“Original.” I lean back and cross my legs. “So, what happens now? Commandos burst in and drag me to an interrogation tank? Peel off parts of me to give to the Reaper when he gets home? Or will it be chemical torture? Experiential? Lock me in a holoimmersion for a relative century? Or do I have a one-way subaquatic ticket to Deepgrave?”
“This is the part where you tell us where the children are,” Holiday says. “Then you tell us who you sold them to. What you know about the Pink with the cane. And how we can get them back. For your sake, I hope you know enough to spare yourself being booked for treason.”
“Fortunately, capital punishment is no longer an option,” I say.
“We might make an exception.”
“How noble.”
She leans forward. “You’re gonna have to get used to the idea that you’re going to spend the rest of your life in a cell, Ephraim. How big that cell is depends on what you tell me.”
“Holiday, you’ve spent too much time in the military. You can’t go at a man like that. Give him no means of escape. No incentive. Remember the Eleventh Legion? You were there. The Golden Basilisks.” She remembers. “What happens if you surround an enemy force with no path of surrender or retreat? They fight to the death. And that’s not good for anyone. Trapped by that dam, weren’t they? Do you remember how we just kept firing into them? Eight hours to kill fifty thousand men because we didn’t want to break the dam with bombs. Who knew it could take so long? I never saw the Reaper’s face after that. But you must have. Did he like it?”
“This isn’t a game, Ephraim,” she says. “If you hate life so much you want to die, then be my guest. I’ll give you the bullet to eat. But don’t take two innocent kids with you.”
“Innocent? Everyone keeps throwing that shit around. Their parents put them on the board. They didn’t have to attend functions of state. They didn’t have to parade them around like the paragons of progress. But they did. They made them the targets, not me. How many little kids do you think died in the Battle of Luna? I saw whole blocks disintegrated by Valii-Rath particle beams. Schools turned to dust by termite munitions with Republic stamps on them. Dead kids are the loose change of war. Don’t come whining to me because the man and woman who started this don’t want to pay out of their own pocket like the rest of us.”
I’ve never seen her look at me with so much disgust. “What happened to you?”
“Life. Same shit that happens to everyone else.”
“Trigg would spit on you if he could see this.”
“Well, he died on your watch. Not mine.”
Holiday looks blankly at me as if I’ve slapped her across the face.
All the days we met on Trigg’s birthday, that truth hung between us, unspoken like some weapon of mutually assured destruction. And now that I say it, I taste ashes in my mouth. To use Trigg like this, as a weapon, is the ultimate perversion of who he was, what he meant to the both of us. But he followed her everywhere. And she led him to his death for a cause that doesn’t even remember his name. Holiday can’t meet my eyes. But Lyria shakes her head.
“That’s not fair, and you know it.”
“Save the speeches, love. You’re just a little girl who thinks she’s a hero. You don’t know a thing about me.”
“You’re right. I don’t,” she says. “You’ve gone hard to make that clear. But I know my ma died of cancer in the mines. Ate her lungs right up. Pa thought it was his fault. That he couldn’t get her the right meds. Saw it squeeze the life outta him. And by the time we got out of the mines, he was already dead. All he saw—the sky, the world—he hated, because she didn’t get to see it. You think she would have wanted that for the man she loved?”
“Never been a slave. Wouldn’t know.”
“We were promised everything when they brought us up; then I lost my family. My whole family. You can whine about your nicks and scrapes, but you got no idea what that’s like. Should I turn nasty because I saw evil done to them? Should I blame the worlds? I blamed myself. I blamed the Sovereign. And what luck did that get me?” She clears her throat, emotion welling. “You asked me if I believe in the Vale. I don’t know. I don’t know if it exists or if they watch me. But I know it doesn’t matter if they can see us. What matters is that we can feel them. Remember them. And try to live to be as good as we were in their eyes.”
I look away from her to the window where pink clouds twirl.
“Trigg might be gone, yeah. I know you feel robbed. But you gotta remember that he saw something to love in you, even if you can’t see it. He saw you as a good man, Ephraim. So if you ever loved him, be a good man.”
“That man never even existed. It was just something Trigg made up to make himself feel better.”
“Then why did you not kill me in the shuttle?”
“I did. I pulled the trigger. The safety was on. It was just luck.”
“You could have pulled the trigger again. But you didn’t. You let me live.”
“And look what happened.”
“This man you’re playing at. You sure he’s not the one you made up to make yourself feel less?”
I feel everything now. As I stare out the window at the ships bound for orbit, I see Trigg in the waters of the Aegean Sea when we took our first vacation during his leave. I remember him playing his little guitar in the hammock behind our bungalow. He sounded terrible but I loved watching the sweat beading on his temples, the freckles on his shoulders, the childish laugh in a
man the world kept trying to make hard. He was patient with me. Slowly breaking down the walls that had stood tall since my mother looked at me and said she loved me for the thousand credits a month. He proposed on that vacation.