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Raven, appearing in the cafeteria doorway, surveys the room like it's a battlefield, drawing all attention to her. Monty watches how the others watch her. He takes in the slight shifts of movement, the flickers of their eyes looking toward her and then away. Some of them are scared. Some of them are scared without knowing why they are scared. He gathers information as if he were a spy embedded in their midst—which, he knows, some of them still think he is—as if he were still on the outside looking in, and his careful, remote observations are all he will ever know, of any of them.
Perhaps, even from a distance and with the calm objectivity of an outsider, he is still too shaded by bias. Because Raven is a beacon to him. Always has been, since they first met, since before they met, since he followed her progress as a shining flare of star-trail light across the clarity of the sky, toward the ordinary dirt. He looks at her and can't stop looking. He looks at her and does not feel either objective or distant, neither a spy nor a stranger.
Raven hesitates a long moment in the doorway, taking in the tables, none of them empty, most of them scattered with empty spaces, until she finds Monty in the far corner of the room. He's sitting across from Jasper, one of the few who did not seem to notice Raven's appearance at the door. Jasper’s staring down at his empty plate, head bent, absently running his palm over the short hair at the back of his neck. Monty helped him cut it three days ago. He does not seem used to it yet.
As Raven makes her way toward them, her own face set like those of the warriors in Monty's village on the day before battle, she focuses her gaze on him and only on him. He wonders if she's afraid to see how people see her, or if she simply does not care. He wonders if her own people, who are cold to her, to whom she is cold, mean nothing to her, or if she only wishes them to believe that they mean nothing. What irritates the Sky People about her, Monty thinks, is that she knows how to be cold and can deploy it as a weapon, that she is at ease with weapons, and unscrupulous with their use. In his village, she would have been a warrior, her body scarred by now in a different way, her sharp and uncompromising mind respected even in its cruelty, but in her own settlement, she defies characterization. She has no obvious place.
People shy away from what they do not understand.
His bias, again. The hundred, too, or what is left of them, face a similar dilemma: neither insiders nor outsiders, survivors but not soldiers, pardoned but still guilty, slotted with awkward imprecision into roles for which they were never destined and haunted by memories and experiences outside the understanding of the later arrivals, the Sky People who came down in this impossible behemoth of a ship—but they, at least, are trying. Most of them. Raven does not try. She picks fights. She watches for uncertainty and fear and she pounces upon it, as emotion easy to defend against; she attacks, first, always, against any hint of judgement. She disdains the weak.
Some of this she has explained to him, while he sits on her bed and watches her train on the equipment she has put together herself, out of spare parts, and set up in her room. Watches her force out the last bits of weakness in herself. Her arms growing stronger, her muscles more taught. Her legs hanging useless and unneeded as she pulls herself up, up, with just her arms, until her chin passes the metal bar she's holding on to, until, for just a moment, as she pauses there at the summit, she seems at last to be at rest.
When she's done, she wipes her face off with a towel and then throws herself down into a chair, one leg sticking out in front of her in an unnaturally straight line, and she tells him about weakness. How Clarke was weak, because she left. How Jasper is weak, moping around Camp Jaha all day searching out ghosts in his own head, then numbing himself, afraid of himself. How even Bellamy is weak, crawling back to the Guard that betrayed him, trying to make himself useful, going out on scouting missions and looking for Clarke, when he knows that she doesn't want to be found.
At her worst: how Finn was weak. How he broke down, in the end.
Monty lets her talk for as long as she needs to, because he's heard other sermons about weakness and about strength. He knows that something indescribable, something that is maybe strength but is perhaps better understood as patience, or perseverance, is needed to coax living things out of the earth, to sweat out the warm months, to huddle down and wait through the cold. He knows not all of Raven's people have this quality. He knows the earth eats the unworthy.
When Raven arrives at their table, she sets her plate down sharply and sits down without saying hello. Jasper looks up, not startled—he seems, Monty thinks, to have a certain extra sense, an ability to see without seeing—and then stands up and picks up his plate, also without saying hello. He does tell Monty that he'll see him later, but the words are mumbled, and Monty only waves at him as he goes.
