He waited. The lead missile closed. Five thousand kilometers. Four thousand. He vented the core.
Two hundred kilometers —
The crush of gravity vanished. The Razorback, still hurtling through space, stopped accelerating. Behind him, the lead missile died in the nuclear furnace of the rapidly diffusing core. The second missile jittered and turned to avoid the expanding cloud of superhot gas, and four lights burned before him, streaking across his screens so quickly he only knew them by their afterimages.
A fraction of a second later the Martian antimissile defenses destroyed the pursuing torpedo, but he had already lost consciousness.
Chapter Twenty-one: Naomi
“B
ist bien, Knuckles?” Karal asked.
The thin, slapped-together galley was too big for so small a crew. Bad design, waste of space. It wasn’t worn; it was cheap. She looked at him from behind the veil of her hair and smiled. “Fine, things being,” she said, making a joke. “Como sa?”
Karal shrugged with his hands. His hair had gotten gray over the years. And the stubble of his beard. It had been as black as the space between the stars once.
He looked at her eyes and she didn’t flinch. “Something to say, me.”
“No secrets between us now,” she replied, and he laughed. She smiled back. The prisoner flirting with the turnkey, hoping a kind thought in his head would help her later. Maybe it would.
The thing that frightened her most was how well she knew how to play it. From the moment she’d come back to consciousness, she talked when people talked to her, laughed when someone told a joke. She acted like her abduction was just one of those things that happens, like using someone’s tools without asking first. She pretended to sleep. Ate as much as she could past the tightness in her gut. And they all treated her like she was the girl she’d been, like they could all ignore the years and the differences, fold her back in as though she’d never gone away. As if she’d never been anyone else. Hiding her fear and her outrage slipped back on so easily, it was as if she’d never stopped.
It made her wonder whether perhaps she hadn’t.
“So I was one,” he said. “Helped with Filipito. Took care.”
“Good.”
“No,” Karal said. “Before that. Sometimes, he was with me.”
Naomi smiled. She’d been trying not to remember those desperate days after she’d told Marco she was leaving. The days after he’d taken Filip. To keep the boy safe, he’d said. Until she got her emotions under control, he’d said. A knot filled her throat, but she smiled past it.
“Those days. You had him?”
“Immer, no. But sometimes. Hijo moved, yeah? Night here, two nights there.”
Her baby passed around among the people she knew. The manipulation of it was brilliant. Marco using his child as a marker of how much trust he placed in them and at the same time painting her as the crazed one. The dangerous one. Making sure the story in their community was about how solid he was and how close to cracked she’d come. She had the sudden powerful memory of Karal looking in from the kitchen while she broke down in his wife’s arms. Souja, her name had been. What must her tears and profanity have looked like to him then?
“Kept it quiet,” Naomi said, “and I wouldn’t have known. So why say it here?”
Karal’s hands shrugged again. “New day. New start. Looking to scrape off some old rust.”
She tried to read from his face whether that was true, or if this was just another little cruelty in a form she couldn’t call out without looking like the crazy one. If it had been back on the Roci, she would have known. But here, now, the balance between fear and anger and trying to control herself swamped little things like truth. It was the beauty of the way Marco had set her against herself. Tell her she was broken as a way to break her, and here they were a decade and a half past, and it still worked.
Then, for a moment, Amos was there, stronger in her memory than the surrounding ship. It don’t matter what’s inside, boss. They only care what you do. She didn’t know if it was a memory or just her mind reaching for a place of certainty in an environment where nothing could be relied upon.
If Amos has become my personal touchstone for wisdom, I’m fucked, she thought, and laughed. Karal ventured a smile.
“Thank you for telling it straight,” Naomi said. “New start. Scrape off the rust.”
And if I ever get the chance to leave you behind in a fire, Karal, then good God you will burn.
A chime sounded, then the acceleration warning came on. She hadn’t noticed when the ship had made its flip. Might have been when she was asleep, or slowly over the course of hours so that the rotation was subliminal. It didn’t matter. She was cargo here. It didn’t matter what she knew.
“Strap in, yeah?” Karal said.