19. Althea
ALTHEA
Vasha makes me something with her own hands, and I'm told later she hasn't done that for anyone in ten years.
It's small — a token of dark metal, no bigger than my thumb, carved with a knot of lines I can't read and a single Ishani word I can.
Kin. She presses it into my palm at the next remembrance gathering, in front of the whole crew, with the particular gruffness of someone doing a tender thing and daring you to make it weird.
"You held the line in the reactor space," she says.
"You held people down on the medical floor who'd have killed you a month before.
You don't get to be cargo anymore. The clan votes you're not.
" A pause, and then, lower, just for me: "I lost a daughter, before.
To the famines. You're not her. But you fill a space I'd stopped admitting was empty, and I'm too old to keep pretending it isn't filled.
" She squeezes my hand hard around the token, once, and steps back into her own gruffness before I can wreck us both with my face.
The gathering is different from the first one I saw.
Looser. People tell stories that aren't only grief — somebody does an impression of a captain three captains back that has the old hands roaring, and Caelis sings a snatch of one of the recordings and gets it wrong and gets corrected by four people at once, all of them delighted to remember the right of it.
I tell them about Tomas — not the dying, they have enough dying; the living.
How he saved a heel of bread for me every shift and lied that he wasn't hungry.
How he laughed like it cost him nothing in a place where everything cost everything.
And eighty Reapers who'd have spaced me at the start sit in the oil-light and listen to a human grieve a human, and nod, because grief is the one language we turned out to already share.
Saren watches from the edge with the token's twin in his look — like he's been handed something he doesn't know where to put.
When the gathering breaks he comes to me and doesn't say anything, just takes my hand and turns it over and traces the carved word in my palm with one claw-tipped finger, gentle as anything that size has a right to be.
"They beat me to it," he says quietly. "Claiming you. I was going to be brave about it eventually."
"Eventually," I echo. "Reaper for 'never,' near as I can tell."
He huffs a laugh, and it's almost a real one.
And then the proximity klaxon opens up across the ship, and the screens swing aft, and it isn't one warship this time.
It's a formation — Jorek's whole pack, fanning into the sector we've just been spat into, exactly where the storm let us go, exactly where no one should have known to look.