“It’s going to be okay.”
She laughed, not because she believed it but because it was obviously untrue. And because he wanted to comfort her, and she wanted to be comforted. He took her arm, drawing her across the open desk, and pulled her beside him. His arms enfolded her, and she let herself curl against him until they were floating together, his head at her shoulder, his thighs under hers, like twins in the same amniotic sac. It wasn’t an image she thought other people would find heartwarming, but she did. And when she was alone with Fayez, other people weren’t important. His breath smelled like smoky tea.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”
“For what?”
“All of it.”
“It’s not your fault.”
She pressed her cheek to his head, felt the scratch of his hair against her cheek. Tears were sheeting across her eyes, making the office swim like she was underwater. “I know. But I don’t know how to fix it, and I’m supposed to.”
She felt the subtle expansion and collapse of his sigh. “We are hailing an awful lot of Marys, aren’t we?”
“We’re making progress. We already know so much more.”
“You’re right. I’m frustrated. I didn’t mean to piss on the project,” Fayez said. “If the answer’s anywhere, it’s here.”
She nodded, and hoped that was true, and that the growing sense she felt that there was something important—critical—in her notes that she’d missed was right. And that whatever it was, she could find it in time.
Later, when Fayez had gone to get some sleep, she went through a packet of reports from Ochida. The high-energy physics workgroup had their most recent data ready for review. The latest complex modeling outputs mapped possible connections between the attack on the Typhoon, the uptick in virtual particles in Tecoma system, and the initial loss of consciousness after the Tempest had destroyed Pallas Station. A surveying company that usually did mining operations around Jupiter was trying to find the weird magic bullet that had been frame-locked to the Tempest when it was destroyed. Her own computational biology group was setting up a distributed study that would put subjects in NIRS imaging around the clock in every populated system in hopes of catching good data the next time the enemy flicked consciousness off. And all the reports were being dumped through massive virtual pattern-matching arrays on Earth, Mars, Laconia, and Bara Gaon in hopes that machine intelligence might catch something the humans had overlooked.
It was the broadest, best-funded research effort in the history of the human race. A million people searching through a haystack the size of 1,300 planets and hoping there was a needle in there someplace.
She sometimes wondered if this had been Duarte’s plan all along. Push and push until solving the ring entity problem was forced into first position for all humanity. He’d always held that it was a problem they’d have to solve sooner or later, and humans did tend to do their best work when survival was on the line. But whether it had been the high consul’s intention or not, humanity had one problem it was trying to solve now. And James fucking Holden had somehow managed to put her in charge of it.
She didn’t know whether looking over the vast effort calmed her or keyed her up. Maybe both.
When she reached the end of the packet, she closed down her screen. There were a couple dozen things that she, as head of the Laconian Science Directorate, needed to authorize or comment on, and she would. But after she’d had some food and maybe a nap. If she could sleep.
She pulled herself through the ship, floating down the corridors. Cara and Xan were in the galley with Harshaan Lee and Quinn de Bodard, and Elvi watched them as she decanted herself a bulb of lentil soup.
“Major,” Harshaan Lee said, nodding to her as she floated over.
“Doctor,” Elvi said, and took a mouthful of soup. The Falcon made good food. The lentils tasted almost fresh—like nutrition and mud and comfort—even though they were probably made from textured fungal proteins.
“We were just talking about Koenji Wizard,” Quinn said. “It’s an entertainment feed out of Samavasarana system.”
“I don’t know it,” Elvi said, and Xan, spinning slowly about his z-axis, launched into a description of the story. It involved a hidden space station built by angels that were also human desires in physical form. And apparently there were a lot of songs, one of which Xan sang. Cara joined in for the chorus. Elvi listened and, to her surprise, felt herself beginning to relax. Xan’s enthusiasm and the benign, childlike narcissism that drove him to the center of every conversation were actually a joy. For a few minutes, Elvi was out of her own head. It was easy to forget that he’d been a seven-year-old for over forty years now.
She almost regretted coming back to herself.
“Cara?” she said, nodding toward the other side of the common room. “Could I borrow you for a second?”
The girl who wasn’t a girl froze the way that she and Xan did sometimes, suddenly going as still as stone. It only lasted a moment, but it was eerie every time. Then she nodded and pushed gently off in the direction Elvi had indicated. Elvi tossed her empty bulb in the recycler and floated over to meet her. Xan, still with Quinn and Harshaan, blinked anxious black eyes at them, and Elvi waved what she hoped was reassuringly.
“What’s on your mind, Doc?” Cara said. Her casual informality left Elvi feeling warm toward the girl every time she heard it. For someone who’d been imprisoned and experimented on for decades by an induced sociopath, Cara had given her trust to Elvi quickly.
“Couple things. I wanted to see how you were feeling. The last dive was… There were some interesting readings. It looked like you were in a different kind of sync with our big green friend. It was looking more like a nonlocal reaction than something with light delay.”
“Yes,” Cara said, so quickly it was almost interrupting. “I felt like that too.”
“And since we don’t know what this is, I need you to tell me how you feel. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Cara said. “Going in there like this seems… I don’t know. It feels good. It feels right.”
Which Elvi knew already. She’d seen the scans and knew what the connection was doing to Cara’s endorphin levels. It was anthropomorphizing to say that the BFE wanted Cara to come back. There was no reason to think it had any will or intentions. But it wanted the girl to come back.
Somewhere deep in her mind, Elvi knew that what came next was a mistake. And that she’d chosen to make it.
“Given that,” she said, “I’d like to consider accelerating the session schedule. If we could take a day or two less between the dives—”
“That would be great,” Cara said. “I don’t think there’s any reason not to. I can handle it.”
Her grin was so genuine—so human—that Elvi couldn’t help grinning back. “All right then. I’ll talk with the team, and we’ll get a new protocol schedule out. Maybe we can try another run as soon as tomorrow?”
Cara gave a little shiver of excitement, and from across the common room, Xan frowned and looked anxious. More than anxious. Melancholy. Elvi took Cara’s hand, squeezing her fingers, and Cara squeezed back. A human gesture of connection, as old as the species.
“It’s going to be all right,” Elvi said, not realizing until she heard herself that she was echoing Fayez. That she hadn’t believed it when he said it.
“I know,” Cara replied.