Except she was already bringing her arms up inside his, rolling her shoulders and shrugging off his grip. She’d planned it. She wasn’t lost in rage haze. She was still thinking.
She locked her legs with his, and rolled so she was on top. The heel of her left hand pushed his chin up and away so her right fist could land on his throat. Amos coughed, tried to roll away. His breath was a thick wheeze. The air that made it into his lungs felt pressed thin. He struggled to get to his feet, but she was already up, kicking his knee out from under him. He hit the deck hard. She was over him, kicking down. Curb-stomping him. He tried to curl away from her. Her heel hit his shoulder, his back. She was going for his kidneys, and he tried to shift away, but he couldn’t. The pain was exquisite and vast. He was helpless. He was fucked. She kicked him again, the whole weight of her body behind it, and he felt another rib go.
He wasn’t going to make it up. The violence was going to go on until she decided it was over, and there was nothing he could do to make it stop. He curled against blow after blow after blow, felt the damage in his body getting deeper. There was nothing he could do to defend himself. If Bobbie wanted him dead, he’d die.
He endured, helpless. The pain smeared into itself until it wasn’t any part of him that hurt. Until it was bigger than his body.
His mind slipped, shifted. Images flickered through him like a memory too deep to bother being coherent. A perfume smell like lilacs and bergamot. A white blanket so used that the cotton fibers were shattering, but soft. The way the cheap ice pops they sold at the shitty little bodega at Carey and Lombard tasted. The sound of a feed in the next room, of rain. It had been a long time since he’d thought about how the rain sounded in Baltimore. Violence, helpless pain, but cheap ice pops too.
A deep peace welled up in his gut, flowing out through him, lifting him up and out of his body. He relaxed into it. The thing in his throat was gone. Or no. That was never going to happen. It was sated. Back in the deep place where it belonged. He felt like the moment after orgasm, only better. Deeper. More real.
Eventually, he noticed Bobbie wasn’t kicking him anymore. He rolled onto his back. Opened his eyes. There was blood on the bulkheads and the deck. His testicles felt like soccer balls made of agony. Drying blood glued his left eye closed. His throat ached and burned when he swallowed, but the thing was gone. Something was weird about his breathing, though. It took him a second to figure out what. It was that he wasn’t the only one wheezing.
Bobbie sat with her back against the door. Her legs were spread a little, taking up the space. Her hands were on her knees. The little bleeding divots where the skin over her knuckles had split looked like art. Her hair was plastered to her neck. Mostly by sweat.
He looked at her looking back at him. Neither one of them spoke for a while. The hum of the station was the only sound.
“So,” Bobbie said, then took another couple breaths before she went on. “The fuck was that?”
Amos swallowed. It hurt a little less this time. He tried to sit up, then thought better of it. There were even a few spatters of blood on the ceiling. One of them looked a little like a cartoon dog face.
“I don’t,” he said, then gulped in another breath. “I don’t want things. You know what I mean?”
“Nope.”
“People … people want things. They want kids. Or they want to get famous or rich or something. And then they get all screwed up trying to get it. So I just don’t want anything. Not like that.”
“All right,” Bobbie said.
“Only I fucked up. Didn’t even know I was doing it, but it got where I wanted a thing.” He waited for the lump to come back to his throat, and when it didn’t, he went on. “I want Peaches to get to die at home. With her family.”
“On the Roci,” Bobbie said. “With us.”
“Yeah, I want that. Only ever since we got back from Freehold, it’s all coming apart. It wasn’t so bad when it was just Holden and Naomi peeling off on their own, because they picked that.”
“And also they never actually went away,” Bobbie said.
“But then that big bastard came through the Laconia gate, and now we’re locked off the Roci, and it’s like the chance to do it right’s just slipping too far away to get a hold of it, you know? I see her acting like it’s not much one way or the other, only it is to me. And then … then everything gets harder. I get cranky. Start thinking about shit I don’t want to think about. You know.”
They were silent for a long moment. Amos tried sitting up again, and managed it this time.
