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“The difference between zero and one is miraculous.
Time was supposed to heal all wounds. To Drummer, that was just a nice way of saying that if she waited long enough, none of the things that seemed important to her would turn out to matter. Or at least not the way she’d thought they did.
It seemed to her that the real sign you were getting old was when you stopped needing to prove you weren’t getting old.
It was the irony of making threats while having mass. The messages and voices, culture and conversation, could move so much more quickly than even the fastest ship. In the best case, it would have made persuasion and argument much more important. Moving ideas across the gap between planets was easy. Moving objects was hard. But it meant that whoever was on the other side had to be listening and willing to let their minds be changed. For all the other times, it was gunships and threats, same as ever.
She was, by some measures, the most influential woman in thirteen hundred worlds, but it didn’t fix insomnia.
Saba had been with her for almost a decade now, and if his age showed a little in the softness of his belly and the roundness of his face, he was still a very pretty man. Sometimes, seeing him like this, she wondered whether she was aging as gracefully. She hoped so, or if not, that he didn’t notice.
They weren’t young anymore. Maybe you could only really see that someone was beautiful when they’d grown into themselves.
It was an odd group of people to fall in love with, to adopt as your own kin and tribe, but there it was, and she wasn’t ever going back.
The light came from thumb-sized recesses in the wall, perfectly regular in their spacing, but rounded and soft. Organic life subjected to military engineering.
Did Amos’ affable smile mean anything? Did it ever?
The Holden she knew was a guy who drank too much coffee, got enthusiastic about weird things, and always seemed quietly worried that he would compromise his own idiosyncratic and unpredictable morality.
When they were gone, nothing would be the same. Bobbie felt the sorrow in that. But, to her surprise, the joy too. She found herself going through her rounds, moving through the ship to check everything that had already been checked, marking anything that looked off—a gas pressure level that was dropping a fraction too quickly, a doorway that showed wear, a power link that was past its replacement date—and the ship itself had changed too. It was hers now. When she put her palm on the bulkhead and felt the thrum of the recyclers, it was her ship. When she woke strapped into her crash couch,
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It was easy to forget sometimes the depth of focus and intelligence behind Amos’ cheerful violence.
She smiled, inviting Bobbie to smile with her. Making the truth into something like a joke.
I mean, I’m all for forgiveness and bygones being bygones, but it’s easier to stomach that after the assholes are all dead.”
A countdown timer marked the minutes and seconds until this Admiral Trejo said he’d be coming through. Her shoulders were tight. She felt like they were in the moment between throwing dice and seeing what numbers had come up. The gambler’s high. She didn’t like how much she liked it.
Bobbie felt the surge of adrenaline in her blood the same moment as the calm descended on her: danger followed immediately by the well-cultivated response to danger. It felt like being home.
“That’s waiting for yesterday, sweetheart.”
“Is is,” the man said, waving her thanks away. It wasn’t an idiom she’d heard before, but his expression explained it. We do what we can for each other.
“No savvy you how good it was to get your message, Cami,” he said. “Heart outside my body, you are. And no one better than us two to be where we’re sitting.”
“Live like you’re dead.”
Drummer touched the screen as if it were his cheek, but it was cold and hard. Live like you’re dead. There was a phrase she hadn’t heard in a long time. Once, it had been the motto of the Voltaire Collective. A call to courage with a fatalistic bravado that angry adolescents found romantic. She’d found it romantic once too.
Vaughn enjoyed telling them what to do. It was probably a vice, but she didn’t mind indulging it.
It happened in a dream, Saba said, which was a little confusing until Naomi told him it was an old-timey Belter idiom for Don’t worry about it.
She flexed her hands like a fighter about to go into the ring. There had been a time, when they’d first met, that he’d found Bobbie’s physicality intimidating. Over the years, she’d grown in his mind into a place where she was only herself. Every now and again, he’d be reminded that she was a professional warrior and well trained in violence.
The arboretum was a restricted-access zone. Some of the trees were experimental, and being in a high-traffic area would have affected the data. But one person or a handful? That was within tolerance. It was warm there, the air thick with moisture and the novelty of oxygen that had just been breathed out by another living thing. It was a strange place, exotic and surreal. Like something out of a child’s fantasy.
