16. Saren
SAREN
Deep in the ship there is a corridor we do not use, and on the night everything is still almost good, I take her down it.
I tell myself it is because she has earned the truth of us, the whole truth, not the fragments she has gathered. The honest reason is smaller and worse: I want to show her something beautiful that I made, before the part of the story that has no beauty in it arrives.
The corridor opens on the oldest section of the hull, salvaged whole from a drifting Ishani lifeboat my grandmother's grandmother rode out of the fall.
The murals here are not painted. They are cut, line by line, by hands dead three hundred years, and I have tended them in secret for years, replacing a failing light, easing a buckling plate, the way you tend a grave you cannot bear to let weather.
"This is the rest of it," I tell her. "What we were. Before the larger powers in the war decided a peaceful world sitting on old technology was a resource that would be more cooperative if it were on fire."
She walks the length of it slowly. "Tell me," she says. "All of it. Not the version you give the crew."
So I tell her. How Ishana made nothing that could kill, and so trusted that nothing would kill it.
How factions in the early war — I do not even know all their names; the names did not survive, only the wound — fed both sides of an old internal dispute until the dispute became a slaughter, and then arrived as peacekeepers to a world too broken to refuse them.
How the survivors fled into the Badlands and the Badlands finished what the war began, changing our bodies one starving generation at a time into the gray armored things that frighten human children into sleep.
"We did terrible things, after," I say, because she should have this part too, and because I will not let her love a lie.
"When we were starving. I will not pretend the Reapers were only victims. Some of what the galaxy fears, we taught it to fear, with our own hands. I have done some of it myself."
"I know," she says. "I watched you fly us out of that current.
I know exactly what you're capable of." She comes to stand in front of the oldest carving, the one of the mother with hope cut into her face, and she reaches up — not to my horns this time, to my face, her thumb along the bone ridge there.
"I'm not asking you to be only the gentle thing.
I'm asking you to stop believing the rest of it is all you're allowed to be. "
I have been alone with this grief my whole life.
I open my mouth to tell her she is not alone with hers anymore either, that I love her, that I have loved her since the asteroid current and probably before — and I stop, the way I always stop, because the moment I say it aloud the galaxy will hear, and the galaxy takes what I love.
and we stand in the light of everything my people used to be, almost saying it.
And even here, even now, I cannot fully silence the cold voice that has not left me since the relay room — the one that knows a transmission walked out of my hull to someone in the dark, and that whatever it carried is still out there, traveling, finding the hands it was meant for.
I hold her in the light and I let the voice wait.
It has waited this long. It can give me this.