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He can feel his heartbeat in three places—chest, incision, bone. It’s a noisy conversation they have with him, asking him over and over what the hell he’s done to himself. There’s no answer to give that will make the pounding stop, and so none is offered.
For awhile it’s all he hears, his own blood talking to him. His injuries make for poor company—all they do is complain. It would be a relatively simple effort to quiet them, but Cee’s put the kit out of reach and if he wants to speak with oblivion instead of his own nerve endings he’s going to have to stand up.
He turns his head enough to look over at her cot, and it’s a startle to find her blanket tented over her head, a faint glow glittering through the fabric. He hadn’t heard her wake up—blood was too noisy.
“What has you so possessed, girl?” he asks, and he can barely hear his own words, but they seem to catch her attention. She pulls the blanket down from her head, and the light of her flashpen illuminates the pod’s cabin.
“Sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“It wasn’t you.” Her hair bristles with static and sleep, and he wonders for the dozenth time how young she really is.
“How are you feeling?”
“Restless,” he tells her. “Heart’s too loud.”
“I think you’re—” She grabs her chronometer from underneath her bunk and frowns at it. “You’re due for another round of meds soon.”
She crawls out of bed and feels her way to the bulkhead where she keeps their fresh provision of medical supplies. He can’t see her from this angle, but she reappears in front of his cot in short order, a syringe and vial in hand.
“In the arm’s fine,” he murmurs, and she kneels down to roll up his sleeve and swab a spot clean on his bicep.
“No fever,” she says after pressing a wrist to his forehead. “Good. Hopefully we won’t have to buy any more ibuprofen.”
The sting of the needle is an inconsequential thing, and it’s almost immediately made up for by the rush of calm that floods his system. His heartbeat recedes back into its rightful domain beneath his ribs, and the noise dies down.
“What were you planning under the covers?” he asks as she disappears again to pack away the syringe and vial.
“Just writing,” she tells him, going back to her own bed and curling up in a loose ball. Her journal is in her hands again, and she looks down at the face of open pages. “There was a line I couldn’t remember for the longest time and it was driving me crazy, but I was having a dream about it and woke up to write it down before I forgot again.”
The twitch of his mouth is unavoidable. “What was the line?”
“Oh.” She pauses, her lips pursing. “I can’t tell you. It’s a spoiler.”
He laughs even though it hurts, and she sags a little on the bed. “Read it to me, then.”
“No way.” The journal snaps closed with a twitch of her hand. “I’m buying a new copy when we reach the Pug. After I’m done, you can read it.”
“But it won’t be the unabridged version,” he says, eyes drawn to the book. “That’s about exclusive print as it gets.”
“Unlicensed unabridged version,” she mutters, looking down at it.
“Art is just a way for humanity to talk to ourselves,” he informs her. She brightens a little at that, and he doesn’t tell her that he’s not the first man to make such a claim. “Ain’t no room for licensing in such a discussion.”
“I’ll still go to jail if I try to print this.” The journal shakes in her hand as she wiggles it at him, the pages wobbling with a faint whiff of air.
“Never met a man in prison for selling art.”
“Have you been in prison?”
He dismisses her concerns with a wave of his hand. The movement is sluggish, only made possible by breaking through the thick membrane of medical-grade pain relief. “For petty affairs,” he tells her. “And that’s pettier still. You’d just get fined.”
“Even worse.” She looks over at their gear, as if she can’t help herself. A sigh escapes her and it sounds far too exhausted for a girl her age. “I hope it’s enough,” she says with a jerk of her chin to their packs.
“It’s a creamy sum. It’ll get us home.”
“Where’s that?”
“You tell me,” he replies. “You got any family?”
“Just my dad,” she whispers, and something foul twists in his gut.
“What about friends?”
“What do you think?” The humour in her words is bitter, spoken through her teeth, and he regrets asking at all.