"I hope you're not tired of being in the middle of this feud," Raven says, a comment that Monty does not think is serious, though he shrugs as if it were. Raven is feuding with everyone. He is in the middle of everything, but also, an Outsider, a Grounder, an alien among aliens, in the middle of nothing.
"It's fine," he answers.
She picks up her fork, seems about to let the subject drop, then: "I think he's waiting for me to apologize. Like I—I'm not going to apologize for saving his life."
Like I killed his girlfriend myself? Like I did something wrong?
Monty stares at the sorry piece of meat, badly cooked, at the center of Raven's plate. He imagines them hunting: a people who do not know how to prepare meat, who do not know how to farm, who are uncertain of their place upon the ground, staring down the long, cold, gray months of winter.
"Do you want some—?"
"Oh. No." He looks up at her, smiling thinly, but not falsely. "He's not looking for an apology. You're just an easy person to blame, especially with Clarke not here, and Bellamy—"
"Bellamy.” The word bitten off hard, angry, between her teeth. “Hero Bellamy. Dad Bellamy." She stabs at her food with her fork. "I get it. He'll have to get over it. It's been a month."
"A month's not that long," Monty answers, even though, privately, he feels like it's been a near eternity.
*
After lunch, they head outside, feet squelching in dirt turned uncertain and infirm from the morning's cold rain. The air is chill and sharp and the sky above almost colorless, now that the last of the clouds have dissipated and left behind nothing but a clear, pale expanse, in which neither the time of day nor time of year can be accurately read. At the edge of the settlement, the newly built wall rises up. Beyond the wall, barely visible, the bare branches of the winter trees, like thin, searching claws, shake in an unexpected gust of wind.
Raven pulls her jacket tighter around herself. In this moment, she looks smaller than she is—a thought upon which he does not dwell, because he knows she would not want him to—and he feels not only in awe of her but fiercely protective, ashamed that she should wither in the shadowy ground between the spaceship and the wall. Perhaps feeling his eyes on her, she glances up. He forces himself not to look away, and she shrugs her shoulders up toward her ears and smiles. "So—you were telling me about your grandmother?" she asks. "And her pumpkins?"
He was. Pumpkins bigger than him some years, the good years, when he was still small.
He finds it difficult to imagine her using this voice, this particularly soft and particularly intimate voice, with anyone else. A strange image: tough, cold, fearless Raven Reyes, defiant of death, a weapon onto herself, now leaning heavy on her good leg as she pries each careful step out of the mud, her arms around herself, the expression about her eyes curious and soft.
They're almost to the main gate, passing beneath the watchful eyes of the Guards on the observation deck, when his story is interrupted by a sudden, loud shout, and he and Raven both stop dead-still in the mud. Waiting. Just a moment, but it stretches, even as the beating of his heart picks up. He flicks his gaze to her and finds her expression set and determined again.
Someone, they do not know who, is approaching, arriving on the other side of the gate.
"Grounders!" the Guard yells, and a flurry of activity follows, time speeding up again. Someone calling for the Chancellor, the heavy stomp of Guard feet, and then Raven's hand grabbing at his arm, just above the wrist, letting go again and then taking his hand.
"If it's Trikru, just fucking run," she murmurs.
This precise fear—his own clan come to drag him off, someone come to claim the price on his head—must be what is causing the distant panic in his heart, but his thoughts are rational, and do not believe this is true. He's no one. A deserter, but a lowly one. A traitor, but his betrayal already a small speck in the distance, a tiny part of a battle, perhaps a whole war, that has already been lost. The kill order is a formality, and the apparitions outside, whoever they may be, have not come for him.
From outside, a familiar voice shouts: "We come in peace! We're here to speak to the Chancellor!" A pause, and he hears the stomp of hooves, the fluttering exhale of a horse's breath: a restless animal barely restrained. "And Bellamy Blake!"
The Guards do not open the gate. A small crowd has started to gather on the Camp Jaha side, Monty and Raven at the fore of it only by chance, and the air takes on a tone half panic, half unadulterated thrill, a crackling uncertainty and excitement from a people too long in isolation, too long on edge. Through the crowd, three figures push their way with some difficulty: the Chancellor, and behind her Marcus Kane, and then Bellamy. He's pulling on his Guard's jacket, perhaps not aware that he has been summoned by name. Monty searches for emotion in Bellamy's face but sees only the hard set of his jaw, the wary narrowing of his eyes.
