Naomi could still remember the shape of the bed there, the cheap plastic curtains with a printed starscape that Marco hung across the doorway. The smell of it made her sick, but he’d been so pleased with himself she’d tolerated it. And even that late in the process, almost everything made her sick. She’d spent her days sleeping and feeling the baby shifting inside her. Filip had been restless as a fetus. She hadn’t felt like a child having a child. She’d felt like a woman in control of her fate.
“How many do you need to get out?” Naomi asked.
“Fifteen, all told.”
“Including you?”
“Sixteen.”
She nodded. “Any cargo?”
“No,” he said, and then seemed about to go on. After a moment, he looked away.
Ceres had still been under Earth control back then. Most of the people living on the base were Belters who’d taken contract with one of the Martian or Earther corporations. Earth security by Belters. Earth traffic control by Belters. Martian bioresearch by Belters. Marco had laughed at it all, but the laughter had an edge. He’d called Ceres humanity’s largest shrine to Stockholm syndrome.
Everyone flying with Rokku had paid part of their share into the OPA, Naomi included. And the OPA looked after them in the last days of her pregnancy, local women bringing food to the hole, local men taking Marco out to the bars so that he had someone besides her to talk to. Naomi didn’t think anything of it apart from being grateful. Those nights when Marco was out drinking with the local men and she was alone in her bed with Filip, her mind moving in the silence had carried an almost transcendent contentment. Or at least that was how she remembered it now. At the time, without knowing what was still to come, the experience might have been different.
“Where do you need to be?”
“We don’t talk about that,” Filip said.
Naomi brushed her hair back from her eyes. “You brought me here because it’s secure, sa sa? So is it that you don’t want to be overheard by someone else, or that you think telling me compromises you? Because if you don’t trust me enough to ask for what you want, you don’t trust me enough for me to be here.”
The words seemed to carry more nuance than they could bear, as if the simple logistical facts also meant something about why she’d left. About who they were to each other. It was like she could feel the words creaking, but she didn’t know what Filip heard in them, or what she should have said differently. For a moment, there was a flicker in his expression. Sorrow or hatred or pain, it was gone too quickly to identify. A new stratum of guilt settled onto her, bearing her down. Compared to what she already had, it was trivial.
“He said I should tell you once we were off the station,” Filip said.
“Apparently he didn’t know I’d be arranging passage on a different ship. Plans change. It’s what they do.”
Filip’s gaze fixed on her, his eyes hard as marbles. She realized she’d been quoting Marco without meaning to. Maybe Filip thought it was a slap, that she was making a claim on his father by using his words. She didn’t know. She didn’t know him. She had to keep reminding herself of that.
“There’s a rendezvous point.”
“Is there a time?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
She saw We don’t talk about it floating in his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was smaller, younger. More vulnerable. “Soon.”
“How soon?”
He looked away.
“Very.”
She’d known, back then, that there were hard-core OPA factions on Ceres, but it hadn’t bothered her. Radical OPA was still OPA, and that made them family. The crazy uncle who got drunk and started fights, maybe, but with Earth cranking up tariffs and Mars lowering the prices it would pay for ore, the sense of being under siege put Belters on the side of Belters first. And after shipping with Rokku for a while, talk of killing Earthers and Martians became a kind of white noise.
The birth had been hard. Thirty hours of labor. The muscles of her abdominal wall, made weaker by a lifetime of inconstant g, had shredded themselves. If they had been in Rokku’s ship or even back on Hygeia Station, she might have died, and the baby with her. But the medical complex on Ceres had seen it all before, and worse. A gray-haired woman with a cathedral of tattoos on her hands and arms had been in her room the whole time, singing little tunes in Swahili and Arabic. Naomi could still see her and hear her voice, though she’d forgotten the woman’s name. If she’d ever known it.
Filip had drawn his first, exhausted, angry breath at five in the morning, the day after she’d gone into the complex. The pediatric autodoc scanned him, considered for the longest five seconds of Naomi’s life, and declared the baby safely within standard error. The gray-haired woman had placed him on Naomi’s breast and sung a blessing.
It hadn’t occurred to her then to wonder where Marco was. She had assumed he was in a waiting area somewhere, ready to pass out some equivalent of cigars as soon as news of her came. Of her and their son. Maybe that had even been true.
“Do we need to be there, or is off station enough?” Naomi asked.
“Off station at minimum. Better to be there, but not here solid.”
“And where are we going?”
“Hungaria cluster.” They were a group of minor asteroids. High albedo. No station, but an open-access storage facility. As close to the inner planets as Belt rocks got.
“Are we meeting someone there?”
“Not there. There’s a ship a few days in. Sunward. But locked to Hungaria. Pella, it’s called.”
“And after that?”
Filip made the hand shrug of a Belter. Apparently she could know that much, but no more. She wondered what would happen if she pushed, and knew it was an experiment she wouldn’t make. I’m sorry, she thought. I loved you more than I have ever loved anything. I would have stayed if I could. I would have taken you with me.
