I emerged, a little refreshed, to find that Daskar had gone. “Well,” Saresh said ruefully, “so much for keeping it a secret.”
“You’re sure you’re all right?” Hathan asked me.
“Believe me, I’d tell you if I wasn’t. I’m not a martyr.”
“I’m not at all sure that’s true.” He looked at Saresh, who said, “That must be my cue. I’ll take my leave. Assuming that’s all right with you, Eyvri.” Both of them looked at me.
Bewildered, I said, “It’s . . . fine.”
When Saresh had gone, Hathan said, “I know you’ve been through a lot tonight. This won’t take long, but there’s still something I have to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Apologize.”
My mouth went dry. “Oh. Okay.”
“I would have done it before, but once I saw that you didn’t trust me, I knew there was no point. Now, I think, you’ll believe me.”
I nodded.
“Eyvri,” he said. “Look at me.”
I did.
Hathan said slowly, “When I think about the things I did that day, I feel more ashamed than I can say. No apology will ever be adequate, but to say nothing would be unthinkable. I hurt you, and I made you afraid of me. It was twisted and cruel. I will never forgive myself for that.”
“It wasn’t you,” I said shakily.
“Yes. It was.” Very slowly he reached out his right hand, palm flat. It was a moment before I understood what he wanted. Then, recalling the ritual apologies offered by Sohra and others after Vekesh led them all to ostracize me, I held out my own right hand. Light glinted along the silver tracery of the wrist brace, a reminder, if I had needed one, of what his touch could do. Hathan took my hand gently in both of his. He knelt on the floor and pressed my palm to his forehead. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. I had a sudden vivid memory of Kylie teasing me about my fanciful visions of Vardeshi engagement ceremonies. They probably don’t go down on one knee either, she had said. I looked down at the man kneeling before me in supplication and pressed the knuckles of my other hand hard against my mouth. It was the only way to keep myself from crying aloud in sheer frustration at what the Flare had made of us.
The next day I went to see Reyna. Her greeting to me was perfectly matter-of-fact, as if she hadn’t scolded me for self-absorption the last time we talked. I knew she preferred the direct approach, so I got immediately to the point. “You were right. I changed my mind. I’ll stay on the Ascendant if the Echelon will let me.”
“The Listening,” she guessed.
“Daskar told you?”
“She did. You know, when I told you to listen to the khavi, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.”
“I know.”
“You took an appallingly dangerous risk.”
Recalling Daskar’s words, I said, “It was necessary.”
Reyna seemed to accept that. “Have there been any side effects?”
“A headache. And I threw up. Nothing else. Yet.”
“Good. I’ll pass your decision on to the Echelon.” This was what I liked about Reyna: her ability to take on unwanted information and move forward without unwarranted theatrics. “The next time you decide to do something reckless,” she said, “tell me. I won’t stop you, but I’d like to be there in case something goes wrong.”
“Okay. I will try not to do anything else reckless.”
“Your recent history suggests that you won’t try very hard,” she said dryly.
I went directly from Reyna’s office to the galley, where Zey was tidying up after the midday meal. He started to speak, but I cut him off, a breach of Vardeshi decorum so egregious it made his eyes widen. I couldn’t help myself; I was terrified that if I hesitated, I’d lose my nerve. “I changed my mind. I’m not leaving the ship.”
He matched my bluntness. “Why?”
“You were right about the Flare. And about Hathan. I see that now. I had it wrong.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “I mean, yes, you did, but how do you know? What’s happened to change your mind?”
Throughout that morning, while my hands worked at one mindless task and then another, I had struggled to assemble the necessary words to explain what I’d done, as if there were some alchemical formula that would automatically yield his understanding. I couldn’t remember any of them. It hardly seemed to matter; his expression suggested the possibility of forgiveness was remote. I said, “Hathan changed it for me.”
“How?” In the next instant I saw comprehension flicker across his face. “You did another Listening, didn’t you?”
