13. Althea
ALTHEA
Morning, by the ship's reckoning, is only the lights going pale, and I wake into it warmer than I have any right to be.
Saren is still asleep, which I get the sense almost never happens, and asleep he looks like a different creature entirely — the bone ridges that read as threats when he's awake just read as architecture now, the hard mouth gone slack, one enormous hand open on the bedding where it spent the night curled around me.
I lie still and study him while I can, the way you study a thing you know won't hold the pose if it catches you looking.
When I finally slip out, Caelis is loitering in the corridor with the studied innocence of someone who's been loitering a while.
"Don't," I warn him.
"I wasn't going to say anything." He falls into step beside me, beaming.
"I just wanted to show you something, and now seems — better than yesterday.
" He takes me down, deeper than I've been, to a sealed section the crew doesn't open, and he keys it, and the lights come up on a chamber that stops me dead.
Murals. Wall to ceiling, untouched by the salvage that scabs over the rest of the ship, paint still holding its color after centuries in the dark.
People who look almost like Saren but unbroken — taller, smoother, crowned with horns they'd carved into shapes for beauty instead of mourning — dancing, building, holding instruments I have no names for.
A whole civilization, painted by people who loved it, hidden behind a locked door on a marauder's ship.
"This is what we were," Caelis says, quiet. "The old ones kept it sealed. Said looking at it just made the now hurt worse. But I come down sometimes." He scuffs a boot. "I like knowing we used to be beautiful. Even if nobody alive remembers how."
"You should open it," I say. "Not all the way. But — Vasha presses her hand to a wall full of dead names every shift. Why not give her a wall of living ones too?"
Over the next few days I do a careless, dangerous thing: I start asking.
I ask Elsyn to teach me an Ishani word and he gives me three.
I ask an old hand what the song at the remembrance meant and he tells me, and then tells me another.
The crew starts talking about the before — haltingly at first, like testing a healed bone, then more.
Someone hums one of the recordings while they work.
The ship, which has sounded like a held breath since I came aboard, starts to sound like a place where people live.
Vasha catches me in the galley and I brace for the warning again. It doesn't come.
"Morale's up," she says, gruff, stirring the eternal pot.
"Fights are down. Two of the young ones asked me about my old clan's death-songs yesterday.
Nobody's asked me that in ten years." She doesn't look at me.
"I still think you're going to get us killed.
I'm just no longer certain it won't have been worth it.
" It is, I'm fairly sure, the warmest thing she's capable of saying, and I take it like the gift it is.
There's one face in the galley that doesn't lift with the rest. Theryn, in the corner, not humming, not carving — just watching the crew sing a dead world's songs around a human who shouldn't be aboard.
I catch it for half a second before he smooths it away, and I don't have the first idea what's moving behind it.
I should. I've read harder men than him across a salvage table.
But I'm warm and I'm wanted and I've stopped watching the exits for the first time in my life, so I look away, and I let myself not wonder what a frightened man does with a fear he's decided he can't say out loud.