Chapter 20 - Wretched #2
“We’d been providing exploitable manual labour for private terraformers on Venus. These people thought they were being sponsored to start a new life.” She laughs humourlessly, closes her eyes and presses her hands to her lids.
I find my tongue, hands pressed to my mouth in horror. “That’s—”
“I was duty-bound to protect them. I failed every single one. Aside from the obvious, the worst part is the utter disregard for life from people I’d lived with, eaten with. Trusted.” She looks at me then, her eyes red. A sneer drags her lip up. “All for money.”
“Ryker seemed to know. Was he part of it?”
Tanisira shakes her head, loosens her hair and digs her hands into her scalp as if she can scrape the memories out. It takes her a while to respond, and foreboding and queasiness feed off each other in my stomach. This is sickening.
But a thought gives me pause. Imagine living with this in your head for years, unable to share it with anyone, believing yourself at fault. That’s sickening.
“Ryker acquires things for clients, no matter how depraved the request. We had dealings with him whenever a buyer would only work through him.”
Tanisira takes a deep breath and seems to shake some life back into herself. Straightening up, she tugs her hair back into its bun and meets my eye as she secures it. She is holding so many pieces of herself right now, and I can’t bring myself to hate her. I don’t know how to.
“Ryker’s unscrupulous—he has a large network on the waystation and friends in high places.”
“That’s why we had to sneak back to the ship?”
“Yes. He couldn’t know who you were, and I couldn’t allow him to track us here. I was prepared to have to evade his lackeys on my own. I didn’t expect...”
Me. She didn’t expect to have to babysit me.
In a moment of clarity, I acknowledge that my actions put us both in danger today.
Not just us, but the whole ship. Vee. Yes, Tanisira made a deal with the devil, but I made a wildly irresponsible decision by following her.
If that gun had gone off, Vee would have lost a mother.
I feel sick at the thought, have to press a hand to my mouth as an intense wave of nausea snatches me in its grip.
Shame isn’t far behind; the knowledge that after everything I’ve ever uncovered in therapy, I can still make stupid, irrational decisions.
Tanisira looks at me, eyebrows drawn together, so much pain gleaming bright in her eyes.
My body’s tense, hands curled into fists that I press between my knees to stop them shaking.
I’m exhausted from the ebbing of adrenaline, but more than that, too.
It’s the heavy shroud of regret. It’s the vulnerability I shared with Tanisira, out on the line and left to rot.
It’s the miasma of emotions I’ve cycled through in the past few hours; all concentrated down into this dark, cloudy dread.
“I need some fresh air,” I say and practically barrel out of the cabin, almost careening into the glass table. Neither of us bothers to point out the obvious. She lets me go.
It takes my stomach over an hour to settle, and that’s only because I manage to compartmentalise for my own mental health. Without that, my imagination had been doing its very best to shred my sanity: incinerated animals, children huddled in the dark, a gun pressed to Vee’s forehead.
Pain started to creep in as the adrenaline wore off, and though I had a shot recently, my body aches. I feel wrung out, physically and emotionally, and I wish I could rewind this day and leave Novus with Vee and Beau. Cowardly, yes, but what good can knowing this do?
I take a deep breath and cut that thought off—a lot of good for Tanisira, actually. She deserves to be heard, especially after all my mistakes today; she hasn’t so much as mentioned my particular brand of bullshit.
When I go back to the cabin, I find Tanisira sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands. I pause at the threshold, taking a deep breath, glancing around whilst I gather myself. The lamps are dim, like she couldn’t bear to be in the light anymore. In the corner, her plant droops.
This confident, guilty woman makes a pathetic silhouette. A burst of indignation sets my spine straight, to see Tanisira brought so low for a situation that no one could have foreseen. She’s not wrong to feel responsible, but this—this is beyond grief. This is self-flagellation, a slow dying.
Maybe we have that in common: seeking safety by settling for an unextraordinary life. Whereas I tried to provide as stable an environment as possible for Vee, Tanisira chose to snuff her own flame to prevent burning anyone ever again. Seeing her like this feels like an injustice.
“You went through an extremely shitty thing. Behaving like this, though—wasting your skills, doubting yourself—is not helping anyone, least of all you.”
“I know.”
“What are you doing about it?” I ask.
