14. Saren
SAREN
There is a market moon at the edge of the Reach where even Reapers can trade if they keep their hoods up, and we put in for parts we cannot make and food we cannot grow, and it is there that I learn exactly how little of myself I still command.
Theryn brings the accusation before we dock, and this time he is not alone.
Two of the older hands stand with him in the corridor, arms crossed, and he lays it out flat: the captain is compromised, the human is a beacon, the hunters found us because something aboard has changed and that something has a name and the name is Althea.
But the meeting does not break his way, and that is the new thing.
Caelis speaks against him. Then Korrah, who has never in my memory spoken in a captain's council.
Then, to my genuine shock, one of the old hands who came aboard before Theryn did.
"She pulled me out of the medical bay floor with her own hands," the old one says.
"Human or not, that buys her a hearing. We are not the kind of crew that spaces the people who save us. Or we didn't used to be."
Theryn looks at me like I have stolen something from him, and I have. I have taken the one comfort he had left, which was certainty. I know exactly how that robbery feels. I performed it on myself the day I touched her.
On the moon it goes wrong in a smaller, uglier way. We are loading crates in a dim market gallery when two smugglers take an interest in Althea — the kind of interest that starts as words and is deciding whether to become hands — and one of them sets his palm on her arm to turn her toward him.
I do not remember crossing the gallery. I remember the after: the smuggler against a bulkhead with my hand at his throat and his feet off the ground, and the whole market gone silent, and Althea's voice somewhere behind me saying my name in a tone I have not earned the right to ignore.
I set him down. He runs. The bond is roaring in me, satisfied and ashamed in the same beat, and I have just shown an entire trading post that the captain of The Hollow Wake can be moved, which is the one thing a Reaper captain can never afford to be.
"That," Althea says quietly, as we walk back to the ship, "scared you more than it scared me."
"It should scare us both."
"Maybe." She bumps her shoulder against my arm, which is as high as she reaches.
"Or maybe a man allowed to want something finally has a reason not to die for the practice of wanting nothing.
I haven't decided. You're a work in progress, Saren.
" She says it lightly, but she takes my hand as she says it, in full view of my crew, and does not let go, and I let her keep it the whole way home.