8. Waking #3
“After the flag, SRS will send a Tier 1 team. Not mercenaries.”
She does not flinch. The pen stops tapping. Her eyes find mine with the expression she wears when she opens the notebook — the look that says someone should care about this, turned on a situation that is rapidly exceeding survivable parameters.
“Then we need to be gone before the flag.”
We. Not you need to run. We. A word that assumes shared navigation. A word I have not been included in since —
The thought does not complete.
“Thirty-six hours,” she repeats. “Right.” She uncaps the pen. Opens the notebook to a fresh page. Writes something, and this time she does not close it, does not angle it away. She leaves it open on the mattress between us and the words are visible in her round, quick handwriting:
Xor Xax. SRS defector (pending). Tactical genius. Has a tail that has opinions. Makes me feel brave.
Below it, in smaller letters:
Someone should be doing this work. Maybe we should.
She looks at me. I look at the notebook. At her handwriting, pressed hard enough into the page that I can feel the grooves, the same pen pressure she uses for the entries about lost cargo and unfiled cases and people who fell through the gaps.
She has filed me in her notebook. Not as a target. Not as an asset with a compliance rating. She has written my name next to the word brave and I —
My hands are shaking.
My hands have never shaken. Not in the Proving Dens. Not on a single operation. They are trembling in my lap and I close them into fists — claws in, smooth pads, the choice my body keeps making — and the notebook is still open between us.
She does not comment on the shaking. She picks up the notebook, closes it, slides it into the cardigan pocket, and says: “Tea?”
And stands. And walks to the galley. And leaves me sitting on a bunk that smells like both of us, where the word brave is still in the air, and the purr is in my chest, and something I killed at seven is alive again.
Someone should be doing this work. Maybe we should.
Three words addressed to her notebook cases and to me in the same breath, as though I am the same kind of thing as an unfiled report — something that fell through the gaps that someone should have caught.
I have nine years of mission reports and not one of them asked whether the work was worth doing.
She has twelve years of a notebook nobody filed and asks nothing back.
Maybe we should is the first proposition that has assumed I could be something other than what Trell built.
I do not have a framework for it. I find — sitting on a bunk that smells like both of us — that the absence does not feel like falling.
I sit. Press my closed fists against my thighs. Wait for the shaking to stop.
It does not stop.
Footsteps. Hers. Light and specific. She appears in the doorway with two mugs. Peppermint, from the smell.
“How do you take it?” she asks.
“You already know how I take it.”
The smallest shift at the corner of her mouth. Not a smile. The architecture of one. “I do, actually. No sugar. Steeped too long. You like it bitter.”
She watched me drink tea and catalogued the details, and this fact is more dangerous than the eight vessels closing on our position because it means she has been paying the same kind of attention to me that I have been paying to her, and neither of us has named it, and the not-naming is the last wall standing.
I take the mug. Our fingers do not touch. The gap between her knuckle and mine is less than an inch and I can feel the heat of her hand through the ceramic and the gap is a choice and the choice is the only discipline I have left.
“Thirty-six hours,” I say.
“Thirty-six hours,” she agrees.
The tea is exactly as I take it. Bitter. Steeped too long. Perfect.
She sits in the co-pilot’s chair — her chair now, the pristine seat that held no one’s impression for a decade now holding the shape of both of us — and pulls up the navigation display and starts plotting routes with the competence that dismantles me more efficiently than anything in her arsenal.
I sit beside her. Console between us. Tea warm in my hands.
Soon — a day, less — Trell will know what I have done.
Trell, who found me at sixteen in the Proving Dens and called me a promising asset — who has approved every mission I have filed for nine years and never once asked me to question the orders that generated them.
The man he sends will be better than the mercenaries, because the man he sends will be me — or the version of me that is still compliant, still capable of treating a courier as a complication and meaning it.
I look at her. The braid escaping at her temples. The pen behind her ear. The notebook in her pocket, where my name is written next to the word brave.
The purr has not stopped.
I have stopped trying to kill it.
My comms unit is on the console. The light that should not be there is still there. I have not looked at it directly since the Merik transmission ended, and I am not going to look at it now, and soon none of that will matter.