Twenty-Four
TWENTY-FOUR
Shakily, she dresses herself, not even caring that she’s putting back on the same dirty, bloodied clothes she fell asleep in. When she emerges from the bathroom, Kob is dressed and working in the kitchen, plating up toast and canned beans, still humming the same tune from the shower.
Isako stands rooted to the spot, staring at his broad back as he opens a jar of applesauce and wipes a finger across the rim to catch the spill.
She has the sensation she gets when she peers through the telescope in the Astrocom observatory, looking at something impossibly far away, knowing that what’s reaching her eyes has already happened.
She opens her mouth to get his attention, to break the spell. The simple act of saying his name feels like taking that first step outside the airshield.
“Kob.”
He turns around, sees her standing there with her damp hair hanging shapeless around her face and shoulders, and the bleak expression on her face makes him stop what he’s doing and lean across the counter in alarm. “Isa?”
She holds up the white injection pen. “What is this?”
Surprise flashes across his face, then anger.
She’s seen him angry before, though never at her, and her heart stutters because Kob’s scary when he’s angry.
A dark shadow crosses his face, turns his strong features into a landscape of hard cliffs, reminds her of the threatening bite in the air that precedes the coldest night of winter.
“Why were you poking around in my stuff?” he growls.
“I didn’t mean to. I was looking for soap.” She’s not defensive, only afraid of what he will say next as she takes a step forward and holds the white cylinder out between them. “Kob, tell me what this is.”
He draws back as if she’s holding a knife. “Why do you want to know?”
She crosses to the door where her red coat hangs on a wall hook and digs into her pockets, pulls out the used dose of sudexatrine that she’s been carrying around for days and nearly forgotten about.
When she couldn’t find any medical information about it, she assumed it was some new street drug, something Martim picked up to feed the habit that stole his life.
She holds up both pens to Kob—one empty, one full, but otherwise identical.
“I found one just like it in Martim’s apartment. ”
Kob’s anger morphs into bewilderment. He takes the pens from her incredulously and holds them up side by side, examining them. “Martim was using sudexatrine?”
“What is this shit?” She wants to grab him and shake.
Kob hesitates. Without meeting her eyes, he says, expressionlessly, “It’s an experimental drug being tested for its effectiveness on neurodegenerative diseases. Including Gray’s Waste.”
For a moment, Isako merely stares at him. “What are you saying?”
Kob raises a sorrowful look, asking her not to make him state the obvious.
“You can’t have Gray’s Waste,” she blurts, with pathetic, childlike logic. “You seem fine.”
But he hasn’t been fine, and if she was really paying attention, she would’ve realized it sooner.
She runs through the list of what she knows are the early symptoms of Gray’s—muscle tremors, debilitating headaches, light sensitivity, memory loss.
She dismissed all the signs as stress on an aging body, the unfortunate byproduct of her friend giving up on life and falling into freelancing.
He hasn’t given up on life. Life’s giving up on him. Gray’s Waste is always fatal.
Kob sets the two white injection pens down on the counter. “There are things you can do and medicines you can take to slow the disease and control the symptoms,” he says. “Things won’t get bad until I hit late stage.”
Late stage is when the disease eating away at the nerve cells in his brain will take away his ability to walk, to talk, and eventually to breathe. Isako feels as if it’s hard for her to breathe right now, to even get words out. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You had a lot going on.”
“You should’ve fucking told me!”
She yells at him, but the anger is for herself.
She was out of contact with Kob for years.
She didn’t make any real effort to maintain their friendship.
If she really cared about him, she would’ve checked in on him after he stopped working and found out he was sick.
She certainly wouldn’t have pulled him into her final assignment, filled his life with stress and injuries that’ll only help the disease along and shorten his remaining time.
He doesn’t owe her any confidence or explanation.
Neither did Martim.
“You should’ve told me,” she repeats. “You shouldn’t be running around getting sliced up by shadowcons while you’re sick with Gray’s Waste, for fuck’s sake.”
“Good thing I didn’t tell you, then. You might not have let me come along.”
She feels a stinging start in the back of her eyeballs. She wants to hit something or knock over furniture. “How long?”
She’s not sure if she’s asking how long he’s known or how long he has left.
“I wouldn’t have found out if it hadn’t been for that injury during the Utilities Strike.
My shoulder was all jacked up, and I had bad headaches that I thought might be related.
I ignored it for a while, but it got to the point that I went in for some scans, and those turned into more tests, and, well, the long and short of it is, I found out about a year ago and I have maybe another two years. Three if I’m lucky.”
Three more years would be well beyond his grace period as a freelancer. He’ll be lucky to live that long even without dying of Gray’s Waste.
“So that’s why you went rogue.” She feels numb and stupid. She took Kob for having gone soft. She’s been silently blaming him for abandoning his skills and profession.
“It wasn’t the only reason. But it sure did have an impact.
” Kob sighs and sits on the kitchen stool, hands heavy on his knees.
“After the Utilities Strike, I took a few short contracts, but in my heart, I was already searching for a way out, even though I would never admit it to myself. The last job I did just for the money, but it took a lot out of me. I couldn’t even finish it out.
When the doctors told me I had Gray’s Waste, I laughed.
It seemed… almost right . Poetic justice, karma, whatever.
As if the universe was giving me back what I’d handed out.
Giving me a kick in the ass and an exit hatch at the same time. ”
How can he sound so casual about it? Then again, he’s had a year to come to grips with dying. She’s only been doing it for a couple weeks.
