Page 9 of Reaper's Brat

"You're still here," I say, when I am certain she is asleep, so it is safe to be afraid of how much I mean it.

"Mm." Not asleep at all. "Get used to it."

I sleep. No old ghost comes to drag me back through the worst of my years. It is the first night in longer than I can count, and I will not understand until morning that the gift was never the heat of her. It was the quiet she left behind in me.

CHAPTER 13

ALTHEA

Morning, by the ship's reckoning, is only the lights going pale, and I wake into it warmer than I have any right to be.

Saren is still asleep, which I get the sense almost never happens, and asleep he looks like a different creature entirely — the bone ridges that read as threats when he's awake just read as architecture now, the hard mouth gone slack, one enormous hand open on the bedding where it spent the night curled around me. I lie still and study him while I can, the way you study a thing you know won't hold the pose if it catches you looking.

When I finally slip out, Caelis is loitering in the corridor with the studied innocence of someone who's been loitering a while.

"Don't," I warn him.

"I wasn't going to say anything." He falls into step beside me, beaming. "I just wanted to show you something, and now seems — better than yesterday." He takes me down, deeper than I've been, to a sealed section the crew doesn't open, and he keys it, and the lights come up on a chamber that stops me dead.

Murals. Wall to ceiling, untouched by the salvage that scabs over the rest of the ship, paint still holding its color aftercenturies in the dark. People who look almost like Saren but unbroken — taller, smoother, crowned with horns they'd carved into shapes for beauty instead of mourning — dancing, building, holding instruments I have no names for. A whole civilization, painted by people who loved it, hidden behind a locked door on a marauder's ship.

"This is what we were," Caelis says, quiet. "The old ones kept it sealed. Said looking at it just made the now hurt worse. But I come down sometimes." He scuffs a boot. "I like knowing we used to be beautiful. Even if nobody alive remembers how."

"You should open it," I say. "Not all the way. But — Vasha presses her hand to a wall full of dead names every shift. Why not give her a wall of living ones too?"

Over the next few days I do a careless, dangerous thing: I start asking. I ask Elsyn to teach me an Ishani word and he gives me three. I ask an old hand what the song at the remembrance meant and he tells me, and then tells me another. The crew starts talking about the before — haltingly at first, like testing a healed bone, then more. Someone hums one of the recordings while they work. The ship, which has sounded like a held breath since I came aboard, starts to sound like a place where people live.

Vasha catches me in the galley and I brace for the warning again. It doesn't come.

"Morale's up," she says, gruff, stirring the eternal pot. "Fights are down. Two of the young ones asked me about my old clan's death-songs yesterday. Nobody's asked me that in ten years." She doesn't look at me. "I still think you're going to get us killed. I'm just no longer certain it won't have been worth it." It is, I'm fairly sure, the warmest thing she's capable of saying, and I take it like the gift it is.

There's one face in the galley that doesn't lift with the rest. Theryn, in the corner, not humming, not carving — justwatching the crew sing a dead world's songs around a human who shouldn't be aboard. I catch it for half a second before he smooths it away, and I don't have the first idea what's moving behind it. I should. I've read harder men than him across a salvage table. But I'm warm and I'm wanted and I've stopped watching the exits for the first time in my life, so I look away, and I let myself not wonder what a frightened man does with a fear he's decided he can't say out loud.

CHAPTER 14

SAREN

There is a market moon at the edge of the Reach where even Reapers can trade if they keep their hoods up, and we put in for parts we cannot make and food we cannot grow, and it is there that I learn exactly how little of myself I still command.

Theryn brings the accusation before we dock, and this time he is not alone. Two of the older hands stand with him in the corridor, arms crossed, and he lays it out flat: the captain is compromised, the human is a beacon, the hunters found us because something aboard has changed and that something has a name and the name is Althea.

But the meeting does not break his way, and that is the new thing. Caelis speaks against him. Then Korrah, who has never in my memory spoken in a captain's council. Then, to my genuine shock, one of the old hands who came aboard before Theryn did. "She pulled me out of the medical bay floor with her own hands," the old one says. "Human or not, that buys her a hearing. We are not the kind of crew that spaces the people who save us. Or we didn't used to be."

Theryn looks at me like I have stolen something from him, and I have. I have taken the one comfort he had left, which wascertainty. I know exactly how that robbery feels. I performed it on myself the day I touched her.

On the moon it goes wrong in a smaller, uglier way. We are loading crates in a dim market gallery when two smugglers take an interest in Althea — the kind of interest that starts as words and is deciding whether to become hands — and one of them sets his palm on her arm to turn her toward him.

I do not remember crossing the gallery. I remember the after: the smuggler against a bulkhead with my hand at his throat and his feet off the ground, and the whole market gone silent, and Althea's voice somewhere behind me saying my name in a tone I have not earned the right to ignore.

I set him down. He runs. The bond is roaring in me, satisfied and ashamed in the same beat, and I have just shown an entire trading post that the captain ofThe Hollow Wakecan be moved, which is the one thing a Reaper captain can never afford to be.

"That," Althea says quietly, as we walk back to the ship, "scared you more than it scared me."

"It should scare us both."

"Maybe." She bumps her shoulder against my arm, which is as high as she reaches. "Or maybe a man allowed to want something finally has a reason not to die for the practice of wanting nothing. I haven't decided. You're a work in progress, Saren." She says it lightly, but she takes my hand as she says it, in full view of my crew, and does not let go, and I let her keep it the whole way home.

CHAPTER 15