6. Saren
SAREN
The Badlands give us a quiet stretch, which is the only kind of warning the Badlands ever give, and I take the helm myself to thread us through a debris field that ate a battle fleet a hundred years before I was born.
When the watch changes I do not sleep. I go to the observation chamber in the ship's forward spine, the one the crew has half-forgotten, and I do the thing I have done alone since I was old enough to understand grief: I play the recordings.
There are four hours of them. Four hours, out of a civilization.
Music, mostly — the Ishani sang the way other peoples breathe — and a little speech, voices reciting verse in a tongue I can read but never learned to think in.
I let it fill the dark chamber and I sit in the grey light of the dead stars beyond the viewport and I let myself be, for one watch, the thing I was bred to be before the Badlands remade us.
Not a captain. Not a weapon. The descendant of people who made beautiful things and believed the galaxy would let them keep doing it.
I don't hear the hatch.
"That's not pirate music," she says.
I'm on my feet before I've decided to be, which tells me how far gone I am — no one gets within arm's reach of me unheard, no one has in twenty years.
Althea stands in the hatch with her arms crossed, lit blue by the recording's glow, and she isn't afraid, and I am so tired of being the only one in a room who knows what I am.
"You should be in the store," I say.
"Caelis forgets to lock it. I think on purpose." She comes in instead of leaving, which no one does, and tips her head at the speakers. "What is it?"
I could lie. I am very good at lying. Instead I say, "Ishana," and watch her not know the word, and feel the old grief turn over.
"My people's world. Before us. Before the Badlands made us into what you were taught to fear, we made — that.
" The music swells and breaks like water on stone.
"Artists. Philosophers. We were known across nine systems for being harmless.
The galaxy found that very convenient, in the end. "
She's quiet a moment, which I didn't expect of her. Then she crosses the chamber and stops close — too close — and lifts one hand toward my face, and I go rigid.
"The carving," she says. "On your horns. Hold still."
She traces the names. Her fingertip follows the cuts I made myself, one for each of the dead I couldn't keep, and the touch goes through me like the recording does, like the fall in the engine bay did, until I'm not certain which ache is the bond and which is just being touched gently by another living thing for longer than I can count.
"Names," she says. Not a question.
"Names."
"You carry your dead on your own head." Her voice has lost its edge. "That's either the saddest thing I've ever seen or the bravest. I can't tell which."
I step back before my hands learn what they want to do. "Go to sleep, Althea." It's the first time I've used her name aloud. It costs me more than the meeting did.
She goes. At the hatch she stops. "Thea," she says. "The people who don't hate me call me Thea." And then she's gone, and I stand alone with four hours of a dead world and the warmth of one fingertip still tracking the names of everyone I've failed.