8. Saren
SAREN
The instinct sharpens after the boarders, and I am not prepared for how little of me is left to govern it.
It is small things first. A crewman braces Althea by the elbow on a pitching deck and I am across the compartment before I have chosen to move, and I have to turn the motion into checking a console so my own people don't see their captain bare his teeth over a steadying hand.
She doesn't notice. The crew notices. Vasha notices, and says nothing, which from Vasha is a shout.
Elsyn finds me cleaning a weapon I haven't fired, which is what I do with my hands when the rest of me is a storm.
"It's worse," I tell him.
"It will keep getting worse the longer you starve it.
" He lowers himself onto the bench across from me with the care of failing joints.
"The old texts had a word for what you're doing.
They didn't admire it. A bond denied turns inward.
The possessiveness, the temper — that isn't the bond corrupting you, Saren.
That's the bond with nowhere to go, pacing the inside of your skin.
" He watches me. "The Ishani believed a true mate was not a prize.
They believed it was ballast. A people in freefall, given something to steady against. We have been in freefall for three hundred years. "
"And if the ballast walks off at the next station."
"Then you find out whether you ever needed it, or only wanted it." He rises. "I am old enough to tell you those are not the same, and young enough to remember they feel identical from the inside."
He leaves me with that. I don't sleep.
The next watch we work a wreck — a Coalition supply hauler gutted in the field, the kind of salvage that keeps us fed for a season if we're fast and dead if we're slow.
I put Althea on the line because she asked and because saying no to her has stopped being something I'm able to do, and I watch a human read an unstable wreck better than crew who've done it their whole lives, calling weak spots before our scanners flag them, threading the team through a collapsing hold like she was born in the black instead of on a colony floor.
When the haul comes aboard, the crew is laughing.
Not the hard laughter of men relieved to be alive — easy laughter, the kind I have not heard on this ship since I was young enough to make it myself.
Caelis is showing her something he built.
Two of the old crew are arguing happily over the best of the salvage.
The mess smells of a real meal, the first in a month.
I stand in the hatch and I let myself, for one breath, imagine it. Not survival. The other thing. A ship that isn't a grave with engines. A people who carve their living instead of only their dead.
The breath ends. It always does.
Somewhere past the hull the dark keeps its own counsel, the way it always has, and a captain who has lived this long in the Badlands learns to feel its moods shift the way he feels an old wound shift before a storm.
I feel one now, low and wordless. I do not let myself give it a shape.
Giving it a shape would end the watch, and the watch is the first good thing I have let myself keep in years.
So I keep it instead. Whatever is coming will still be coming tomorrow. Tonight there is warm light and easy laughter and a human asleep two decks down who has made my ship feel like something other than a place to die, and I let that be the whole of what I know.
I let myself have the watch.