“I—”
“That sucks, Avery. That was a shitty thing to do. You could have trusted me. I asked you to trust me. But you took the easy way out. You cheated. I guess my word as a Blank wasn’t enough for you. Do you have any idea how many times that’s happened to me? Do you have any idea how it makes me feel?”
“No,” I whispered.
“And the worst part is that you didn’t even have to! No one’s life was on the line this time. This was just”—he gave a slow, contemptuous shake of his head—“lazy.”
My eyes stinging, I said, “I know it must look that way to you. But I didn’t have a choice.”
“No?” he snapped. “Why not?”
I could almost taste the words. Because I’m in love with him. I had to know. I couldn’t make myself say them. Saresh was bound by the Vox code of ethics not to speak of what he knew. Zey was governed by no such constraint. I couldn’t take the risk that Hathan would find out, not now, when it seemed we had finally achieved a fragile understanding. I looked at Zey in helpless silence.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’re going to have to do better than that, Eyvri. I can’t hear what you’re thinking, remember? I’m just a Blank.” He turned away from the half-emptied cleansing machine and walked out of the galley without another word. I watched him go, sickened by the thought that I had reclaimed one Takheri at the cost of another.
I didn’t say a word to anyone else about the fight, and I doubted Zey did either. But the Vardeshi were an observant people. I suspected the coolness between us hadn’t gone unnoticed, and the sudden arctic chill certainly didn’t. Saresh, catching me alone during the evening senek hour, said quietly, “I take it you told Zey about the Listening.”
“I had to. It didn’t seem right to keep lying to him.”
“That couldn’t have been an easy conversation.”
I shook my head. “No, it was not.”
“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I think you did the right thing.”
“You mean doing the Listening, or telling him about it?”
“Both.”
“Yeah.” I sighed. “Me too. Amazing how much that doesn't help. If you can possibly find a way to drop into your next conversation with him that I’m incredibly sorry and would do anything to make it up to him, please do it.”
“I’ll try, but I'm not entirely sure when our next conversation will be.” I looked up in surprise. He went on, “He seems to be avoiding me too.”
“I thought you guys were . . . moving toward okay.”
“We were,” Saresh said. “Now we appear to be moving somewhere else. I’m not sure what he’s”—he broke off, and an odd expression flashed across his face, half laughter, half anguish—“thinking.”
Over the days that followed, I felt a gradual easing of strain, as if the broken edges grinding together inside me had been fractionally smoothed down. The Listening had done its work. I was as certain now of the essential goodness in Hathan as I had been certain before of his viciousness. I hadn’t liked everything I saw in his mind. He had an incisive wit that turned easily to mockery. Quick to see patterns and implications, he was impatient with slowness in others. He had laughed at my mistakes in the beginning, and not always alone. That was hard to forgive. But if he was intolerant of error in others, he loathed it in himself. His shame and regret for the way he had treated me under Vekesh’s tenu
re ran deeper than I could have imagined.
And I had felt the truth in every word he had spoken to Reyna. There was no longer any question in my mind that he was not the man he had been during the Flare. I didn’t know how to explain what I had seen that day, except to conclude that it was something ineffably other. The real Hathan was the one who had knelt unprompted before me in the atonement ritual of his people. When I recalled that moment, most of my remaining anger sluiced away like rain.
Recalling Reyna’s advice from before the Listening, I focused my energies on my work. I had been doing my novi tasks unthinkingly for a long time. Now I forced myself to think about them again. There was a kind of solace to be found in doing simple repetitive things mindfully and well, and a kind of grace in caring for my crewmates. One afternoon I went by the medical clinic to bring Daskar a cup of her favorite tea. Her smile warmed my entire day. I sought Sohra out in the lounge to ask her questions about Vardesh Prime, knowing now that her reticence concealed a fierce longing for home. Seeing Khiva sitting alone in the mess hall, her plate untouched, I carried my tray over to her table and made banal but insistent small talk until she couldn’t ignore me any longer. I could see the effort it cost her to pull her attention back to the present. I understood. It was an act of will to keep my own mind from straying down the too-short stretch of corridor that led to the conference room on helix three.
