Chapter 20 - Wretched
Wretched
“What...the fuck are you wearing? Is this some kind of roleplay?”
“Beau, not now.”
I storm past them and head for Tanisira’s cabin, aware that she’s following. After this conversation, I’ll need to be alone, and it’ll be easier to leave her cabin than it will be to kick her out of mine.
“Cap, I tried—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Tanisira’s quiet voice reaches me just as I turn a corner. I’m relieved that Beau won’t get in trouble for letting me go off alone. It should make me feel like an errant child except I didn’t make good choices today, so it’s not wrong.
Tanisira enters her cabin hot on my heels. I start pacing, hands on my hips, as I try to organise my thoughts into some semblance of order. I have questions—boy, do I have questions— and maybe they’re all important, but what the hell do I start with?
My gaze flicks to where she stands, hands in her pockets, watching me. Uncertainty is writ large across her face. It’s almost painful to look at. Her usual, aggravating confidence is nowhere to be found. I falter.
But that’s not the only side of her I’ve seen today.
“I trusted you,” I blurt.
That might just be devastation on Tanisira’s face.
“What are you—”
“Not me, I don’t mean with me. With my son, Tanisira. I trusted you to keep him safe. I trusted you to have his best interests at heart. I trusted that you were good. Except that you’re not, are you?” I shake my head. “You’re a liar. A really fucking adept one, it turns out.”
“I never lied to you,” she says, voice thick.
“Tell me that tonight was one big misunderstanding, then.”
Tanisira’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. She says nothing. My gut churns.
“Lied. You lied to me. Illegal weapons, smuggling, and oh, let’s not forget human trafficking.” The laugh that I grind out is jagged.
In my whole adulthood, I’ve probably only been in a handful of arguments.
It’s not a point of pride, but rather one of contention between me and my loved ones.
If something is a big enough issue for me, I walk away.
Life is too short to stick around, drowning in discontent.
But—and this is another thing that I keep safely buried—I’d rather walk away than create something out of the pain.
I leave every time because I’m just not built for it.
I can’t walk away from this and it’s fucking killing me. I’m trapped with this damn poison thundering through my veins, and I wish I could just run.
As a choked sound slips from Tanisira’s throat, it feels like my insides are being tugged every which way. I’m not the one who committed literal crimes, but seeing her face darken with indecipherable emotion makes me feel guilty. We had shared something soft and tender and new for both of us.
And still, Tanisira hasn’t denied the accusation.
“I would do anything to keep Vee safe,” she finally says. “And you. I know you don’t believe me now. You’re right, I did lie. I’m sorry—”
“I don’t want your apologies. What the fuck happened out there?”
Hands yanking at her hair, I watch as she starts to pace and then abruptly stops and spins towards me. All I keep thinking is that I want to walk away, walk away now; from that forlorn look in her eyes, from this tangle of emotions connecting us.
Suddenly though, Tanisira looks determined.
“After I left the IAF, a friend reached out. He was smuggling goods, no drugs, and said it was the kind of job I could handle in my sleep.” Her hands curl into fists. “I was struggling to adjust to life as a civilian, and I needed to get out of that house. Being back was slowly killing me—”
“So you became a fucking human trafficker?” I yell.
“It was just meant to be goods,” she cries. “Victimless. Most of the time, clients on one end would load their haul straight into the hold and unload at the other end; we had minimal to no interactions with the delivery itself.”
Her eyes are too bright, a sheen of rain and resin. And I hate myself for noticing how beautiful they look, even now.
“Cargo ships are stop-searched religiously, but there are always officers on the take. If you find one high enough in rank, they can act like an early warning system, but that only makes a difference if you’re quick on the ball.
They called me Myth because I was never caught.
Ridiculous, but reputation’s invaluable in that world. ”
I can’t picture Tanisira as this person, this Myth.
I scrutinise her. If I hadn’t heard Ryker—a man who’s probably never joked a day in his life—call her by that name, I wouldn’t have believed it.
But that’s not why my heart pounds. It’s not the most pertinent truth I’m after.
Despite all the blustering, I’m terrified to ask now that I know I might get the answer I really, really don’t want.
Good or bad, Tanisira will tell me; I can read it in every single grimace, her hunched shoulders, the inward collapse of all that confidence.
