Chapter 25 #2
“She wouldn’t work out on a heist team anyway,” Rowan cut in suddenly.
“I assessed her on the way up here, boss. Clutching her pearls and throwing a tantrum every time she so much as read a fanfic she didn’t like.
I thought maybe she might have grown out of it by now, but it’s how she’s always been; a rule-follower to the bone.
No matter what we promise or threaten, she’d betray the team to the authorities the first chance she got.
It doesn’t make any sense to put her on a heist team. She’s a liability.”
Kelli wasn’t sure if she wanted to strangle him for insulting her, or thank him for trying to help. Maybe both.
Conchita stood, slowly and deliberately, out of her armchair. She looked even bigger standing than she had in the chair. She loomed.
“I try to do what’s best for my daughter,” she said in a low, measured tone.
“She is young yet. She is allowed her whims. But I am a careful woman, and I would not have invited you here and told you my plans, on this of all days, if I didn’t already know you were going to help me.
I already have all the leverage I need.” Her gaze flicked to Rowan. “Or didn’t you tell her?”
“Tell me what?!” Kelli yelped, more betrayed than ever.
Rowan turned to look at her. His big dark eyes had gone wider than ever, panicked, pained. “Kelli, I’m sorry. I didn’t want this. This wasn’t my choice.”
“Tell me what?!”
“My boy Rowan really does care about you,” Conchita continued placidly. “Even after all these years. Maybe a little too much. Maybe he talks about you a little more than he should. He talked about you a little too vulnerably, one drunken night with Zhaleh, and let something crucial slip.”
Kelli stared at Rowan, uncomprehending.
“One thing you might not understand,” said Conchita, “is that everyone in the Brimstone Syndicate is family. Rosaura has certain privileges as the daughter of my womb, but everyone in this distribution center is a child who came to me in their hour of need and swore loyalty to me. Everyone here is my family, my responsibility, my son or my daughter or my nonbinary child. I ensure that their needs are fairly met, and in return, they owe me a certain filial piety.” Her eyes narrowed as she glanced at Rowan.
“Rowan is a troublesome boy who occasionally forgets how a good family ought to behave.
He forgot that a son ought not to keep secrets from his mother.
He ought to have told me the truth immediately, and I am still hurt that he neglected to do so.
But Zhaleh is a good daughter. Zhaleh tells me what I need to know.
“So here is the choice I am offering you. You’re going to be a good daughter, too, and do what I’ve asked.
Or else I will drop you and Rowan both down on the doorstep of Inspiration’s community standards enforcement division, and I will let them know, as a little favor from a loyal and grateful businesswoman, exactly who started Callisto’s great fuel-leak fire ten years ago. ”
Kelli stared at her in shock.
Hearing Rowan’s name on the heist team had been a slap in the face, but this was more like being shot: a deep, whole-body jerk too sudden and terrible to register as pain.
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t think.
This was worse than if Conchita had locked her up and refused to let her go back to Callisto; worse than if she’d threatened to kill her. The worst thing of all.
Somehow she could still feel the dry rasp of the forbidden match between her fingertips, the lurch in her stomach as she’d worked up her nerve, the rage that she’d told herself was righteous rage.
The blaze of it all through her body, even before the match fell.
She’d spent the last ten years trying to forget how that felt.
The deliberate calm of her morning routine in the safety of her apartment.
The press of her noise-cancelling headphones, piping soothing tones into her ears.
The constant effort so that she didn’t get that angry again, so that no one found out what a monster she really was.
She’d known, all along, that she shouldn’t have come here.
But when Conchita Quixada smiled and thanked her for seeing reason, when she gestured for the guards to take her back to the Wildfire, Kelli couldn’t even bring herself to speak.
She didn’t know how it was that she managed to walk, as Conchita Quixada’s goons marched her and Rowan back to the Wildfire, with Ting and Zhaleh trailing behind.
People talked about Kelli’s temper, but at her worst times, she didn’t scream or cry right away.
She got blank and rigid like this instead; her mind went somewhere bad and far away.
It was like how she’d managed not to scream, during the liftoff, until the radio turned off: except that had been mostly on purpose, and this time it was completely involuntary, a kind of loss of consciousness.
She couldn’t have moved on her own initiative, but she was just aware enough to respond to simple commands, and when they shoved her and told her to move, she moved.
Somewhere in that other place, bad and far away, her mind worked frantically.
It was churning through all her remaining options, all the things she was going to have to do.
But those thoughts didn’t seem to have much to do with her body or with her surroundings.
They were partitioned off until it was safe.
As they approached the airlock door, Rowan stepped out in front of the rest of the group.
He looked almost as stricken as she felt, but he’d stayed in better control.
“Can you guys wait outside?” he said to Ting and Zhaleh, pointing at Kelli with his thumb.
“I think the two of us need to talk for a sec.”
“Can’t,” said the goon at the front, a stocky guy with a downturned lip and big sideburns. “The boss says make sure you’re all four on board.”
So Kelli numbly piled into the airlock with the rest of the heist team and they all four stood there, pressed together in the small space, avoiding each other’s gazes.
The goons, at least, stayed outside. When the inner hatch opened the team stumbled into the Wildfire’s cramped, L-shaped hallway and immediately sprang away from each other.
Oh. It wasn’t safe yet, but Kelli could feel her connection to her body changing slightly.
