That miffed her. "Is that what you wanted, night before last?"
NG just shrugged.
She screwed up her courage to have it out, then, her whole body going on alert to move if she had to. "I talked to Musa," she said, and expected some blow-up, but all he did was breathe a little faster, no change of expression. "He's half on your side, Ramey."
"Musa's all right," NG said, so little moving of his jaw it hardly showed. "McKenzie's all right, far as that goes. I do my job, crew lets me alone, don't screw it up."
He was going to leave. He reached for the door latch.
"Ramey."
"Forget it."
"Hell if I will." She put her arm in his way, heart-thumping scared, knowing he could break it in that position. "I go back down there and McKenzie's all over me. I don't want McKenzie."
He stood still, just stopped with his hand on the door, not looking at her.
"Ramey, don't walk out on me. Dammit, don't you walk out on me! I got some answers coming!"
He dropped his hand, turned around of a sudden and hauled her up against him, nothing she couldn't stop, but she went entirely null-state then, scared—God, getting body to body with him was so damned stupid. He could do anything, he could break her neck, she ought to make him back up and work this through slow and sane, but she was having real trouble putting two thoughts in a row right now, not on-course with anything that had to do with him.
"Out of the damned doorway," she gasped when she got her mouth free and had a breath, "dammit, NG—"
She hadn't meant to call him that. He didn't even seem to notice. "Come on," he said, and pulled her off with him into the dark, into a gap between the wall and the cans, where the track they rode on turned a corner.
There was an old cushion and a couple of blankets back there in the dark, about enough room between the track and the outside wall for a body to fit; or two, one on top of another, if they arranged things. Cold, God, it was cold, but his hands weren't, and he wasn't, and she was trying the best she could to keep things paced with him, to keep him calm and all right… until the colored lights went off behind her eyes and she had to concentrate on breathing and not making a sound for a while.
"Oh, God," she said, finally, and put an arm out into the cold air and hugged him. He let out a breath and just got heavier for a moment, relaxed on top of her because there was no room for him to do anything else.
"You're all right," she said, hand on his side, not wanting him to move. "You're all right, Ramey. Let me tell you, you got a couple friends on this ship. At least."
He drew a sharp, sudden breath, another one, as if the air had gone thin—or his sanity had.
She rubbed his shoulders, a little scared at that, kept doing it while he got his breathing straightened out again. "How'd you get here?" she asked, to chase the silence away and keep him thinking. "How'd you get on this ship?"
No answer. But NG was like that.
"You free-spacer, Ramey? Just a hire-on?—Or are you a Family merchanter? What's your real name?"
He shook his head, slowly, against her shoulder.
"Ramey a first name?"
Another shake of his head, just refusal to answer, she thought.
"Doesn't make any difference," she said. "You just got the moves, Ramey, just got the way about you. I don't care. Want to know about me?"
No answer.
"What I thought.—Well, me, I'm a hire-on, Pell, Thule, wherever. Seen a lot. Some of it not too pretty. They tell where Fitch got me?"
A few deep breaths. Quieter now. "They say."
"What d' they say?"
"Say you cut up a couple of people."
It caught her grimly funny, somehow, him with cause to worry about her, all along; and not funny: maybe they both had cause. She ruffled his hair. "Not habitual. Doesn't worry you, does it?"
"Don't care," he said.
Absolute truth, she thought, just flat, dead tired truth.
"Been that way too," she said, and felt the cold of Thule docks, remembered what the nights were like there when you were broke—felt the cold ofLoki's deck through the blanket, chilling her backside; felt the cold chance that somebody could walk in and bring down the mofs on both of them. "But things change. I'm alive to tell you that."
"Can't," he said, "can't change," and he gave a long, deep breath that became a shiver, brushed his mouth past her ear. "Just a matter of time." A slow tremor started, like a shiver, got worse; and he started to get up in a hurry, but he banged the overhang of a girder and came down hard on her, smashed her with his elbow, shoved at her, but the space trapped them. "God!" he yelled, "God—get out of here!"
No place to go: she knew a space-out when she saw one. She scrambled, blind for a second, blood in her mouth, fetched up against the icy metal of the can-track, got her knees up to protect herself, but he was just sitting there, bent double.
"Ramey," she said, shaking, trying to pull her clothes together.
He just curled over and tucked down, arm over his head.
She grabbed a blanket and got it around his shoulders.
"Go to hell," he said, between chattering teeth.
"Been there, too, you sum-bitch." She put back the blanket he shrugged off. "Should have kicked you good. Leave it, dammit!"
Long, long time he was like that, clenched up hard, shaking. She just sat there, leaned on his back and held the blanket around him, talked to him sometimes, wished she dared hit him with the trank she carried, but God knew if that was the right thing, or where he was, or when, out in some mental jump-space.
Finally he said: "Go 'way, Yeager. Get the hell out of here."
"You all right?"
"I'm all right."
"C'n you get up?"
He straightened up long enough to shove her away. "I said let me alone!"
She caught her balance squatting on her heels, put a hand down to steady herself, not a defenseless position. "You yell all you like, man. You want crew in here, you just yell your head off."
Silence from the shadow opposite her, a long, long time.
"Ramey."
"Get on back," he said without raising his head from his arms.
"Do what? Leave you to freeze your ass off? Get up. Come on."
No answer.
"Ramey, dammit."
Still no answer.
She pushed up to her feet, stiff, half-frozen, caught herself on the wall. "I'm going after Bernstein."
"No!"
"Then get on your feet, Ramey, hear me?"
He moved. He started getting his clothes together, hands shaking. He didn't look up, and she squatted down again and blotted her lip.
"Sonuvabitch," she said slowly, with a despairing shake of her head, and put out her hand to press his shoulder. He shook that off.
"You're being an ass," she said.
"General opinion," he said. "Let me be."
"That how you pay all your favors?"
He sank against the wall, hand over his eyes, turned his shoulder away from her, just beyond coping with her.
Her gut hurt. She was still shivering with adrenaline and her teeth were chattering, but some kinds of pain got to her, and a man with a reality problem was a hard one to sit through. A spacer who'd had done to him by another spacer what Fitch had done—that was hard even to think about.
What this crew had done, on the other hand—
—maybe just not knowing what to do with him… She didn't know what to do with him either, right now. She was ready just to give up and go away and let him pull himself out of this particular hole in his own time, man wouldn't do himself any hurt, he never had.
And maybe there was just nothing she could do but make him crazier.