Part 26 (1/2)

”Those or these?”

Cyn coughed out a laugh and looked over at her, a question in his eyes. ”These? Esa the promised land. Belt standing up. You know how it was before. You remember running thin because we couldn't get enough oxygen. Breaking bones because the meds got taxed too much.”

”I do,” she said, but Cyn was on a roll now, and he wasn't ready to stop. He put down his array and stared at her. The sympathy had burned out of him, and there was a rage in his eyes. Not with her. With something bigger.

”I got three cousins died because Earth corporations wouldn't sell the good cancer meds to Belters. Gave us the c.r.a.p left over from the farms on Ganymede. Only vat meats aren't like people, yeah? Don't work the same, but who cares? Tio Bennett got his s.h.i.+p taken away because he was behind on his permitting. He wasn't even in a pinche Earther dock, but he didn't pay, so they boarded him, dropped him on Ceres, and sold his rig. And for what? They protect us from pirates? They protect us from third-rate manufacturers pa.s.sing off old suits as new? They care if we got shot? If we got killed?”

”I know they don't.”

”Didn't, Knuckles. They didn't. Because past is the past now. Today,” Cyn said, poking the air with his thumb. ”You been flying on their side for a lot of years, and maybe not tu falta. Things before, keeping Filipito away, maybe we all did that wrong, yeah? But I'm starting to think you been sharing a couch with an Earth coyo so long you forgot what you are. Started thinking maybe you're like them.”

No, she wanted to say. No, I never forgot. But even as she formed the words, she wasn't sure if they were true. Once, there had been a girl with her name who had belonged here. Who'd felt the rage she saw in Cyn and in Filip. There had been a time when she could have cheered the deaths on Earth. But Jim was from Earth. And Amos. Alex from Mars, which from a Belt perspective was more or less the same thing. And what was she? Their pet Belter? The one that didn't belong? She didn't think so. So then, she was something else.

And still, how well had they known her, really? There was so much she hadn't said. She didn't know what would have changed if she had.

Cyn was scowling at her, his eyes hard, his jaw set. She tried to retreat back behind the curtain of her hair, but it wasn't enough. Not here. Not now. She had to say something; she had to react or it would be the same as confessing, and she was done taking responsibility for things she hadn't chosen. She tried to think what Jim would have said, but imagining him was like touching an open wound. Guilt at keeping her past from him and the grief and longing of being away from him and the fear that something bad had happened to him on Tycho. Or was happening to him, right now, while she could do nothing about it. She didn't know what Jim would do, and didn't dare to imagine him.

All right. Amos, then. What would Amos do?

She took a deep breath, let it out. When she looked up, she brushed her hair away. Grinned. ”Well, Cyn. That's one way of looking at things,” she said, leaning into the words. ”Ain't it?”

Cyn blinked. Whatever he'd expected, it hadn't been that. She checked the last battery on her pallet, replaced it, and shut the box back down. Cyn was still looking at her, his head turned a degree to his left. It made him seem wary of her.

Good.

She nodded at the open pallet at his feet. ”You going to check those?” she asked. ”Or d'you need some help?”

By dinner, it seemed like the attacks were done. The feeds, on the other hand, were in full swarm. She sat at a table that, like everything on the s.h.i.+p, seemed too familiar. Cyn sat on her right, and a young woman she didn't know on her left. Her plate was heaped with fried mushroom in hot sauce, the way Rokku used to make it. She ate it one-handed, the way the others did, and wondered whether someone looking over the room would have been able to pick her out as the one that didn't fit.

The screen was set to a feed coming out of Tycho Station. She watched it and tried not to feel anything. When Monica Stuart appeared, she felt a shock of fear that she couldn't quite explain. The woman made an introduction that told Naomi nothing new, then turned to Fred Johnson sitting stiffly across from her. He looked old. He looked tired. She didn't watch him, barely listened to them speak, straining instead at the edges of the screen in case Jim was there. The others were heckling and catcalling anyway. She caught fragments.

”Do you believe that you were the primary target of the attack?”

”That appears to be the case.”

”f.u.c.king liar!” someone across the galley shouted, and the others roared their approval. Including Cyn.

