Chapter Twenty
THE brIDGE WAS AT THE front of the Endurance, and the Palatine hub was all the way at the other end of the ship, five kilometers away.
Luciana emerged from the Collinas Gate just as many people were finishing their work for the day and the platform for the train was crowded, even though the trains ran without stopping when it was busy.
She fretted and shifted on her feet, and considered walking to the hub. Only, she could see the next train making its way toward the platform already, and it would surely pass her if she started walking now. Yet standing here was driving her crazy.
Everyone crowded into the car. Luciana didn’t fight for a seat. She couldn’t possibly sit still. She gripped the overhead railing and tried to calm herself down. She was starting to hyperventilate.
She reasoned it out carefully. Brice didn’t know she was coming. So the urgent need to rush there as fast as possible was just a product of her own mind. No appointments or timetables existed.
Calm reason didn’t make her nerves stop twitching.
Even when the train halted at the Palatine platform she still couldn’t hurry, because everyone still on the train was heading to the same place she was.
She tripped and skipped and wished everyone packed in around her would pick up speed.
They plodded up the stairs to the hub itself and onto the taxiboat platform, while others turned and walked down the stairs to the surface of the drum.
This time, Luciana was grateful for the bots that piloted the taxiboats now. They processed everyone’s destination instantly and didn’t sit at the platform trying to figure out the quickest and most efficient route to reach all the drop off points.
She found herself in a taxiboat with five other people, and even though a seat was made available for her, she sat on the edge of it, gripped the low sides of the boat, and tried to peer past the solid mass of the bot at the front.
Her heart was hammering.
The bot dropped three people off first, then alerted her that her stop would be next. It grounded the boat barely three minutes later, on the gravel pad in front of the concrete house with the glass walls.
She was here.
And now her feet felt heavy and her heart weak. What if he refused to speak to her?
What if he had lost interest or found someone else, or hated her now?
The taxiboat lifted away. She barely noticed. She couldn’t stand here forever though. She moved along the path with the soft ferns to the door under the balcony.
Brice wasn’t in the kitchen, where she had most often found him, or on the sofa, where he sat when he wasn’t cooking.
She knocked on the door, wondering if she was knocking loud enough and wishing he had an alert pad like everyone else.
Nothing stirred. Her knocking roused no one.
Luciana rested her heated forehead against the cold glass. Now she was starting to feel foolish. She couldn’t just drop into someone’s life and expect them to be there waiting for her.
She moved back out into the sunlights, along the little path. If Bryce wasn’t here, then she couldn’t even call a taxiboat to go home. She would have to walk to the neighboring house – the Grey house – and ask Danni to call one for her.
“Luciana.”
She spun, her heart leaping and her throat closing over.
Brice stood only a dozen paces away, up to his knees in grass.
Luciana couldn’t think of anything to say. Her gaze fell to the grass stains on his trousers. “What in the stars are you doing?”
He moved over to the path and stepped over the ferns, carefully, the cane working hard. “What are you doing here?”
Luciana’s fear swamped her. She couldn’t bring herself to answer him directly. “I just…I was…Brice, you resigned!”
He nodded. “It was time. Finally.”
“But…tankball!”
He leaned the cane against his leg, brushed off his hands, then picked up the cane once more. “Now I’ll be able to watch the games as a spectator, instead of sitting in the box and worrying about gate revenue.”
Her throat was still closed over and it was difficult to speak. She wanted to jump in with both feet and tell him about everything in her heart and mind, only fear kept her silent.
He was watching her with a touch of wariness. She didn’t blame him for being suspicious. She had walked away without explanation. Refused all communications.
Someone speak! She screamed in her mind.
She was the conversationalist, though. She had just spent two weeks talking to hundreds of people, some of them shyer and more laconic than Brice. She had used all her skills to draw those people out.
And at last, Luciana knew what to say.
She swallowed. “I thought you would be in the house as usual, as you wouldn’t be in the office. Were you walking? You’ve got a lot to think about now.”
