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Marya’s always so self-assured, so confident about the techniques she teaches Ludmila, fastening bolts through plates, working metal like it’s magic. When Ludmila watches her soldering, when Captain Junková puts her hands on top of Ludmila’s hands, guides her, shows her, teaches her, and Ludmila feels her face heat beneath her goggles—
It’s been. Educational. Flying aboard the Kingfisher.
Kočka bruxes in her ear while she’s watching Marya fix the rigging, and Ludmila bats her hand at him. “Hush,” she whispers. “It’s just a crush.”
He is not there on her shoulder when she is taken by the Straka, plunged into the crow’s massive maw while Marya screams her name. This is right, she remembers thinking. She asked to be the captain for today, and the captain goes down with the ship. What does it matter that it was her very first act as ship’s captain, losing this battle? What does it matter that, though she strives to assert herself as a grown adult, responsible and experienced, as capable as any of these seasoned sailors and wind riders, she is still in so many ways just a girl? Out of her depth. Adrift. None of it matters.
She smells her own flesh, burning, and she hears the screams of her injured and dying crewmates. The people she was supposed to protect. The people Marya trusted her to protect, and now look what she’s gone and done. Got them all killed. Shit excuse for a captain.
She feels the Warding Bond that Marya placed on her stretch and snap, feels the loss like it’s a cut tendon.
And she falls backward into nothing.
In the original text, unedited and unabridged, she lands very hard on a dry and dusty floor. The worms care for her, give her things to make her stronger, like she once did with Kočka. These creatures save her life, and she owes them a debt. She repays it in ingenuity and invention, making them arms and legs and lips and ears, making them as human as she can manage. They saved her life. She must repay them.
She gives them these upgrades, and in return they give her a throne. Though she tries to deny it, they push it on her. Lead us, they beg. Protect us. Right. Like she protected her dead crew. When they ask her to build them a machine, something capable of housing the Calefactory Biangle and keeping the Corrodi safe, how can she refuse? They protected her when she was at her most vulnerable. She must do the same to her subjects. Otherwise, she is just repeating all her same mistakes, letting down the people who trust her to guide them.
Her hands have always been clever.
Too clever for her own good.
What her hands build is monstrous, evil, and it was a work of love which can only mean that what’s in her heart is monstrous and evil, too. The giant bird takes flight, filthy and vicious and powerful, and the Corrodi thank her and praise her as they claw out her heart.
And the Empress of Ruin reigns over Zern in all her glory, slick with oil and blood.
It wasn’t really her, not now, not in this version of the story. Just a shadow puppet of her, cast over Zern and its inhabitants for a thousand years. The idea of her, without her mind and soul behind it. But that shadow took so much. Hurt so many.
Killed Comfrey MacLeod.
Comfrey, who was Marya’s Marya.
She’s gone forever now, and it’s Ludmila’s fault, even if it was only an empty copy of her that struck the killing blow.
At the funeral, she keeps her distance, letting Olethra say her goodbyes, letting Marya find some closure.
It’s Kočka who comes and finds her, skitters up her body and perches on her shoulder. “We do not need to stay here,” he points out, nuzzling against her jaw. “We could go and explore Zumhara, go shopping— or, I think there is some Disaronno in the galley—”
“Yes,” she says, turning away from Comfrey MacLeod’s somber sendoff. “This is a good idea. Let’s get drunk.”
Kočka shouldn’t drink alcohol, probably, but he also shouldn’t wear a little scarf and possess human-like intellect, so, Ludmila decides it’s okay that he has a few nips. She doesn’t realize she’s crying until one of his little paws comes up to wipe away her tears. She chokes back more Disaronno and lets the rat wipe her eyes with the end of his scarf.
“You are going to be okay,” Kočka says. “We both will.”
(She falls asleep there in the galley, but she wakes up in the bedroom she was assigned, which means somebody found her and carried her to bed like she’s a child. In the morning, she doesn’t ask questions.)
Marya keeps trying to talk to her about feelings.
“I have been informed that meditation is not real, but therapy is, and we both need, like, a shit-ton of it,” she says to Ludmila one day. “Barring that, I just want you to know that I am here if you need to talk.”
Well, yes, she needs to talk. Of course she needs to talk. But she’s not going to talk to Marya.
Marya, who never stopped thinking about her, who did finally come and save her. Marya who also left her waiting at a door for a thousand years. Things that weren’t real but feel real mix and congeal with things that were real but feel fake, and she’s left in a storm of conflicted feelings and pointless emotions. She can’t possibly resent Marya. But the Queen of Zern made an artform of resentment, and all that pain didn’t just disappear. It rests around the edges of her golden heart, the ghost of a grudge, love that sat in a kiln until it was fired into hate.
“What have you been up to?” Ludmila asks her eventually. “While I was… ? What did you do?”