Her breath came faster, big gulps of hyperventilated air; her fists clenched.
Apparently getting back to this passingly familiar space, without a bunch of frightening strangers prodding her along, was enough.
She was going to melt down now; she felt it starting.
She couldn’t have stopped it any more than she could have stopped everything else.
Zhaleh motioned to Ting and they both retreated into the study, leaving Rowan and Kelli in the hall.
They could probably still hear everything, but Kelli couldn’t help that.
The moment the two of them disappeared from view, she dropped to her knees and screamed until her throat hurt.
Her fists pounded against the rubber mat on the floor, which was impervious; she couldn’t stop them.
She felt like she would never, ever stop crying, even though that wasn’t how crying worked.
It always felt like that when the meltdowns got bad.
Rowan didn’t try to stop her. But also, Rowan didn’t leave.
“Hey. Kelli, hey,” he said softly, sitting down in her line of sight, but not too close.
He’d used to do this when they were little.
Grown-ups and the other kids had never known how to deal with Kelli’s meltdowns, but Rowan had some supernatural sense of how it was done.
He’d always known better than to tell her that it would be okay, or that she should calm down.
He hadn’t pushed her to tell him what was wrong, at times when she couldn’t talk anyway.
He just sat with her. It hadn’t stopped the meltdowns, but it had helped, knowing she wasn’t alone; she hadn’t become something so horrifying and disgusting that he couldn’t look at it.
She was still a person, and it was possible for a person, here in this room, to be calm.
Right now, she hated him for it. She was the one who’d set the fire, and who’d stupidly gotten on a spaceship with him. She didn’t deserve his help. And he didn’t deserve it, either. He shouldn’t get to pretend like he was her friend.
“YOU LIED,” Kelli said. The words tore their way out painfully, half strangled.
“I’m sorry.”
“YOU LIED TO ME,” said Kelli.
“I did. I had to. I’m sorry.”
Kelli wordlessly howled.
It was a long meltdown. It was ages and ages before the screams subsided into sobs, before the tears slowed to the point where she could speak again in proper sentences. Her hands hurt from hitting the rubber mat. Her throat hurt. Everything hurt. She scrubbed her face furiously with her sleeve.
“Everything was a lie,” she said at last. Her voice shook. “You said it would just be a gray-market job. You said I’d go back to Callisto after. Are you even a media smuggler? Are you even in debt?”
“I am, and I am. I thought if I handled it just right, I could make the rest of this not happen. I thought I could make those other things true. I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry.”
The best way to make the rest of this not happen, Kelli thought, was if he hadn’t come to Callisto for her in the first place.
“What else do you smuggle besides media?” she demanded.
“Drugs? Weapons? And what other crimes do you do besides smuggling? Do you kidnap people a lot? Is that what you do?” Her voice rose, and then she shook her head sharply.
Rowan was a liar, so therefore, anything he told her would probably still be a lie.
“Ugh—never mind! I don’t even want to know.
But you knew this was going to happen. You knew what Conchita was going to ask me to do and you knew what she’d do to me if I said no to her. ”
“Or if I didn’t agree to bring you to her,” Rowan said flatly. “We both started the fire, right? She blackmailed us both. If I’d failed her, she would have sold me out and sold you out, before you’d ever even known anything was happening.”
Kelli paused. She hadn’t actually thought about it from that direction. What would it be like if Rowan had refused to come get her? Would she simply have woken up that morning, in her white-gold apartment, to the sound of community standards enforcement knocking on her door?
What would she have done if she was Rowan, and someone had given her that awful choice?
Rowan handed her a disposable tissue and she blew her nose into it violently.
“Fine. But you still had a choice. You could have told me the truth from the start. You could have told me she was blackmailing us and we could have figured out what to do about it together. Instead you tricked me and that was your choice. That’s on you. ”
“Is that what you’d have liked better? Me dropping back into your life and right away threatening the worst thing I could possibly do to you, right off the bat?
I thought maybe when Conchita met you she’d change her mind, and then you’d never have to know what the alternative would have been.
Wouldn’t that have been better? Kinder?”
“Kinder for you,” said Kelli, curling her lip. “You got to show me sappy movies. You got to dance with me. And you thought you wouldn’t have to see my face when you told me the truth.”
The dance and We’re Okay Now had felt so dangerously sweet at the time. So right, even though she knew they must be wrong. Now she wished neither one of them had ever happened. She wished she’d never seen Rowan’s adult face at all.
“I wish—” said Rowan. There was a pain in his face Kelli couldn’t decipher. “I wish it didn’t have to be like this.”
“I wish I was dead,” Kelli snapped back.
Rowan went quiet so abruptly she felt like she’d slapped him.
It was a low blow, and she almost wanted to take it back.
It occurred to her abruptly that, even now, they couldn’t really talk about the fire.
There had never been any words that could encompass what had happened.
There weren’t any words that could make it okay.
At that moment, one of the display screens in the center of the hallway made an impatient ping. Rowan pivoted on his heel and glanced at it, then scowled.
“That’s Conchita’s people,” he said, “wanting to know why I’m not in the cockpit yet. I gotta go.”
He stomped over to the ladder, pausing only to throw an irate glance into the study. Ting and Zhaleh were both huddled in there, trying gamely not to look like they’d just listened to every word.
“And get out of there,” he snapped in their direction as he passed. “That’s Kelli’s room.”