that knows a transmission walked out of my hull to someone in the dark, and that whatever it carried is still out there, traveling,finding the hands it was meant for. I hold her in the light and I let the voice wait. It has waited this long. It can give me this.

CHAPTER 17

ALTHEA

We fly into the storm because the storm is the only thing in this region the hunters won't follow us into.

It's a stellar squall — a churn of charged gas and debris the size of a moon, throwing radiation that blinds sensors and lightning that can cook a hull from the outside in. Saren takes us into it the way you'd walk into a burning building to lose someone chasing you through it: deliberately, and only because the alternative is worse.

Inside, the ship starts coming apart in small ways that add up. Lights stutter. A coolant main lets go two decks down. And then the reactor housing throws an alarm I've learned to dread, because I've heard Caelis swear at it for a month.

"Containment breach, aft seal," he shouts, already running. "If the seal goes we lose the whole drive section. Maybe the whole ship."

I run with him. Nobody tells me to. The breach is a hairline split in an ancient weld, venting something that makes the air taste like a struck match, and the manual clamp is a two-person job in a space built for one. We wedge in together, shoulder to shoulder, and I hold the seal plate while he torques it, and the storm punches the hull and the lights die and we finish it in thedark by feel, my hands and his, until the alarm drops from a scream to a grumble and the air stops tasting like death.