9. Althea
ALTHEA
They bury their dead in metal.
I learn it on the night the crew gathers in the long hold, where the salvaged plates rest in their racks, and I learn it because Caelis comes to the store-room and doesn't bring food. He brings a hand held out, palm up, the way you'd coax an animal you weren't sure of.
"You don't have to," he says. "But Elsyn says you should be asked. Nobody's ever asked a human before."
So I go. The hold is full of them, eighty-some bodies that could each break me in half, and not one of them looks at me like a threat tonight.
A bowl of oil burns in the center, throwing their faces into something softer than I've seen, and one by one they go to the wall and press a hand to a name and say a thing in their own tongue, low, and the rest answer it back like a tide.
I don't understand the words. I understand the shape of them. Grief, given a place to stand so it doesn't have to be carried alone.
Saren is last. He doesn't go to the wall. He touches his own horn instead, his mouth moving over each cut he made there, and I watch a man recite a list of the people he couldn't keep alive and I have to look at the floor because my eyes have decided to embarrass me.
After, he finds me at the edge of the light. "You stayed," he says, like it surprises him.
"My brother." The words come out before I've cleared them for takeoff.
"Tomas. He was sixteen. There was a fever going through the labor sectors and the clinics wanted three months' wages I didn't have, and by the time I'd stolen enough he was —" I stop.
I have never said this out loud, not once, not to anyone.
"I never had a wall to put him on. I just have the part of me that's angry, and that's not the same as a place to set him down. "
Saren is quiet for a long while. Then he lifts a thumb to his own horn, to a smooth stretch below the last carved name, and he says, "There is room."
I don't have an answer that won't undo me. He doesn't make me find one. He stays beside me while the oil burns low, close enough that the heat of him reaches me through the cold of the hold, and at some point my shoulder comes to rest against his arm and neither of us moves to fix it.
When the light gutters out he turns toward me, and I turn toward him, and for one suspended second the whole dying ship leans in with us. His hand comes up. Stops short of my face. Hovers there, shaking, like a man holding himself off a ledge by his fingernails.
Then he steps back. "Sleep, Thea," he says, wrecked, and he's gone into the dark with his dead, and I stand there wanting the thing he wouldn't take more than I have ever let myself want anything.