“Did that to me too,” she said. Filip’s expression asked the question. “Your father. He put blood on my hands too. Made me complicit in killing people. Thought it would make me easier to control, I guess.”
It was the wrong thing to say. The boy flinched, drawing into himself like a snail’s feeler touched with salt. The feed changed. The dead and missing on Earth had topped two hundred million. A cheer went up all through the galley.
“Is that why you left?” Filip asked. “Couldn’t handle doing the work?”
She sat silent for a long moment. Then, “Yes.”
“Better that you went, then,” Filip said. She told herself he didn’t mean it. It was just something he said to hurt her. It worked. But more than that, she felt a vast sorrow for all the things her baby boy might have been that he wasn’t. For the child she could have had in him, if there had been a way. But she’d left her child in the hands of a monster, and the infection had spread. A family of monsters, father and mother and child.
It made it easier.
“Weighed on me,” she said. “All those dead people because of what I’d done. I tried to leave. Told him I wouldn’t turn him in if he just let me take you and go. So instead he took you away. Said I was acting crazy, and he didn’t trust me around you. That if anyone was getting turned in, it would be me.”
“I know,” Filip said. Spat. “He told me.”
“And I was going to have to do it again. And again. And again. Kill more people for him. I tried to do it too. Tried to push through. Let them die. He tell you I tried to kill myself?”
“Yeah,” Filip said. She should stop. She didn’t need to put this on him. Her little boy. Her little boy who’d just helped kill a world.
God, she still wanted to protect him. How stupid was that? He was a murderer now. He needed to know.
“I was at an airlock on Ceres Station. Rigged it to open. All I needed to do was step out. It was an old-style one. Blue and gray. And it smelled like fake apple. Something about the recycler there. And, anyway, I did it. I triggered it. Only the station had put in a fail-safe I didn’t know about. So.” She shrugged. “That was when I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I couldn’t save you. You could have a gone mother or a dead one. Those were all the options.”
“Some people aren’t meant to be soldiers,” Filip said. It was meant to cut, but she was past feeling now.
“The only right you have with anyone in life is the right to walk away. I would have taken you with me if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have stayed if I could. But I couldn’t. I would have saved you if I could.”
“I didn’t need saving.”
“You just killed a quarter of a billion people,” she said. “Someone should have kept that from happening.”
Filip stood, his motions wooden. For a moment, she saw what he would look like as a man. And what he had been as a boy. There was a deep pain in his eyes. Not like her own. His pain was his, and she could only hope he would feel it. That he would at least learn to regret.
“Before you kill yourself,” she said, “come find me.”
He pulled back a centimeter, as if she’d shouted. “Con que I do something stupid like that? Soy no coward, me.”
“When it comes,” she said, “find me. Nothing can ever take it back, but I’ll help you if I can.”
“You’re merde to me, puta,” Filip snapped and stalked away. Around the galley, the others stared or pretended not to. Naomi shook her head. Let them look. She was past caring. She didn’t even hurt. Her heart was vast and dry and empty as a desert. For the first time since she’d taken Marco’s call on Tycho, her mind was clear.
She’d almost forgotten Cyn was there until he spoke. “Harsh words for his big day.”
“Life’s like that,” she said. But she thought, This isn’t the big day.
In her memory, Marco spoke. In order to be heard by the oppressing class, one must speak as a member of it. Not only the language, but the diction. But he hadn’t made his pronouncement yet. Not in any diction. She didn’t know his plans. Likely no one but Marco knew all of them.
But whatever his grand design was, it wasn’t over yet.
Chapter Twenty-six: Amos
S
ullivan died when they were about fifteen meters up the shaft.
The plan, if you wanted to call it that, was open the elevator shaft doors, then boost up a level and pry those open. Each level could be a staging area for getting to the next, and by the time they got to where the car was stuck at the very top level, they’d have enough experience with the layout they’d maybe be able to find a way to get past it or get the guards posted in it to let them through. Anyway, it was a problem they could solve once they got there.