Page 15 of Reaper's Brat
"He's different," Vasha says. We're sharing the last of a ration brick in the half-dark of the galley, both of us too tired to pretend at dignity. "The captain. I've stood beside that man through two famines and a mutiny, and I have watched him plan his own death a hundred quiet ways, and I never once saw him plan a life. Now he asks the helmsman about fuel reserves three jumps out. Three jumps. He's started thinking aboutlateragain." She breaks the brick and gives me the bigger half. "That's you. I still don't entirely forgive you for it. A man who plans to die is easy to follow. A man who plans to live, you have to live up to."
I don't have an answer. I'm too busy realizing that somewhere in the last weeks I stopped thinking of theHollow Wakeas the ship I'm escaping on and started thinking of it as the place I keep my brother's wall. As the place I sleep without one eye on the door. As home, which is a word I retired so long ago I'd forgotten I owned it.
When we reach the edge of the dead zone, I'm on the bridge, and the whole crew goes quiet at the sight of it, and I understand I'm not leaving at the next station. I'm not leaving at any station. Wherever this dying, stubborn, carved-up ship is going, I'm going with it.
It's a strange place to decide a thing like that — in the middle of a salvage operation, hands blistered, a tally of failing systems running behind my eyes. But it's exactly where I decide everything that's ever been true for me. Not in the quiet. In the work. I learned a long time ago what a thing is worth by measuring how hard I'm willing to work to keep it breathing, and I notice I'm willing to work very hard indeed to keep this ridiculous wreck of a ship breathing, and the people aboard it, and the impossible man who flies it. For someone built the way I'm built, that's the entire answer. I don't trust feelings. Feelingsare cheap and they lie and they've never once kept me fed. I trust the ledger. And somewhere in the last weeks the ledger quietly moved theHollow Wakeinto the column markedworth it— moved all of them there, and then, when I wasn't reading closely enough to object, moved my own name into the same column as theirs.
Even if where it's going is the place the charts mark only in warnings.
CHAPTER 26
SAREN
The dead zone has a color the rest of space does not, and it takes me a long moment to name it, because I have only seen it once before — in the oldest recording, in the light over Ishana the day it fell.
It is the color of a wound that has stopped bleeding because there is nothing left to bleed.
I take the helm myself. No one argues. Inside the zone the stars are wrong, half of them collapsed to embers, and between them drift the bones of a war no one living remembers — hulls the size of cities, broken open, three centuries cold. Our scanners light up with contacts that are not ships. Mines. Automated guns. Defenses my ancestors seeded here to guard the thing at the center, still faithfully killing anything that comes close, long after the people they were protecting turned to dust.
I fly us through it the way Althea taught me to fly the rock current, except now she stands at my shoulder calling the dead weapons instead of the live rock, reading their firing arcs off our scopes faster than the scopes can warn me. We lose paint. We lose an antenna array. Halfway through, a dormant mine the size of a cargo hauler wakes off our port bow, its ancient sensors stuttering up out of three centuries of sleep, and Korrah calls ita half-breath before I see it. There is no room to turn. So I do the thing the rock current taught me, the thing Althea does not have to say aloud: I cut everything. Power, lights, every emission down to the heat of our own bodies, and we go dark and silent and dead-looking, one more piece of debris among a war's worth of debris, and the mine's failing mind cannot make us out as alive. We drift past its guns close enough to read the corrosion eating its hull. No one breathes until it is astern. Then Caelis makes a sound that is half laugh and half sob, and an old hand thumps him between the shoulders, and for one absurd moment we are simply a crew that got away with something. We do not lose the ship, and when the last gun gutters out behind us, the dead zone opens onto the thing it was built to guard, and the whole bridge stops breathing.
A city. Not a station, not a wreck. A city, vast and broken and beautiful, drifting whole through the dark — towers I have no human or Reaper word for, spires carved the way we carve our horns, a ruin the size of a moon that was, once, the most beautiful thing nine systems had ever made.
The bridge makes no sound at all. I have flown these people through famine and ambush and the deaths of friends, and not once have I seen them go silent the way they go silent now. Korrah, who has crewed for me since he was a boy and carries a horn worn nearly to a stub by all the burying he has done, lifts a hand to his own brow without seeming to know he does it — the old gesture of mourning, the one we make over our dead, except he makes it over a city he was never alive to lose. An old hand at the back says a word in the old tongue, low, and three others answer it, and I understand that they are greeting the ruin. Greeting it the way you greet kin at a funeral, grief and recognition braided into one, because every gray scarred face on this bridge is looking at the drifting city and seeing at last the shape of the thing that was taken before any of us drew breath.
