Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
HOLDEN
The board call lasts seventy-three minutes.
That’s eleven minutes longer than the emergency pod ascent and somehow harder to survive.
Maren sits beside me at the temporary operations table in a borrowed gray sweatshirt, fresh bandage around her hand, steri-strips at her hairline, and a medical monitor clipped to one finger because the rescue team made the mistake of leaving her with a device she could read.
She keeps glancing at the oxygen saturation, pulse, and blood pressure like the numbers are a personal insult.
They’re not great numbers.
The support island’s operations room is all functional ugliness: folding tables, satellite equipment, waterproof crates, cables taped to the floor, emergency lights, coffee that tastes like someone described coffee to a battery.
Outside the windows, the Pacific looks far too clean for what it knows.
The board appears in six small boxes on the screen.
Five faces. One counsel. All of them pale, furious, afraid, and trying to decide which version of those three emotions is most legally useful.
I give them the sequence.
They want a different story. One that makes Maren the entire failure point so every other signatory, funder, reviewer, and safety committee can sleep in their own beds tonight with clean hands.
Maren listens while I say her name in every place the record requires it.
Dr. Vale authorized.
Dr. Vale initiated.
Dr. Vale confirmed.
Dr. Vale chose.
I feel every one hit her, though she only moves once, when her injured hand curls under the table and the monitor on her finger chirps disapproval.
I keep going.
I also say board-approved model parameters.
Oversight tolerance bands. Deferred funding for redundant exterior containment.
Tourism load expansion. Approved guest operations within live habitat parameters.
Known variance reports filed as controlled operations.
I say every structural phrase that belongs in the room.
Counsel tries to interrupt twice.
I don’t let him.
The third time, Maren looks at him and says, “Let him finish.”
He lets me finish. Small miracles remain possible, though most are irritating.
What I’ve just done will follow me. The board sent an evaluator to find the failure point, and the evaluator spent seventy-three minutes spreading the failure across every signature in the room, including the ones that approved my own appointment.
They’ll remember that. Evaluators who refuse to deliver a clean scapegoat don’t get sent on the next assignment.
I don’t care, which is new, and would have terrified the man I was a week ago.
When the call ends, the screen goes black.
For several seconds, neither of us moves.
The room hums around us. Generators, satellite link, distant voices in the hallway. Medical staff. Rescue coordinators. People who have already begun turning horror into paperwork.
Maren pulls the monitor clip off her finger. It beeps once in protest.
“You’re going to get scolded,” I say.
“I survived Kevin. I’ll risk the wrath of Nurse Blue Clipboard.”
“She frightened Dutch.”
“That’s different. Dutch has survival instincts.”
“Does he?”
“Intermittently.”
We both look toward the hallway without meaning to.
Dutch is two rooms over in the island’s small med suite, sedated enough to lose the argument and stable enough to hate that when he wakes.
Cracked ribs. Blood loss. Deep laceration along his side.
No internal bleeding on the first scan, though the doctor said the words first scan in a way that made everyone in the room want to behave violently.
Reyes is with him. He texted me twice during the board call. The first message was medically useful.
Dutch stable. Sedated. O2 good. Repeat scan pending. Stop letting Maren stand.
The second only said: He tried to argue with the pulse ox.
I showed Maren both.
She laughed at neither, but she touched the screen on Dutch’s name with one finger, which was something else entirely.
“Reyes is still with him?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“Has Reyes slept?”
“No.”
“Has anyone tried force?”
“Dutch did. Before sedation.”
“How’d that go?”
“Poorly for everyone.”
This time, the smile arrives. Tiny. Devastating. Then it’s gone.
She rubs both hands over her face and winces when the movement pulls at her palm.
I catch her wrist before she can pretend it didn’t hurt.
She freezes. So do I.
Old muscle memory is a treacherous thing.
There was a time when I touched her without thinking.
A time when her wrist in my hand meant late nights, library stacks, borrowed apartments, bad coffee, her laughing into my mouth because I said something too dry while she was trying to be serious.
A time when I knew the shape of her body in the dark better than I knew my own ambition.
That time isn’t a key. It doesn’t open the present.
I let go slowly. “Sorry,” I say.
“For catching me before I aggravated an injury or for remembering you used to touch me?”
The room loses air.
Maren’s eyes are on mine.
