5. Althea
ALTHEA
The filtration line blows its seal at third bell, and that's how I get out of the store-room.
I hear the alarm before Caelis comes scrambling, and I'm already on my feet. "That's the line we patched," I say through the grille. "The patch didn't hold, did it. You crossed the polarity on the return feed."
"I — that's not —" He's got the hatch open before he's finished deciding to. "Vasha will skin me."
"Then let's not tell Vasha." I'm out and moving before anyone can think better of it, and nobody stops me, because the whole junction stinks of scorched coolant and a crew that can't breathe doesn't care who fixes the air.
The engine bay is a cathedral of salvage, and it's drowning. I find the return feed, find Caelis's mistake, and I put my hands in it the way I've put my hands in a hundred dying systems on a hundred worse days. "Spanner. The long one. Now talk me through what you did so I know what you undid."
He talks. I work. The bay fills with Reapers who came to watch a human fail and stay to watch her not, and when the line catches and the bay's air goes from poison to merely stale, somebody actually grunts a word I've started to recognize as approval.
Vasha is the one who corners me after. She doesn't loom; she doesn't have to.
"You're useful," she says, like it's an insult she's choosing to allow.
"Useful makes the captain careless. Careless captains get crews killed.
" She steps close enough that I can see the bone charms braided into her hair.
"Whatever you think you're doing to him, stop.
He has carried us through famines you can't imagine.
I will not watch a human take the legs out from under him. "
"I'm not doing anything to him."
"You're breathing," she says. "On this ship, that's enough." And she leaves me with that, which is the most honest threat anyone's given me in years.
We hit a rough hyperspace transition that night. I'm crossing the engine bay catwalk when the floor lurches sideways and my feet leave it entirely, and there's a long bright instant of nothing under me and a railing too far to reach.
Then there isn't nothing. There's an arm like a hull strut, and I'm against a chest that runs hot as an engine, and the captain has crossed half the bay in the time it took me to fall.
We both go still. His hand is splayed across my back, and where it touches me the heat sinks in past my jacket, past my skin, into something I don't have a name for, and I feel it hit him too — a flinch that runs the whole length of him, his eyes going wide and his grip tightening like he's afraid I'll dissolve.
"You're fast," I manage, because the alternative to a joke is asking what just moved through both of us.
He sets me on my feet with a care that doesn't fit his size and steps back the regulation distance. "Watch your footing," he says, rough, and is gone before I can answer.
I stand on the catwalk with my heart going stupid and the print of his hand still warm on my spine, and the thing that scares me isn't the fall. It's how safe I felt in the arms of something I'm supposed to run from.