Marya blinks. “I opened a toy shop with my Auntie Zuzu,” she says. She tells Ludmila about the wares she sold, and the half-smiles on the faces of the children in Scrapsylvania.
“You did not fly?”
Her old captain lets out a long breath. “Of course not, Mila,” she says. “I could not bear it. I felt like the sky had made its message clear enough.”
Ludmila blinks back tears, thinking about Marya Junková, the Kid herself, keeping herself on the ground. Never looking up, never dreaming larger. “I’m sorry.”
“My little salad, do not be sorry,” Marya rushes to say. “You did nothing wrong.”
But she did everything wrong. She led her crew into a massacre. She abandoned Marya. She subjugated an entire dimension under her tyrannical, violent rule. And even though it wasn’t truly her, not now, not now that Marya saved her, it still happened. Torse still couldn’t face her directly, always looking over her shoulder the sparse number of times she spoke to him before he took off back home. His home, which she destroyed. Which her arrival ruined.
“Please don’t forgive me,” Ludmila begs, pushing away Marya’s grasping hands like she can shove away the warm and understanding words. “Please do not, I cannot bear it.”
“There is nothing to forgive,” Marya insists.
“I would have killed you,” she insists, knowing it is true. The thing the Corrodi Primarch made her into would have dragged Marya’s remains through the ragged scrapyard of Zern, cutting open her flesh on jagged metal and rusted nails. “I would have put you through so much before I killed you, too, I know this. I do not remember all the details but I remember the deep hatred. How can— how can you forgive me for this? The spite? The rage?”
Marya’s hand falls on her face. Ludmila tenses up, like she might be slapped or kissed. One or the other. She doesn’t deserve gentleness. “You think I have not felt spite and rage, these years?” she says, her thumb swiping a frustrated tear from Ludmila’s cheek. Poor Mila, always with someone else to wipe her tears, the little crybaby. The torment and slavery suffered by Torse’s people is so hard on poor little Mila. “Spite and rage have been my best friends, zlato. These are not the things I feel guilt for. They are just… emotions. I know that I am allowed my emotions, as you are.”
Ludmila feels like if Marya keeps her hand there on her face a second longer she’s going to incinerate. At the same time, she feels like if Marya takes her hand away, she’ll crumble into dust. The way she should have done a long time ago.
“What if we are just sorry to each other?” Ludmila asks, terrified to hear Marya harp on about how she’s without blame. There’s a part of her that needs it— all of it, the Straka and the Kingfisher and the naughtomata and the Prime Disruption— to be her fault, because if it isn’t her fault than she’s just a victim, and that sounds even more unbearable than being some kind of evil queen. “What if I say to you, ‘I’m sorry, Marya,’ and you say to me, ‘I’m sorry, Mila,’ and then we get to move past it and just be… normal?”
Marya’s smile is blindingly beautiful. Ludmila wonders how many people have gotten to see her smile since the Kingfisher fell from the sky. “I’m sorry, Mila,” she says.
“I’m sorry, Marya,” Ludmila says back.
Kočka is more grizzled now, weather-worn after his time grieving alongside Marya and flying with the Zephyr. Hesitant around her. Mila knows she doesn’t deserve his trust, but oh, how badly she wants it back. She feeds him aioli off her fingertips. “What was she like?” she asks, peering down to the deck below from her vantage point atop one of the friodynamic platforms. Marya is teaching Olethra the proper way to spot obstacles on the horizon and plot a navigational course around them— or, for more fun, directly into them.
“Mm?” the rat asks, looking up from his snack.
“After I… left,” Ludmila says, eyes glued to her captain, her savior. “When the Straka took me. What was she like, after? Those years?”
Kočka chitters uncomfortably. “Bad,” he says.
“I need to know,” she pushes. “It is my fault.”
“You want to torture yourself?” he asks, beady eyes glaring up at her. A little glob of aioli dangles off one whisker. He licks it off. “You want me to hurt you by telling you what Marya Junková was like in grief? No, I will not do this. You have been through enough.”
“Kočka—”
“And so have I,” he adds, the fierce look on his face daring her to keep asking.
He has always been so expressive, even before the serums. It was a joy to watch him become wiser and smarter, to watch him be able to communicate the thoughts and feelings that were buried under animal instinct before. He’s become so complex— he can talk now— but his personality has never really changed. He is still the same little rat pup who curled up in her hands when she first found him, sweet as a kitten, wily as an old alley cat.
“Did they hurt you?” she asks. “Did my monsters hurt you?”
In the time since her rescue, she’s been ravenous for information, desperate to know all the details of everything she needs to feel guilty for. She tried asking Torse before he went back to Zern, but the pugilist seemed intent on keeping the two of them separated. She’s pressed Olethra and Marya for information about the Queen of Zern, her reign, her sins.