“I wasn’t walking.”
She looked down at the damp cuffs of his trousers once more. Clearly he had been moving through damp grass.
He shifted his good foot. “That?”
“Well, it does look as though you were walking…” she said carefully.
“I wasn’t walking.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, I supposed walking was involved. I was looking for…” He drew in a breath. “Flowers.”
Flowers. Luciana hid her smile. “It’s autumn Brice. There are no flowers.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“You know you can print flowers, right?”
“I know. It felt right to pick them.”
He was a natural reductionist. Food cooked from scratch, flowers picked, not printed. Luciana sighed. “Who were the flowers for?” She suspected his abrupt resignation would upset a lot of people who must be mollified.
“You, of course.”
Her heart lurched heavily. She squeezed her fists. “Me?”
Brice came a little closer. Close enough that she could see he was tired.
His eyes had a pinched look. “I was coming to see you. To stand on your doorstep all night, if that was what it took to get you to talk to me. I was…what I did to you—Devar and the charges… I’ve hated myself for that.
There were good reasons for what I did. Well, they felt like good reasons at the time.
I even knew it would probably mean you’d never talk to me again, when I did it.
It was the only way…” He stopped. Drew in a breath.
“I was a bastard, Luciana.” His voice was low.
“One day, if you care to know, I’ll explain why.
I knew what it would do to you, and that’s why I was coming to see you. I’m asking you to forgive me.”
Her breath escaped her in a rush. She pushed her hand against her chest, trying to contain her runaway heart. “It’s too late for forgiveness,” she began.
Brice’s shoulders slumped.
She put her hand out. “No, no, I mean, I just came from the Bridge. Travers told me what you did. Refusing to sell your stalls so they wouldn’t take mine. And Devar…Brice, you saved his life! How could I ever hold anything against you, after that?”
He smiled. “Devar accepted the deal. I’m glad. For both of you.”
There was so much more to say. She could feel it all welling up in her. An overwhelming torrent of hot words and scalding feelings.
So she kissed him instead.
Brice wrapped his arms around her. She heard the cane clutter on the path. Then he was kissing her with a fervor that left her breathless. Oh, how she had missed his kisses!
He held her head and kissed her once more, then rested his forehead against hers. “I love you, Luciana. I have for a long time, only I didn’t have the guts to tell you that. And I’ve hated myself for what I did to you.”
“You’ve made up for all of it,” she whispered. “I’ll spend the rest of my life reminding you of that. I love you.”
He sighed and kissed her again.
“What are you going to do, now that you’re not with the Tankball Association?” Luciana asked him.
“Something will come along, I suspect. I might shadow you for a few weeks and learn from the master.”
She could feel her cheeks heating. Then she remembered. “Oh! But I’m going to be busy for…well, a long while, I suspect. Captain Travers wants me to talk to everyone on the ship all over again, and help them understand why giving Devar a child is so much better than executing him.”
“I don’t think that’s a hard sell at all,” Brice said, his voice low.
“And you’re the perfect person to do it.
” He brushed her hair over her shoulder.
“Maybe I can help. The former Tankball Association manager standing by your side, the guy who laid the fraud charges in the first place…that would carry some weight, wouldn’t it? ”
“It would,” she breathed, delighted.
“Wait…all over again? That’s what you said, isn’t it? That you’d have to talk to everyone on the ship all over again….” He touched the center of her chest. “It was you who turned the ship around on the mutiny charges, wasn’t it?”
She smiled.
Brice laughed. “I knew it. So Travers figured that out, too. And now she’s using you to change the ship’s mind about Devar and the child…Oh, she’s clever.”
Luciana tugged on his jacket. “We should go inside or go back to my place, or something besides standing here.”
“Wherever you want to go,” Brice said. “I’ll be right there with you.”
Luciana laughed. “And if I want to go dancing?”
He smiled and lifted her chin. “I’ll watch you dance, my love, and tell everyone who will listen that you’re mine.”