Chapter Fifty. Forsaken
CHAPTER
FIFTY
Forsaken
Dr. Pierce was off duty but on call, which was the perpetual state of ships’ doctors. Of course these days a lot of the more routine medical work was done by the drones anyway—the doctor’s primary role was to oversee the medbay and to take the blame if something went wrong.
Most of the beds were empty; the sky-hunt was dangerous but a lot of its dangers were the kind that killed you quickly, irrecoverably, and quite often explosively so there’d been a relatively small number of actual injuries on the voyage.
Sickness was more of an issue since we lived in close quarters and breathed recycled air that had been through a hundred other pairs of lungs, but the atmosphere scrubbers and decontamination chambers saw to most of that.
For somebody who had been shot in the back with a spray of subsonic flechettes, Q looked pretty good, inasmuch as I was any judge.
For somebody in almost any other context, she looked terrible.
Her tattoos, which normally burned with light even when she was asleep, were lifeless traceries of biometallic wire.
Tubes ran out of her arm into a set of machines which I assumed were designed to do her some kind of good—although, since they were likely the products of some subsidiary or other of Aphrodite Pharma State, they were also probably charging her by the hour.
There was a stool by the bed for the convenience of visitors and, presumably, the doctor, so I pulled it over and sat down beside her. I’d come straight from Locke’s cabin, so my cheeks were still stained with tear tracks I hadn’t bothered to wipe away and my mouth still tasted of salt and blood.
Even if Locke hadn’t put me off talking for at least a day, I’d have had no words, so I reached out and took Q by the hand. She felt cold. Not void-cold or ice-cold and, most importantly, not grave-cold, but colder than I’d ever felt her, and by that time I’d felt her a lot.
In case the weird chronology and constant digressions in this book didn’t make it obvious enough for you, I’ve always been fucking hopeless at being in the moment.
In some ways I’ve been more fully aboard the Pequod in the years after I shipped on her than I was on the voyage.
To actually ground me in the here and now of where I am I need something sharp.
It can be pain, it can be pleasure, it can be a blinding light or a deafening noise, but it needs to be something that grabs me by the throat and says, If you look away you will die.
It isn’t a thing I can find in quiet moments.
So as I sat there holding Q’s hand and trying so hard, so mercilessly fucking hard to just focus on the fact of her, on the moment that for all I knew then might have been the last, on the palm-to-palm feeling of her fingers intertwined with mine, my mind slipped its shackles and started wandering.
I failed her, in other words. As I would fail her so often.
My thoughts fled to everything they could possibly flee to that wasn’t the death of a lover.
To the sting of her knife on my throat when we first met.
To the scrimshander picture she’d drawn of me in a place I could never understand.
To the night I’d first begged her to fuck me.
Untethered and undisciplined, I gave in to wondering who she really was, who I might have been with her, and from there to self-indulgent speculations about identity and context and winds and words that looking back I’m ashamed of myself for falling into.
I’m not a scholar. Not really. I’m not a philosopher. I’m just a cold, frightened woman screaming her insecurity to an indifferent sky. Sometimes I wonder if I could have been more, but even wondering that seems egoistic.
Sometimes I look at myself and say girl, accept it. You’re full of shit.
While I sat there dreaming my narcissist’s dreams, Q lay silent beside me until, after I don’t know how long of stewing in my own crap, I felt her fingers tense.
I looked down to see her eyes flicker open. She turned her head towards me the barest fraction and I saw her lips move, but her voice was faint and between that and the language barrier I couldn’t make out what she was saying.
“Don’t speak,” I told her. And then, because it felt like the kind of thing you say, I added, “I’m here.”
Turning her head just a little, she looked into my eyes. And she said, “Quid dereliquisti me?”
I had no idea what she meant. I’d made some effort to learn some bits of her language, but since she understood Exodite perfectly well and we both mostly went in for nonverbal communication anyway, I’d kinda stalled shortly after working out the Q-words were questions. There I went letting her down again.
And when I looked so obviously blank, she said, “Left me. Forsook me. Why?”
Of all the things I wished she hadn’t asked me, that was … I mean it was one of them. Perilously close to all of them. And I was silent.
“Why?” she asked again.
I could feel my fingers going limp. My hand slipping out of hers as I pulled away out of sheer primordial shame.
With a will and a strength that I at once envied and thought it was a really bad time for, she forced herself into a sitting position. “Immemor atque unanimis false sodalibus,” she said, in a tone I’d not heard her use since Cthonius Linea. “Iam te nil miseret, dure, tui dulcis amiculi?”
I still didn’t understand her. Couldn’t even do her that courtesy.
“Iam me prodere, iam non dubitas fallere, perfide?” she went on, increasingly frustrated with me. “Nec facta impia fallacum hominum caelicolis placent.”
“I’m sorry,” I half sobbed, half whispered. “I just— I couldn’t…”
I wasn’t used to Q being angry with me. But what was really devastating was that I didn’t get the chance, because I saw her anger bleed so quickly into sorrow. “Quae tu neglegis ac me miserum deseris in malis.”
I still didn’t understand. I still couldn’t face her.
I fled.