Chapter Text
Calico lifted a spanner with his zero-point beam and passed it to Harkinss. One of her docked arms twitched as if reaching for it. The Ghost blinked his orange eye and pretended he didn’t notice, holding it patiently until she got it right.
The author, LaGrange, watched them intently. Cleo felt a small flare of annoyance as she came upon him blocking the doorway. She made a silent attempt to retreat without being noticed, but it was no use. LaGrange eyed her and straightened up, turned around, and leaned in, taking a breath like he was about to ask a question. Ever since they’d let him come aboard, he’d had a bad habit of peppering her crew with invasive questions at inopportune times. Cleo was next.
“Those two always been so close?” he asked her quietly. No preamble or anything, just a thumb over his shoulder at Cal and Harkinss, as if the question had been on the tip of his tongue this whole time. He had his datapad and stylus out, and Cleo could see he’d been jotting down some notes already, watching the pair work on Harkinss’ souped-up Pike.
“Not sure what you mean,” Cleo said, knowing exactly what he meant.
“Has he always had that shell?” LaGrange asked. “I saw her doing maintenance on it earlier. She seemed to know it as if she’d crafted it herself.” At Cleo’s silence, he went on. “If he had it when you were Risen, I wonder what sort of history he had with her from before. Shanks, you know—in many communities, they’re like pets to them. Some texts referring to Ghosts and Shanks use very similar language, as if the two have little distinction. Others, with less reverence for their roots and the Great Machine, speak of Ghosts only with reference to monetary value, and their potential for some vestige of control over Lightbearers. Now, from what I’ve heard the crew say about her father…”
And on he went, pontificating as he often did. Cleo looked past him and watched Harkinss. She’d been just a Dreg when they’d met, struggling to hold her father’s shock blade—the blade that had killed her, the blade that had kept Cal from rezzing her in a way that managed to stick, the blade that Cal had encouraged her to pull from Cleo’s chest. Such a little thing.
“…that she might feel some sort of ownership over him. Given the complicated feelings from Eliksni, the manifestation of envy, that the Blessings of the Great Machine went not to their kind, but…”
What Ether the crew could manufacture was far more than Harkinss had been alotted before. Now that she’d grown, she’d had donned the hood characteristic of a Marauder, though they were waiting for her docked limbs to grow back. She still talked little, only to Cal and herself. Mainly to Cal. He was such a softie for her, after all.
“…What do you think?” LaGrange said, snapping Cleo back to the conversation at hand.
“I think you do an awful lot of talking for someone who’s supposed to be a writer.”
She watched the correction, translator , form on his lips and get held back by his tongue. If he corrected her, he’d have to admit that he wasn’t much of a writer after all, and therefore had no purpose among their crew.
The blessed quiet lasted only a moment.
“I’m curious,” he went on, “if you have a contingency plan for what you would do should she ever try to… abduct him.”
Cleo gave him a dubious look.
“I respect what I cannot steal from,” he said, quoting from something Cleo had probably never read. “She is young, and the law of the Reef is all she’s known. It’s the rule of life out here, especially with respect to her lineage. I should know, since I essentially wrote the book on it.”
“Been so long since you had a story to tell that I’d hate to see you crafting a narrative where there isn’t one,” Cleo said. Her gaze narrowed to a glare.
LaGrange put up his hands up in surrender. “Stranger things have happened. That’s all I’ll say.”
When he was gone, Cleo took his place in the doorway, leaning on the frame with her arms crossed. Abduct him. She snorted. Abscond with him, more like. But she tried to picture it: Harkinss snatching Cal in some anti-transmat cage, boarding her Pike in the dead of night, pulling up her hood, and rumbling out along the tangles of the Reef to seek favor with her mutinous father. All of it, the rescuing, the loyalty, the favors as some sort of long con, a point of proof that mutineering was an inherited trait.
She wasn’t sure why, but the thought made Cleo oddly proud.