Page 13 of Reaper's Brat

She's crying, which she'd deny under torture. "You were going to surrender me," she says. "An hour ago. I saw it on you."

"I was." I will not lie to her, not about this. "I had decided. I am a man who decides the survivable thing and lives with it. And then Vasha put her hand on my chest and I understood that the survivable thing has been killing us by inches for three hundred years, and I am done surviving." I press my brow to hers. "I would rather fight for a future and lose it than keep a present that is only a slower grave."

The pod sits open behind her, patient as a coffin. She looks at it. She looks at me. And — gods help us both — outside the hull, the gravity well drags, and somewhere a fleet recharges, and she steps away from the pod and into me instead, and for the length of one breath the dying stops mattering at all.

CHAPTER 23

ALTHEA

The file is named for me.

Not a code. Not a manifest number. When Caelis cracks the last partition of the stolen core, the deepest layer opens on a personnel record, and the name at the top of it is mine,Althea, A. — Armstrong labor registry,with a string of cold annotations beneath it that I make myself read all the way down.

Low survival probability. No dependents post-event. Suitable carrier — disposable.

There it is, in someone's clean clerical hand. Daxira's, I'd bet my life. She didn't pick me because I was good. She picked me because nobody would come looking when I vanished — because my brother was already dead and there was no one left to raise a noise over one more scavenger gone quiet in the Badlands. I wasn't even a person to her plan. I was a courier chosen for being unmissed.

I sit with that. I let it do what it wants to do, which is hollow me out. And then, slowly, it does something else instead, something I didn't expect: it makes me furious, and this time the fury has somewhere to go.

"Caelis. The other layer. The destination data — what's actually at the end of the coordinates?"

He pulls it up. The ruins, yes — but tagged, in the Ishani glyphs Elsyn has been drilling into me, with a word I now know cold.Archive.And beneath it, half-corrupted, a phrase that stops my breath:record of the fall.

"It's not just technology Daxira wants buried out there," I say. "It's proof. Whatever really happened to the Ishani — how it happened, who did it — it's sitting in that archive, and she'd rather it stay sitting forever than let it loose." I look at Caelis. "She used me to find the one thing that could clear your whole people's name, and she meant for me to die carrying it so it'd die too."

The ship is limping. Half its systems are scar tissue. The gravity well is a patient mouth at our flank. By every measure of sense we should run for the nearest neutral port and never look back.

I put the decoded coordinates — the map I made him carry with me, the one we've both been circling for weeks — flat on the chart table

"They wanted this lost," I say. "So I want it found. Take us to the ruins."

CHAPTER 24

SAREN

My crew mutinies, in their way, on the morning I would have given her up.

They do it kindly, and the kindness is the worse part. Caelis will not meet my eye. Korrah lays the night's repair manifest on the chart table and says, flatly, that the crew has voted to make for the ruins, with their captain or without him, and that they would prefer with. Even the ones who called Theryn early stand with it. They have spent weeks watching a human teach them to want a future, and now they want it more than they want my permission.

Vasha says it plainest. "You spent eleven years keeping us alive for nothing in particular," she says. "She gave the nothing a shape. We're not handing the shape back to a hunter to buy six more months of drifting. Lead us there, or get out of the way and let her."

I lead them there. And when the watch ends and the course is locked and the ruins are a hard certainty ahead of us, I go to find the woman who did this to my crew, and to me, and I find her already in my quarters, waiting, like she knew.

"You decided," she says.

"They decided. I only stopped arguing." I shut the hatch. The lock engages — the one lock on this ship I hold the key to, and I think of her dream, a door that locks from the inside, and I cross the room and tell her so. "Your door," I say. "For tonight it's this one. No one decides anything about you while you're behind it but you."

Whatever's been holding her upright through the betrayal and the file and the long fall toward the ruins lets go all at once, and she comes into my arms hard, and the kiss is nothing like the careful first one in the observatory. This one has the betrayal in it, and the dead, and the terror of how close the pod came, and underneath all of it the furious refusal to lose what little the galaxy has let either of us keep.

"Say the thing you wouldn't," she says against my mouth. "On the ship. With the murals. You stopped."

"I love you." It costs nothing now and it costs everything — both at once, the way the true things do. "Not the bond. The bond is only the door it walked through. I love the woman who reads wrecks like prayers and grieves a brother she couldn't save and walked toward me when she had every reason to run. You. Althea. Mine, if you'll have a monster who finally learned the word."

"Took you long enough."She's already pulling at my harness, fingers fighting the salvaged clasps, and I let her win, because there is nothing left in me that wants to be anywhere but bared to her. The harness hits the deck. Then her jacket, the patched one she came aboard in, pushed off her shoulders and dropped after it; then the worn shirt beneath, peeled up and away, until there is only her — scarred and small and fearless in the low light — and the sight of her undoes something in me every single time.

I take my time stripping the rest from her, slower than the want clawing through me wants, dragging the last of it down her legs and dropping it aside, learning her by hand as I go — thejut of a hip, the soft inside of a knee, the old salvage-scars she has stopped flinching from when my mouth finds them. She is not patient. She is never patient. She reaches for the fastenings I haven't gotten to yet and finishes the work herself, and then there is nothing between us at all, and we both go still for a breath at the heat of skin meeting skin.

"Don't you dare go slow," she warns, even as she arches into the hand I drag up her ribs.