“You might as well,” Teresa said. “I wasn’t going to eat it before. I’m certainly not going to now.”
Muskrat swung her wide tail twice, uncertainly. She ate the sausage with something that looked like shame. Teresa’s numbness slid away for a moment, and tears came to her eyes. The State Building was filled with people from every system in the empire. She had people whose only duty was to cook her food, to educate her, to see that her clothes were cleaned and put away. Nobody had the job of actually caring about her. The only one who even noticed her was a dog.
A voice spoke in the back of her head, as clear as if there had been someone in the room. It sounded like her own, but calmer. Drier. Somehow more adult than she thought of herself, like some later Teresa sending a stray observation back through time. Muskrat likes Holden.
The voice didn’t go on. Teresa looked down at Muskrat’s complicated brown eyes, and the sorrow lost its edge.
“You may have shitty taste in friends,” she said. “Sorry, dog.”
Another tap came at her door, and she didn’t need to open it to know it was Ilich. She stirred her food to make it look like she’d eaten more than she had and let the door open. As soon as he saw her, his smile faltered.
“I know,” she said, before he even spoke. “It’s very important that we maintain the image that everything is normal. You tell me that every day.” She stood up and put her arms out to the side. “This is normal. I’m normal!”
“Of course,” he said with a practiced smile that meant he just wasn’t going to fight her. “Your peer class is going to start soon. Dr. Okoye is going to be leading it today so that I can meet with Admiral Trejo.”
So that I can do something more important, he meant. Even if he didn’t say the words, Teresa heard them. Muskrat huffed and wagged her tail, anticipating the adventure of leaving her rooms. Teresa shrugged and walked toward the door, daring Ilich not to step aside. He stepped aside.
The State Building was the same as it had ever been. The archways, the colonnades, the gardens. Nothing about it had changed. It was her home and her kingdom. And somehow they’d made it into her cell, Ilich and all the others too. She was honored and revered and treated with total deference if she did what she was told, when she was told. Her opinion was listened to with seriousness and gravity, and then ignored. She stalked toward the lecture room, wondering what would happen if she marched in, took the microphone, and shouted My father is brain-dead and nothing is all right. It was enough to make her smile.
As it turned out, though, the fantasy wouldn’t have worked. The lecture room had been rearranged for the day—six slate-topped tables stood in rows of three. The other students—her so-called peers—were already there. Apparently Ilich had come because she’d run late and hadn’t noticed.
The room stank of something deep and caustic. Air recyclers were set up in all the windows, scrubbing whatever the volatiles were out and blowing fresh air back in. Small trays sat on each table, two each, with a variety of scalpels, tweezers, pins, and thin scissors laid out between them. Elvi Okoye was walking among the students, leaning on her cane, and chatting as she went. Teresa felt her anger shift again. She was supposed to be fixing Teresa’s father, not teaching classes to a bunch of kids. But, of course, Teresa wasn’t allowed to say that. Because that wouldn’t look normal.
“Good to see you, Teresa,” Elvi said, and touched her hand. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Teresa shrugged and moved away, leaning against one of the tables. Now that she was close, she could see the bodies spread out in the trays and held down with pins. Dead animals. Dead as Timothy. Dead as her mother. Dead as all the people in the ring space.
“So today Colonel Ilich wanted me to, um, give you all a little introduction to parallel evolution. So what we have here are two different species from two different trees of life. One of them is native to Laconia, and the other one’s from Earth. They’re both called frogs because they fill the same ecological niche and because they have some similarities in anatomy. So, yeah. Get in groups of three, I guess? And I’ll walk you through the dissections.”
Teresa looked at the frogs. They both had pale bellies and darker skin, though the one she recognized was considerably darker. The rear legs folded differently, and one had two forelimbs to the other’s four. From where she was standing, the thing they had most in common was that they were dead. She took a scalpel between her fingers, considering the blade, and wondered whether she’d be able to cut the bodies open without vomiting. The upside was she didn’t have much in her belly to puke up. So that was fine.