Filip looked at her and then away.
She’d spent most of the weeks following the birth in recovery. The baby kept her from sleeping very long at a stretch, but apart from one week of frankly hellish colic, he was neither harder nor easier than she’d been led to expect. The worst thing she suffered was boredom, and Marco helped with that. The local group he’d been drinking with were mechanics and technicians at the port, and Marco brought her engineering problems that they were trying to solve. They were the sort of work consultants would do for half a month’s credit. She did them from goodwill and the need to do something intellectually challenging. While Filip napped in the little plastic crib, she customized diagnostic programs for water recyclers. She built virtual timing sequencers for shear force detection units. She designed software overrides for testing the containment limits of magnetic bottles.
The kind of limits that, before long, would fail on the Gamarra.
“All right,” Naomi said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Do you have access to another ship?” Filip asked.
“I may be able to charter something.”
“You can’t just hire a charter. This has to be untraceable.”
Meaning, she knew, that whatever was going to happen, it would mean people with guns coming after Filip and Cyn and all the others. Maybe security forces, maybe a rival faction, maybe something else that she hadn’t anticipated yet. But there would be consequences. And there would be violence.
“I may be able to charter something discreetly,” Naomi said. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll be sure it doesn’t come back to you.”
Filip swallowed. For a moment, she saw a glimmer of fear in him. He was sixteen years old now. A year younger than when she’d met his father. Three years younger than when she’d held him to her breasts to feed.
“I would have looked for you if he’d let me,” Naomi said. The words came out of her from a need she couldn’t control. He was a boy. He was carrying whatever burden Marco had put on him already. Making him responsible for how she felt too wasn’t a kindness.
She rose to her feet. “You don’t need to do anything about that. Just I would have. If he’d let me.”
If he’d let me. The words were heavy and toxic as lead. I would have done what I wanted, except he still controlled me. Still does. After all these years, and all these changes, and everything I have done and become, I wouldn’t have left you to him except that Marco still controls me. Constrains me. Punishes me for not letting him rule me outright.
“All right,” Filip said. His expression was empty.
Naomi nodded. Her hands were in fists so tight the knuckles ached. She made herself relax. “Give me a day. I’ll know more.”
“Come to the club,” Filip said. “If we’re not there, just wait and we’ll make contact. We need to stay moving.”
I thought I could stay with you, she thought, and then hated herself for the disappointment she felt. This wasn’t a reunion. Her unfinished business with Filip might be what brought her here, but he was doing something else. Something that had brought his long-lost mother back into his world. If she wanted to sit with him and eat sweets and share stories the way they never had, that was her problem.
“Fair enough,” Naomi said. She hesitated, then turned to the door. As she reached it, he spoke again, his voice tight. Like the words were hard to say.
“Thank you for coming.”
She felt it in her sternum, someone taking a hammer to the bones over her heart. Filip watched her from the table. He looked so much like his father. She tried to imagine that she had ever been that young herself. Tried to imagine that at that age she would have known how to pick words that were that perfectly empty and heartwarming and cruel. She felt the smile press her lips out a millimeter. It was an expression of sorrow more than joy.
“He told you to say that,” she said. “Didn’t he?”
There were a hundred ways to unpack the boy’s silence.
After the Gamarra, Marco had come home drunk and happy from his celebration. She’d told him to be quiet, not to wake the baby. Marco had swooped her up in his arms, twirling her in the little room until her ankle hit the bed and she yelped with pain. He’d put her down then, rubbing the little injury. Kissing it. He’d looked up at her with a smile that asked as much as it promised, and she’d thought about whether they could make love quietly enough that Filip would keep sleeping. That was what she’d been thinking of when he destroyed her.
“Managed it, us. You, que si?”
“Managed what?” she asked, leaning back against the gel of the bed.
“Got even for Terryon Lock,” Marco said. “Stood up for the Belt. For us. For him.”
Marco nodded toward the baby. Filip’s thumb had been in his sleep-slack mouth, his eyes so closed they seemed like they’d never open again. She’d known before she understood what she knew. An electric cold washed her heart, her belly, all her body. Marco sensed it. The memory of his quizzical smile looking up past her knee was still burned in her mind.
“What did I manage?” she said.
“Perfect crime,” he said. “First of many.”
She understood. The Gamarra had been killed with her code. The people who died there were dead because of her, and all of Rokku’s rough talk and ranting had stopped being empty banter. Marco was a killer now. She was too. They’d gone on to make love anyway, him too warm and dangerous to refuse, her too much in shock even to understand how much she wanted to object. She hated the fact, but they had. It was the beginning of the dark times, but looking back, all the rest of it – the depression, the fear, the loss of Filip, her failed suicide – had all been implicit in that night.
The script over the doors of hell, writ small.
Renting a hole by the port was easy. She had enough money to buy anonymous credit, route it through an off-station exchange, and bring it back to a mayfly shadow account. It only felt strange doing it because she hadn’t had to go through those motions in so long. Not since she’d signed on to the Canterbury, and that felt like it had been seven lifetimes ago.