He thinks Clarke's on the other side of the gate.
Possible. But if she is, she's coming home in chains.
"Open the gates," Abby yells, and from the strain in her voice, it is clear that she is, as Bellamy, gripped by an irrational and fearful hope.
When the gate does open it reveals, not Clarke, but two figures on horseback: Indra on the left, and Octavia, in the clothes of a Trikru warrior, on the right. Her voice, then, calling for her brother from the far side of the wall. They have not seen each other since the Mountain was destroyed, since Lexa called her people back and Octavia went with them. She looks different than she did a month before, but not unexpectedly so: her hair longer, the braids more intricate, her face thinner and lacking the roundness of youth.
“We’ve come to tell you that Clarke has been spotted,” she says.
Bellamy steps forward at the name, hands in useless fists. Kane holds him back with a hand to his chest.
“North of here,” Octavia continues, “in the woods near the river. Then the scout lost track of her.”
“And if you want her back in this settlement alive, you should work on finding her again. Quickly,” Indra adds.
“Is that a threat?” Abby snaps.
“No. A warning.” Indra looks to Abby, then to Kane. “You aren’t the only ones looking for her. Her reputation is growing among the clans. Many believe she has great power, and if they kill her, they can take it for themselves.”
“Power?” Bellamy’s voice, incredulous and strangled, addressed more to Octavia than Indra. “What sort of power?”
“Power over death itself. She’s known as Wanheda.”
Indra pauses; a ripple of confusion through the crowd; Raven still holding Monty’s hand, and radiating scorn.
“What does that mean?” Abby asks, and as Indra answers, Monty murmurs quietly along with her:
“The Commander of Death.”
*
“You don’t believe this Commander of Death bullshit, do you?” Raven asks, loud and sudden into a previously comfortable silence. They’re lying side by side on their backs on her bed, their shoulders touching. Her room has no windows, but outside it is probably dusk.
Does he believe? He believes that he felt a shiver of fear at the word: Wanheda. A ghost-breath in his native tongue, wafting over the back of his neck. A cracked, gnarled word from the deep soil of the earth, an omen, a warning. A figure in the forest, barely visible between the trees, a flicker, a nightmare still present upon waking.
And yet: he was in the Mountain himself; he saw the dead. He helped to bury them, and then he walked for hours back to Camp Jaha, tired, unceasing, Raven limping beside him and refusing to speak, Jasper on his other side, dazed and blank and his hair in his eyes, holding a weapon kept pointed at the ground. Three figures in a group of shuffling, weary people, but only people. Clarke with her head high, her gaze on the horizon, walking at the back as if unable to stand the feel of eyes on her, or unwilling, for a few final moments, to let her people out of her sight.
"Some people," he says, not an answer, because he cannot explain the difference between what he knows and what he believes, what he remembers and what he fears, "can't believe that anyone but Wanheda could defeat the Mountain. The Commander's best warriors were there, they know what happened, but ordinary people? You don't understand. The Mountain was a legend."
Raven doesn't answer for a long while. He can hear her breathing, can hear every slight movement of her body against the bed.
"I wasn't asking about other people," she says, then. He'd expected she would snap, but her voice is quiet. "When Indra said Wanheda, you looked... like you were expecting to see a ghost or something."
"I don't hear a lot of Trig around here."
Sorry excuse. She knows it. He doesn't want to talk about it.
"You know it wasn't even Clarke," Raven says, a little louder. She turns her head so she's staring at him, at his profile as he keeps his eyes fixed on the gray shadow of the ceiling above. "Not just her. She and Bellamy pulled the lever, to let the radiation in, but only after I wrote the code." The sharp emphasis on I, almost defensive, almost pleading, makes him wonder if she's begging for recognition or forgiveness. "I'm not even—computers were never my area of expertise. But more mine than Bellamy's or Clarke's. They couldn't have done it by themselves."
