22. Saren
SAREN
She has packed nothing, which is how I know she means to leave with even less than she came aboard with.
"Get away from the pod, Thea."
"You heard him." She doesn't turn. Her hand stays flat on the pod's frame, knuckles pale.
"He's not wrong about the shape of it. As long as I'm aboard, they keep coming.
People are dead in your medical bay because the dark followed me onto your ship.
I can do one decent thing with a life that's mostly been spent on me by other people. I can take myself off the board."
"And go where," I say. "To Jorek? You think the hunter who shot up my ship for sport gives you a clean death?"
"I think it stops being your crew's problem.
" Now she turns, and her face is doing the thing I have only seen it do once, in the reactor corridor, except it's aimed inward now.
"I'm trying to save you, you impossible — for once in my life I'm trying to be the one who saves somebody, will you let me. "
"No." It comes out of the oldest part of me.
"Because I have spent thirty-eight years certain my people were owed an ending.
I carved a place on my horn for every name the ending took, and I told myself carrying them was the same as fighting for them, and it never was.
Carrying the dead is easy. It asks nothing of you but grief.
" I cross to her, and I take her face in my hands, careful, always careful.
"You walked onto my ship and made me want a beginning.
I do not know how to want one. It terrifies me more than dying ever has.
But I will not let you teach me the word for hope and then climb into a box and prove the lesson wrong. "
She's crying, which she'd deny under torture. "You were going to surrender me," she says. "An hour ago. I saw it on you."
"I was." I will not lie to her, not about this.
"I had decided. I am a man who decides the survivable thing and lives with it.
And then Vasha put her hand on my chest and I understood that the survivable thing has been killing us by inches for three hundred years, and I am done surviving.
" I press my brow to hers. "I would rather fight for a future and lose it than keep a present that is only a slower grave. "
The pod sits open behind her, patient as a coffin.
She looks at it. She looks at me. And — gods help us both — outside the hull, the gravity well drags, and somewhere a fleet recharges, and she steps away from the pod and into me instead, and for the length of one breath the dying stops mattering at all.