Page 22 of Reaper's Brat

"You're shaking," he observes, mild.

"I have boarded a flagship and walked through vacuum and fought a fleet in a dead ship this week," I tell him. "I am not shaking."

"You're shaking." He smooths the ceremonial harness — salvaged, mismatched, the best we could assemble from a marauder's hold, and somehow right for exactly that reason. "Good. A man should shake before he claims a mate in front of his clan. It means he understands the size of what he's promising." He steps back to look at me, and his clouded eyes are kind. "You're afraid you'll fail her. I can see it. You've been afraid of it since the bridge."

"Every name I have carved is someone I failed to keep." It comes out lower than I mean it to. "What right do I have to promise her a future when the future is the one thing I have never once managed to deliver to anyone who trusted me with it?"

Elsyn is quiet a moment. Then: "Love isn't a promise that no one dies, Saren. We'd all be liars. Love is the decision to stay anyway, with your eyes open, knowing what it costs. You've spent your life believing that needing someone is a weakness the galaxy will use against you. I am old, and I am nearly out of glow, and I will tell you the last true thing I know: a people that has forgotten how to need each other is already dead. It just hasn't finished the paperwork. You are not making us weak by loving her in front of us. You are showing us how to be a clan again. That is not the act of a man who fails his people. That is the only thing that's ever saved them."

So I go up to the long hold, where the whole clan waits — crew and rescued and freed alike, packed in among the carved walls, the oil-bowl lit, the new names already cut beside the old. And Althea is there in the center of it, in a salvaged thing of her own, scarred and defiant and beautiful, and she is not afraid, and I am, and that is exactly as it should be.

Vasha presides, because she is the oldest clan-blood aboard and because no one would dare suggest otherwise. She has dug a ceremonial role out of three centuries of disuse and half-remembered teaching, and she performs it gruff and certain, and when her voice cracks on the old words no one pretends to notice. The rescued are here too — Daxira's freed labor, the mercenaries who chose to stay, the human kid from the gunship standing wide-eyed at the back — folded into a clan that didn't exist a season ago, witnessing a rite no one alive has seen performed. The oil-bowl throws its light up the carved walls, over the dead and the new-cut living names beside them, and the whole drowned weight of my people's history leans in to watch two people refuse to let the dark keep the last word.

I claim her in the old way — the public half of the rite, the clan-claiming, the half we could not perform on the eve of the battle because it belongs to the whole people, and the wholepeople had a fleet to answer first. The private binding we made that night, alone, the pigment vow drawn along her collarbone where the bond first sang; tonight is its completion in the light, before witnesses, the way the archive taught me the rite was always meant to be finished — not a male taking possession, the way the broken centuries warped it, but the original form, the true one: a mate named before the clan and woven into it, declared kin in front of every soul who will now help carry her. I say the words in the tongue of a world that no longer exists, and the clan answers them like a tide, and I touch the silvered mark I drew on her that other night and she touches the one she drew on me, the private vow lifted now into something the whole people will help carry — and when I name her before them all —mate, equal, kin, mine because she chose it and not because fate or law made her so— eighty-odd voices, human and Reaper both, take up a song I have only ever heard in a recording, and it fills the hold, and it does not sound like mourning.

It sounds like a beginning.

I let myself believe, standing there with her hand in mine and a dead world singing through living throats, that happiness might be a thing I get to keep. After a lifetime of refusing the thought, it does not feel like weakness. It feels like the bravest decision I have ever made.

CHAPTER 39

ALTHEA

Our quarters have a window now.

That's the detail that undoes me, somehow, more than the ceremony did. The crew restored a section of the old Ishani hull for us while we were busy not dying, and set a real viewport into it, and now there's a place on this dying-no-longer ship where I can lie in the dark and watch the stars instead of watching the door. I've spent my whole life watching doors. It takes me three nights to stop, and Saren never once tells me to hurry.

Tonight no one is hunting us. That's the strangest luxury I've ever owned. No fleet at our backs, no bounty on my head, no fuse lit under me by someone who decided I was disposable. Just theHollow Wakedrifting easy through clean space for longer than I can remember, and a clan asleep around us, and a window full of stars, and him.