I have spent my whole life certain the gray was the truth of us and the old beauty the lie. The city slides into our running lights, vast and patient and broken, and the certainty buckles in my chest like welding giving way under load. We were that. The Badlands only changed the packaging, exactly as she said. Under three centuries of cold and hunger and inherited shame, we are still the people who built the loveliest thing nine systems ever produced — and someone decided that was a crime worth a slow extinction, and I am about to go down into that dark and learn who, and why, and what, precisely, they thought they had the right to take.
"That's what you were," Althea says quietly, beside me. She's not looking at the city. She's looking at me. "That's still what you are. The Badlands just changed the packaging."
I cannot answer. The city is answering for me, because as theHollow Wakedrifts into its shadow, the ruin begins, very faintly, to wake — lights running along the broken spires in patterns I half recognize, a low harmonic rising through our hull, the dead place reaching out toward the first living Ishani blood to come within its reach in three hundred years, and reaching, specifically, for me.
CHAPTER 27
ALTHEA
The airlock opens on a cathedral, and I forget, for a second, that we're standing in a tomb.
We go in small — Saren, Vasha, Caelis, me — through a breach in the city's flank, into a hall so vast our lamps lose the ceiling. And as Saren steps over the threshold, the city knows him. Light blooms ahead of us, panel by panel, a path lighting itself toward the heart of the ruin, and the harmonic in the walls shifts into something I can only call welcome.
"It's reading him," Caelis breathes. He's got a scanner out and his hands are shaking. "Genetic. The whole city's keyed to Ishani blood. Captain, you just — you turned the lights on for the first time since the fall."
The hall opens onto galleries, and the galleries are full.
Not bodies. Art. Sculpture and mural and instrument, libraries of crystal that hum when our lamps cross them, a memorial colonnade where ten thousand names are cut into a single curving wall. Vasha stops in front of it and goes so still I think something's wrong, and then I understand: she's looking for a name, the reflex of a woman who's spent her life pressing her palm to walls of the dead. She finds it. Some ancestor, some clan-line that survived long enough to carve her into being. Shepresses her hand to it and her shoulders shake, once, and Caelis pretends very hard to be reading his scanner.
In a side gallery I find an instrument I have no word for, a frame of crystal rods strung with something finer than wire, and when my lamp crosses it the thing sings — one pure sustained note that floods the dead hall and does not stop, a sound stored in the crystal itself three centuries ago and only waiting for light to set it loose. Caelis goes pale. "A memory-string," he whispers. "Elsyn told me they existed. You play into it once and it holds the song forever. That note, Thea. Somebody played that note. Somebody real, with hands, sitting right here." So the four of us stand in a tomb and let a dead musician finish their last note, and not one of us bothers to hide what it does to our faces.
I move through it with my scavenger's eye, the eye that reads value, and what it reads, this once, isn't anything I could sell. It's a people. A whole, beautiful, gentle people, rendered in their own hands at the height of what they were, and I think of the gray scarred crew waiting on theHollow Wakeand I want to drag every one of them in here and saylook, look what you come from, look what they couldn't burn all the way out of you.
It's Caelis who finds the gallery that breaks us, though none of us say broken out loud. A low room off the main hall, the ceiling close, the murals scaled down — and it takes me a moment to understand why the proportions are wrong, and then I understand all at once and wish I hadn't. It's a nursery. A children's hall. The walls are covered in small handprints pressed into soft stone and then fired, hundreds of them, the way human children leave them in playgroup paint, except these have lasted three hundred years. And above the handprints, the Ishani young themselves, painted by someone who clearly loved them: round-faced, soft-horned, laughing, nothing of the gray armored thing the Badlands would later make of their descendants. Beautiful. Ordinary. Beautiful the way all childrenare — which is exactly what makes what was done to them unforgivable.
Saren stops in the doorway and does not come in. I have seen this man walk through gunfire and vacuum and his own dead without breaking stride. He cannot make himself cross the threshold of a room full of children's handprints. 'This is what we were,' he says, very low, and his voice does a thing I have never heard it do. 'Before they decided a gentle people sitting on old technology was a waste of a good resource. These hands. These small hands. Every Reaper child born wrong in a famine ship, every one we lost because the cold remade us faster than we could feed ourselves — they all trace back to a choice somebody made to put these hands out.' He finally steps in, and he presses his own enormous gray palm against one of the small fired prints, and it covers four of them, and he stays like that a long time. I go and stand beside him and I press my own hand against another, my knuckles a map of small scars beside prints that never got the chance to scar at all, and neither of us says anything, because there is nothing to say that the wall hasn't already said better, in the only language a dead child ever needs.
Saren has gone to a central dais, where a console older than the city waits, and the moment his hand finds it the records begin to open — and the first fragment that surfaces, projected huge into the dark above us, is not art.
It's a warning. Ishani script, the formal kind, the kind you use for things that must not be forgotten, and Caelis translates it in a voice gone thin:To any who survive — remember that we did not fall. We were pushed.
Saren grips the edge of the console hard enough that I hear the metal complain.