The Alpha Station computers were brought back to life last week. Raven and Sinclair headed the project, and Monty sat in with them to watch. No Trig words could have described the process, nor even the sensation of voyeurism he felt, of seeing what should not be seen because it should not exist. A block of odd black boxes, a strange pattern of lights, the blink and fizz of the screen as it came on. Then an inscrutable pattern of figures jumping in and out of sight, neon green letters and numbers in incomprehensible strings. He'd sat utterly still and stared with sick fascination, deeply desiring this secret knowledge, but deeply suspicious, too. Half outside himself, half out of this life, testing out the sureness of his balance in the next.
He imagines himself in Raven's place, keeper of sacred understanding, a fast rush of adrenaline in his veins as his mind jumps and blinks and fizzes in time to the neon patterns, as he draws them out, those patterns of death, like magic from his fingers. Was that what it felt like? Or merely like putting together a puzzle, resolving a complicated problem that simply needed to be solved?
She is watching him, half-turned on her side. Eyes wide open and lips parted and waiting. She curls her fingers around his arm.
"If you'd been alone," he asks, wrapping his hand over hers, "would you have done it? Would you have pulled the lever, too?"
She nods. Doesn't hesitate, but doesn't speak.
"I would have, too," he says, quiet, as in his mind the Mountain falls simply, severely inward, crumbles down upon itself and into the earth. "I would have and I wouldn't have any regrets. I'm glad it's gone, you know?" Squeezes her hand, hard. "I'm glad it's gone."
*
Raven wakes him the next morning with an excited knock on his door. He knows it's her even before he opens it, still bleary, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes with his fist.
"I've been thinking—"
"Never a good sign," he mumbles, as he steps back to let her in.
"Funny. I've been thinking and I know what we should do today."
Monty sits back down on the edge of his bed, rubs at his eyes again and passes his hand over his face. All right. Mostly awake now. Raven is bright and smiling and happy, waiting for him to ask, but he takes a long moment, just watching her, taking her in, before he does.
"And? What are we doing?"
"Going to Mecha. I got us permission to leave camp for the day." She steps closer, rests her hands on his shoulders with great purpose, and he tilts his head back and smiles up at her. He's still a bit drowsy, still quietly drifting. "I want you to see where I'm from."
"Where you're from," Monty echoes. He reaches up and rests his own hands on her upper arms, as if he were bracing himself on her. The gesture feels more intimate than he'd intended. "I thought you were from space."
"Monty, if I could show you the stars, I would." She gives his shoulders a last squeeze, then steps back. "But we'll have to settle for my home station. I know roughly where it landed. But it's a bit far. Can we take your horse?"
He's a little surprised at the suggestion. The first and only time she tried riding—no more than a slow walk around Alpha Station, Monty on the ground leading his horse gently while Raven swayed, uncertain, clearly terrified, on its back—she'd declared the experiment a failure. He'd figured he'd have to wait at least a month before bringing up the possibility of trying it again. This time, he helps her up first and then climbs on, too, sitting in front of her so she can wrap her arms around his waist. He pretends he does not feel the close pressure of her body against him, her legs tucked in against his legs, her nose pressed to his shoulder, because if he dwells too carefully and too long upon these feelings, he won't even be able to navigate them safely through the gate.
But he does notice. And his palms feel slick with sweat.
Once they're beyond the wall, they pick up speed, and the faster his horse gallops, the farther they get from Camp Jaha and the hulking shadow of the ship, the more a familiar, clean, free feeling eases through him. Blissfully, he feels an unexpected, long-held tension seeping away.
Raven, behind him, seems to be feeling the opposite sensation. Her grip around him tightens. He hears, or thinks he hears, a string of low and colorful obscenities mumbled into the fabric of his shirt.
When they get to the forest, they slow down. Raven's hold around him loosens again, and her breathing gradually evens out and slows. "You know what they have in Mount Weather?" she asks, ducking, barely in time, beneath a low-hanging branch, and Monty glances briefly over his shoulder at her.
"Lots of shit, probably," he answers. "I spent most of my time there chained up or in a cage, so—I wouldn’t know."
"Cars," Raven says, ignoring his bitter comment. And it's fine. She knows he doesn't want to go back to the Mountain. She knows he thinks the whole damned place is cursed. "Auto-mo-biles, Monty. A step up in travel. I bet I could fix one up if I could just get my hands on it."
