Page 12 of Reaper's Brat

CHAPTER 20

SAREN

Iam eating when the alarm I have spent weeks dreading finally comes, and there is a cruelty in that — that the worst hour of my life begins with a spoon halfway to my mouth.

Jorek does not hail. Hunters who hail still want something they can bargain for; Jorek wants a reputation, and reputations are built on the ones you didn't bargain with. His pack comes in fast under the storm's cover and the first salvo takes our aft shielding and the second puts boarding pods into our flank like teeth into a wrist.

Then they are inside my ship, and I become the thing the galaxy named us for.

I do not enjoy it. That is the lie the stories tell, that we revel — I have never once reveled. But I am very, very good at it, and good is its own dark grace. I meet the first boarding team in the throat of the lower corridor where their numbers can't help them, and I do not waste motion, and I do not waste mercy, and when Althea comes around the corner with a salvage cutter in her fist she stops dead at the sight of me standing in the work of my own hands.

I see her see it. The whole of it. Every reason she was taught to run.

"Behind me," I tell her, in a voice I keep level by force, and after one heartbeat — one — she steps in behind me instead of away, and that single step does more to undo me than any kindness she has ever shown.

We hold. It costs. By the time the last pod is purged we've lost good people, and the ship is bleeding from a dozen wounds, drifting now, the storm shoving us toward the lip of a gravity well that will fold us into a point of light if the drive doesn't come back. Caelis nurses the drive. Elsyn drowns in the wounded. And in the wreck of the bridge, Korrah brings me the thing that breaks the night fully open: the relay logs, recovered, showing every transmission that walked the hunters onto us, one after another after another, each one keyed from inside my own hull.

The bridge goes silent around the truth of it. Eighty-one of us. One traitor. The arithmetic I would not perform has been performed for me, in the dark, in secret, for weeks.

It is Vasha who drags him before the crew, because she will not let it be me — she knows what I'll do if it's me. Theryn does not fight her. He stands in the ruin of the bridge with his forward-curving horns and his charcoal skin and his absolute conviction, and he looks at me, and he says, "I did it to save them." And the worst of it, the unforgivable cleanest worst of it, is that some buried, frozen part of me understands exactly what he means.

CHAPTER 21

ALTHEA

They find the transmitter behind a panel Theryn installed himself, which somehow makes it worse — that he built the hiding place before he had anything to hide.

The crew packs the bridge for the reckoning. There's no court out here, no law but the captain's, and Saren stands over the man who sold us with a stillness that's scarier than any rage, and Theryn doesn't beg. That's the thing I can't get past. He doesn't beg. He explains.

"A human aboard a Reaper ship draws every hunter in the Badlands," he says, to the crew, not to Saren. "I watched the captain go soft over her. I watched him put one life — one human life — above eighty of ours. So I did the arithmetic he wouldn't. One of them, traded quiet, for all of us." His red eyes find me, and there's no hate in them, which is the horror of it. "It was never personal. You were just the cheapest thing to spend."

And the awful part is that it lands. Not as truth — as the thing I've believed about myself my whole life, said out loud at last by someone who means it as strategy.Cheapest thing to spend.That's all I've ever been to anyone — something to spend. Pell spent me. Daxira spent me. Why not him too?

People are hurt because of me. The ship is dying because of me. I feel the old certainty close over my head like water.

Saren moves. I've seen him fast; I've never seen him like this. He has Theryn off his feet and against the bulkhead and his hand drawn back, and the whole bridge holds its breath — and it's Vasha who steps into it, plants a hand flat on Saren's chest, and says one low word in their tongue that stops him with his fist in the air.

"Not like this," she says, in the common tongue, for me, I think. "We are not the thing they made us. You taught me that. Don't unteach it now."

He sets Theryn down. He walks out. And in the quiet after, with the crew fractured into people who think Theryn was a traitor and people who think he was just early, I do the math myself, the way I was taught, and I make for the lifeboat bay while the bridge is still arguing.

I have one boot on the pod's ramp when the hatch behind me opens and Saren says, "Don't you dare."

CHAPTER 22

SAREN

She has packed nothing, which is how I know she means to leave with even less than she came aboard with.

"Get away from the pod, Thea."

"You heard him." She doesn't turn. Her hand stays flat on the pod's frame, knuckles pale. "He's not wrong about the shape of it. As long as I'm aboard, they keep coming. People are dead in your medical bay because the dark followed me onto your ship. I can do one decent thing with a life that's mostly been spent on me by other people. I can take myself off the board."

"And go where," I say. "To Jorek? You think the hunter who shot up my ship for sport gives you a clean death?"

"I think it stops being your crew's problem." Now she turns, and her face is doing the thing I have only seen it do once, in the reactor corridor, except it's aimed inward now. "I'm trying to save you, you impossible — for once in my life I'm trying to be the one who saves somebody, will you let me."

"No." It comes out of the oldest part of me. "Because I have spent thirty-eight years certain my people were owed an ending. I carved a place on my horn for every name the ending took, and I told myself carrying them was the same as fighting for them, and it never was. Carrying the dead is easy. It asks nothing of youbut grief." I cross to her, and I take her face in my hands, careful, always careful. "You walked onto my ship and made me want a beginning. I do not know how to want one. It terrifies me more than dying ever has. But I will not let you teach me the word for hope and then climb into a box and prove the lesson wrong."