25. Althea
ALTHEA
We fix the ship the way you fix anything you can't afford to replace — badly, and on faith, and with whatever's bolted to the wall nearest the hole.
The boarding gutted us. Drives at a crawl, half the recyclers dead, three decks open to vacuum and sealed off behind emergency bulkheads we don't have the parts to reopen.
So I do the thing I'm actually good at, the thing that has nothing to do with being anyone's fated anything: I organize a salvage operation on our own dying ship.
I put Caelis on the drives and the old hands on the hull and the young ones on stripping the wrecked sections for anything we can cannibalize, and I keep a running tally in my head of what we have against what we need, the way I've kept that tally my whole life, except now the column marked ours has my name in it.
Nobody questions me running it. That's what catches me off guard, somewhere around the second sleepless shift.
A week ago I was cargo with a guard on my door.
Now a crew of marauders takes my hand signals across a vacuum gap without blinking, because the captain's mate said to, and because — Vasha tells me this later, gruff, not looking at me — I'm the only one aboard who treats a broken thing like it's worth the work of mending instead of worth the price of scrapping.
"He's different," Vasha says. We're sharing the last of a ration brick in the half-dark of the galley, both of us too tired to pretend at dignity.
"The captain. I've stood beside that man through two famines and a mutiny, and I have watched him plan his own death a hundred quiet ways, and I never once saw him plan a life.
Now he asks the helmsman about fuel reserves three jumps out.
Three jumps. He's started thinking about later again.
" She breaks the brick and gives me the bigger half.
"That's you. I still don't entirely forgive you for it.
A man who plans to die is easy to follow.
A man who plans to live, you have to live up to. "
I don't have an answer. I'm too busy realizing that somewhere in the last weeks I stopped thinking of the Hollow Wake as the ship I'm escaping on and started thinking of it as the place I keep my brother's wall.
As the place I sleep without one eye on the door.
As home, which is a word I retired so long ago I'd forgotten I owned it.
When we reach the edge of the dead zone, I'm on the bridge, and the whole crew goes quiet at the sight of it, and I understand I'm not leaving at the next station. I'm not leaving at any station. Wherever this dying, stubborn, carved-up ship is going, I'm going with it.
It's a strange place to decide a thing like that — in the middle of a salvage operation, hands blistered, a tally of failing systems running behind my eyes.
But it's exactly where I decide everything that's ever been true for me.
Not in the quiet. In the work. I learned a long time ago what a thing is worth by measuring how hard I'm willing to work to keep it breathing, and I notice I'm willing to work very hard indeed to keep this ridiculous wreck of a ship breathing, and the people aboard it, and the impossible man who flies it.
For someone built the way I'm built, that's the entire answer.
I don't trust feelings. Feelings are cheap and they lie and they've never once kept me fed.
I trust the ledger. And somewhere in the last weeks the ledger quietly moved the Hollow Wake into the column marked worth it — moved all of them there, and then, when I wasn't reading closely enough to object, moved my own name into the same column as theirs.
Even if where it's going is the place the charts mark only in warnings.