“Hey,” Connor said. She hadn’t seen him come up, but here he was. Sandy hair and soft eyes. She remembered caring what his opinion was. She remembered wanting to kiss him like it was in a film she’d watched, and not something she’d felt herself.
She pinched the flat of the blade between her fingers and held the handle out to him. “Want to cut?” she asked. He took it and looked away, uncomfortable. That was fine. Shan Ellison made up the third of their group. When all the rest had formed up, Elvi Okoye opened a volumetric display with an image of two idealized frogs to match the ones on their trays.
“Okay,” Elvi said. “So one of the things that we see in both Laconia and Earth biomes is water. And there are animals that have found an advantage to living part of their lives in the water and part out. We call them amphibians. Both of your frogs are amphibians. And because water is chemically identical in both worlds, and the adult forms that we have here need to breathe air, there are some problems they both faced as they evolved. Some solutions look very similar, and some of their strategies could not have been more different. So let’s start with looking at the Earth frog’s lungs. Each team should make the first incision right here—”
Slowly, step by step, they began unmaking the frogs. Despite herself, Teresa found the process interesting. The way the Laconian frog cycled water in and out of its chest cavity to do the work that the Earth frog did with a diaphragm. The way the feeding mechanisms—mouth and esophagus for the Earth frog, chambered mouth and gut for the Laconian—served the same functions in different ways. She felt like it was all telling her something deeper than just biology. Something about herself and the people around her. Something about whether she could ever belong.
She realized she had been drifting off when Connor spoke to her again. His voice was quiet and tentative. “My mom.”
Teresa glanced up at Elvi. She was across the room, talking to one of the other groups.
“What about her,” Teresa asked.
“I was just saying that my mom, she’s… You know. She watches the newsfeeds. With everything that’s going on.”
He glanced at her, and then away like he was shy. Like he was saying something shameful. Shan Ellison didn’t speak, but watched with the intensity of someone expecting violence. It felt illicit and strange, like he’d said the first part of some password, and she didn’t know the rest.
Then, a heartbeat later, she did. He was asking her to tell him something reassuring. His parents were scared. He was scared. And because they were in peer class together, and she was her father’s daughter, he wanted her to tell him that everything was going to be all right. That she, knowing what she knew, wasn’t afraid and that he shouldn’t be either.
She licked her lips and waited to see what would come out of them.
“She shouldn’t spend too much time on them,” Teresa said. “I know everything looks really scary, but it’s not that big a problem. Dad has the best minds in the empire working for him, and they’re learning more every day. Everyone always knew there’d be setbacks.”
“Yeah,” Connor said. “Everyone knew.”
So she’d lied. That was interesting. She’d told him what he wanted to hear, and it wasn’t even because she wanted to protect him or keep him safe. It was just easier. She understood now why adults lied to children. It wasn’t love. It was exhaustion. And she was like them now. They’d eaten her.
“Are you okay?” Shan asked, and it seemed like her voice was closer than she was. Like the girl wasn’t talking from across the table, but whispering into Teresa’s ear. It sounded soft and weirdly intimate. I’m fine, Teresa said. Only the words didn’t come out.
She had the sense that she needed to leave now. That if she could get a drink of water and lie down for a minute, her breath wouldn’t seem so loud in her ears. She felt herself walking. At the door, someone’s arm appeared beside her, startling her. It was her own. She moved the hand, fascinated by her control of it married with the absolute emotional certainty that it wasn’t her arm.
Elvi Okoye was there too, like something from a dream. She said something, asked something, but before Teresa could answer, she’d forgotten what it was.
I wonder if I’m dying, Teresa thought, and the idea wasn’t unpleasant.
For a while, Teresa lost herself. A flurry of sensory impressions—voices, movement. Someone was touching her hands and her neck. A bright light shone in her eyes. When she came back, she was lying down. The room was familiar, but until she heard voices she knew, she couldn’t quite place it.