My days were beginning to feel familiar again, but my estrangement from Zey was a fracture running through them, and it would take more than a cup of herbal tea or a little small talk to mend it. At briefings now he sat next to Ziral, ostensibly to ask her questions about piloting. He ate most of his meals at the lower-ranking table, but he avoided it if I was the only one there. It was the same in the lounge. He would join a dice game that I was a part of, but he wouldn’t sit in one of the curtained alcoves with me and Sohra, and I knew it was because he didn’t want to risk finding himself alone with me. He didn’t come to my evening English lessons any more. There were no more private jokes, no sly digs at Vethna. He contrived to be entirely civil without showing the faintest trace of warmth. It was like the worst days on the Pinion, when Khavi Vekesh had ordered the rest of the crew to ostracize me, except that this time Zey was doing it all on his own.
One evening as the crew was assembling for the late briefing I heard him teasing Khiva about an error she’d made in the ranshai drills that morning. I listened eagerly, glad to hear laughter in his voice again. “Come on, Khiva,” he was saying. “That’s a second-rank move at best. You shouldn’t even have to think about it. I bet you’re the reason we’re still having morning practices.”
“Suvi Ekhran,” Khiva called in half-feigned irritation. “Novi Takheri is being insubordinate. Can you—”
I didn’t hear anything past the word “insubordinate.” The flexscreen slid from my nerveless fingers and clattered on the floor. The axis chamber went dark. The conference-room lights clicked on. After an undefined interval, I came back to myself, blinking dazedly, wondering why my throat felt so raw. It came to me that I’d been screaming. Saresh had hold of my shoulders and was calling my name urgently. Daskar, beside him, was paging through messages on her flexscreen. The room had emptied out around the three of us. “I’m okay,” I said. “I’m okay.” Saresh let go of my shoulders and stepped back, but his eyes didn’t leave my face.
“Has that happened before?” Daskar asked quietly.
“Never during the day.”
“How often at night?”
“Maybe . . . three or four times since the Flare.”
Daskar found the message she’d been looking for. “Flashbacks are a common manifestation of post-traumatic stress. Have any of Dr. Okoye’s suggestions been helping?”
“I haven’t, uh . . .” I looked at Saresh.
“You haven’t viewed any of your messages from Earth.” He spoke gently but with authority, and I saw that there was no point in denying his assertion. I should have realized that, as communications specialist, he would have access to the logs of my incoming messages. Since the Flare, I had received video transmissions from Ambassador Seidel, Dr. Sawyer, Dr. Okoye, my parents. I had deleted them all unwatched.
“They’re bringing me home,” I said. “I can’t see that there’s anything more to say. If I need therapy, I’ll get it on Earth. I doubt they’ll give me a choice.”
“Earth is a distant proposition as yet,” said Daskar. “Can you think of anything that might help you now?”
I sighed. “Vardesh Prime would have helped. I need to be outside. I need to feel sunlight on my skin. Any sunlight. All these little rooms . . . Sometimes I feel like I can’t breathe.”
They looked at each other. Daskar said, “It’s unlikely that you’ll be allowed soilside before Earth. The Council is calling for your immediate return. They’re pushing hard to curtail your stay on Elteni.”
“It’s fine. That’s what I figured.”
“It will do no harm to ask,” Saresh murmured.
Daskar nodded. “I’ll send the message. In the meantime, Eyvri, why don’t you see if it helps to visit the hangar? It’s the largest space on the ship. I’ll see that you’re given clearance to lock it from the inside.”
“Thanks. I’ll try that,” I said, although I had no intention of doing so. A few days later, however, overwhelmed by the sense of being confined, I made my way down to helix one. I brought Kylie’s portable speaker, which I had found tucked into the top of my duffel bag after we left Arkhati, along with the beaded dress and a handwritten note reading, “You need these more than I do. Be safe. Be strong.” I recognized the last four words as the particular farewell the Strangers used among themselves. I locked the door and sat cross-legged in the center of the largest section of empty floor. For a time I just sat there, taking deep breaths, listening to the throbbing of the engine and the far-off hum of the air recyclers. Then I turned the speaker up to its loudest setting and played the album I’d been gravitating to since the Flare. Hathan wouldn't have liked it. It was abrasive. I held the speaker in my lap and wished I could crawl inside it. With all that noise in my head, there was no room for words.
