Page 3 of Reaper's Brat

"You are being treated well," he says. Each common-tongue word set down carefully, like he doesn't trust the floor to hold it.

"I'm being kept. Those aren't the same thing. You'd know it if you'd ever been on the locked side of a door."

Something crosses his face and is gone. "You'll be released at the next station. Unharmed. My word, for whatever a Reaper's word buys you."

"Then why the guards?" I stand, so he's got less of a head start on me. "If I'm cargo you're dropping off, put me in a bunk. But you've got three of your people watching a half-starved human who tried to hitch a ride. That's not what you do with cargo." Closer to the grille now, close enough to see the names— I'm sure they're names — carved down one horn. "That's what you do with something you're scared of."

The ridge of bone over his nose tightens a fraction. "You should be the one afraid."

"Been afraid my whole life. It's boring." I hold his eyes the way I did on the bridge, because it's the only thing I own that visibly costs him something. "What I can't work out is what a thing your size is scared of. And it's me. Why?"

He doesn't answer. He holds my eyes until one of the guards shifts, uneasy, and then he's gone, and the air comes back, and I sit down with my pulse doing something I refuse to examine.

That night the guard change comes and no one takes the post. I look out, and it's him. The captain, on an overturned crate across the junction, a knife and a scrap of metal in his hands, not carving, just holding them, his back to the wall and his eyes on my hatch like it's the only thing left worth guarding.

He thinks I'm asleep. I let him.

He stays until the lights go gray, and he never comes closer, and that's the part that finally scares me. Not his size. Not his eyes. A thing that lonely keeping that careful a distance from the one door he can't stop watching.

CHAPTER 4

SAREN

Theryn calls a crew meeting on the sixth day, which is his right, and which means I have less time than I thought.

We pack into the mess because nothing else holds us all. The long table is a destroyer's blast door laid on welded struts, and around it my people press in, and I take the head of it the way I have for eleven years and feel the floor of their trust go soft under me as I do.

Theryn doesn't stand. He never does; he lets the forward sweep of his horns do it for him. "We're three days from the station," he says. "I want it on record that the captain has kept a breach aboard for six days against every law we hold, and I want to know why."

"Because we have done enough killing of the helpless to last us," I say. "Some of it should start to cost us something."

"It always cost us. We did it anyway. To live." True, and the table knows it's true, and the quiet that follows is the quiet of people remembering the years we don't carve into the walls.

So I give them the part I can. "She has scavenger hands. She helped Caelis pull the filtration line back from the edge last shift — ask him. Three days from a station, with the recyclers failing, I will take a useful pair of hands over a clean conscience."

It's not the reason. But it's true enough to stand on, and Caelis lights up down the table, too young to govern his own face. "She knew the fault before I named it," he says. "She's good. She's really —"

"She's a human," Theryn says, "and the galaxy hunts anything a Reaper values. You taught me that too, Captain. Keep her and you make us a target. Space her and we're clean by nightfall."

He's right. That's the thing I can't say at the table: he is right, and I have spent six days hunting the flaw in an argument I built myself, and there is no flaw. I let the meeting break without a vote, because a vote I'd lose, and I keep my reasons behind my teeth.

Afterward I find Elsyn in the medical bay, where the old healer's hands are steady even as the glow in his eyes keeps failing. There is one person aboard I can say it to, and we both know it before I open my mouth.

"It's her," I tell him. "I touched her and I heard Ishana."

Elsyn sets down the suture he's cleaning. For a long moment the bay is only the hum of the failing recycler and the old man's breathing. "Jalshagar," he says, like a word he'd thought he would die without speaking. "After all of us. After everything we became."

"Tell me how to make it stop."

"You don't." He says it gently, which is worse than if he'd said it hard. "The texts are clear on one thing only. The bond is not a gift the way the children's stories paint it. It heals what is fractured — or, refused long enough, it breaks the one who refuses. It will not let you set it down, Saren. It will only let you carry it well or carry it badly."

"Then I carry it three more days," I say, "and I leave it at the station, and I carry it badly for the rest of my life, and my people live."

Elsyn looks at me with the patience of a man who has watched a great deal of grief and learned it can't be argued with, only outlasted. "And the eighty who need their captain whole," he says. "What do they carry, when you come back from that station hollowed out?"

I don't answer. There isn't one.

I go to the bridge and pull her feed out of habit, telling myself it's vigilance. She's in the engine bay with Caelis, sleeves shoved up, arguing about polarity, and she laughs at something he says — short, surprised, like the laugh got out ahead of her — and three of my crew who wanted her dead a week ago are leaning in the hatch to watch.