“I’m not drawing any conclusions,” the doctor said. It wasn’t Dr. Cortázar. It was her old pediatrician, Dr. Klein. And he was talking to Elvi Okoye. “What I’m saying is she’s dehydrated and malnourished. Maybe she got that way because there’s some kind of uptake problem. Maybe she’s had an allergic reaction to something. Or her stress levels are so high, she’s somaticizing. Or—and I’m just saying maybe here—she’s been starving herself.”
She was in the State Building’s medical wing, on a gurney. There was a line connecting an autodoc to a vein at the back of her hand. When she shifted, she could feel the needle under her skin and the coolness in her arm where it was feeding fluid into her.
“I skipped breakfast,” Teresa yelled, and her voice sounded normal again. “It’s my fault. It was stupid. I just lost track of time.”
They were at her side before she’d finished speaking. Dr. Klein was a youngish man with wavy brown hair and green eyes that reminded her of Trejo. She liked him because he’d given her sweets after her checkups when she was young and because he’d never condescended to her. Now he was looking at the system readout from the autodoc and trying not to meet her eyes. Elvi, leaning on her cane, was ashen. She looked directly into Teresa’s eyes, and Teresa stared back.
“It was the frogs,” Teresa lied. It came easily. “Between not eating first and cutting them up, I got light-headed.”
“Maybe,” Klein said. “But if there is an underlying gastrointestinal issue, we should get on it quickly. There’s some microbial life on Laconia that we’re seeing fungal-model infections with. It’s not something to take lightly.”
“It’s not what’s going on. I promise,” Teresa said. And then, “Could I talk to Dr. Okoye for a minute?”
There was a moment’s hesitation that she couldn’t quite read, like Klein might refuse. But then…
“Of course.” He nodded to Elvi. “Major,” he said, and walked away.
When he was out of earshot, Teresa whispered, her voice harsh, “What are you doing bringing him into this? We’re not supposed to be around other people. Dr. Cortázar is my doctor.”
“He’s not a physician,” Elvi said. “His doctorate’s in nanoinformatics. He shouldn’t be practicing medicine any more than I should.”
“But he knows what’s going on. Do you want Dr. Klein asking around about why I’m under so much stress? You want him to figure it out?”
There was a joy to throwing all the things they’d said to her back at them. A delight in seeing Elvi flinch. She watched the woman struggle with something, and then reach a decision. Elvi sat on the end of the gurney, sighing as she took the weight off her leg. She rubbed her hand across her forehead.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you cannot trust Dr. Cortázar. I’m almost positive he intends to hurt you. Maybe kill you.” Then, a moment later, “Probably kill you.”
She felt a wave of vertigo, and the autodoc threw up a warning. It was just that she was hungry. That she needed water, that was all. Teresa shook her head. “Why?”
Elvi took a deep breath and spoke softly. “I think to give a well-known subject to the repair drones and see what they do. He has two others, but he didn’t have the kind of scans and prep work that he has with you. That and… he wants what you and your father were going to have. He wants to live forever too.”
Like the frogs, Teresa thought, and fought back cruel, despairing laughter. He wants to treat me just like the frogs. Nature eats babies all the time.
Holden had known too. He’d tried to tell her. That was two different people who’d warned her. Two different people who’d discovered the same thing. Elvi was holding her hand. The one that didn’t have a needle in it.
“I’ve been trying to keep him away from you,” Elvi said. “But Cortázar’s very important. Without him… your father’s recovery gets a lot harder. Everything gets a lot harder.”
“We have to tell Trejo,” Teresa said.
“He knows,” Elvi said, her voice dark. “I told him. We’re doing what we can. But you should know too. You should protect yourself.”
“How?”
Elvi started to say something, stopped, started again. There were tears in her eyes, but her voice was steady. “I don’t know. I’m in over my head here.”
“Yeah,” Teresa said. “Me too.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alex
You should rest,” Caspar said. “How many double shifts are you now?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said, leaning his back against the galley bulkhead. “But I can’t see that one more’s going to kill me.”
