The feed ended. Prax, surprised, found he’d been tearing up. He wiped his cheek with the cuff of one sleeve, and was startled when the next message opened its own feed automatically. A thin-faced woman with skin darker than Djuna’s but with the same deep hazel eyes smiled into the camera. The image shook a little and the colors weren’t as professionally toned as Holden’s had been.
“This is Fatima Crehan, sending back to James Holden and all the good people of the Belt. We’re in the refugee camp opened by the governor of Arequipa, and today I want to introduce you to a woman whose causa has been turning heads and filling bellies for, it seems like, everyone in the city.”
Prax watched, fascinated. And when it was over, another video feed, this one from Shanghai, where an old man in a yarmulke interviewed a musical band of ethnic Han boys about their music and then watched them in an alleyway with mud-colored clouds churning above them. Prax couldn’t look away.
A soft knock came at the door. Brice leaned in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir, but—”
“No no no, it’s fine. I’m transferring them now.” Prax grabbed Karvonides’ data reports—none of them edit-locked now—and shifted them into the open partition. “You should be able to access all of them now.”
“Thank you, sir,” Brice said. And then, “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Prax said, wiping his eyes again. “Carry on.”
She closed the door. Two hours had gotten away from him somehow, and he was going to have to hurry in order to get all the samples pulled before lunch.
We could save lives. One message.
Prax shut down the dead woman’s partition, put it under administrative lock. There wasn’t time to think about anything more. He had work to do. In order to catch up, he ran the samples during his lunch hour, grabbing a few mouthfuls of rice and mushroom before the management team meeting. Afterward, it was time to go and retrieve Mei and Natalia from school, but he sent a message to one of the other parents in his parenting coop. The girls could go play with the other kids until Djuna got home. He stayed, checking in with Brice and Khana. Seeing that everyone who needed access to the datasets could get to them.
Everything felt weirdly dreamlike and light. As if he was watching someone else doing it. In his office, he rechecked the day’s sample run. How much dissolved CO2 in the water, how much nitrogen, calcium, manganese. The plants were doing well, but until the stats were all fed through, he wouldn’t know what he was looking at. That was fine.
He resisted the urge to reopen Karvonides’ partition. To find the other feeds Holden had made or inspired. It was a bad idea. Instead, he waited, worked, watched through the glass. Only Brice remained, and her workstation was down a long and curving hallway. He closed his terminal, clocked out, went to the men’s room, and waited. Washed his hands. Waited. Then casually stepped out to the main floor, swinging by one of the gang stations, opening a terminal with a guest account, accessing the datasets and protocols that Supervisor Praxidike Meng had carelessly put in the open partition without permissions set. The screen showed a pale blue logo, the flag of Ganymede. He sent copies to Samuel Jabari and Ingrid Dineyahze on Earth and Gorman Le on Luna. The only message was PLEASE CONFIRM THESE RESULTS.
Then he shut down the terminal and made his way out to the common corridors. Everything seemed brighter than it should have been. He couldn’t tell if he was tired or restless. Or both.
He stopped at a noodle stand between the tube station and home. No-Roof for him and Djuna. Fried tofu for the girls. And—a luxury—rice wine. And a round ceramic container with green tea ice cream for dessert. When he got home, Natalia was whining about having to drill her times tables and Mei had shut herself in her room to trade messages with her friends from school and watch entertainment feeds of boys three or four years older than her. Other nights, he would have insisted that they all come to the table for dinner, but he didn’t want to disturb anything.
He served the noodles into recyclable ceramic bowls with a pattern of sparrows and twigs on them, brought one to Natalia at her desk, another to Mei sprawled out on her bed. She was so big these days. Soon, she’d be bigger than his shoulder. His little girl, who no one had expected to live, and look at her now. When he kissed the crown of her head, she looked up at him quizzically. He nodded her toward her screen of soulful-looking young men.
He and Djuna sat at the table together, almost like they were dating again. He looked at her: the curve of her cheek, the little scar on her left knuckle, the gentle fold of her collarbone. Like he was saving it for some coming day when she wouldn’t be there. Or else when he wouldn’t.
The rice wine bit at his mouth. Maybe it always felt like that—chill and warming at the same time—and he just didn’t usually notice. Djuna told him about her day, the office politics and palace intrigues of biofilms, and he took in her words like they were music. Just before he cleared their dishes and broke out the ice cream, she reached across the table and took his hand.
“Are you all right?” she said. “You’re acting strange.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Bad day at work?”
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I think maybe it was very good.”
Chapter Twenty-Five: Fred
James Holden has just declared piracy legal,” Avasarala said from Luna, then paused. Her eyebrows were high on her forehead, and she nodded a little. Like she was encouraging a not very bright child to understand her. “He took in a pirated ship. From a pirate. And then thanked her for his cut of the fucking booty and waved as she burned away. And you, the Butcher of Anderson Station, grand Whatever-the-Fuck of the OPA? You sat there with your cock in your hand and let him do it. I mean, I understand Holden is Holden, but I let you put your hands on Ceres because I thought you at least were a fucking grown-up.”
She leaned back from her camera, shaking her head, and cracked a pistachio.
“I thought better of you, Johnson,” she said. “I really did. My life has become a single, ongoing revelation that I haven’t been cynical enough.”
At this point, he was pretty clear she was talking for the comfort of hearing her own voice. He checked the feed data. Ten more minutes. She might get to something important in the course of it, so he let it play as he walked through the bedroom. Her sharp consonants and scratching vowels made a kind of background music while he dug his evening medications out of his bedside table. Five pills and a glass of water. The pills were chalky and bitter on his tongue, and even after they were washed down his throat, he suffered their aftertaste.
Working twenty-hour days was a younger man’s gig. He could still rise to the occasion, but there had been a time his determination against the universe would have felt like a fair fight. Anger alone would have carried him forward, and maybe the scourge of fatigue would have made him feel he was expiating his sins. Now he was surviving on coffee and blood pressure meds and trying to keep the system from falling any further apart. It seemed less romantic.
“It looks like Richards has almost whipped what’s left of the Martian parliament into order,” Avasarala said, “so hopefully we can get something from her. Just an assurance she won’t come piss all over our strategy so it smells more like her would be enough. Souther’s pushing for Rhea or Pallas, depending on whether we want to shore up the allies we already have, half-assed as they may be, or deny Inaros a manufacturing base. Admiral Stacey’s pushing back against any of it for fear of stretching our ships out too thin.”