She doesn’t accept his acceptance. His moral reasoning is flawed and it infuriates her that he’s acting so passive about his fate.
She wants him to treat the disease as he would any other assignment.
Resolve to break it the way Strikebreaker would break a revolt.
Cow it and fight it and win , force it to back down.
“You gave up,” she accuses him. “You let your license expire and stopped taking contracts, so now you’re a freelancer, and you…
you don’t have medical care .” She had to argue with the nurse at the clinic last night just to get his urgent wounds taken care of.
How could he be so fucking careless with his own life?
There’s a way out of this, there must be.
But he’s already walked away from it. “How are you getting medicine? Treatment?”
Kob comes over and wraps his huge arms around her.
It’s ridiculous. For him to be comforting her . She pushes against him, but he doesn’t let go. He’s much too strong for her to break free. She punches his broad chest in abject frustration, then drops her head against his shoulder, tears leaking from her eyes onto his shirt.
“Do you think I haven’t done my research?” he asks her gruffly. “I’m an atier, Isa, give me some credit. I must’ve talked to dozens of doctors. I read everything I could. I didn’t just roll over and accept it. It’s not that I want to die. Pretty much the opposite.”
“What are you going to do in a year or two, when things get worse?”
“I have more than enough medicine stocked up to get me through to the end of my grace period. I made sure of that—used up most of my savings and some… unconventional connections. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine for as long as I need to be.”
She pulls back. “What about sudexatrine? You said it’s an experimental drug. There’s a chance it can cure the disease, right?”
Kob shakes his head. “There’s evidence it can slow down Gray’s Waste enough to put a patient into remission for months, maybe years. But it’s not a cure. I tried it for a while but stopped taking it months ago.”
“But if—”
“I wasn’t willing to accept the side effects.
Paranoia, aggression, hypomania… I don’t want the disease or the medications to change who I am.
I’d rather have less time, so long as I’m still myself.
” He smooths her damp hair, the way Tai used to.
Her long, thick black hair, the one thing she remains vain about.
Kob says, “Did you know Gray’s Waste isn’t a disease recorded by the Founders?
It didn’t exist on Earth. It began showing up in the second generation of colonists.
It comes from Aquilo. Scientists don’t know if it’s caused by the radiation of the Vastness, or the toxins people are exposed to in the gas fields, or some side effect of airshield technology.
This accursed planet has always tried to break the human spirit, but it keeps failing.
I don’t want to die—but I’ve been a partner of death for long enough that I’m not going to try to cheat it either. ”
She buries her face in her hands.
Kob lets go of her and clears his throat. “I haven’t told anyone else, you know…”
“I’ll treat it like we’re on contract,” she promises in a whisper.
She’ll go to the grave with Kob’s secret.
She’ll do it happily, because that’s how she knows that in spite of the ways her friend has changed, he’s still a longknivesman at heart.
He’d rather people believe him to be irresponsible and eccentric than sick and feeble.
There’s still some mystique of Strikebreaker that he won’t relinquish.
Kob nods gratefully, eyes downcast. He turns and picks up the two injection pens again, frowning. “You say you found sudexatrine in Martim’s apartment?”
The implication makes her reel all over again, like a training dummy being knocked around repeatedly. “How could he have Gray’s Waste, at his age?”
“Early-onset Gray’s Waste is rare, but it’s not unheard of,” Kob says. “The youngest recorded case was in a twenty-six-year-old.”
“If Martim was diagnosed with the disease while serving Uchi…” Isako sucks in a breath through her teeth.
She still doesn’t believe the report of suicide by overdose, but if Martim was suffering from a terminal illness, a lot of things now make sense in an awful way.
“His performance would’ve begun to slip.
He panicked and started relying heavily on his drug habit to keep working.
His client didn’t just find out about the drugs; he must’ve learned that Martim had Gray’s Waste. ”
Uchi could claim his atier had indeed failed him—declining performance, substance-use violations, keeping secrets from one’s client—all worthy of contract cancellation.
But the main reason to get rid of Martim was because he was a rapidly depreciating asset, one that Uchi could not trust to keep his mouth shut.
Isako drops onto the sofa, hugging her arms around her torso.
“Letting Martim live was an unacceptable liability. The poor kid was sick and never going to get another contract, and he had no children or other close relatives to inherit a resignation bonus, so he couldn’t be incentivized that way.
With his days already numbered, what did he have to lose?
He could publicly reveal everything he knew about Field 93, including Uchi eliminating the survivors.
He was holding all the evidence in storage.
He was the one person who could’ve single-handedly torpedoed the Board vote. ”
Kob’s expression is troubled. “You think Martim was planning to betray his client?”
“What matters is that Uchi thought he might. That’s enough reason to term him.
Whether he actually had him killed, or forced Martim to kill himself, doesn’t matter.
Either way, he murdered my apprentice.” For a second stager like Sandbar Uchi, the life of a deckhand kid might as well be that of livestock, already destined to be as brief as his kith namesake.
If Gray’s Waste was going to claim him, what did another year or three matter?
The logic is evil, but it makes sense.
Kob opens his mouth to reply, but a call comes in on Isako’s line, alerting her in the same tone she’s used for years to indicate a call from Forest Greves, one she must pick up.
It’s her client.
She takes the call, audio only.
“Atier Isako,” comes Savannah Minto’s tinny voice. “I hope you can explain this fuckup.”