“All right,” Bobbie said. “I get it.”
“You do?”
“Close enough,” she said. “I get it close enough.”
She levered herself up to standing, then held a hand out to him. He took it, his hand on her wrist, hers on his. They pulled together and got him to standing. Her face was almost unmarked, but there were some bruises starting to show around her neck. “You really beat the shit out of me,” he said.
“Would have been easier to kill you,” Babs said, and grinned with bloody teeth. “But I feel like we still need your dumb ass.”
He nodded. She was right about both things.
“We should get you some ice,” he said.
“Fuck you,” she said. “If I did half my job, you’ll be stuffing your jock with every cold thing we have.”
“Yeah. You can have it when I’m done, though.”
She managed another bloody smile and turned toward the door.
“Hey, Babs,” he said. “No hard feelings, right?”
“Just next time you need to beat someone up, how about you don’t insult me first.”
He chuckled. It hurt. “If I need to beat someone up, I’ve got a whole station full of possibilities. But if I’m looking to lose a fight, I’m pretty much down to just you.”
She took a second. “Fair point.”
It took him about five minutes to get to the head. He washed up the best he could, but he was going to need some fresh clothes, and washing his eye pulled the clot a little bit loose. It started bleeding again. He’d talk to Saba about getting someone to stitch it closed. But clothes first.
“Jesus Christ,” Peaches said when he stepped into the room. “What happened?”
“Huh? Oh, you mean this? Me and Babs were doing a little sparring. I put my face where it shouldn’t have been. It ain’t nothing.”
Her face balanced between not believing him and choosing to, despite the thinness of the lie. He looked at her collarbone, waiting for the thing to come up with some way to break it, but nothing came. So that was good.
“You need to be less rusty,” she said at last.
“That’s not wrong,” Amos said. “What’re you up to?”
“I was going to go smear some food on my mouth like a toddler,” she said.
“Sounds good,” he said. “I’ll go with you.”
Chapter Forty: Naomi
Wake up. We have to go,” someone said. “Now. Go, go, go.”
Naomi forced her eyelids open. Her feet hit the decking before the dream she’d been in loosed its grip on her mind. There had been a fire. She’d been talking to it … she felt herself forgetting, the dream dissolving like sugar floss in water.
Amos rolled off his bunk with a grunt of pain and went to help Clarissa up. Alex was tugging his jumpsuit up over thin, brown legs. The new voice belonged to a girl too young for the split-circle tattoo on the back of her hands.
“What’s going on?” Bobbie said. “We got a problem?”
“Saba got word we need to go, so we go. Now go.”
“Where is he?” Bobbie asked.
“Gone,” the girl said, and then she was gone too. Light spilled into the bunk from the door she hadn’t closed. The voices and sounds of metal against metal were loud and panicky, but they weren’t battle. There wasn’t gunfire. The fear and the urge to motion that grabbed Naomi’s heart were still as violent.
“You good, Peaches?” Amos asked. Clarissa nodded, and pulled her hair back into a ponytail like she was getting ready to go to work. There was more color in her cheeks since she’d gotten the new medicine. If Amos hadn’t found a supply, they’d have been carrying her right now. Heaven. Small favors. Like that.
They piled out into the corridor, and Naomi paused, looked back. There were no tools, no terminals, nothing left behind but traces of hair and DNA. Which would be plenty enough to identify them.
“Naomi?” Alex said from the hall. “Everyone else is getting out mighty quick here. We should maybe—”
She moved quickly, decisively, pulling blankets and pillows and sheets up in her arms. They were cheap, so they pressed down to almost nothing. Another small favor. She shoved them into the makeshift recycler feed at the end of the hall. Maybe it wouldn’t make a difference. Maybe she’d been foolish to take the time. It didn’t matter. She’d done what she’d done.
A lot of her life was like that now.
Saba was at the service doorway that led out to the rest of the station. The vast body of Medina that the underground didn’t control. His jaw was tight, and there was a darkness around his eyes that the brown of his skin couldn’t hide.