2. Saren
SAREN
Ihave killed for less than a stranger in my air, and I mean to do it cleanly, which is the only mercy the Badlands sells.
I crouch in front of the human. She's small, ash-pale at the dock with cold and fear, and she doesn't look away from me, which they always do. I reach for her throat, because the throat is fast.
My hand closes on her, and the deck holds steady while I come apart.
Heat that isn't heat floods up through my palm and into my spine, every nerve lighting at once, and behind my eyes a chord sounds that no instrument is making — a note I have heard exactly once, in the oldest recording Elsyn keeps, the sound the Ishani made for home when no word was wide enough.
Jalshagar. The thing my people stopped believing in the same century we stopped deserving it.
I hold her two breaths too long. Long enough for eighty of my crew to watch their captain freeze with his hand on a human's neck.
I let go. I stand. I build the face they need before they see the one underneath.
"She lives," I say.
Vasha is at my shoulder. "She's a breach." Our tongue, fast and quiet. "Out the lock and we're clean. You taught me that."
"She lives." It comes out wrong, with something in it I can't file down in time, and Vasha hears it. Fifteen years at my side has left her very little I can hide. Her ruined horn turns toward me.
"What is wrong with you," she says. It isn't a question, only an accusation still looking for its shape.
I switch to the common tongue so no order can be mistaken. "Aft store. Guard rotation. She speaks to no one and touches nothing. We make the neutral station in nine days, we leave her, and we forget this."
Theryn's horns swing forward. "We have never kept a stranger past the hour we found them."
"And we've never once been wrong to space one," I say. "We can afford to be right slowly. Once."
It's a thin answer. They know it's thin. I watch them weigh whether the captain who has never given them a reason to doubt him has finally cracked, and a lifetime of being right buys me this — one order I can't explain, before the questions start in earnest.
They take her. She fights, which is stupid, and which I respect before I can stop myself. As they drag her up she finds my eyes again, and there's no thanks in her, only fury and a creature already counting exits.
Good, I think. Count them. Get out before I learn the shape of you.
The store hatch seals. The bridge breathes again.
I give the watch to Vasha and I go down into the ship's spine, to the relic hold where the carved plates stand racked like the ribs of something drowned, and I set my back to the coldest of them and let my hands shake where no one can see them do it.
We are dying. Every Reaper knows it the way you know a tooth is going bad.
Fewer of us each year, fewer daughters, and the ones born too often born wrong.
We made our peace with ending by deciding ending is what monsters are owed, and there's a terrible rest in that, the rest of a debt you've stopped pretending you can clear.
Now the dark has put a human on my deck and told me, in a dead world's voice, that there is hope.
I learned young what hope costs a Reaper. It is the one weight that has killed more of us than hunger ever did.
The carving under my brow, when I open my eyes, is a face. Some old artist's idea of a mother, maybe. Whoever cut it gave her an expression I have spent years refusing to name, and I name it now because there is no one here to see me do it.
She goes to the station, I tell the face. I let her go.
The face has heard better promises. It keeps its hope anyway. They always did.