He looks away, up at the viewport. They’re in motion, back to Puggart Bench, but all the stars are too far away to do anything but hang stuck in the sky.
“I think you got at least one,” he says quietly. When she snorts, his eyes flick to her. “What’s so tickling about that?”
She shrugs, and that’s her only answer.
“I know a crofter,” he tells her then. “More than willin’ to house and help if the pay is pretty, long as we assist in her day-to-days. A low lay for the season might be in our benefit.”
“Where?”
“On Gaubolt.”
“Never heard of it.”
“That is precisely the point.”
“That might be okay,” she sighs, her head nodding in deliberation. He’s clearly not through with his pitch.
“It better be,” he says. “Ain’t a lot of options elsewise.”
“I can work,” she tells him. “The boards on Pug change all the time.”
“So can I, but I’d rather avoid contract gigs for the time being.” He shifts in the cot, bringing his cleaved shoulder into view. “Boards ain’t kind to hobbled men.”
She shakes her head. “Your trophy case is enough to get a lease on a flat. You can rest and I can figure something out.”
“Or we can catch a sling to Gaubolt.”
Cee is silent again, and he can’t figure why. She fidgets with her journal, her thumb feathering the pages. She doesn’t have a thrower on him this time, but the air’s tense enough that there may as well have been a gun in the room.
“Or we even split,” he suggests with a wet of his lips, and she looks up. “Cut and run on our merry ways when we get to the Pug.”
“You want to do that?” she asks. There’s a tremor in her voice again, but it’s not from rage.
“No,” he says plainly. “Do you?”
“I don’t—” Her mouth twists and she looks up at the viewport. “I know the Pug. I don’t know Gaubolt.”
The kernel finally reveals itself. He’s overestimated the breadth of her trust, even if its depth is plain as sky.
“We’re out of the Green now, girl,” he whispers. “But my offer of protection still stands, and it will as long as I draw breath.”
She considers him, perhaps wondering how useful that offer is coming from a wounded man with one arm. “So this is just what, a debt you’re repaying? For my father?”
“For you,” he corrects her, and she seems surprised at that. “In all my time, not a man alive who had the opportunity to take my spoils and leave me for rot would’ve forsaken such good fortune. You got me loyal as a dog now, kid, and I intend to make good on that.”
Cee ducks back to the sanctuary of her journal, thumbing the pages some more. She sells her own virtue short because she doesn’t know how precious it is. How does he tell her that? Make her understand plainly that she’s got a kind of integrity in easy spades that most others dream of even standing in the shadow of.
“You said,” she whispers after a moment, her voice thick. “You said partners are made through candid discord.”
“Discourse.”
She glares at him and he drops it. “If we’re going to Gaubolt, you have to tell me everything. Why we’re going, what it’s like, who’s going to be there, how we can leave—everything.”
“That’s a fair deal,” he says with a grin. “And trust that any obfuscation of truth is done in ignorance, not exclusive self-interest.”
She nods, satisfied with his answer, and lays down on her cot. He listens to her settle as he looks back up to the viewport, watching the stars stay exactly where they always are. When she shuts off her flashpen, the cabin goes awash in a deep pale light from overhead.
“Okay,” she murmurs. “I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why do you talk like that?”
He smiles. “Be specific in your line of inquiry, girl, or we’re gonna be here awhile.”
“Never mind.”
She shifts around some more and he settles into his own bed. The pain has long since faded into a background radiation that easy enough to tune out. He’s spent most of the freighter ride sleeping, but exhaustion still keeps its claws in him, and he’s quick to let his eyes droop back closed.
“Partners, then,” she whispers, low enough that he could pretend to be asleep and hadn’t heard it.
“Partners,” he answers instead. “And friends.”
She accepts that promise wordlessly, but the tension humming in the air is gone and the oxygen around them is finally quiet, too.
Then she speaks, once more. “I’ll set the alarm for your next dose.”
He doesn’t remember falling asleep, but he remembers how quiet it is.