Thinking about the Listening was another thing that kept the darkness at bay. At idle moments I found myself turning over the images I’d seen in Hathan’s mind, studying them like gemstones, waiting for new facets to catch the light. I hadn’t known whether the individual details would stay with me after the connection was severed. I was glad they had. Each new fact, however trivial, added to my store of knowledge about him. He didn’t like mizik root. He had asked Reyna to meet him at the Afterburner rather than the Double Star because, although the drinks cost more, the viewports overlooked the docks. In the two minutes I’d been inside his mind, he hadn’t thought about his fiancée once. He thought Reyna was pretty. He thought I was brave.
My thoughts drifted again and again to the memories containing myself, particularly the ones he’d dismissed as irrelevant. What did they mean? The others had been easy to classify: Eyvri the inept, Eyvri the saboteur, Eyvri the beleaguered defender of humanity’s good name. The fourth category eluded me. And why had he been so quick to suppress those particular scenes? That fact alone heightened their significance in my eyes.
“Do Vardeshi fall in love?” I asked Sohra in the lounge that night.
She picked up the thread as easily as if it had been hours rather than months since we last compared courtship traditions. “Most of our matches, arranged or self-selected, are about long-term compatibility. It’s rare for us to feel infatuation as you think of it.”
“Okay, maybe not love. But are you ever drawn to someone without knowing why?”
“Oh, we know why,” she said wryly. “We experience attraction too. We just don’t act on it. These are fairly pointed questions, Eyvri. Is there something you want to tell me?”
I gave what I hoped was a convincing laugh. “Me? No. I was just thinking about that human-Vardeshi couple, you know, the ones who slept
together. Do you have any idea what happened to them?”
She looked surprised. “You didn't hear? His family had him recalled. He went home.”
“He left? Just like that?”
“Of course. He was engaged. What did you expect, that he’d toss aside all his plans for the future? For something as fleeting as desire?” She sounded faintly alarmed by the idea.
“I guess not,” I conceded. “That kind of thing probably only happens in television.” It was, in fact, the exact plot of the final season of Divided by Stars. I felt a sudden fierce longing for Zey. To cover it I said, “But there must be cases of Vardeshi couples who turn out not to be compatible. For whatever reason.”
“Of course. We’re not robots.”
“So what happens then?”
“They reconcile. Or they separate.”
“Has that happened to anyone you know?”
“Not anyone I know personally. You might ask the Takheris about it.”
I looked at her in confusion. Then I remembered Saresh telling me on Arkhati that his mother worked on one of the outlying research stations and he didn’t expect to see her again for several years. I had found the statement puzzling, since I knew Novak Takheri was a senator on Vardesh Prime, but there hadn’t been time to pursue it. Now I said, “Their mother lives offworld. Their parents are divorced?”
“Separated, technically. Their mother still wears the Takheri sigil. But her birth house was lower-ranked, so that may have been a practical choice.”
“Why? I mean, why did they split?”
Sohra shook her head. “I don’t know the details. It happened a long time ago, just after the senator’s trip to Earth. I know their mother belongs to one of the anti-alliance factions now. Perhaps she was against the idea of contacting your people.”
“Huh. If that’s how she feels, she must have been thrilled when all three of her kids signed on to go to Earth. Talk about taking sides.”
“They’re sending a message,” Sohra agreed. “And not a subtle one.”
God, I thought, if I hadn’t just seen in Hathan’s mind that he bore no ill will toward humanity, this would have been motive enough for the rage I’d seen during the Flare. His parents’ marriage had broken up over the question of whether or not to contact Earth. I remembered Saresh telling me that Hathan had heard more than his share of anti-human sentiment. How much of it had come from their mother? I thought again of Zey. He must have been only a child when she left. I wished he would talk to me.
Bright Shards (The Vardeshi Saga Book 2) Page 21