They were quiet for a moment. Her sleeve was still wet. It clung to her arm.
“I’m angry,” she said.
“I know.”
“I feel like he’s throwing me away. Putting me aside because I’m inconvenient.”
“I hear you.”
“It’s like who I am and what I want don’t even matter to him. I know that’s crazy. Or at least I know it’s overblown, but it’s like I have a splinter I can’t dig out. It’s just right there on my nerve ending, and every time I even brush up against it, it hurts.”
“Yeah.”
She sat still, feeling her blood pulse in her temple, her mind agitated. “I’m not really mad at the captain, am I? This is about my father.”
“This school thing could be good for you, Tiny. A lot healthier than hanging around an old warship with nobody your own age.”
“But I like it here. You like me being here, right?”
“No,” Amos said. “I don’t want you to stay.”
It felt like a punch in the gut. “But—”
“Look, Tiny, I’ve watched a lot of people die. Some of them were my friends. I’m mostly okay with that now. But I ain’t ready to watch you die. And if you stay here on this ship, you will. That’s the kind of ship this is.”
“That’s what Jim said too,” Teresa said.
“Yeah? Well, the two of us see a lot of things the same way.”
“You seem very different to me.”
“We are.”
“You’re going to be fighting for the fate of humanity. I’m going to be worrying about algebra assignments.”
“Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and we’ll win and the algebra will matter. Then twenty, thirty years down the road, something else will show up to slaughter everyone, and you can take care of that one.”
She didn’t want to be crying. She didn’t want to be sad. Amos leaned over and put a thick, ropy arm around her. He was strangely hot to the touch, like he was always running a fever. She leaned into him and wept anyway.
She said her goodbyes to Alex and Naomi on the ship just after they touched down. They’d landed far enough away from the school that they wouldn’t damage the grounds, so there was still a little walk from her old life to her new one. She tried not to think about that. It was easier if she could pretend that this wasn’t the last time she would be on the ship. That she didn’t have to start her life over again. She just put one foot in front of the other as if this particular walk didn’t signify anything in particular.
Jim and Amos went with her to make sure everything was all right, but she could tell their minds were more than half on the incoming ship. Like guards from the State Building, they wore light body armor and sidearms. She just had a duffel bag with a couple of folded flight suits and a few days’ supply of dog food. Muskrat trotted along with them, her brown, worried eyes shifting between Teresa and Amos.
The sky was wide and blue with cumulus clouds on the horizon. The valley opened before them, gentle curves of land that looked like erosion and wind and the growth of plants. The local plants were tall and thin, rising up into the air like three-meter-high blades of blue-tinged grass. The breeze passing among them sounded like radio static. The school’s grounds stood out from the world around it—straight lines and right angles. The air smelled like overheated metal.
There weren’t any people.
“Term doesn’t start for another two weeks,” Jim said. “You’re probably the first to arrive.”
“Isn’t it a boarding school?” Teresa asked.
“They still have breaks between terms. I mean, don’t they?”
Amos shrugged. “Not a lot of private school types in my social circles. They know we’re coming?”
“Finley knows to expect us, but Naomi was keeping the radio-silence thing pretty strict. You know, in case.”
“Sure,” Amos said.
The main path was crushed stone gravel, light gray with flashes of pink and blue and gold where the sunlight glittered off it. An earthmover stood idle at the side of the path. Its wide industrial treads had left tracks behind it half a meter across. The disturbed ground was dark and damp. The sun hadn’t dried it yet. Amos smiled at nothing in particular, looking around like a tourist taking in the sights. Jim seemed tenser.
They walked up the path to a central courtyard three glass-windowed stories tall with a canopy stretched between the buildings. A stone fountain had lines of mineral deposits that showed where the water would have flowed if it had been flowing.
Teresa recognized it all from her reading about the school—the pale wood juxtaposed with the glass was apparently very interesting from an architectural perspective, but she just thought it looked awkward. The smiling kids and serious instructors that had filled the campus weren’t there, though. Muskrat whined and pressed in against Teresa’s leg.
“Yeah, dog,” Amos said. “Putting my little hairs up too.”
The wide double doors of the main building ten meters ahead of them swung open and a woman stepped out. Her arms were out at her sides, her hands open and empty. She was tall, long limbed, and thin, with high cheekbones and dark eyes. Her skin looked as taut and tough as if she’d been carved out of wood. Teresa couldn’t guess the woman’s age, but she wore a Laconian Marine uniform.
Jim muttered fuck to himself.
“I’m unarmed,” the woman said. Teresa recognized her tone. An officer’s voice. Brusque, and carrying an expectation of obedience. Her father’s palace had been filled with voices like it. “I’m no threat to you. You don’t need to escalate.”
“What are you doing here?” Teresa said, loud enough to carry through the courtyard. “Do you know who I am?”
Amos put a hand on her shoulder and gently pulled her half a step back. Jim’s eyes were wide, and his face was bloodless. If his expression hadn’t been so calm, she would have thought he was having a panic attack.
“Yes, I know who you are,” the woman said. “You’re Teresa Duarte. I am Colonel Aliana Tanaka of the Laconian Marine Corps. And Captain Holden, if I’m not mistaken. I have to say that’s a bit of a surprise. I’d have thought you’d have put her on a different ship. Eggs. Baskets. You know.”
Jim stood silent. Frozen. Oh, Teresa thought. He’s about to have a panic attack.
“I’m not here to hurt anyone,” Tanaka said. “I need the girl’s help.”
“I am here of my own free will,” Teresa said. “If my father—”
“At this point, I am considerably better briefed about your father’s condition than you are,” Tanaka said.
Amos reached down into his pocket, appearing to scratch idly at his leg while he looked up toward the canopy. Teresa heard a tiny, distant voice. Alex, saying What’s up, big guy?
“If we’re all friends and just talking,” Amos said, his voice loud enough to carry, “how come you got a fire team on the roof up there?”
Teresa looked up. She wasn’t certain, but there might have been shadows on the canopy. Her heart was tapping at her ribs like it wanted to get out. Muskrat whined, and she put a hand on the old dog’s back.
“He’s right,” Jim said, his voice steadier than Teresa expected. “That doesn’t seem friendly.”
The woman didn’t miss a beat. “You’re correct. If I wanted to resolve this through violence, it would already be resolved. But I think we’ve all been through enough firefights to understand that when the bullets start flying, it gets very hard to be certain where they all end up. And I don’t want anything to happen to the girl either.”
“Where’s the head of school?” Jim said. “The one who was meeting us?”