"You could," Monty agrees. "But my feet and my horse work just fine for me."
Raven just grunts, low and disbelieving, but when the ground dips and hollows, and they sway to the irregular rhythm of the horse's feet, he hears her bite back a scared, high gasp, and rest her forehead against the space between his shoulder blades.
*
Everything that falls from the sky is unique.
First the dropship, appearing, in glimpses through the trees, as massive and intimidating as an ancient monolith, holding dominion over its clearing—yet spewing forth from its gaping mouth a new settlement, a raw and angry and vengeful riot in the woods. Then Raven's escape pod, beautiful and small, nestled in among the grass like hidden treasure. Later, Alpha Station, impossibly large and still growing, sprawling, redefining the barren landscape into which it has settled, blending its crooked metal with the dirt.
And now Mecha Station. A long, low, rectangular block, half-sunk into the shore by the lake. It has about it already an air of abandon, not unlike the dead cities, as if it were a relic of human achievement now long past, strange and inscrutable and, soon, the basis of myth.
Monty assumes Raven will want to show him her old bedroom, or perhaps take him on a hunt for some personal object or memento, something she wants to save before the scavengers inevitably arrive. But instead, she leads him, through hallways littered with debris, over an obstacle course of junk shaken loose and strewn about in the violence of landing, to a long, rectangular window at the back of the ship.
The window frames a magnificent view of the lake and the distant snow-capped mountains beyond. The high late-morning sun sends glittering sparks across the water, while the sky above extends infinitely, cloudless, the palest blue. To Monty, it is absolutely breathtaking. Only when he looks at Raven's face, sees the disappointment there and the shade of confusion, too, does he remember that this is not the landscape of her youth.
"See this?" Raven asks, an abrupt interruption, her voice falsely buoyant and light. "This was my favorite spot on the whole Ark. I used to stand here and look out this window before a spacewalk, just to psych myself up. And over here—" she gestures, then leads him off to the right, "this is the airlock, beyond here.”
They're standing, now, in front of a door made mostly out of glass, an interlocking, circular piece of metal in the center delineating where the wall can split in two. Beyond, a smaller room, and another circular door, safely shut and windowless. Even inert, the obvious complexity of the mechanism inspires in him a low feeling of unfathomable awe. He’s spent almost five weeks now at Camp Jaha, sleeping every night in a little room in a downed spaceship, but he still marvels, in moments like these, when he realizes that such odd machines as this exist.
"I'd come in through there," she says, gesturing toward the circular door, "and then once it was closed, this door could open and—"
"I know how airlocks work."
Not the point, he knows: she wasn't explaining for his benefit. But she looks embarrassed for a moment anyway.
"Right. Sorry."
Her fingers wander over the control panel next to the door, pushing one of the buttons, first tentatively, then with more force, but nothing happens. The door stays firmly shut. No electricity, of course. No spark. And on the other side of the airlock, not stars and space and weightless flight but water, and the shore, and gravity to hold a former spacewalker down.
"Do you miss it?" Monty asks. "Being up there?"
He's pitched his voice low, quieter than usual, but it is nowhere as soft as Raven's is when, after a long moment, she answers: "Sometimes." A slight fissure forms between the syllables, threatening to crack them apart. He had not expected her to sound quite this lost.
And he doesn't know what to say. He starts with just her name, tentative, no idea what may come next.
Before he can decide, even this partial sentiment is obliterated, neatly and suddenly, by the distant sound of movement somewhere behind them, beyond the far end of the hall. Movement—human movement. He hears the clang of heavy-soled boots on the floor, the irritated scrape of objects shoved roughly out of the way. Time slows, and every sense but hearing fades.
Next to him, Raven mumbles a sharp, angry, “Fuck,” and immediately grabs for his arm.
He's not entirely sure what is happening, why his pulse is jumping in his throat: is he only surprised, perhaps, that the station had seemed so abandoned, so distant from civilization, and here they have found themselves so unexpectedly not alone? Or are his emotions tuned to Raven's lead, her obvious panic, as she yanks him along with such force that he almost trips over his own feet?