There will be no coming back from it. She knows, of course she does, and the skin around her mouth tightens. Her whole body does. If I just push hard enough...
Fear tastes bitter in the back of my throat. Fear that the woman I admire is both a liar and a monster, that I’m a terrible judge of character; that this space we created, of seeing and being seen, has always been false.
“The crew expanded into trafficking.”
I exhale on an explosion as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. The air, at least, is too thin and slippery.
“How could—” I bite off the sentence, shaking my head. That’s not the right question. But what is? Anxiety steals all my words. I’ve let this person talk to my son, be alone with him. I shared parts of myself with her, truths that I would never have told anyone else in the same situation.
“I didn’t know.”
She’s suddenly so close to me that I can feel her breath against my temple. She reaches out, and I blindly stumble back, avoiding her hand. If she touches me, I don’t know what I’ll do, I’ll—I’ll...
And then her words register. My head snaps up, gaze meeting hers: guilt, shame, acceptance, fear.
“How could you not know? You were the captain.” It comes out as a snarl.
“I didn’t. The ship was my responsibility, and I failed. I’m not denying that.”
My eyes narrow, and I wait for the ‘but’. It doesn’t come. Tanisira seems to be gathering herself, having fallen into pieces I didn’t know she could shatter into.
“I made changes that the crew didn’t like, but they’d stopped complaining, and I thought I’d won them over.” Tanisira looks away.
“I trusted them to do their jobs. They said I made them feel like children, so I backed off. Everything ran smoothly, so we just went on like that. There were...” She swallows hard.
“Parts of the ship that I didn’t need to visit.
The Raat-Sarpa didn’t have advanced AI, so if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I didn’t know about it.
After years of running this operation, no one was messing up. ”
“That’s your excuse?” I stare. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play?”
“No excuse. This was my fault.” Her eyes are dead when she looks at me. “There was a warning light; solar flares had jammed our signals, and I couldn’t get through to the crew. I went to check myself. A threadbare, grimy scrap of clothing snagged on a panel caught my eye.
“Something felt wrong, but a comms came through from my contact about an incoming search. Because of the flares, it was already delayed. The DTI had us in their sights, and it was too late to evade them, so I activated the eleventh-hour protocol.”
“Which was what?”
“The crew vented anything we couldn’t hide.”
Chills steal across my entire body, my hands spasming. I have a horrible, horrible feeling that I know where this is going and I’m not—
I can’t—
Tanisira won’t even raise her head.
“I’d never had to use it, and I went to watch the crew in action.
It was chaos.” Tremors briefly mangle her words.
“I will never forget the sound. Crates stuffed with screaming animals, agitated because they could sense something was wrong. The crates were sucked out into space, and it all just... stopped. Silence like death. The crew saw me, but the DTI were about to board, and they had to continue incinerating the shipment.”
Tanisira’s voice breaks. I want to reach out for her, but I can’t make myself move.
“We used the thrusters. No evidence. The officers boarded, and we didn’t put up a fight.
The whole time they searched the ship, I was stuck in the cargo bay surrounded by these people I thought had at least come to respect me—people I had started to think I knew, if nothing else.
But none of them could look me in the eye, and I just knew that there was more.
Once the officers left, I showed the crew the scrap of clothing and told them to take me to whatever they were hiding.
“Five people crammed into a space usually reserved for jailbroken comms chips. Thin, frightened, cold. I think I shouted, I don’t know.
There are chunks of that day that are hazy because I was so furious, I literally saw red.
The only thing that stopped that poor family from being vented was their silence.
I dread to think what would have happened had one of them been a baby. ”
The relief that crashes over me has barbs.
I’m torn apart by how glad I am to hear Tanisira wasn’t responsible for something so inhumane, even as I think about the poor animals and those abused people.
Fuck. I drag my hands down my face, momentarily letting the pain of my fingernails digging into my skin distract me.
Raat-Sarpa means Night Serpent, and seems appropriate.
I believe her.
There’s agony in her that can’t be faked, a tangible regret laid over her shoulders. She looks wretched, tears rolling silently down her cheeks. I should have held my judgement until I knew the whole story.
I should have done a lot of things.