“What about you? Your… y’know. Stuff?”
Clarissa bowed her head. Her laugh shook the tubes. “Apart from the fact that every time I used them, I wound up puking and mewling for a couple minutes afterward, they’ve got some other drawbacks. If we pull them out, I’d survive, but it would be even less pleasant than this. Turns out there’s a reason the stuff I got isn’t in general use.”
“Shit. That’s got to suck for you.”
“Among other things, it means I’m here until… well. Until I’m not anywhere. I get my blockers every morning, lunch in the cafeteria, half an hour of exercise, and then I can sit in my cell or in a holding tank with nine other inmates for three hours. Rinse, repeat. It’s fair. I did bad things.”
“All that shit the preacher pitched about redemption, getting reformed—”
“Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.”
“Huh,” he said. “Actually, I think I know what you mean.”
“I really hope you don’t,” she said.
“Sorry I didn’t put a bullet in your head when I had the chance.”
“Sorry I didn’t know to ask. What brings you down here, anyway?”
“Was in the neighborhood saying goodbye to a bunch of my past, mostly. Don’t see how I’m coming back this way, so thought I’d better say hi now if I was going to at all.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, and she took his hand. The contact was weird. Her fingers felt too thin, waxy. Seemed rude to push her away though, so he tried to remember what people were like when they had an intimate moment like this. He pretended he was Naomi and squeezed Clarissa’s hand.
“Thank you. For remembering me,” she said. “Tell me about the others. What’s Holden doing?”
“Well, shit,” Amos said. “How much they tell you about what happened on Ilus?”
“The censors don’t let me see anything that involves him. Or you. Or anything involving Mao-Kwikowski or the protomolecule or the rings. It might be disruptive for me.”
Amos settled in. “All right. So a while back, Cap’n gets this call…”
For maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, he laid out all the stuff that had happened since the Rocinante turned Clarissa Mao over to the authorities. Telling stories that didn’t have a punch line wasn’t something he had much practice with, so he was pretty sure that as story time went, it sucked. But she drank it up like he was pouring water on beach sand. The medical system beeped every now and then, responding to whatever was happening in her bloodstream.
Her eyes started to close like she was going to sleep, but her fingers didn’t lose their grip on his. Her breath got deeper too. He wasn’t sure if that was part of the medical whatever it was they were doing to her or something else. He stopped talking, and she didn’t seem to notice. It felt weird to sneak out without saying anything, but he also didn’t want to wake her up just to do it. So he sat for a while, looking at her because there wasn’t anything else to look at.
The weird thing was, she looked younger. No wrinkles at the sides of her mouth or eyes. No sagging in her cheeks. Like the time she’d spent down in the prison didn’t count. As if she’d never get old, never die, just be here wishing for it. It was probably some kind of side effect of the shit they’d pumped into her. There were kinds of environmental poisoning that did that too, not that he knew the details. She’d killed a lot of people, but he had too, one way and another. Seemed a little weird that she’d be staying and he’d be walking out. She felt bad about all the things she’d done. Maybe that was the difference. Regret and punishment the flip sides of the karmic coin. Or maybe the universe was just that fucking random. Konecheck didn’t look like he had a lot of regrets, and he was locked up just the same.
Amos was about to start trying to get his hand free when the Klaxons went off. Clarissa’s eyes shot open and she sat up, present and alert and not even sort of groggy. So maybe she hadn’t been asleep after all.
“What is that?” she said.
“I was about to ask you.”
She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that one before.”
It seemed like the right time to get his hand back. He went to the door, but his escort was already there coming in. She had her weapon drawn, but not pointing at anything.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and her voice was higher than it had been before. She was scared. Or maybe excited. “This facility has been put on lockdown. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to remain in here for the time being.”
“How long are we talking about?” he asked.
“I don’t know the answer to that, sir. Until the lockdown is lifted.”
“Is there a problem?” Clarissa asked. “Is he in danger?”
That was a good move. No guard ever gave a fuck whether the prisoner was in danger, so she was asking about the civilian. Even so, the escort wasn’t going to say a goddamn thing unless she wanted to.
Turned out, she wanted to.
“A rock came down outside Morocco about three hours ago,” she said, her sentence curling up at the end like it was a question.
“I saw something about that,” Amos said.
“How did it get through?” Clarissa asked.
“It was going very, very fast,” the escort said. “Accelerated.”
“Jesus,” Clarissa said, like someone had punched her in the chest.
“Someone dropped a rock on purpose?” Amos said.
“Rocks. Plural,” the escort said. “Another one came down about fifteen minutes ago in the middle of the Atlantic. There’re tsunami and flood warnings going out everywhere from Greenland to fucking Brazil.”
“Baltimore?” Amos said.
“Everyplace. Everywhere.” The escort’s eyes were getting watery and wild. Panic maybe. Maybe grief. She gestured with her gun, but it just looked impotent. “We’re on lockdown until we know.”
“Know what?” Amos said.
It was Clarissa that answered. “If that was the last one. Or if the hits are going to keep on coming.”
In the silence that came afterward, they weren’t guard, prisoner, and civilian. They were just three people in a room.
The moment passed.
“I’ll be back with an update as soon as I have one, sir.”
Amos’ brain ran through all the scenarios that came easy and didn’t see many options. “Hey, wait. I know it ain’t for pleasure viewing or nothing, but that screen over there catch newsfeeds?”
“Prisoners only get access in the common area.”
“Sure,” Amos said. “But I’m not a prisoner, right?”
The woman looked down, then shrugged. She took out her hand terminal, tapped in a few lines of text, and the empty gray screen flickered to life. A pale man with broad, soft lips was in the middle of his report.
“—undetected by the radar arrays, we are getting reports that there was a temperature anomaly that may have been related to the attack.”
The guard nodded to him and closed the door. He couldn’t hear it lock, but he was pretty sure it had. He sat back in his chair and propped his heels on the side of the hospital bed. Clarissa sat forward, her bone-thin hands knotted together. The feed switched over to a white-haired man talking earnestly about the importance of not jumping to conclusions.
“Do you know where the first one hit?” Clarissa asked. “Do you remember anything from the news?”
“I wasn’t paying attention. I think they said Krakatoa? Is that a place?”
Clarissa closed her eyes. If anything, she went a little paler. “Not exactly. It’s a volcano that blew itself up a long, long time ago. Sent ash eighty kilometers up. Shock waves went around the world seven times.”