Fred moved carefully, and the camera stayed close on his face. He was hurt then, and hiding it. She'd heard once that birds back on Earth would do everything they could to hide that they were ill. Any visible weakness was an invitation to attack. The comparison made Fred Johnson seem vulnerable. Maybe everything was vulnerable now. ”The attackers are in custody, and we hope very soon to have a clear idea who was behind this.” Something about that caught her. It was odd, knowing Marco, that he hadn't made a press release of it. He'd brought her here to show off, hadn't he?

Or had he? She was supposed to bring the Rocinante with her, and they'd been disappointed when she didn't. Was the s.h.i.+p what he'd really wanted? Or Jim? She wondered with a sense of dread what would have happened if she hadn't come alone.

And then, as if thinking had summoned him, Monica Stuart ended the interview with Colonel Fred Johnson, voice of the OPA and director of Tycho Station, and turned instead to Captain James Holden.

Her breath stuttered.

”I understand you were working as a bodyguard for Colonel Johnson,” Monica said.

”Yes, that's true,” Jim said with a little grimace. He hadn't done a very good job of it apparently. ”It wasn't really needed. The people who infiltrated the security team turned out to be a very small minority. He wasn't ever in real danger.”

He was lying. Naomi pushed her food away.

”Is it true that there was a secondary target? There are some people reporting that the attack may have been cover for some kind of theft.”

Annoyance flashed in Jim's eyes. She wondered if anyone else saw it. Monica was probably pus.h.i.+ng into territory that they hadn't agreed on. Or had agreed to avoid. ”They're not reporting that to me,” Jim said. ”As far as I know, apart from some damage to the station, the coup was a total failure.” Another lie.

”Switch the feed!” someone shouted. A chorus of agreement rose. Someone called Jim something insulting, and Cyn glanced over at her and then away. Naomi went back to her food. The hot sauce burned her lips, but she didn't mind. The screen switched to a major newsfeed from Earth. The reporter was a young man in a black raincoat. The text said he was in someplace called Porto. The buildings behind him were a mix of ancient and new, with thick, muddy water tearing at them all. On the higher ground behind him, there were rows of sacks. No, body bags.

”That was him, wasn't it?”

She didn't know how long Filip had been standing behind her. The girl to her left nodded to Filip and fled. The boy took the empty seat. Wisps of stubble stretched along the line of his jaw, black against the golden brown of his skin. He turned to look at her, and his eyes took a moment to find her, like he was drunk. ”That was the man you left us for, si no?”

Cyn grunted like he'd been hit. Naomi didn't know why. The question was so wrong it was actually funny.

”Not how it played,” she said. ”But yes. I s.h.i.+p with him.”

”He's handsome,” Filip said. She wondered whose voice he was echoing. It didn't sound like Marco. ”Wanted to say, about your being here? Wanted to say.”

But then he didn't go on to actually finish the thought. She wondered whether she saw regret in his eyes, or if she was imagining it because she wanted it to be there. She didn't know what to say, how to answer. It felt like there were many versions of her the captive, the collaborator, the mother reunited, the mother who went away and all of them spoke differently. She didn't know which was her real self. If any of them.

Probably, it was all.

”Not the way I'd have chosen,” she said, stepping through the words like they were sharp. ”But that's true of a lot of things, yeah?”

Filip nodded, looked down. For a moment she thought he'd move away, and didn't know whether she wanted him to stay or go.

”It's me up there now, you know,” Filip said. ”On the feed? That's me.”

The reporter was older than Filip, broader across the face and shoulders. For a moment, she tried to see a resemblance between them, and then like walking into a freezer, she understood.

”Your work,” she said.

”Gave it to me as a present,” Filip said. ”The stealth coating on the rocks? I led the team that retrieved it, me. Without me, none of this.”

He was boasting. It was in the corner of his eyes and the tightness of his lips how badly he wanted her to be impressed. To approve. Something like rage s.h.i.+fted in her gut. On the screen, the reporter was listing relief organizations and religious groups. People who were trying to organize help for the refugees. As if anyone on the planet didn't need refuge now.

”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.