Page 4 of Reaper's Brat

I sit there in the dark of the bridge and I feel the hope come up in me like water against a door I've held shut every year of my life, and I know, with a captain's cold clarity, that the door is going to give. The only question left is how many of us are standing behind it when it does.

CHAPTER 5

ALTHEA

The filtration line blows its seal at third bell, and that's how I get out of the store-room.

I hear the alarm before Caelis comes scrambling, and I'm already on my feet. "That's the line we patched," I say through the grille. "The patch didn't hold, did it. You crossed the polarity on the return feed."

"I — that's not —" He's got the hatch open before he's finished deciding to. "Vasha will skin me."

"Then let's not tell Vasha." I'm out and moving before anyone can think better of it, and nobody stops me, because the whole junction stinks of scorched coolant and a crew that can't breathe doesn't care who fixes the air.

The engine bay is a cathedral of salvage, and it's drowning. I find the return feed, find Caelis's mistake, and I put my hands in it the way I've put my hands in a hundred dying systems on a hundred worse days. "Spanner. The long one. Now talk me through what you did so I know what you undid."

He talks. I work. The bay fills with Reapers who came to watch a human fail and stay to watch her not, and when the line catches and the bay's air goes from poison to merely stale,somebody actually grunts a word I've started to recognize as approval.

Vasha is the one who corners me after. She doesn't loom; she doesn't have to. "You're useful," she says, like it's an insult she's choosing to allow. "Useful makes the captain careless. Careless captains get crews killed." She steps close enough that I can see the bone charms braided into her hair. "Whatever you think you're doing to him, stop. He has carried us through famines you can't imagine. I will not watch a human take the legs out from under him."

"I'm not doing anything to him."

"You're breathing," she says. "On this ship, that's enough." And she leaves me with that, which is the most honest threat anyone's given me in years.

We hit a rough hyperspace transition that night. I'm crossing the engine bay catwalk when the floor lurches sideways and my feet leave it entirely, and there's a long bright instant of nothing under me and a railing too far to reach.

Then there isn't nothing. There's an arm like a hull strut, and I'm against a chest that runs hot as an engine, and the captain has crossed half the bay in the time it took me to fall.

We both go still. His hand is splayed across my back, and where it touches me the heat sinks in past my jacket, past my skin, into something I don't have a name for, and I feel it hit him too — a flinch that runs the whole length of him, his eyes going wide and his grip tightening like he's afraid I'll dissolve.

"You're fast," I manage, because the alternative to a joke is asking what just moved through both of us.

He sets me on my feet with a care that doesn't fit his size and steps back the regulation distance. "Watch your footing," he says, rough, and is gone before I can answer.

I stand on the catwalk with my heart going stupid and the print of his hand still warm on my spine, and the thing thatscares me isn't the fall. It's how safe I felt in the arms of something I'm supposed to run from.

CHAPTER 6

SAREN

The Badlands give us a quiet stretch, which is the only kind of warning the Badlands ever give, and I take the helm myself to thread us through a debris field that ate a battle fleet a hundred years before I was born.

When the watch changes I do not sleep. I go to the observation chamber in the ship's forward spine, the one the crew has half-forgotten, and I do the thing I have done alone since I was old enough to understand grief: I play the recordings.

There are four hours of them. Four hours, out of a civilization. Music, mostly — the Ishani sang the way other peoples breathe — and a little speech, voices reciting verse in a tongue I can read but never learned to think in. I let it fill the dark chamber and I sit in the grey light of the dead stars beyond the viewport and I let myself be, for one watch, the thing I was bred to be before the Badlands remade us. Not a captain. Not a weapon. The descendant of people who made beautiful things and believed the galaxy would let them keep doing it.

I don't hear the hatch.

"That's not pirate music," she says.

I'm on my feet before I've decided to be, which tells me how far gone I am — no one gets within arm's reach of me unheard,no one has in twenty years. Althea stands in the hatch with her arms crossed, lit blue by the recording's glow, and she isn't afraid, and I am so tired of being the only one in a room who knows what I am.

"You should be in the store," I say.

"Caelis forgets to lock it. I think on purpose." She comes in instead of leaving, which no one does, and tips her head at the speakers. "What is it?"

I could lie. I am very good at lying. Instead I say, "Ishana," and watch her not know the word, and feel the old grief turn over. "My people's world. Before us. Before the Badlands made us into what you were taught to fear, we made — that." The music swells and breaks like water on stone. "Artists. Philosophers. We were known across nine systems for being harmless. The galaxy found that very convenient, in the end."

She's quiet a moment, which I didn't expect of her. Then she crosses the chamber and stops close — too close — and lifts one hand toward my face, and I go rigid.