“Both,” I say.
She leans back in her chair and studies me.
I used to love and fear that expression in equal measure. Maren looking at me as if I were a problem interesting enough to solve and reckless enough to bite her.
“You were very good on that call,” she says.
“I was accurate.”
Her brow lifts. “You were more than accurate.”
“I didn’t protect you from the truth. I didn’t give them an easy version. I wanted to.”
Her face softens.
“Not to lie,” I say. “But there’s still a part of me that wanted to take every sentence with your name in it and put my hand over the sharp edge before it reached them.”
Maren looks down at the black screen.
“You didn’t. Thank you.”
The words are too plain. They go straight through me. I’ve learned, late and badly, that not every hard thing needs a clever answer.
Maren pushes her chair back.
I stand automatically.
She looks at me.
I stop.
“I’m going to my assigned room,” she says. “Before Nurse Blue Clipboard hunts me for sport. Walk with me?”
I nod.
The hallway outside operations smells like antiseptic, salt, coffee, and hot electronics. Morning has become afternoon somehow. Through the windows, rescue personnel cross the dock in purposeful lines. Beyond them, the ocean reflects too much light.
The ocean shouldn’t be allowed to look innocent.
We pass the med suite.
The door is partly open. Dutch is asleep on the narrow bed, one arm outside the blanket, chest rising carefully beneath monitors and bandages. Even unconscious, he manages to look annoyed. Reyes sits in the chair beside him with one boot braced on the bed frame, arms folded, eyes closed. Listening.
The moment we pause, he opens his eyes. “Maren should be resting,” he says.
“Hello to you too,” she says.
Dutch shifts on the bed, groans, and doesn’t wake.
Reyes’s attention snaps to him immediately. Hand to the monitor. Then to the blanket edge. Then Dutch’s wrist. The sequence is so practiced, so exact, that something in my chest pulls tight.
The pod held because of him. Dutch is breathing because of him.
Because of all of us, maybe, but in this room, Reyes is the one sitting beside the man who turned himself into a brace.
“He’s stable?” Maren asks.
“Yes,” Reyes says. “Hurting. Sedated. Stable.”
Maren’s shoulders lower a fraction.
Reyes’s gaze moves from her face to me.
A structural check between load-bearing points.
I nod once. He nods back.
Dutch mutters something in his sleep that might be profanity and might be my name.
“Still charming,” Maren says softly.
Reyes’s mouth moves. “Unfortunately.”
She steps into the room long enough to touch Dutch’s hand.
His fingers twitch.
She bends and presses her mouth to his knuckles. Public enough that no one in this room can pretend not to see. Private enough that the world outside doesn’t deserve it.
Then she touches Reyes’s shoulder.
He turns his face into her hand for one breath.
We leave them there.
Her assigned room is at the end of the corridor, one of the island’s emergency guest quarters meant for visiting engineers and storm-stuck staff.
It’s small and clean and aggressively beige.
Single bed, narrow desk, shower, window facing the dock.
A stack of folded clothes sits on the chair beside a medical packet and two bottles of water.
Maren steps inside and stops.
I stop behind her.
The door remains open. For a moment, she just looks at the bed. It seems to offend her.
“There’s no one left in this room you have to perform for,” I say.
She closes her eyes. Her face is too open. Exhaustion has worn through every practiced layer, and what remains is raw and alive and looking directly at me.
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” she asks.
“No. I think it’s what you’ve had to do.”
She studies me.
I stand in the doorway because crossing the threshold feels like the kind of thing that should be chosen by the person whose room this is.
“You can come in, Holden.”
I step inside.
The door shuts behind me with a soft click.
We face each other in a room too beige for everything we’ve survived.
Her gaze drops to my mouth. Then lifts. History arrives in the space between us like a third body.
A thousand things once known and then locked away because knowing hurt worse than ignorance.
I remember the exact sound she makes when she’s trying not to laugh into a kiss.
I remember the place below her jaw that made her breath catch.
I remember her naked in morning light at twenty-three, irritated by my thesis notes and wearing my shirt.
“I remember too much to pretend I don’t,” I say. “Not enough to assume I still know.”
Her breath leaves quietly. “That’s inconveniently good,” she says.
“I’ve had years.”
“To become inconvenient?”
“To regret.”
Her mouth tightens.
I don’t reach for her.