Before you kill yourself, his mother had said, come find me.
He stood up, shut down the feeds with a gesture, and stalked down toward the gym. The good thing about being alone was that no one was using any of the equipment. He didn’t bother warming up, just brought down the resistance bands, strapped in, and pulled. He relished the way the handles bit into his palms, the sense of his muscles protesting and tearing, each little injury making them grow back again stronger. Between sets, he turned on some music—loud, aggressive dai-bhangra—only to stop in the middle of the next set and turn it off again.
Everything he wanted annoyed him as soon as he had it. He wondered if he’d have felt the same about the girl. If she’d stayed, and they’d fucked, if afterward he’d have wanted her gone. Turned off like the music. He didn’t know what it would take to make him feel right. Getting the fuck off Ceres wouldn’t hurt, though.
The voices came first, loud and laughing and familiar as Tía Michelle’s bread soup. Karal and Sárta, Wings, and Kennet and Josie. The crew, coming back on board. He wondered if his father was there yet, and what he hoped the answer would be.
“Bist bien,” Wings said. “Jeszcze seconds more.”
The older man staggered a little as he stepped into the gym. His hair was swept up at the sides as it always was, but with a little less crispness than usual. His real name was Alex, but someone had started calling him Wings because of that hairstyle, and his eyes were bloodshot pink, and his gait was a little too relaxed and unsteady. He had a crumpled purple bag under his arm.
“Filipito!” he said, lumbering over. “Bila a ti, I was.”
“And now found me,” Filip said. “So geht gut, yeah?”
“Yeah yeah yeah,” Wings said, not hearing the bite in Filip’s words. The older man lowered himself to the deck, and watched blearily as Filip pulled against the bands and trembled with the effort. “Done. Alles complét. Everyone coming home to … to roost. Or … not roost. Fly, sa sa? We’re flying out into the big, big empty.”
“Good,” Filip said. He made the last pull of the set, holding the tension long and hard until his arms shook and burned and failed. The bands snapped back a few centimeters, then slowed and retracted. Filip squeezed his fists. Wings held out the bag.
“Yours,” he said.
Filip looked at the bag, then at Wings who shook it at him in a take it gesture. It looked like plastic, but it felt and folded like paper in Filip’s hands. Whatever was inside it shifted, limp and heavy as a dead animal.
“No point leaving anything for the pinché inners,” Wings said. “Confiscations all over the station. Anything they didn’t bolt down and half of what they did. Only since tu es lá, I think for you. Yeah?”
He opened the flap. Something dark and textured, regular and irregular at the same time. He pulled the bag free and unfolded the heavy material. It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before. He unfolded it.
“A … vest?” Filip said.
“For you,” Wings said. “Leather, that. Alligát. Real too. From Earth. Took it from a high-end shop by the governor’s quarters. Very rich. Only the best for you, yeah?”
Filip gave into the temptation to smell the thing, putting the dead animal’s cured scales against his nose and breathing in. There was something subtle and beautiful about the leather—not sweet and not sour, but rich and low and deep. He put it on, settling the weight across his sweat-damp shoulders. Wings clapped his hands in glee.
“You know how much esá cost?” Wings said. “More scrip than you or me would see in five years. For that. Just that. Would be some pinché Inner strutting around the Belt wearing it just to show how he could and we couldn’t, yeah? But we’re Free Navy now. No one better than. None.”
Filip felt the smile on his lips, tentative as a breeze. He imagined himself in the bar now, wearing his leather vest like the richest of the rich from before. Wings was right. This was the kind of thing that no Belter could have had. A symbol of everything that Earth used to remind them that they were less. Small. Not worth. Only who had it now?
“Aituma,” Filip said.
“Welcome. You’re welcome,” Wings said, waving Filip’s gratitude away. “The thing for you, the pleasure for me. Good trade à alles.”
“How much was it a reál?” Filip asked, part to let Wings brag, part so he could brag himself later. Only Wings had lain back on the deck, his arm over his eyes.
The man shrugged. “Nothing. Everything. For for? Shop’s closed. Not like there’s going to be another shipment of them, yeah? Esá es the last leather vest out of Earth. End point.”
The Free Navy left Ceres Station like spores shed by a fungal body. Drive plumes lit and flared and blinked out again like images Filip had seen of fireflies on Earth. If there were still any fireflies on Earth.
And while each Free Navy ship carried a few civilians away toward safety, theirs were far from the only ships leaving. As soon as Marco had made his intentions clear, a wave of civilian refugees had made themselves ready. Rock hoppers and prospectors and shitty half-legal transport ships all filled to the bulkheads with people desperate to get out of the great city of the Belt before it fell back into the hands of Earth and Mars. And in the midst of it all, the great spinning plume of water and ice as the reservoirs vented. The water reserves spun out from the station, briefly echoing the arms of the galaxy and then stopped, thinned, and spread out into the vast darkness of the Belt. Ice lost among the steady brightness of stars.
The docks, they left in ruins. The reactors, powered down, then either sabotaged or stripped. The power grid and tube systems dismantled. The defense grids stood quiet, their magazines open and empty. Transmitter and sensor arrays were salvaged for parts, then melted to slag. The medical centers had been raided and emptied, leaving only enough to treat the patients already in their care. Taking those supplies, Marco said, would have been cruel.
Of the six million people on Ceres, maybe a million and a half would escape before the enemy arrived. The ones that remained would be in a shell of stone and titanium hardly more capable of sustaining life than the original asteroid had been.
If Earth hunkered down and rebuilt, it would take them years to get back to where Ceres had been, pinning them to the station like insects against a board. If Earth chased and attacked the Free Navy, they would be firing on ships carrying refugees. If they abandoned the station, millions of Belters would die under their care and push anyone still sympathetic to the old ways toward the new. Anything they did would be a victory for the Free Navy. They couldn’t win. That was Marco’s genius.
On the Pella, things fell quickly back into their old patterns of duty, but Filip saw differences now. Ways that Ceres Station had changed them. For one thing, the liquor was better. Jamil had his whole cabin stacked with bottles in polished boxes carved from real wood. The packaging alone would have cost more than Filip would have seen in three years’ work, to say nothing of the whiskey inside them. Dina came back with half a dozen hand-painted silk scarves confiscated from an Earther’s mansion, and she wore them like a bird proud of its plumage.
Everyone wore trinkets of gold and diamond and peridot, but the best was the amber. All the other gems and jewelry could maybe get mined from the Belt. Amber, though, needed a tree and a few million years. It was the one stone that spoke of Earth, and wearing it showed who they’d become better than all the perfumes and spices and leather vests there would ever be. The luxuries that Earth and Mars had bled the Belt to acquire belonged to the Free Navy now. Back to the Belt, as was only just.