“It’s time,” she said, her voice gentle. She remembered all the drama feeds and films with a mother waking her child up for school. This was the closest thing she would ever have to that, and against her best judgment, she savored it. “Filip. We can go now.”
His eyes opened, and for a moment, he wasn’t wholly awake. He looked confused. Vulnerable. Young. And then his focus sharpened, and he was himself again. His new self. The one she didn’t know.
They cycled the front door and stepped out into the corridor. The cool rotation breeze smelled of damp and ozone. She was still holding Karal’s cousa half-eaten in her off hand. She took another bite, but it had gone cold and the roux was clotting. She dropped what was left in the recycler and tried not to see it as a metaphor for anything else.
Cyn loomed up from the door, his face in its resting scowl. He looked older. Harder. She missed who he’d been when they were young. She missed who she’d been.
“Ready to go, Knuckles?” Cyn asked.
“Hell, yes,” she said, and he looked at her more closely. Hearing, maybe, something more in the words than only the affirmation.
The ship was a simple transport skiff so small that the docking clamps holding it seemed about to crush its tarnished sides in. It didn’t have an Epstein drive, so most of the hold would be taken up by the propellant mass. It would have to fly teakettle, and even then, a fair stretch of the way they’d be on the float. It was one step better than getting EVA suits and a bunch of extra air bottles, but it would do what they needed. Naomi had bought it at salvage rates, routing money from her share in the Rocinante through two anonymized accounts, one on Luna, the other on Ganymede. The final owner of record was Edward Slight Risk Abatement Cooperative, a company that had not existed before it appeared on the registration forms and that would vanish again when the ship was disposed of. The transponders would announce it as the Chetzemoka. In all, it represented about half of everything Naomi could call her own, and her name wasn’t on any of the paperwork.
It didn’t seem like enough. It seemed like too much. She didn’t know what it seemed like.
Filip waited in the bay outside the boarding gantry, and so she did too. Cyn and Karal and Miral stood far enough away to give them something like privacy. The berth was a rental space with a red-numbered counter on the wall measuring the minutes left under agreement before its ownership changed. The metal and ceramic walls had the foggy look of sealant breaking down from the constant radiation of space. The air stank of lubricant. Someone had left an old poster on the wall, the split circle of the OPA with a hemisphere of Mars and one of Earth as the circle. Not just OPA, but militant OPA.
They’d been her people, once.
The others arrived. Josie and Old Sandy. Wings, whatever his real name was. A thick-faced, sorrow-eyed woman with one missing tooth that Naomi hadn’t seen before. A shaven-headed man with livid scars webbing the dark flesh of his scalp and the limp of an unhealed foot wound. More. Each of them nodded to Filip as they passed, their expressions a mix of respect and indulgence. All of them knew him better than she did. All of them would ship with him when he left. The ache behind her breastbone would have concerned her any other time. Just now, she knew what it was.
Soft tears threatened, but she blinked them back. Bit her tongue to stop them.
“All well?” Filip asked.
She laughed, and the tightness around her heart grew harder. “Well enough. As soon as the registry updates, we can file a plan and go.”
“Good.”
“Do you have a moment?”
His gaze flickered up to hers, something like anxiety in his eyes. A heartbeat later, he nodded once and pointed to the corner with his chin. They walked together, and the others gave them space. Naomi’s heart beat like she was in danger. She could feel her pulse in her throat.
At the wall of the berth, she stopped. Filip turned to face her. The memory of him as an infant, toothless and grabbing onto her finger with a grin of unmistakable pride intruded powerfully into her mind and she took a moment to shove it away.
“It’s been good seeing you,” she said.
For a moment, she thought he wouldn’t answer, then, “You too.”
“The ship,” she said. “When it’s done, it’s yours, all right?”
Filip looked over her shoulder toward the gantry. “Mine?”
“I want you to have it. Resell it, keep the money for yourself. Or hold it, if you want. Yours, though. No one else.”
He tilted his head. “You’re not coming with?”
“I didn’t come here to join back in,” she said, then sighed. “I came because he said you were in trouble. I came because of you. Whatever he’s doing, whatever he’s having you do, I can’t be part of it. Not before. Not now either.”
For a long moment, Filip didn’t move. Her throat felt too narrow, like she couldn’t get air through it.
“I understand,” her son said. Her son who was leaving again. Who was going back to Marco and everything he was.
“Your father isn’t a good man,” Naomi said, the words spilling out. “I know you love him. I loved him too once, but he isn’t…”
“You don’t have to justify it,” Filip said. “You did this for us, and I appreciate it. This is all you’re willing to do, and that’s disappointing, but he told me it might happen this way.”
“You could come with me.” She hadn’t meant to say it, but as soon as she did, she meant it to her marrow. “The ship I’m on needs crew. We’re independent and we’re well stocked. Come do a tour with me, yeah? Get to… get to know each other?”
For the first time, a real expression cracked her son’s reserve. Three thin lines drew themselves between his brows and he smiled with what could have been confusion or pity. “Kind of in the middle of something,” he said.
She wanted to beg. She wanted to pick him up and carry him away. She wanted him back. It hurt worse than sickness that she couldn’t have him.
“Maybe after, then,” she said. “When you want it, you say it. There’s room for you on the Rocinante.”
If Marco lets you, she thought, but didn’t say. If he doesn’t hurt you as a way to punish me. And then, a moment later, God this will be weird to explain to Jim.
“Maybe after,” Filip said, nodding. He put his hand out, and they held each other by the wrist for a moment. He turned first, walking away with his hands in his pockets.
The sense of loss was vast and oceanic. And it was worse because the loss wasn’t happening now. It had happened every day since she’d left. Every day that she’d lived the life she chose instead of the one Marco had prescribed for her. It only hurt so badly now because she was seeing what all those days summed to and feeling the tragedy of it.
She didn’t see Cyn and Karal coming up until they were there. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her palm, angry and embarrassed and afraid that a kind word would shatter the composure she still had. A kind word or a cruel one.
“Hoy, Knuckles,” Cyn said, his landslide-deep voice low and soft. “So. No chance kommt mit? Filipito’s something. Know he’s tight and thin right now, but he’s still on mission. When he’s not running herd, he can be funny. Sweet too.”
“I left for reasons,” Naomi said, the words feeling thick and muddy and true. “They haven’t changed.”