20. Saren
SAREN
Iam eating when the alarm I have spent weeks dreading finally comes, and there is a cruelty in that — that the worst hour of my life begins with a spoon halfway to my mouth.
Jorek does not hail. Hunters who hail still want something they can bargain for; Jorek wants a reputation, and reputations are built on the ones you didn't bargain with.
His pack comes in fast under the storm's cover and the first salvo takes our aft shielding and the second puts boarding pods into our flank like teeth into a wrist.
Then they are inside my ship, and I become the thing the galaxy named us for.
I do not enjoy it. That is the lie the stories tell, that we revel — I have never once reveled.
But I am very, very good at it, and good is its own dark grace.
I meet the first boarding team in the throat of the lower corridor where their numbers can't help them, and I do not waste motion, and I do not waste mercy, and when Althea comes around the corner with a salvage cutter in her fist she stops dead at the sight of me standing in the work of my own hands.
I see her see it. The whole of it. Every reason she was taught to run.
"Behind me," I tell her, in a voice I keep level by force, and after one heartbeat — one — she steps in behind me instead of away, and that single step does more to undo me than any kindness she has ever shown.
We hold. It costs. By the time the last pod is purged we've lost good people, and the ship is bleeding from a dozen wounds, drifting now, the storm shoving us toward the lip of a gravity well that will fold us into a point of light if the drive doesn't come back.
Caelis nurses the drive. Elsyn drowns in the wounded.
And in the wreck of the bridge, Korrah brings me the thing that breaks the night fully open: the relay logs, recovered, showing every transmission that walked the hunters onto us, one after another after another, each one keyed from inside my own hull.
The bridge goes silent around the truth of it. Eighty-one of us. One traitor. The arithmetic I would not perform has been performed for me, in the dark, in secret, for weeks.
It is Vasha who drags him before the crew, because she will not let it be me — she knows what I'll do if it's me.
Theryn does not fight her. He stands in the ruin of the bridge with his forward-curving horns and his charcoal skin and his absolute conviction, and he looks at me, and he says, "I did it to save them.
" And the worst of it, the unforgivable cleanest worst of it, is that some buried, frozen part of me understands exactly what he means.