Chapter 7 #2
“I’ll manage with the top,” I say. Because putting on his shirt right now would be a decision, I am not ready to make in front of his face. “The sauce adds character.”
An hour passes. Then another. The conversation starts with the food and moves the way conversations move when two people are sealed in a small warm space with nothing to do except talk and carefully not talk about the thing they’re not talking about.
He tells me about the route. Fourteen years. The belt loop. Sixteen stops, thirty-eight days round trip. The same run, over and over, and when I ask him if he gets bored, he actually thinks about it — considers it the way you consider a question when the person asking deserves a proper answer.
“No,” he says. “The route changes and the stations drift, but the cargo is different every run.” He turns the mug in his hands.
The ridges catch the light. “There’s a stretch between Marker 11 and 12 where the belt opens up and you can see the Anvari Nebula from the starboard window.
Every run. Same window. It’s different every time. ”
“Different how?”
“Color. Density. The ionization shifts. There’s a registration system — OOPS calls it the Courier’s Atlas — where runners log the nebula’s state at each pass. I’ve been logging for fourteen years.”
“You’ve been watching the same nebula for fourteen years?”
“I’ve been watching the same nebula look different for fourteen years. There’s a difference.”
There is a difference. Between watching and seeing, a route and a life. Between a male who runs the same loop for a decade and a half and one who notices the way the light changes every time.
I tell him about the colony. Vestari-4. The gravity differential — everything weighed more; you developed muscles you didn’t know you had just from walking.
The three brothers. The evacuation drills.
The food — terrible, everything reconstituted, except on holidays when my mother performed miracles.
“And the cat,” he says. Recalling what I told him about why I spoke to the Vrennak like I did. “The one behind the heating unit.”
“Betty. The cat’s name was Betty. Betty was ancient and neurotic and hated everyone except my mother. My mother could talk Betty out of anything.” A pause. “That’s where I got it. The voice. The Vrennak voice. It’s Betty’s voice.”
He looks at me. Not amused. Something deeper. “You calmed a Vrennak with a cat trick.”
“I calmed a Vrennak with Betty’s cat trick. Betty was very specific.”
The laugh again. Low and real, and it hits me in the sternum and stays.
The conversation spirals. Station politics.
HORATIO’s worst moments — the time he locked the cargo bay doors during a dock inspection because the inspector was “unforgivably rude about the ventilation.” The time my brother Kev got his arm stuck in a mining vent and the fire brigade had to be called, and my mother made them all tea while Kev screamed.
We are laughing. Both of us. Simultaneously. The laughter overlaps, and the overlapping feels like recognition. The feeling of finding someone whose brain works the same way yours does.
And then the conversation goes somewhere I don’t expect.
“Why SNAG?” he asks. “Instead of OOPS. Instead of something — safer.”
I look at my tea. The answer to this question is the answer to a lot of questions, and most of them are questions I have never answered out loud because the answer is the shape of me and the shape of me is something I have spent my whole life apologizing for.
“Because Flossie’s job posting said we find what’s lost. And I —” I stop.
Start again. “On Vestari. Growing up. I was the youngest. Three brothers, all older, all — useful. Colony-useful. Strong arms, steady hands, good in a drill. They left when they were old enough. One by one. Routes, stations, better gravity. I don’t blame them.
Everyone leaves the colony if they can.”
My tea is fascinating. My tea is the most important object in the galaxy. I am going to look at my tea and not at his face because if I look at his face I will see pity and I cannot do this with pity.
“When my brothers left, it was just me and my mother. And the colony kids.” I wrap my hands around the mug.
“I was — I am — clumsy. Not charmingly clumsy. Not oh she dropped a thing, how sweet. The kind where you walk into a room and the room gets worse. I knocked things over. Broke equipment. Said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Tripped during drills. My hands didn’t do what I told them to do, and my feet didn’t go where I put them, and my mouth said sorry.
All the time. For the knocking and the breaking and the tripping and eventually just for being there. For taking up space.”
The galley is quiet. HORATIO is muted. The hum of the ship fills the silence as if something were holding its breath.
“Colony kids figure out who’s useful fast. Who fixes things, who carries things, who you want on your drill team and who you don’t.
I was the don’t.” A breath. “The names. Clumsy. Stupid. In the way. They said it until it stopped being a thing they were calling me and started being a thing I called myself.”
I am telling a male I met today about the thing I do not tell people. The words are coming out and I am not sure I want to stop them because something about the way he listens — the stillness, the attention, the way he has not moved or interrupted or tried to fix it — is making it safe to say.
“Once it got physical. A group of them. I’d broken something in the prep hall, some piece of drill equipment.
They waited until the adults were in the lower levels, and they cornered me in the access corridor, and they —” My voice goes flat.
Small. The voice of a girl who learned to take up less space.
“It was enough. It was enough to teach me that taking up space had a cost, and the cost was going to be collected.”
I set the mug down because my hands are shaking.
“So I learned to hide. That became my thing. The one thing I had that nobody else had. I learned to fold myself into the smallest shape I could make. Under things. Behind things. Inside things. I got so good at it that during evacuation drills I was always the last one found. The drill officers would do full sweeps — ventilation ducts, maintenance crawls, cargo tarps — and I’d be somewhere they hadn’t thought to look because I had been practicing not being found since I was nine years old. ”
I look up. I have to look up.
He is not pitying me.
He is sitting very still with his hands flat on the table and his ridges have gone dark — not the warm bronze of attraction, not the middle shade of interest — dark.
The dark from the fight. The dark from standing between me and the Vrennak.
His jaw is locked so tight I can see the muscles working.
His pupils have contracted to slits. His claws — the ones I saw for the first time today, the dark, curved ones — have extended.
Just the tips. Pressing into the surface of the table. He doesn’t seem to notice.
It is not pity. It is not sympathy.
It is fury.
Quiet, controlled, barely contained fury on behalf of a girl who learned to fold herself into the smallest version of herself because the world punished her for being the size she actually was.
I think — looking at the claw marks appearing in his own table — that if the people who did it were in this room, they would not leave it the same way they came in.
“Jazil,” I say. Soft. “It was a long time ago.”
His jaw works. The claws retract. Slowly. Like he has to think about it.
“Names,” he says. His voice is low and wrong in a way that I have not heard from him before. The business voice with something underneath it that is not operational. “The ones who cornered you. Do you remember their names?”
It’s a question that’s shaped like something else.
“It was twenty-one years ago.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“Jazil.”
He closes his eyes. Takes a breath. When he opens them the slits have eased back to something wider and the ridges have gone from black to dark bronze and the claw marks in the table are the only evidence that something just happened inside him I do not fully understand but that I felt — felt the way you feel a change in gravity, in the weight of a room rearranging itself around a person who has made a decision.
“I know,” he says. Quiet. “I know it was a long time ago.”
He says nothing else. He doesn’t need to. The claw marks say it. The ridges say it. And I have a feeling — a deep, stomach-dropping, thrilling feeling — that the colony kids who taught me to hide would not enjoy being in a room with Jazil Ereux.
Not today. Not ever.
“The point is,” I say, and my voice has found itself again, steadier now, warmer, “I am very good at hiding. The best. Professional-grade. If you ever need someone to disappear into a maintenance duct on short notice, I am your girl.”
The fury breaks. Not all of it. The ridges don’t go back to bronze. But the almost-smile arrives, and it has something behind it that wasn’t there before. Something fierce and gentle at the same time. Something I am going to be thinking about for a very long time.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says.
And the way he says it makes my chest ache in a way that has nothing to do with bruised ribs.