21. Althea
ALTHEA
They find the transmitter behind a panel Theryn installed himself, which somehow makes it worse — that he built the hiding place before he had anything to hide.
The crew packs the bridge for the reckoning. There's no court out here, no law but the captain's, and Saren stands over the man who sold us with a stillness that's scarier than any rage, and Theryn doesn't beg. That's the thing I can't get past. He doesn't beg. He explains.
"A human aboard a Reaper ship draws every hunter in the Badlands," he says, to the crew, not to Saren.
"I watched the captain go soft over her.
I watched him put one life — one human life — above eighty of ours.
So I did the arithmetic he wouldn't. One of them, traded quiet, for all of us.
" His red eyes find me, and there's no hate in them, which is the horror of it.
"It was never personal. You were just the cheapest thing to spend. "
And the awful part is that it lands. Not as truth — as the thing I've believed about myself my whole life, said out loud at last by someone who means it as strategy. Cheapest thing to spend. That's all I've ever been to anyone — something to spend. Pell spent me. Daxira spent me. Why not him too?
People are hurt because of me. The ship is dying because of me. I feel the old certainty close over my head like water.
Saren moves. I've seen him fast; I've never seen him like this.
He has Theryn off his feet and against the bulkhead and his hand drawn back, and the whole bridge holds its breath — and it's Vasha who steps into it, plants a hand flat on Saren's chest, and says one low word in their tongue that stops him with his fist in the air.
"Not like this," she says, in the common tongue, for me, I think. "We are not the thing they made us. You taught me that. Don't unteach it now."
He sets Theryn down. He walks out. And in the quiet after, with the crew fractured into people who think Theryn was a traitor and people who think he was just early, I do the math myself, the way I was taught, and I make for the lifeboat bay while the bridge is still arguing.
I have one boot on the pod's ramp when the hatch behind me opens and Saren says, "Don't you dare."