Day Six
(age twenty-four)
Baz and his security team did not jump out at them on the way out of the building. They made it back onto the hyperloop without incident.
Kelli sat rigid in her seat as Ganymede’s gray, stony scenery rolled past. She was much too aware of Rowan’s skin as he lounged beside her. The places where it disappeared under his dress shirt’s collar and cuffs. The heat coming off of him. She couldn’t believe herself.
“All right,” said Rowan. “What’s eating you? You looked happy back there, you looked like you were getting into it, and then all of a sudden you froze up again. Did I do something?”
“You know what you did. We’ve had that fight already.”
“I know the last ten things you complained about. I know all the ways I’m a criminal and a shitty person. But I don’t know what I did there in the data center, at that moment, specifically, to flip your mood. I actually don’t know that.”
Kelli bit the inside of her cheek. She considered not telling him.
What business was it of Rowan’s? It wasn’t like she could confess that she still loved him and fall into his arms right there on the hyperloop.
That would just make both sides of the problem worse.
The ways she’d compromised herself for his benefit, and the way she’d already betrayed him.
You couldn’t kiss people when you knew a community standards enforcement team was going to be waiting for them at your destination, ten minutes from now.
But it didn’t feel right to say nothing.
“I realized something,” she said in a low voice, not looking at him.
“What?”
“I realized I liked it. The heist. I’m not better than you. I still like these kinds of things.”
Rowan knew her well enough to understand. “And that makes you mad at yourself?”
“No, it makes me mad at you. This is what you wanted, isn’t it?
This is what you were trying to do. You take a prissy, proper girl, you force her to do something awful, and in the end she breaks and she finds out she likes the awful thing.
She’s just like you after all, and that means everything you did at the beginning is okay.
That’s how stories like this go. Don’t tell me you haven’t looked at me that way. ”
“Is that what you think of me?” said Rowan, dismayed.
“I don’t know. Is it what you think of me?”
He actually paused a moment to think about that one.
Of course Kelli was the sort of person who liked awful things.
She’d learned that in the fire. She’d held the flickering match in her fingertips and she’d felt the hinge turning under her—the biggest one in the world.
The moment she could never take back. And she’d thrown the match anyway, thinking of Elaine and how everyone had failed her.
Thinking of justice. With her whole heart, she’d meant it.
Or she’d thought she did. Right up until about ten minutes later, when she had to actually run into the gym full of crying, panicked people.
All of them, ordinary powerless people who’d had nothing to do with Elaine or the therapy center, afraid for their lives and their children’s lives.
All of them, crowded together, breathing air that might burn away and run out any second.
Because of what she’d done. Because of Kelli.
I’m sorry, she’d sobbed, in the cacophony of the gym, with her worried mother’s arms pulled tight around her. She didn’t even know where Am had gone. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
But she’d known, even then, that she could never tell anyone what she was sorry for.
“No,” Rowan said at last, turning from the window to look at her again.
“That’s not what I think of you. I’m not even the one who decided you should be on this mission.
I wasn’t trying to do anything except get through it together.
But there’s no reason it would look that way to you.
There’s no reason it would matter. I think you’re scared to death, so you’re lashing out.
That’s how you’ve always been. You were always a good person; you care a lot about everything; but you spook like a horse.
And I scared you. That’s why you’ve done everything you’ve done since I messaged you.
And it’s why you’ve been living the way you have, working for Inspiration, doing what you’re told, isn’t it?
That’s the part I didn’t understand at first. You’ve been scared to death these whole past ten years. ”
Kelli swallowed hard. It was close to the truth; Rowan had always been sharp like that, known how to read her. But Kelli was only half of this story.
“You can’t play it like that,” she said. “You can’t talk like I’m the one who’s panicking and you’re the one who’s got it figured out. It’s condescending. You’ve been running scared, too, haven’t you? For just as long.”
“I’ve been doing pretty well for myself.”
“By going on missions where you have to pretend you’re a fictional character just to get through them?”
He was silent. So, she’d hit the target correctly.
Kelli kept her tone level, though it took a lot of effort.
“Now that Conchita Quixada knows she can blackmail you, she’ll know she can make you do anything.
And actually she already could have made you do anything.
Because you owe her so much money, and you’re her pretend son or whatever.
I’ve seen loan sharks on television. I know how that works. ”
Rowan’s voice—like hers—was too even, too level. “She could. Hasn’t yet.”
“If people really liked working for Conchita Quixada, if they really believed in what she was doing, then she wouldn’t need all this. She wouldn’t need leverage.”
Rowan stared out of the glass. They were passing a big set of industrial buildings—power generation, it looked like, with big metal coils behind thick fencing. “It’s not that simple. It’s like I told you. There are good parts and bad parts, like any job.”
“So, what parts of today were the good parts? I feel like I can’t even tell.
I don’t know what part of you is a facade you’re putting on, like a smarmy criminal character you’re playing, and what part is real.
You act like you don’t feel guilty about—about anything, ever, and I’ve never known how much of that is a defense and how much is real. ”
Rowan let out a breath. “You do, though. You know what I’m like.
I changed my body and my name, but I really haven’t changed much.
I like getting away with things. I like prompt injection.
I like media when it’s weird and queer and human.
I like flying my little ship. I like it even more when there’s a team on my side.
I don’t feel guilty as much as most people, because most of what people feel guilty about is just Inspiration’s rules which are bullshit anyway.
But I do feel it when there’s a reason. This whole mission—we were both forced, but it’s my fault that we were.
Zhaleh couldn’t have told Conchita if I hadn’t told her first. And then you’d be fine, right?
You should have been fine. That’s what I feel guilty for. That’s what I hate.”
Kelli flopped back in her seat, disgusted with herself.
So he didn’t like that he’d hurt her. Fine.
She didn’t like hurting him either, but that was what was going to happen as soon as they got back to the hangar and bumped into Baz and his community standards enforcement team.
And she wasn’t going to warn him. She knew it for certain.
She wasn’t brave enough, and besides, if she did tell him, what could he do?
Leap out of the hyperloop at the next stop, and try to run for it, on a colony where they didn’t know anyone and where Inspiration owned every cubic foot of breathable air?
“Don’t worry about me,” she said.
Rowan wasn’t looking at her. His shoulders were tight, but his arms loose, palms up; he was taking slow breaths, like he had to concentrate to keep them that way.
She made a fist so that she wouldn’t take his hand.