Page 6 of Reaper's Brat

"And if the ballast walks off at the next station."

"Then you find out whether you ever needed it, or only wanted it." He rises. "I am old enough to tell you those are not the same, and young enough to remember they feel identical from the inside."

He leaves me with that. I don't sleep.

The next watch we work a wreck — a Coalition supply hauler gutted in the field, the kind of salvage that keeps us fed for a season if we're fast and dead if we're slow. I put Althea on the line because she asked and because saying no to her has stopped being something I'm able to do, and I watch a human read an unstable wreck better than crew who've done it their whole lives, calling weak spots before our scanners flag them, threading the team through a collapsing hold like she was born in the black instead of on a colony floor.

When the haul comes aboard, the crew is laughing. Not the hard laughter of men relieved to be alive — easy laughter, the kind I have not heard on this ship since I was young enough to make it myself. Caelis is showing her something he built. Two of the old crew are arguing happily over the best of the salvage. The mess smells of a real meal, the first in a month.

I stand in the hatch and I let myself, for one breath, imagine it. Not survival. The other thing. A ship that isn't a grave with engines. A people who carve their living instead of only their dead.

The breath ends. It always does.

Somewhere past the hull the dark keeps its own counsel, the way it always has, and a captain who has lived this long in the Badlands learns to feel its moods shift the way he feels an old wound shift before a storm. I feel one now, low and wordless. I do not let myself give it a shape. Giving it a shape would end thewatch, and the watch is the first good thing I have let myself keep in years.

So I keep it instead. Whatever is coming will still be coming tomorrow. Tonight there is warm light and easy laughter and a human asleep two decks down who has made my ship feel like something other than a place to die, and I let that be the whole of what I know.

I let myself have the watch.

CHAPTER 9

ALTHEA

They bury their dead in metal.

I learn it on the night the crew gathers in the long hold, where the salvaged plates rest in their racks, and I learn it because Caelis comes to the store-room and doesn't bring food. He brings a hand held out, palm up, the way you'd coax an animal you weren't sure of.

"You don't have to," he says. "But Elsyn says you should be asked. Nobody's ever asked a human before."

So I go. The hold is full of them, eighty-some bodies that could each break me in half, and not one of them looks at me like a threat tonight. A bowl of oil burns in the center, throwing their faces into something softer than I've seen, and one by one they go to the wall and press a hand to a name and say a thing in their own tongue, low, and the rest answer it back like a tide.

I don't understand the words. I understand the shape of them. Grief, given a place to stand so it doesn't have to be carried alone.

Saren is last. He doesn't go to the wall. He touches his own horn instead, his mouth moving over each cut he made there, and I watch a man recite a list of the people he couldn't keepalive and I have to look at the floor because my eyes have decided to embarrass me.

After, he finds me at the edge of the light. "You stayed," he says, like it surprises him.

"My brother." The words come out before I've cleared them for takeoff. "Tomas. He was sixteen. There was a fever going through the labor sectors and the clinics wanted three months' wages I didn't have, and by the time I'd stolen enough he was —" I stop. I have never said this out loud, not once, not to anyone. "I never had a wall to put him on. I just have the part of me that's angry, and that's not the same as a place to set him down."

Saren is quiet for a long while. Then he lifts a thumb to his own horn, to a smooth stretch below the last carved name, and he says, "There is room."

I don't have an answer that won't undo me. He doesn't make me find one. He stays beside me while the oil burns low, close enough that the heat of him reaches me through the cold of the hold, and at some point my shoulder comes to rest against his arm and neither of us moves to fix it.

When the light gutters out he turns toward me, and I turn toward him, and for one suspended second the whole dying ship leans in with us. His hand comes up. Stops short of my face. Hovers there, shaking, like a man holding himself off a ledge by his fingernails.

Then he steps back. "Sleep, Thea," he says, wrecked, and he's gone into the dark with his dead, and I stand there wanting the thing he wouldn't take more than I have ever let myself want anything.

CHAPTER 10

SAREN

Word reaches me at third bell that a scavenger post three jumps behind us has gone dark, and dark stations only mean one thing out here.

Korrah brings the intercept — a distress burst, cut off mid-word, then nothing. I have the chart pulled up before the recording ends. The post sat squarely on the route we ran four days ago. Someone is walking our backtrail, and walking it methodically, the way professionals do.

"Hunters," Vasha says, reading it over my shoulder. "Not pirates. Pirates take the station and stay to strip it. This one took it and moved on. They're looking for something specific."

They're looking for her. I don't say it. I don't have to; Vasha's face has already arrived there.