"You keep looking at me like you're waiting for it to be taken away," Saren says. He's stretched the length of our bunk, which means most of him is off the end of it, and his hand is tracing idle patterns on the bare skin of my back, the bonding-mark on my collarbone gone silvery in the starlight. "It won't be. Not tonight.Tonight there is nothing to survive. There is only us, and we have all the time we never thought we'd get."

"I don't know how to do that," I admit. "Nothing to survive. I've never had a night with nothing to survive."

"Then we'll learn it." He rolls over me, slow, careful and not careful, and there's no desperation in it this time, no betrayal behind it, no fleet bearing down — just a man choosing to take his time because, for once, time is a thing we have. "Let me teach you the one thing the Badlands never could."

And he does. It's nothing like the observatory, where we were two starving people falling into each other; nothing like the night before the dead zone, all claim and possession and the terror of loss. This is unhurried. This is a man worshipping his wife in a window full of stars with absolutely nowhere either of us has to be. He undresses me like he has the whole night and intends to use every minute of it, and he does, his mouth tracing the silvered mark along my collarbone and lower, learning me again like there'll always be more time to learn, until I'm coming apart under his hands with my fingers knotted in the bedding and a sound in my throat I don't recognize as mine.

When he finally moves into me it's slow and deep and devastating, and I wrap myself around him and meet him stroke for unhurried stroke, the bond a steady bright current running both ways between us, no door left anywhere in either of us to hold it back. I watch his face in the starlight, the bone ridges I once read as threats and now read ashome, the crimson eyes fixed on mine like I'm the only fixed point in the turning galaxy, and when I break the second time I take his name with me, and he follows me over with the old words on his lips and my name like a vow underneath them, and for one perfect weightless stretch there is genuinely nothing in the universe to survive. Only this. Only him. Only the absurd, undeserved, hard-wonluxury of being wanted by someone who plans to keep wanting me into a future we both stopped believing in and built anyway.

After, tangled and warm and unhurried, he pulls me up onto his chest and I trace the names cut into his horn, and the smooth place below them where Tomas lives now, mine and his dead carried side by side.

"They gave me something today," I tell him. "Before the ceremony. The crew. Carved tokens — kin-marks, Caelis called them. One from nearly every person aboard." My voice does the thing it does when I'm not going to be able to stop it. "Twenty-eight years, Saren. Twenty-eight years of being the thing people used and put down, and then I stow away on a marauder ship to escape off-world for one jump, and instead I get — this. A clan. A window. You. I didn't know I was allowed to want any of it. I spent so long surviving I forgot there was supposed to be a point."

"There's a point," he says, into my hair. "I forgot it too, for three hundred years' worth of my people's grief. You walked into our tomb and reminded us." His arms tighten. "The point was always this. We just had to live long enough to be told."

I fall asleep watching the stars through a window on a ship I once thought was abandoned, in the arms of the monster the galaxy taught me to run from, and I have never in my life felt so completely, dangerously, permanently safe.

CHAPTER 40

SAREN

We leave the dead zone the way you leave a grave you have finally finished tending — slowly, and without looking back, and lighter than you came.

TheHollow Wakecarries more than it did when it limped in. It carries the archive, whole, the truth of a murdered world backed up a hundred times over now, copied to every clan and station that will take it. It carries the freed and the rescued, mercenary and captive both, most of them choosing to stay, because it turns out a clan that just pulled you out of the dark is a hard thing to leave. It carries new names on its walls and, after three hundred silent years, the expectation of new names that will belong to the living.

And it carries the broadcast's aftermath, which arrives the way light arrives — all at once, from everywhere. We are barely clear of the zone when the long-range fills with traffic, and not the kind we are used to. Reaper clans. Dozens of them, scattered across the Badlands, half of them clans I believed extinct, all of them hailing the same frequency, all of them having heard the same four seconds of truth I once thought would die in a dock on Armstrong with a girl I never met.

Is it true,they ask, one after another, in the old tongue, in voices cracked with the same grief I carried alone for so long.Were we pushed? Were we loved before we were feared?