Strange Dogs (The Expanse, #6.5)

by James S.A. Corey

The day after the stick moons appeared, Cara killed a bird.

Bright-blue dots like fireflies fluttered and spun in the air as the first of the doglike things came out of the trees.

But if all the things in her books were about other places with other rules, then none of them could ever really be about her. It was like going to school one morning and finding out that math worked differently for you, so even if you got the same answer as everyone else, yours was wrong.

All names were like that. A shorthand so people could talk about things. Laconia was only Laconia because they called it that.

The people from town and the soldiers who’d come to the surface all sitting together but apart, like words in a sentence with the spaces between them.

She knew something was wrong the moment she stepped in the back door. The air felt different, like the moment before a storm. Soft voices she didn’t recognize came from the living room. She walked toward them with a sense of entering a nightmare.

She knew something was wrong the moment she stepped in the back door. The air felt different, like the moment before a storm. Soft voices she didn’t recognize came from the living room. She walked toward them with a sense of entering a nightmare. Her father was sitting on a chair; his face had literally turned gray. A uniformed uniformed soldier stood beside him, head bowed, and Santiago Singh was behind them, looking away. The boy’s eyes were puffy and red from crying. No one turned to her. It was like she was invisible. Her mother walked in from the front door, footsteps hard and percussive. Her mouth was tight and her eyes as hard as rage. She gazed toward Cara without seeming to see her. “Mom?” Cara said, and her voice seemed to come from a long way away. “What’s wrong?”

Xan had been nearest the road, so he’d been the one to run out to retrieve it. The whole thing was over before anyone understood it had begun.

Admiral Duarte sent his condolences. This was a lapse of discipline that should never have happened. The admiral had already ordered the drunk soldier’s execution. Cara’s family would be put first on the list for a place in the new housing facilities, and Cara would be guaranteed a place in the academy when it opened. The admiral understood that nothing could compensate for their loss, but the soldiers would do what they could. With the family’s permission, the admiral would like to attend the wake.

There was something. Not a bruise really, but where a bruise would have been if Xan’s blood hadn’t stopped where it was. A discoloration on his head. Cara couldn’t get the idea out of her mind that this was where Death had touched him.

“My name is Winston.” “I know,” she said like she was accepting an apology. Letting him off the hook.

“Would you undo it,” she asked, “if you could? If you could bring him back?” Maybe he heard something in the question. Maybe it was only that he was listening to her so deeply. He paused, thought. “I believe that I would, yes. I need your family to be well. To be part of what I’m doing here.” “Taking over Laconia?” “And everything that comes after that. I want to keep people safe. Not just here but everywhere. The people on Laconia, not just the ones who came with me but all of us, are my best chance to do that. And yes, if I could save your brother, I would. For him, and for your parents, and for you. If I could wave a magic wand and go back in time to keep him off that road? I would do it.”

“You killed the soldier who killed him. Didn’t you need him too?”

“You killed the soldier who killed him. Didn’t you need him too?” “Not as much as I needed you and your family to know that your brother mattered to me. I’m the government here. I imposed that. I didn’t ask your permission first. That puts some obligations on me. It means I have to show sincerity and respect for our rules, even when that requires doing something I might not want to do. I don’t have the right to compromise.”

“There’s no room for tribes on Laconia. That’s how they do it back in Sol system. Earth and Mars and the Belt. That’s what we’re here to outgrow.”

“We have to be one people,” he said. He sounded sad. “There’s no room for tribes on Laconia. That’s how they do it back in Sol system. Earth and Mars and the Belt. That’s what we’re here to outgrow.”

“Everything is different here,” Cara said, and the admiral nodded as though she’d understood him perfectly, then touched her shoulder and walked away.

The strangest thing was how normal they sounded. How much grief sounded like regular life.

Two stick moons floated against the stars, shimmering and shifting, swimming toward each other in the darkness above the sky.

A decade was a long time to live somewhere, but a planet was larger than the best intentions.

A sense of peace crept over her, and it felt like the world had sat beside her, opened its own lunch bag, and was just being with her.

She tried to imagine what it would be like going back to Earth, where everything was already known and there weren’t any miracles left. It seemed sad.

There wasn’t a perfect answer, but she didn’t need a perfect one. Good enough was good enough.

Going away from a point, there were any number of paths, and all of them were right. Going back to the point, most paths were wrong.

All the ways they wanted to help her, but never asked how she wanted to be helped.

“We have to warn the dogs.”

The worst that could happen was she’d die. The dogs would fix her.

Her legs burned and she felt light-headed from hunger. She hadn’t had anything to eat since the fruit and rice in the forest. And there wouldn’t be anything for her out in the world. All the plants that Laconia grew were indigestible for her at best. Poison at worst. The sunbirds, the blue clover, the grunchers, the glass snakes, everything alive knew, at a chemical level, that she wasn’t one of them. But that didn’t matter either. The worst that could happen was she’d die. The dogs would fix her.