And for him anyway, Bobbie counted double.
Taking care of their little family had been his job damn near since the day the Canterbury died, back in some other lifetime. And usually, he felt like he managed it pretty well. The only time things had really come apart, he’d been married to Giselle and preoccupied with trying to pump air into that leaking sack of a relationship. But all the times he hadn’t lost focus, Alex felt like he’d kept the crew of the Roci working together, mostly. It wasn’t big things. The powerful stuff was always small. A kind word when Clarissa was feeling unappreciated, a little elbow in the ribs when Holden’s outrage on someone else’s behalf threatened to eclipse the person in question, a cordon around Amos when the big man was in the bad part of his head. Every crew that lasted more than three runs together had someone who kept a weather eye on the balance. For decades now, he’d been that man on the Roci.
Only they weren’t on the Roci now. And that, so far as he could see it, was more than half of the problem. Not the whole problem. But more than half.
“Hoy, hoy, hoy,” one of Katria’s people said, trotting up behind him. Alex recognized him from the galley. Young guy with a nose that had gotten bent sometime back and never put straight. “Passé alles gut?”
“Sure,” Alex said. “Everything’s fine.” It wasn’t true, but he wasn’t looking to talk about family business outside the family.
“Bist bien,” the crook-nosed guy said. “Just. We’re alles busted about Holden, yeah? Whatever Voltaire can do, help out, yeah?”
Alex clapped the crook-nose on the shoulder, and looked deeply into his eyes. “Thank you. Seriously. That means a lot.”
The kid was just another someone who wanted to get close to the action. There had been a million like him over the years. Holden had always been the one who soaked up the fame and celebrity, because for the most part he didn’t notice it. He just kept on being himself, and got vaguely surprised when anyone recognized him. The rest of them had to build up their routines and diversions, ways of being polite to the people who wanted to insert themselves into anything that the Rocinante did so they could tell their friends and feeds that they knew James Holden. Shaking Crook-nose’s hand and sending him away didn’t cost Alex much, but it didn’t cost him nothing. Part of him wanted to ignore the guy or yell at him. But this was easier in the long run. He had enough experience to know that, and he was pretty good with patience when he needed to be.
After a well-calculated moment, he turned away and resumed walking toward the makeshift bunkroom. And Naomi.
It had been hard when Holden and Naomi pulled the ripcord, but it hadn’t been unexpected. Part of him had been braced for it since his own second divorce. He’d been ready for the blow when those two packed up their things and retired. When Duarte’s forces blew through the gate and changed everything, part of him had thought that getting Holden and Naomi back was going to be the silver lining.
He’d called it wrong, though.
They treated it like Laconia was the only problem because it was the one most likely to get them all killed, but there was more than that. Now that Holden was out of the picture, the only one in a position to fix it was Naomi.
Fix it. That was optimism. The only one who could fix as much of it as was fixable. He hoped she was able to rise to the occasion. He hoped he was too. But no matter how bad it was, things had gone pretty well with Bobbie. He still had Bobbie.
The smuggler’s cabin was dim. Golden light spilled from the toolkit light they used for illumination when the built-in fixtures were too harsh. The air was warmer here, and it had the vague smell of bodies and old laundry. They hadn’t changed out the sheets since they’d gotten here. Some things slipped when you were hiding from authoritarian police squads and trying to topple a conquering army. Linens appeared to be one of those things.
Naomi sat against the back wall, her stool tipped back so that she could rest against the bulkhead. She smiled when he came in and put a finger to her lips. Alex paused, and Naomi nodded toward the bunk to his left. The lump under the blanket was the curve of Clarissa’s back. It rose and fell slowly. She was asleep. Alex turned back to Naomi, gestured to the door behind him in invitation, but Naomi shifted her stool to one side, making room for Alex to sit on the lower bunk beside her. Come sit with me. I will not go outside.
With a sinking sensation in his gut, Alex sat. His back popped like a bolt shearing off, and the ache went away. In the shadows, Naomi seemed like someone just waking up from sleep or just falling into it. On a borderline, regardless, between one state and another.
“Hey,” Alex said softly.
Naomi made a little wave with a smile behind it. “I’ve been sitting with her for the last couple hours. Amos is trying to get something to take the edge off in the short run, but we need to get her to the med bay. That sludge in her blood is building up. It’s making her jittery.”
“Soon as we’re out of here,” Alex said. “First thing. How’re you holding together?”
She shrugged with her hands.
“Yeah,” he said.
“You coming to tell me that I need to put my big-girl boots on? Stop sulking in my tent and rejoin the battle, quick before Patroclus does something rash?” There was a warmth and a humor in her voice he hadn’t expected. It almost undercut the sorrow that he had expected.
“Yeah, I don’t actually know who Patroclus is,” Alex said.
“Greek kid, got in over his head,” Naomi said, waving it away. “I’ll be fine, Alex. I’ll be out there. Just I needed to be away for a little while. It’s just the down cycle.”
He went through all of the things he’d planned to say, all the arguments he’d prepared to make. None of them seemed to quite fit the situation.
“Yeah, okay,” he said instead. And then, a moment later, “Down cycle?”
“The part where I don’t know if he’s dead or alive. The part where I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. The part where I think how much I want him to be here and safe and not hurting. And telling me not to hurt either.”
“I know it’s … that’s got to be—”
“Alex, I live here,” Naomi said. “I can’t tell you how many times he’s put me here. How many times he’s seen the right thing to do and rushed off to do it without thinking about the price. Without letting me or you or the Roci scare him into being less than his conscience demands. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. It’s natural to him. Who he is. It’s the only thing about him I’m really angry about.” The buzz in her voice wasn’t sorrow.
Alex took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I may not have really understood the whole situation.”
“You remember Io? When he went off to a ship with active protomolecule all over it because maybe he’d be able to save Mars? Or Ilus, when he vanished with whatever that weird version of Miller was because maybe he’d be able to keep you and me from falling out of orbit? Or on Marais, when he went into the cliffs so we wouldn’t run out of water? So this time he went to keep Amos and Katria playing nice, and instead, he saved the whole operation and maybe opened the way for all of us to get away safely. All it cost was him. And he paid that price without hesitating. Same as fucking always.”
A tear tracked down her cheek, and he felt his own eyes stinging.
“We’ll get him,” Alex said. “We’ll always get him back.”
“Sure we will. Until the time we don’t,” she said. “It’s like this for everyone. There’s always going to be a last time, eventually. I just wish with Jim there could only be one last time, and not all of them, over and over and over.”
He took her hand. Her fingers were warm, but thinner than he remembered them being. He could feel the little bones beneath the skin, and her skin was dry.
“He’s exhausting,” she said.
“But we love him.”
She sighed. “We do.”
They sat in silence for a moment before she drew her hand back from his and wiped her cheeks dry. She leaned forward, setting the legs of her stool down against the deck. Her sigh came from a thousand klicks away. “Let me get cleaned up, and I’ll get to work,” she said.
Alex stood when she did, but waited behind as she walked out. He’d been traveling with Naomi for a lot of years. It was amazing how easy it was to forget how much she knew herself. He didn’t know if that said more about her or him.
Probably him.
Clarissa made a soft sound, somewhere between a grunt and cough. She turned toward him. Her skin was pale, sheened with sweat, but her smile was strong and unforced. “Hey,” she said. “What did I miss? Did we hear about Holden? What’s news?”
“No, it wasn’t that. I was just getting a little pep talk,” Alex said. “How’re you doing?”