She grabs at the handle of a door, so slim and discreet Monty might never have noticed it was there, and shoves him through, follows after and then shuts them neatly and efficiently inside.
The footsteps are louder now, closer, and Monty's breath is trapped within his lungs.
Wherever they are, it is pitch black and narrow. Hardly any space to breathe, even if he could. His body feels frozen with terror now deeply set in. Raven is so close that he can hear the ragged working of her lungs, the shaky exhales she is trying to bite down.
Slowly, he shifts his weight from his left foot to his right, and his arm brushes up against something strange in the dark. Something stiff but soft, like an arm without bones. He yelps, but the sound is caught at the last second by Raven's hand clamped hard over his mouth.
"Shhh," she whispers. "That's the Guard outside. I didn't know they'd started scouting Mecha already. I didn't know they'd be here. But it’s them."
Monty doesn't care a bit about the Guard. He yanks Raven's hand away from his mouth and hisses, each word barely audible through the hard grind of his teeth: "There is—something—in here."
She does not answer right away. Only a moment of silence, broken by the thud of footsteps outside, closer and closer, and then, slowly, weaker and farther away.
Then Raven takes his hand and brings it back to the heavy, boneless, thing, and curls his fingers around it until it squashes within his fist. "It's a space suit," she says, voice still secretive and quiet, but beneath that, noticeably amused. "We're in the closet where engineering kept all the spare suits. It's okay."
She lets go of his hand, and he lets go of his breath. His fingers test out the texture of the material carefully. Curiosity settles in the wake of fright. The monster was nothing more than a sleeve, a heavy, strange, empty sleeve, and as he reaches out farther into the darkness, he encounters several more layers of similar fabric, stretching out for some unknown distance along the wall.
"Oh," he says, and Raven stifles a laugh. The sound is at his expense, but still makes him smile.
"Shhh," he reminds her, though, pretending to be angry. "Be quiet or they'll hear us."
"Oh, right. Sure." She sounds on the verge of giggling, which makes Monty want to laugh in turn. But then he feels her hands curl around the edges of his jacket, tug him a little closer, and her voice drops again and she says, forcing herself to be serious now, "We really should. Be quiet. We don't know if they'll be back."
He shuffles a half-step forward. His eyes have not adjusted to the dim, because there is nothing to which they can adjust; not a bit of light filters in even at the edges of the door. All he knows is that she is ever closer in the small, narrow space and the dark.
"Why—why does it matter anyway?" he asks, clearing his throat around the slight stutter in his words. "You said we had permission to leave camp."
"Permission to leave, yeah," Raven answers. "Not to come to Mecha. I said you were teaching me how to identify medicinal herbs."
"Medicinal herbs," Monty echoes.
For some reason he cannot name—the image of Raven arguing with the Chancellor about plants, the obviously thin nature of the excuse—he finds the familiar words nearly incomprehensible. They echo again and again in his mind, quickly becoming a rhythm without sense.
“Yeah,” Raven whispers. “I figured… you know, it was probable enough…”
Medicinal herbs. Medicinal herbs.
He hears his own heart beating steadily in his ears; he can feel the heat of her body next to his. She shifts a bit closer. His hands settle, tentative at first, against her hips, and her hips bump up against his hips, and her hands let go of his jacket, her palms settling instead against his chest.
"Maybe," he breathes, "on the way back—"
His words cut off, his breath cuts off, her lips pressed against his on an exhale.
He is uncertain, just for a moment, and then he kisses her in return.
*
A disturbance in the night sky. A flash of light arcing its way toward the ground. And the next day, a strange little ship hidden among the burnt-orange leaves, which crunched beneath his feet as he approached. He remembers the air was crisp and smelled like rain, the sharp scent of the outdoors after the harvest, as the season tips forward and slides down to meet the cold part of the year. When he pulled at the door, it opened with surprising ease, and almost knocked him off his feet. He stood back and thought, dumbly, only this: that the ship looked like a giant insect, getting ready once again to take flight.
Inside the insect, the ship, a woman who had previously walked among stars. For a long moment, he found himself unable to speak, shocked by the unexpected beauty of her face.
She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead, and he heard himself ask, at last, though as if from a distance, if she was all right.
