Mila
The one underneath was very still.
She crossed to the desk. The laptop was where she'd left it, positioned to catch the satellite signal that was strongest between eleven PM and two AM, a window she'd mapped during her first month aboard. The lid opened. A sixteen-character key. The encryption took four seconds to handshake.
The screen resolved. A chat window. Secure, routed through three relays, untraceable. If anyone came looking, this line had never existed.
Status update.
A pause. Then a cursor.
Go ahead.
Mila studied the screen. She thought about the gallery on Tuesday night.
Star's back against the wall. Artem's hands pressed to the panels on either side of her head.
His forehead dropping to her shoulder, his mouth against her collarbone, and the expression on his face, the unguarded one, the open one, that Mila had spent eleven years trying to put there and never had.
She thought about the green dress. The mirror. Star turning, flushed and young and astonished by her own reflection. How the girl's eyes had stung with tears because a twenty-euro-account masseuse from Nice was beautiful in a dress and couldn't believe it.
She thought about what it cost to smile while her knuckles ached.
He's distracted. The girl. It's a problem.
The cursor pulsed. Then:
Handle it.
Mila closed the laptop. She sat in the dark cabin, in the chair by the porthole, and faced the black water.
The ship hummed beneath her. Sixty-two hertz.
She didn't know that fact. Artem did. Artem knew the frequency of his own ship's engines, knew the weight of a four-hundred-year-old handkerchief in a girl's palm, knew how many sugars a twenty-year-old masseuse took in her coffee and what time she started her morning and what her hands felt like on his scars.
He knew all of this because he'd chosen to learn it, and he'd never chosen to learn a single comparable thing about Mila in eleven years.
The girl understood him. That was the problem.
The girl understood everything about him.
She understood the insomnia and the engine room and the hands he wouldn't let anyone touch and the smile he didn't give to anyone else, and she understood it all without being told because her hands had read his body like a book and she'd paid attention to every page.
Eleven years. Mila had spent eleven years beside him.
She had stood in military briefings and at his father's funeral and in the gallery they'd built together, and she had been warm and generous and present and professional, and she had smiled and smiled and smiled, and he had never once seen her.
Not like he saw a girl from Nice who held an old handkerchief in her palm and wept.
When Mila stood, her face was the one she'd wear tomorrow. Warm. Generous. Delighted for them both.
She practised the smile in the bathroom mirror until it reached her eyes.