Page 5 of Reaper's Brat

"The carving," she says. "On your horns. Hold still."

She traces the names. Her fingertip follows the cuts I made myself, one for each of the dead I couldn't keep, and the touch goes through me like the recording does, like the fall in the engine bay did, until I'm not certain which ache is the bond and which is just being touched gently by another living thing for longer than I can count.

"Names," she says. Not a question.

"Names."

"You carry your dead on your own head." Her voice has lost its edge. "That's either the saddest thing I've ever seen or the bravest. I can't tell which."

I step back before my hands learn what they want to do. "Go to sleep, Althea." It's the first time I've used her name aloud. It costs me more than the meeting did.

She goes. At the hatch she stops. "Thea," she says. "The people who don't hate me call me Thea." And then she's gone, and I stand alone with four hours of a dead world and the warmth of one fingertip still tracking the names of everyone I've failed.

CHAPTER 7

ALTHEA

The pirates come out of a debris shadow with their drives dark, which is how I learn the Badlands have predators worse than the people running them.

The first I know of it is the deck slamming up into my knees and the lights going to emergency red. Then the boarding charge — a sound like the ship taking a punch to the lung — and the corridor I'm in fills with a wind that wants to drag me toward a breach two compartments down, the ship bleeding its air into the void through a hole that's getting wider.

A bulkhead starts to drop to seal the section. I'm on the wrong side of it. I get three running steps before my boots leave the deck and the breach starts to win.

He comes through the dropping bulkhead in the last hand's width of space, and he doesn't grab the railing, he grabs me, and turns his own body into the wall between me and the void. We hit the deck hard with the bulkhead slamming shut over us and the wind cut off all at once, and for a second there's only his weight and his heartbeat going like a drum against my ear and his voice in my hair saying a word in his own tongue, over and over, that I don't need translated.

Then he's up, and I see the other thing he is.

I've seen violence. I grew up in it. I have never seen anything like Saren in a corridor full of men who came to take his ship. He doesn't rage. That's the part that stops my breath. He's economical, almost gentle, and three boarders are down before the fourth understands the math has changed, and he moves through them like weather moves through a market, and when it's over he's standing in the wreck of them not even breathing hard, and his crimson eyes find me where I'm pressed to the wall, and for one bad second I can see exactly what the galaxy was afraid of.

Then it's gone, folded back behind the careful captain, and he's bleeding from a gash along his ribs and pretending he isn't.

"Sit down," I tell him, in the medical alcove, with a suture kit I've stolen from Elsyn's stores. "You're dripping on your own deck. It's undignified."

"I have had worse."

"That's not the flex you think it is." I get my hands on the wound, and he goes still under them, every muscle locked, and I work fast because the alternative is thinking about how warm his skin is and how the heat answers mine. "Hold still or I'll make it crooked on purpose."

He holds still. After a while, in a voice with all the captain stripped out of it, he says, "When the bulkhead dropped. I thought you were on the other side of it." A pause. "I thought you were gone."

I don't look up from the suture. If I look up I'll have to deal with my own face. "You came back for cargo," I say. "Sentimental, for a monster."

"You are not cargo." He says it quietly, like a fact he's only just allowed himself. "I have not decided what you are. But you are not that."

I tie off the last suture and make myself let go of him, and I sit back, and I understand with a sinking certainty that I havestarted to care about the captain of a dying ship far past anything that's going to end well for me.

CHAPTER 8

SAREN

The instinct sharpens after the boarders, and I am not prepared for how little of me is left to govern it.

It is small things first. A crewman braces Althea by the elbow on a pitching deck and I am across the compartment before I have chosen to move, and I have to turn the motion into checking a console so my own people don't see their captain bare his teeth over a steadying hand. She doesn't notice. The crew notices. Vasha notices, and says nothing, which from Vasha is a shout.

Elsyn finds me cleaning a weapon I haven't fired, which is what I do with my hands when the rest of me is a storm.

"It's worse," I tell him.

"It will keep getting worse the longer you starve it." He lowers himself onto the bench across from me with the care of failing joints. "The old texts had a word for what you're doing. They didn't admire it. A bond denied turns inward. The possessiveness, the temper — that isn't the bond corrupting you, Saren. That's the bond with nowhere to go, pacing the inside of your skin." He watches me. "The Ishani believed a true mate was not a prize. They believed it was ballast. A people in freefall,given something to steady against. We have been in freefall for three hundred years."