Hearing him speak, and in her tongue, seemed to draw her from herself. Did the people above even know there were people below? She exhaled a light, “Oh,” surprised but restrained, and touched her fingers to the wound. They were already blood-stained, but she looked at them again as if shocked by her own body, by her own presence.
"I'm—I’m okay." Her brow furrowed. "Who are you?"
"I'm Monty." He held out his hand, thinking perhaps he might help her to climb down. What hurtling through space might do to a body, he could only guess. Still, he half-expected she would reject the offer, and was startled when he felt her hand slip neatly into his.
“I’m Raven.”
He smiled, genuine and broad. "Raven. Okay. Welcome to Earth."
Now, riding back to Camp Jaha, he remembers her voice breaking—sometimes—her gaze distant as she stared at the airlock door, and he wonders, what if she really could introduce him to the stars?
*
Monty does not expect they will talk about the kiss—how they clung to each other, desperate, blinded, tracing the outlines of each other’s bodies in the dark—and that is fine. He has no regrets. And he doubts Raven does either, not only because he has never known her to be held down by remorse, but because of the way she let her hand rest, with unexpected gentleness, against his cheek (soft shaking exhale of breath against his lips), in that final moment before she pulled back and opened the door.
That night, they huddle together by the fire, watching the snap and dance of the flames long after the winter chill has driven everyone else inside. Raven’s brought one of the old orange dropship blankets with her. They wrap it around their shoulders and over their knees, and Monty curls his arm around Raven’s waist, and she lets her head rest against the space beneath his shoulder, above his heart.
Occasionally, one of the night patrol passes by. Miller’s on duty tonight, and when he sees them still up and outside, he jokes, “What’s this, Reyes? Date night?”
She sticks her hand out from underneath the blanket, flips her middle finger up and warns, “Go float yourself, Miller.” He holds up his hands in mock surrender and moves on.
Raven’s hand sneaks back under the blanket and settles again on Monty’s knee.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you,” she says, and for a moment, he feels tense despite the easy, light tone of her voice. She sits up a little and leans back just far enough to reach and twitch a bit of hair out of his eyes. “I like this new look.”
“Yeah?” He runs his hand over the top of his head, feeling out the still-unexpected short strands of his hair. Jasper cut it for him, the same day Monty helped him with his own new look. “Do you think it makes me look like one of you?”
“Maybe. The hair and the outfit...”
In the flicker of light from the fire, he can see the hint of a smile on her face. But the rest of her expression is thoughtful and soft.
He considers asking her why she took him to Mecha Station, but the question seems useless, a waste of the last bit of night they have left, when he’s quite sure that he already knows. She is lost. Trying to return to someplace that she knows. Because if she is not Spacewalker, and she is not Wanheda, if she is neither Raven Reyes of Mecha Station, nor of the hundred, what is left? Who is she?
He’d like to tell her: someone I love, or could someday love, but she could tell him the same, and he’d still feel no more certain in his own skin. With his short hair, and his new clothes.
The blanket has started to fall down from their shoulders. He pulls it up and wraps it securely in place again. It won’t keep them warm much longer but for the moment, it’s enough, as Raven watches him with an unusual patience, as he swallows down his own nerves, seeks out the deepest stores of tenderness within himself. He rests his palm carefully against her cheek, as she did for him, and stretches his fingers up until they slide into her hair. Though he doesn’t tug her forward, she leans in closer, and he wonders if this feeling is anything like what she might have felt, when she still lived in the sky, in the moments before she leapt out of the airlock door and into space.
“I’d like,” he tries. “I’d like to kiss you now, I think.”
“You think?” Gently mocking him again. She hides her hands under the blanket, one still on his leg. Behind her, the broken arch of the station looms, and around them he can hear the trudge of boots in the dirt, but this, this subtle pressure of her hand on his leg, has become the tiny center of the universe.
“I think,” Raven says, “that you should.”
He should.
Uncertain from which angle to approach, dancing around each other at first as they lean in, still they manage to drift closer, closer. Nose bumps up against nose. He swipes his thumb across her cheekbone. He feels her mouth soft against his as the fire cracks and snaps, sending tiny sparks and embers like burning orange stars into the night.