She sat on the thin gel bed and waited for the weeping and nausea to stop. They would, even though at the worst of it, they felt like they might not. Then she took a long shower, changed into a fresh set of clothes purchased from a kiosk. Watching the hard puck of compressed cloth expand into a jumpsuit reminded her of an insect pulling itself out of its shell. It seemed like it should be a metaphor for something.
Her hand terminal showed a half-dozen new messages from Jim. She didn’t play them. If she had, the temptation to reply – to confess to him and take comfort in him, to talk to someone she trusted completely – would have been too much. And then he would have felt obligated to do something. To come and fix things. To insert himself into the messes that she’d made and the things she’d done. The distance between here and there, between Marco and the Rocinante, was too precious to sacrifice. The time for comfort would come later, when she’d done the things she needed to do. When she’d saved Filip. When she’d escaped Marco. So she didn’t play the messages. But she didn’t delete them either.
Even back on with Rokku, Marco had been cultivating himself as a leader. He’d been good at it. No matter how bad things got, he’d always managed to make it seem like each new hurdle was something he’d factored in, every solution – even ones he’d logically had nothing to do with – was somehow his brilliance. He’d explained once how he managed it.
The trick, he said, is to have a simple plan that more or less can’t go wrong so that you always have something, and then stack your risks on that. Have another alternative that won’t work but maybe one time in a hundred, and if it happens, you look like a god. And then one that won’t work but one time in twenty, that if it lands you look like you’re the smartest one in the room. And then one that’s only one time in five, but you look like you knew you could do it. And if everything else fails, you’ve still got the one that would always win.
If there was a single phrase for Marco, that was it: always win.
She wondered more than once over the years where she’d been on that scale. Had she been his one-in-a-hundred or his sure thing? She’d never known, and there was no way that she ever would. It didn’t even matter to her anymore, except the way a missing finger itched sometimes.
And now here she was again, doing what he wanted. He’d made her complicit in his plans, whatever they were. This time, though, she knew who she was dealing with. She wasn’t the girl who he’d tricked into sabotaging the Gamarra. She wasn’t a love-struck teenager in over her head. And Filip wasn’t a baby that could be spirited away and held as hostage against her good conduct. Her silence.
And so maybe – maybe – this was the moment she’d wanted. Maybe calling her in was Marco’s mistake. She pushed the idea away. It was too dangerous, too complicated. Too likely to be what Marco had known she would think.
Digging through the station directory, she took the better part of an hour to find the address, even knowing what she was looking for. She didn’t know what Outer Fringe Exports did, except that they were shady enough that she hadn’t wanted to work with them, and that they were competent enough that they’d known about the Martian claims disputing the salvage of the Rocinante before her crew had. Naomi found their physical address – a different berth than the one she’d been at the last time – and caught a cart.
The warehouses near the port were in a constant state of flux. The pressure of commerce and efficiency kept every space in use with as little downtime between rental agreements, loading, and unloading as could be arranged. The sign on the tempered glass door read OUTER FRINGE EXPORTS, but in a week, a day, an hour, it could have been anything.
A young man at the counter smiled up at her. He had close-cropped hair and skin several shades darker than her own. The steel-rimmed glasses could have been an affectation or an interface device. She’d never seen him before.
“Hi,” she said.
“Miss Nagata,” the man said as if they were old acquaintances. “It’s been some time. I’m
sorry to say we don’t have any work that would be suited to your ship at this time.”
“Not what I’m here for,” she said. “I need to charter a ship. And I need to do it very quietly.”
The man’s expression didn’t change. “That can be an expensive problem.”
“It needs to carry a crew no larger than twenty.”
“How long would you need it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would it be hauling cargo?”
“No.”
The man’s eyes lost their focus for a moment. The glasses were an interface, then. Naomi crossed her arms.
One in a hundred, she thought, I show up with my own warship ready to carry people off Ceres. One in twenty, I know how to find someone who will. She wondered what the one-in-five plan was. What was the sure thing.
The man’s focus came back to her.
“I think we may be able to help,” he said.
Chapter Fifteen: Alex
The ride to the hospital was a thing out of a nightmare. As the transport sped through the corridors, the painkillers started to take effect. The combination of ache and sharpness in his body shifted into a deep and troubling sense of simply being wrong. Once, when they were near the emergency admitting entrance, time stuttered as his consciousness slipped away and back again. None of the medics paid him much attention.
They were all focused on Bobbie.
The big woman’s eyes were closed, and a pale plastic tube came out of her mouth, keeping her jaw open. From where he rode, Alex could make out only parts of her gurney’s readout, and he wasn’t sure how to interpret what he was seeing. The medics’ voices were clipped and tense. Words and phrases like attempting to reinflate and stabilizing and maintaining pressure pushed Alex toward the edge of panic. Bobbie’s body, what he could see of it, was limp. He told himself she wasn’t dead. If she were dead, they wouldn’t be trying to save her. He hoped that was true.