“It was nothing,” Kočka says. “They ruined my mech, but now I have gotten an upgrade.”
Ludmila nods, and adds to her list of sins.
Olethra is a delight. Being with her is one of the only times Ludmila doesn’t think about Zern, or the Empress of Ruin, or Straka. She’s weird and wonderful and kind, and if Ludmila were writing a book like Monty does, she would pair herself with the other young sky-eyed girl, and they would hold hands and walk off into the sunset together.
But this is not one of Monty’s books, and the spark she feels around Olethra is not the same as the fire that roars within her when she thinks about her former captain. Her “just a crush” on Marya weathered a near-death experience, abduction, abandonment, reinvention, the befrumplement of time— and now she is here, on an airship along with the woman she adores, feeling all the same feelings, and knowing for a fact now that if you wait too long, you get yanked into a furnace and lose your chance.
This is a second chance.
She is scared— terrified, truly— but she is not going to waste this chance.
First, she tries drinking more Disaronno and letting the liquid kind of courage push her toward confessing how she feels to Marya, but once she’s full of martinis and doubt, she walks herself back and instead spends the night playing gin rummy with Bert Chapman.
The night after that, she stays away from the liquor and instead marches to Marya’s quarters.
“I have to talk to Marya,” she tells Kočka, letting him down off her shoulder. “If I need you afterwards… you will be there?”
“Of course,” he says, giving her a little kiss on the cheek. “I am going to go and steal Bert’s grapes.”
“Okay, good.”
He scampers off, and she turns to face the door of the captain’s quarters. She knocks.
Marya answers with her hair just-washed, hanging loose around her face, her pointed chin, her lip piercing, her bright eyes, the bags beneath them— fuck, she’s beautiful. “Mila,” she says, smiling at her. “What’s up?”
She knows what she wants to say. There’s no need to be polite and act like she came here to say something else.
“I don’t want you to just be the beginning of my story,” Ludmila says, pouring all her earnestness and adoration into the words. “I want you to be the middle and the end, too.”
Marya’s eyes widen, and she stammers, unsure. “Mila, what are you— ?”
“You were everything to me,” Ludmila admits, hating how much she feels like a little girl with a stupid wish. “I don’t just want to be your protégé or your contribution to the world. I want to be yours, Marya. I wa— I want to be a woman for you, Marya, not just the girl you lost.”
Marya looks lost, adrift, unsure. She holds out her arms and Ludmila falls into them, wrapping herself around the other woman, clinging tight. “I am not unreachable anymore,” she says, pleading, into Marya’s ear. “You can touch me.”
Marya wraps her arms around Ludmila’s waist and squeezes, tugging her closer, like they can combine to be one living entity, no longer two women separated by dimensions and time. In so many ways, they are the same. Born of the same homeland. Torn up by the same tragedy.
“I just want to protect you,” Marya admits, lips against Ludmila’s ear. “You should not be beholden to any— any want, or need, or desire that I have—”
“I’m not beholden,” Ludmila insists, pressing against her. Internally, she’s reacting like a switchboard of lights flashing brighter and brighter. Want? Desire? “I feel for you, Marya. You are special to me. I… I wanted you. I want you still.”
Marya pulls back, astonishment on her face. Like she cannot believe it. Like this is not the kind of thing that happens to Marya Junková, vengeful former sky captain and toy shop owner. Maybe to Marya the Kid, but not this sadder and older version. She puts her hands on Ludmila’s face, again, and something within Ludmila’s new gold heart sings.
Experimentally, like the tinkerer she is, Marya leans forward and presses her lips against Ludmila’s. And then Ludmila is drinking her in, her captain, her rescuer, her beloved one. In her exuberance, her teeth click against the ring in Marya’s lower lip, and they both laugh, and then Ludmila ducks her head. “I have embarrassed myself.”
“Never,” Marya swears, combing a lock of hair out of her face, smiling in a way that makes her look younger, brighter. Once again, they are on a skyship together, venturing into the unknown. “Mila, when I lost you… I wanted you back whatever the risks. Even if it killed me. Especially if it killed me.” She goes in for another kiss, and Ludmila lets out a breathless little sigh. “I needed to hold you again, even if it was only to watch you pluck out my heart, little salad.”
“Please don’t,” Ludmila begs, blinking away tears. “Please don’t talk about that.”
“I’ve seen the very worst version of you that you could be,” Marya says, cradling Mila’s face in her hands. “And I loved her still. I love you.”
The tears fall, and Marya surges forward to kiss them away.
Marya holds her, and she feels solid and real. Damaged, yes, but never disposable.
There was never any version of the story where Marya abandoned her. So many different spiraling timelines, but Marya was always going to keep fighting to save Ludmila until it killed her.
Ludmila is so devastatedly grateful that it did not kill her all the way.
“I love you,” she says back, finally safe in the circle of Marya Junková’s arms.