She must have slept on the shuttle; she had no memory of the journey back to the station.
When they finally docked, she stumbled to her quarters, ignoring the littered corridors, the open doors, the rescue personnel flooding in from every other mining station in-system. She could barely see straight, and her eyes and throat felt like they’d been peeled.
She pressed her palm to her door seal and swayed unsteadily in the corridor while it read her implant. She had stepped inside before she felt the faint twinge of alarm that told her something was out of place.
Before she could react—before she could even think about what had triggered the feeling—a hard hand closed over her mouth.
“Leave the witch alone,” a man’s voice whispered in her ear, “and don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to.”
She scanned to see if her attacker had a weapon and found none. That was the good news. The bad news was that he had the kind of probe shielding that could only go with a wire job.
He spun her around and slammed her head into the wall hard enough to make her eyes water.
“Accidents can happen on-station too,” he whispered, “not just underground.”
Then he was gone—just in time for Li to realize that the stink filling her nose was Kintz’s cheap aftershave.
AMC Station: 25.10.48.
The knock came at her door well after two in the morning station time.
“Who is it?” Li asked hazily, trying to remember if she’d put on enough clothes when she went to bed to be decent now. The whispered reply was enough to jolt her wide-awake and halfway to the door.
Bella all but fell into Li’s arms as the door hissed open. Li supported her to the bed. Bella clung to her as if she were drowning while Li brushed her hair back from her face to reveal a new bruise blossoming over the old ivory stain of the last one.
Her first thought was that Haas had done it. Then she caught herself. Had Bella ever come out and accused him? Had she ever done more than deal in hints and innuendo? Haas had been off-station for days, first in Helena, then dealing with rescue operations on the surface. Did this mean he was back? Or had someone else done it? And what, in the end, did she really know about Bella?
“Haas doesn’t know I’m here,” Bella said, shuddering. “He… fell asleep.”
“Let’s go down to Security, Bella. You can file a report.”
“No,” Bella whispered. “You’ll leave, sooner or later. Then there’ll be no one to protect me.”
Li stared at her, knowing what she said was true, hating it, hating herself for not being able to change it.
Bella started and pulled out of Li’s arms.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, picking up Sharifi’s copy of Xenograph from the floor where Li had dropped it when she fell asleep. “It’s Hannah’s.”
“I took it from her room.”
Bella looked at her, and that calculating look drifted across her face again. “Read to me,” she said. “Like Hannah did.”
Li hesitated.
“Please. I just need to hear your voice.”
Li thumbed through the book, wondering what passages Hannah would have read to Bella. What she would have said about them. She remembered the secretive habits she’d developed during a childhood of reading library books: cracking their spines so the next person who checked them out couldn’t spot her favorite passages, couldn’t read over her shoulder and trace her own reactions in the rut of her reading. Had Sharifi been like her, a private, furtive, guilty keeper of secrets? Li doubted it; the Sharifi she remembered watching, the Sharifi that Bella and Sharpe and Cohen talked about, hadn’t been interested in hiding.
She held the book up and let it fall open. Sure enough, she saw a line of Sharifi’s neat writing in the margin. She read out the words Sharifi had underlined:
I write these words sitting in our field camp. Behind me rise the eight thousanders of the Johannesburg Massif, still unclimbed every one of them. To my left lie the salt flats of that ancient ocean whose banks I spent two years walking. To my right, the highlands that Cartwright and Dashir mapped. All untouched, alien, perfect as it was on the first day we saw it.
But on my way to camp, I passed the terraforming plant. I passed algae flats, the furrows of farmers’ fields. And I have now a wheat ear lying across the page I write on. I plucked it from the trailside. Life in a blade of grass.
Life for another planet. For this one, death—and the slow, fatal rot that follows the map of our best intentions.
We were mapmakers. Monks and worshipers. We came into the country like saints coming to the desert. We came to be changed.
But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.
And in the margin, Sharifi’s scribbled words—words Li didn’t read to Bella:
But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?
Li raised her eyes from the page to find Bella staring at her. She closed the book, started to speak. Bella put a finger to her lips.
“Hush,” she murmured, leaning into Li, ducking her head so that her hair brushed Li’s mouth and tickled her nose.
“How I can help you, Bella? Tell me. What can I do?”
“Just hold me.”
So Li held her, her pulse racing at the smell and the feel of her, her stomach curling with shame at what she couldn’t help wanting.
They sat that way for so long that Li began to think Bella was asleep when she finally spoke again.
“How strong are you?” Bella asked.
Li frowned, caught off guard. “Strong.”
“Stronger than a man?” A warm hand slipped under Li’s T-shirt, slid over her flanks and stomach.
“A lot stronger,” Li said.
The hand paused in its exploration. Bella looked up at her intently. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
Li started. She thought of Korchow of all people, half-expecting a joke or an accusation. “Of course I have,” she whispered.
“What’s it like?”
“Not nice.”
“Do you ever feel guilty about it?”
“Sometimes.” She saw Gilead’s brilliant sunrise, its snowcapped mountains rushing up at her in the split second before her auxiliary chute popped open. “Some of them.”
“But then you jump to a new star, a new planet, and you forget all about it. That’s a gift. To be able to leave a place behind forever. To forget the person you became there. Some people would give anything for that.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Li protested, but Bella wasn’t listening anymore.
“Kiss me,” she said.
Li swallowed.
“Don’t you want to?”
“Listen,” Li began—but whatever she’d been about to say caught on an indrawn breath as Bella’s fingers circled her nipple.
“You look at me like you want to,” Bella whispered into her ear, a whisper that was itself a caress.
“Looking isn’t doing,” Li said with the last rational part of her brain. But those were just words, and Bella knew it as well as she did.
Instead of answering, she dropped to her knees in front of Li and kissed her stomach, her waist, the point of one hip.
The book fell to the floor and lay there unnoticed. I can stop in a minute, Li told herself as she drew Bella to her. If I want to. I can stop anytime I want to.
Then she pressed her mouth to Bella’s pale face and buried her hands in the dark torrent of hair and found the lips that were searching for hers.