She looks up as I come to stand between her legs. Like this, she has to crane her neck to meet my eyes. I’ve never seen anyone look so devastated. It takes Tanisira a beat to register my words, and I can see that she’s confused. Because of my question, or because I came back?
“You don’t want responsibility,” I say. “You’re talented, experienced, and confident, but you’re flying a pleasure yacht for rich men. You don’t want responsibility.”
Tanisira flinches but doesn’t look away. Her hands fall to either side of her thighs and if I wasn’t standing in the way, she’d curl in on herself. “I’m terrified. How can I ever trust myself again?”
“Bullshit.”
“It—”
“You’re flying this behemoth with my ten-year-old on board. Do you really think I want to hear that you don’t trust yourself?” There is too much tension in my muscles, electricity buzzing through my body. “Why are you here then?” I snap.
“A ship this advanced, this expensive, basically captains itself. There’s minimal danger—”
“Oh, fuck off.” I scowl and pace away from her. “I don’t even know what to say to you right now except that my son is onboard, so get your shit together.”
But I hear how I sound, and this isn’t the way I want to talk to her. I feel like an emotional wasteland, but I dredge up a sliver of calmness and lower my volume.
“Tee, it’s fine that you want to atone for fucking up, but you can’t just quit.”
“Marlowe.”
At the threadiness of her voice, I finally turn to face her. When I picture Tanisira, I usually think of shrewd amber eyes, a calm watchfulness that does nothing to soften the pure strength of her.
Right now, she is none of those; she is a wild thing that has been hurt and doesn’t trust the light outside her cage.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“How can I fix what’s been done?”
“You try! You don’t bury your head in the sand. You use your talent for good. Do you even know where your old crew is now, or did you just run and never look back?”
For the first time tonight, something like fire sparks behind Tanisira’s amber eyes. It whispers along my skin.
“I would never allow something like that to continue happening.”
That’s pride blooming in my chest. “Right.”
“My contact received an anonymous tip the day I walked away from the Raat-Sarpa. The crew was arrested, the ship scrapped, and the passengers taken home.”
Relief. Relief that I hadn’t made the wrong decision; that I hadn’t allowed a monster into my child’s life, my bed, my heart.
I soften my voice. “Still, you can’t forgive yourself.”
Tanisira closes her eyes, shakes her head.
I’m still apprehensive, still aching, but I approach anyway, climb into her lap and cup her jaw in my hands. She was doing the best she could with what she had.
Tanisira looks from eye to eye, scouring my face. Her hands, hesitant and slow, settle against the small of my back. It’s a comfort I didn’t know I needed.
“Thank you for doing that for me. I see how hard it was to step back into that world, and you did it just to spare me the pain. I trust you,” I say gently, surprised to find that I still do.
“Everyone on this ship does. So you have to trust yourself, Tee, or you’ll always be here, crucifying yourself.
I know you’re hurting, and I won’t make false promises—it will always hurt. But you can learn from it, okay?”
Tanisira swallows hard. I feel it against my palms. She nods, falteringly.
“Has this changed your opinion of me?” she asks in a voice that abrades me the whole way down.
It’s not that I think masculine-presenting women shouldn’t show emotion, or vulnerability—that’s a ridiculous fucking notion—but that I hate Tanisira feeling like this because of me.
She reached back into her murky past for me, didn’t hesitate to debase herself for my health.
But she’s grown, and I don’t want to diminish this gift because of my guilt.
“It’s a lot to process, but I don’t think less of you.”
Tanisira grimaces, slides her gaze away.
“Captain Tanisira—”
I’m so wired; I don’t even jump. Kit has appeared, delicate hands folded politely.
“I told you no disturbances.”
“An emergency has presented itself.”
Tanisira sighs, glances at me, and then gestures for the AI to continue. I slide off her lap and onto the cushion beside her.
“The Archival brothers are asking to board. They say it’s urgent.”
A frown creates a deep slash across Tanisira’s brow. “Who are—” She stops, realisation dawning. “Maximus and Julian?”
I jerk at that. “Urgent?”
“They insist they don’t have much time.”
“What’s the emergency?” Tanisira asks.
“They won’t tell me. They wish to speak to you.”
She sighs, turning a look of frustration on me. “Are you coming?”
I don’t know if she asks because she wants to continue our conversation or because I’m better with people than she is. Right now, I think I’m too tired to even care.