Naomi could still remember the shape of the bed there, the cheap plastic curtains with a printed starscape that Marco hung across the doorway. The smell of it made her sick, but he’d been so pleased with himself she’d tolerated it. And even that late in the process, almost everything made her sick. She’d spent her days sleeping and feeling the baby shifting inside her. Filip had been restless as a fetus. She hadn’t felt like a child having a child. She’d felt like a woman in control of her fate.
“How many do you need to get out?” Naomi asked.
“Fifteen, all told.”
“Including you?”
“Sixteen.”
She nodded. “Any cargo?”
“No,” he said, and then seemed about to go on. After a moment, he looked away.
Ceres had still been under Earth control back then. Most of the people living on the base were Belters who’d taken contract with one of the Martian or Earther corporations. Earth security by Belters. Earth traffic control by Belters. Martian bioresearch by Belters. Marco had laughed at it all, but the laughter had an edge. He’d called Ceres humanity’s largest shrine to Stockholm syndrome.
Everyone flying with Rokku had paid part of their share into the OPA, Naomi included. And the OPA looked after them in the last days of her pregnancy, local women bringing food to the hole, local men taking Marco out to the bars so that he had someone besides her to talk to. Naomi didn’t think anything of it apart from being grateful. Those nights when Marco was out drinking with the local men and she was alone in her bed with Filip, her mind moving in the silence had carried an almost transcendent contentment. Or at least that was how she remembered it now. At the time, without knowing what was still to come, the experience might have been different.
“Where do you need to be?”
“We don’t talk about that,” Filip said.
Naomi brushed her hair back from her eyes. “You brought me here because it’s secure, sa sa? So is it that you don’t want to be overheard by someone else, or that you think telling me compromises you? Because if you don’t trust me enough to ask for what you want, you don’t trust me enough for me to be here.”
The words seemed to carry more nuance than they could bear, as if the simple logistical facts also meant something about why she’d left. About who they were to each other. It was like she could feel the words creaking, but she didn’t know what Filip heard in them, or what she should have said differently. For a moment, there was a flicker in his expression. Sorrow or hatred or pain, it was gone too quickly to identify. A new stratum of guilt settled onto her, bearing her down. Compared to what she already had, it was trivial.
“He said I should tell you once we were off the station,” Filip said.
“Apparently he didn’t know I’d be arranging passage on a different ship. Plans change. It’s what they do.”
Filip’s gaze fixed on her, his eyes hard as marbles. She realized she’d been quoting Marco without meaning to. Maybe Filip thought it was a slap, that she was making a claim on his father by using his words. She didn’t know. She didn’t know him. She had to keep reminding herself of that.
“There’s a rendezvous point.”
“Is there a time?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
She saw We don’t talk about it floating in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was smaller, younger. More vulnerable. “Soon.”
“How soon?”
He looked away.
“Very.”
She’d known, back then, that there were hard-core OPA factions on Ceres, but it hadn’t bothered her. Radical OPA was still OPA, and that made them family. The crazy uncle who got drunk and started fights, maybe, but with Earth cranking up tariffs and Mars lowering the prices it would pay for ore, the sense of being under siege put Belters on the side of Belters first. And after shipping with Rokku for a while, talk of killing Earthers and Martians became a kind of white noise.
The birth had been hard. Thirty hours of labor. The muscles of her abdominal wall, made weaker by a lifetime of inconstant g, had shredded themselves. If they had been in Rokku’s ship or even back on Hygeia Station, she might have died, and the baby with her. But the medical complex on Ceres had seen it all before, and worse. A gray-haired woman with a cathedral of tattoos on her hands and arms had been in her room the whole time, singing little tunes in Swahili and Arabic. Naomi could still see her and hear her voice, though she’d forgotten the woman’s name. If she’d ever known it.
Filip had drawn his first, exhausted, angry breath at five in the morning, the day after she’d gone into the complex. The pediatric autodoc scanned him, considered for the longest five seconds of Naomi’s life, and declared the baby safely within standard error. The gray-haired woman had placed him on Naomi’s breast and sung a blessing.