“Isn’t until it is,” Caspar said. “But that’s not even all of it. As hard as you’ve been working, you’re going to start making mistakes.”
Alex scowled at the boy. He knew Caspar hadn’t meant it as an insult. Knowing was what kept him from being angry. Or from showing it at least.
“When you catch me screwing up, I’ll stop taking doubles,” Alex said. “Until then…”
Caspar raised his hands in surrender, and Alex went back to his meal. Textured yeast paste and a bulb of water. It was his lunch if he was second shift, breakfast if he was third. So, in a sense, it was both.
The Storm had burned hard to get away from Laconian forces, but no one had chased it. No one dared to. To judge from the newsfeeds, most people weren’t sure what they’d done to kill the Tempest, and no one wanted to risk that they’d do it again. Which was just as well, because the more they pushed, the clearer it was how much the victory had compromised them.
Every shift found new, unexpected degradations in the Storm. Vacuum channels that weren’t transmitting power, regenerative plating that had stopped regenerating, atmosphere leaks so subtle that they couldn’t be located except as the slow and steady loss of pressure. Alex was no engineer, but he’d been on the Storm as long as any of them and in space since well before many of them had been born. When he wasn’t sleeping, he was working to keep the ship together. He stopped when exhaustion promised a fast, deep, and dreamless sleep.
It wasn’t the first time he’d used work to keep his emotions at bay. On and off his whole life, there had been times like this when the danger of feeling what he felt was too much to face. Some people got drunk or got in fights or hit the gym until they collapsed. He’d done all those things too, but with the Storm as beat up as it was, and the crew as injured and sick as many still were, this was fine. It kept him busy and it kept the ship alive.
Even so, it was imperfect. He knew he wasn’t healed, and he suspected he wasn’t even healing. The pain came in odd moments. When he was just waking up or going to sleep and his mind wandered. Then, sure. But also when he was crawling through the access spaces looking for a broken line or at the medical bay getting his daily ration of medication to keep the lining of his gut
from sloughing off again. It would sneak up on him, and for a few seconds he’d be lost in his own mind, and the oceanic sorrow there.
It was about Bobbie, of course, but it spilled over. In his worst moments, he also found himself thinking about Kit’s upcoming marriage. About Holden and that terrible last run they’d had together on Medina when he’d been captured. Talissa, his first wife, and Giselle, his second one. Amos, who was the worst loss in this because he’d just vanished into the enemy lines. Alex might never know what had happened to him. All the families he’d had, and all the ways he’d lost them. It felt like too much to bear, but he bore it. And after a few minutes the worst would pass, and he could get back to work.
The passage through the ring gates into Freehold system went as well as they could have hoped. Alex let Caspar do the heavy lifting. It was going to be his job soon enough, and it was better that he get the practice. They came in hot, bent their trajectory hard for the Freehold gate, and shot back out into normal space. In theory, it was possible to hit a gate from the realspace side at the perfect angle and make the transit through the intervening space in a straight line. In practice, there was usually a little flex, but Caspar did a good job. As good as Alex could have managed. They threw a fast torpedo at the only thing that looked like a Laconian sensor array, blowing it to dust before they made their last course correction. It was as close to anonymity as they could ask without the shell game.
Freehold itself was a straightforward little system. The one habitable planet was a little smaller than Mars. Then a slightly larger one farther out with an unwelcoming atmosphere, and a series of three gas giants protecting the inner system. The Storm’s home port was there, in the shadow of the giant they called Big Brother when they were being polite and Big Fucker when they weren’t. It was a fraction larger than Jupiter back in Sol, with a blue-green swirling atmosphere and constant electrical storms that created arcs of lightning longer than the Earth was wide. Alex watched it grow close on the Storm’s scopes, saw the black dot against it that was the rocky moon where they hid. Long-dead volcanism had left lava tubes big enough to land the Storm and a small fleet like her under the lunar surface, and that’s where they were headed. Toward the permanent base of Belter engineers and underground operatives that Bobbie had called the “pit crew.”
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