“Hmm. Maybe. I don’t know why I was thinking lover.” His voice had started taking on the fuzzy edges of sleep. “Hey, can I ask an inappropriate question?”
“If memory serves.”
“Why didn’t you and Amos ever get together? I mean back on the Cant.”
Naomi laughed, rolled over, put her arm across his chest. Even after shipping with him all this time, she liked the way his skin smelled. “Are you serious? Have you paid any attention at all to his sexuality?”
“I don’t think Amos and I are supposed to do that.”
“It’s not a place you want to be,” Naomi said.
“Hmm. Okay. I was just thinking, you know. How much he followed you around back on the Cant. And he’s never talked about leaving the Roci.”
“He’s not staying on the Roci for me,” Naomi said. “He’s staying for you.”
“Me?”
“He’s using you as his external, aftermarket conscience.”
“No, he’s not.”
“It’s what he does. Finds someone who has a sense of ethics and follows their lead,” Naomi said. “It’s how he tries not to be a monster.”
“Why would he try not to be a monster?” The sleep-slurred words were like a blanket.
“Because he is one,” Naomi said, her consciousness flickering across the line. It’s why we get along.
The message came two days later, and without warning. Naomi was in an EVA suit, inspecting the work with Chief Engineer Sakai. He was in the process of explaining why they were looking at a different ceramic alloy for the connections between inner and outer hull when a priority message popped into her HUD. She felt a rush of fear, the aftermath of her talk with Holden. Something had happened to Alex. Or Amos.
“Hold on,” she said, and Sakai answered with a raised fist.
She started the message. A flat transmission screen popped on with the split circle of the OPA, and when it flickered away, Marco was there. The years had thickened his face a degree, softened the curve of his jaw. His skin had the same richness and depth she remembered, and his hands, folded on the table wherever he’d recorded this, were as delicate. He smiled with the mixture of sorrow and amusement that was like falling backward through time.
The message halted, cut off by the suit’s medical systems. Warnings for increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure. She chinned the override, and his voice stuttered softly into her ears, smoothing as the feed cohered.
“I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear from me. If it helps, I’d just point out that I haven’t done it before this. And I’m not doing it lightly now.”
Shut it off, she thought. Stop the feed. Erase it. It would all be lies anyway. Lies or only what parts of the truth served him. Forget it ever came. Marco looked away from the camera as if he’d read her mind, or known what she would be thinking.
“Naomi, I don’t agree with your decision to leave, but I’ve always respected it. Even when you showed up in the news so everyone knew where you were, I didn’t reach out. And I’m not coming to you now for myself.”
The words were all crisp and warm and careful: the flawless grammar of someone speaking a second language so well it sounded uncanny. He had none of his Belter patois. So there was another way the years had changed him.
“Cyn and Karal send their love and respect, but they’re the only ones who know I’m reaching out. And why. They’re on Ceres Station right now, but they can’t stay long. I need you to meet their team there and— No. I’m sorry. That’s wrong. I shouldn’t have put it that way. It’s just that I’m at loose ends. I don’t know what to do, and you’re the only one I can turn to. It’s Filip. He’s in trouble.”
Chapter Four: Amos
H
is throat ached.
Amos swallowed, trying to force the lump away with a mouthful of saliva, but all that got him was a thick new pain like swallowing sand. The Roci’s med bay had shot him full of all the booster vaccines and bacterial prophylactics three months ago, right on schedule. He didn’t figure he could be sick. But there it was, a spot in the back of his throat that felt like he’d swallowed a golf ball and it got stuck halfway down.