His parents all turned toward her. Naomi’s eyes widened a degree. The little, panicked flare of her nostrils was probably something only he could see. There was a pause he hadn’t expected, a stuttering moment when he saw her through their eyes: Here is the Belter girl their son was sleeping with. Here is the ex-lover of the man who killed the world, the representative of everything that had happened. One of them. It lasted a heartbeat, then another. It was vast as the space between worlds.
“I’ve heard so much about you, dear,” Mother Elise said, moving to Naomi and taking her in a wide embrace. The others followed, queuing up to welcome her to the family. But it wasn’t an illusion. The moment had been there. Even when his two families diffused into each other—Father Dimitri and Father Anton and Alex talking about the ship, Mother Tamara and Amos looking at each other with a kind of amused bewilderment—Holden felt the hesitation. They would love her if he said so, but she wasn’t one of their kind.
He barely noticed Bobbie at his side until she spoke. “This is how she does it. She finds a way to pay you.”
She nodded toward the back of the room. Avasarala stood alone, watching with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Holden went to her.
“They told me they were all right,” he said. “When I talked to them, they said they weren’t in danger.”
“It was true, as far as it went,” Avasarala said. “The reactors hadn’t failed there yet. And they had more food stored than most. They might have lasted another … month? How should I know? Canning. Who the fuck does their own canning anymore?”
“But you evacuated them.”
“Another week, another month. Not another year. They wouldn’t have been safe forever, and once they realized they were fucked, all the slots would have been filled. I flagged them as priority evacuees. I get to do that kind of shit. I’m the boss.”
“Where …”
She shrugged. “They’ll have quarters here or on L-4. Not as big as they had in Montana, but together. I can do that much. Maybe they’ll even go back to their farm someday when all this is done. Stranger things have happened.”
Holden took her hand. It was cool and hard and stronger than he’d expected. She turned to look him in the eye for the first time since he’d come into the room. The smile edged into the corners of her eyes.
“Thank you,” he said. “I owe you one.”
Her smile shifted, losing the formality and coolness and distance it had carried beneath the surface. She chuckled deep in her throat.
“I know,” she said.
Chapter Ten: Avasarala
She didn’t sleep anymore, or at least it didn’t help when she did. The bed in her suite was spongy, but she didn’t sink into it the way that a lifetime at normal gravity made her body expect, so it felt too soft and too hard at the same time. And sleep was supposed to mean rest. There was no rest anymore. She closed her eyes and her mind stumbled on like it was falling down stairs. Mortality rates and supply windows and security briefings—all the things that filled her so-called waking hours filled her nights as well. Being asleep only meant they lost what little coherence they had. It didn’t feel like sleeping. It felt like going mad and catatonic for a few hours and then regaining enough sanity to push through for eighteen or twenty hours more before collapsing into herself again. It was shit. But it needed doing, so she did it.
At least she had a shower.
“It seems like Bobbie Draper managed to keep Holden from screwing the mission up,” she said, drying her hair. The suite glowed a soft blue, like the promise of dawn. Not that any dawn looked like that on Earth now. But it had once. “I like that girl. I worry for her. She’s been sitting behind a desk too long. It doesn’t suit her.”
She considered the saris in her dresser, running her finger across the cloth and listening to the sound of skin against fabric. She opted for a green one that shimmered like a beetle’s carapace. Gold embroidery along the edges that caught the false sunlight made it look cheerful and powerful at the same time. And she had the amber necklace with the jade that went with it. Fashion. All humanity shitting itself to death, and she still had to worry what she looked like going into the meetings. Pathetic.
Aloud, she said, “Gies and Basrat sent word today. Everyone thought they were dead, but they were holed up under a mountain in the Julian Alps. Probably didn’t plan to pop their heads above ground until everything was settled, but you know how Amanda is. It’s never real with her unless someone knows she has it better. I don’t know why you liked them.”
She caught her mistake too late, and something vast and dangerous shifted in her heart. She took a deep breath, bit her lip, and went back to wrapping her sari in place.
“Once we have the Free Navy under control, we’ll have to do something about emigration. No one’s going to want to stay on Earth. At this rate, I may take off. Retire on some alien ocean where I don’t have to feel like I’m responsible for making the waves go up and down. Mars will never sort itself out. Smith? He puts a brave face on it, but he’s not a prime minister. He’s hospice nurse for a republic. Anytime I start feeling like my job’s bad, I just have a drink with him.”
They were all things she’d said before, in some variation. There were new things every day—reports from the planetary surface, from the surveillance drones around Venus, from her covert service agents on Iapetus and Ceres and Pallas. With the Free Navy busy making the OPA look measured and rational, Fred Johnson could still be of use making contact with the reservoirs of the Belt that understood how dangerous Marco Inaros was and how the damage already done could spiral into something even worse. God knew he never brought in good news. But for everything new, for every irrevocable tick of the clock, there were the things she cycled back to. The ones she revisited again and again like rereading a favorite book. Or poem. Things she said because she had said them before.
“There was a thing you read me one time. About jack pines,” she said, digging through her jewelry box for her necklace and the gold bracelets that would go with the embroidery. “Do you remember it? All I have is that it ended ‘da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, and paved the way to Paradise.’ It was about how the seeds needed a fire before they could spread. I told you it sounded like a sophomore girl trying to make the break up with her abusive boyfriend sound deep. That poem. I can’t get it out of my head now, and I can’t remember it either. It’s annoying.”
The bracelets slid into place. The necklace settled too lightly on her collarbone. She sat at her table, touching on eyeliner, tapping a nearly homeopathic bit of rouge onto her cheeks. Just enough to make her look more vital than she felt. Not enough to make it seem like she was wearing makeup. The smell of the rouge reminded her of the apartment in Denmark she’d kept during university. God, her mind was everywhere these days. When she finished, she turned to her hand terminal. The indicator showed she was still recording. She smiled into the camera.
“I have to put the mask on now. Go wade into it all again. They still haven’t found you, but I tell myself that they will. That I would know it if you were dead. I don’t know it, so it isn’t true. But it’s getting harder, love. And if you don’t come back soon, I’ll have saved so many of these messages, you’ll spend half a semester just catching up to me.”
Except, she thought, there wouldn’t be semesters. Or poetry courses. Or any of the things that had made her life hers before the rocks fell. And then, almost as if he was there, Arjun’s dissenting voice murmured in her mind, There will always be poetry.
“I love you,” she said to the hand terminal. “I will always love you. Even …” She hadn’t said it before. Hadn’t let herself think it. There was a first time for everything. A last time too. “Even if you’re not here.”
She stopped recording, repaired the damage her tears had done to the makeup, and lowered her head like an actor preparing to take the stage. When she lifted her eyes again, they were harder. She made the connection request to Said, and he answered immediately. He’d been waiting.
“Good morning, Madam Secretary,” he said.