Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

“Injector’s getting a little ragged at the mouth is all,” Timothy said. “I can touch it up. Just means I’ll be drinking my yeast patties more than eating them.”

“You spend a lot of time with that thing.”

“You take care of your tools, your tools take care of you.”

Teresa leaned against the wall. The stone was cool against her back. Deep cave temperatures were the measure of the underlying climate average. Mass and depth smoothed out the daily highs and lows—even the annual fluctuations of summer and winter. She knew it intellectually, but she hadn’t understood it until Timothy’s cave. The way it always felt cool in the heat and warm in the chill.

“You know, the wise man living alone on the mountain is really cliché,” she said, smiling when she said it so he wouldn’t think she was being mean. “Anyway, I don’t have anything to be scared of.”

“Assassins with pocket nukes for one,” Timothy said, slotting the injector back into its housing.

Teresa laughed, and after a second, Timothy smiled too.

“If anyone’s going to kill me, it’ll probably be Dr. Cortázar,” she said.

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“It’s just a joke. I was watching Holden, like we talked about? And I heard this conversation he and Dr. Cortázar were having.”

“What about?” Timothy asked, idly.

Teresa thought back. What had they been talking about exactly? Mostly she remembered Cortázar talking about how nature ate babies and Holden looking into the camera. But it had been about her father too.

She took in a breath, ready to speak, and the air rattled against the back of her throat and down into her lungs like a billion little molecule-sized marbles banging against the soft tissue. Her respiration system was a cave inside Timothy’s cave, and she was acutely aware of the complexity of her own body and the answering complexity of the caverns around her. Veins and chips in the wall before her fragmented and smoothed together. Gravity trying to tug her down into the floor, and the astonishingly complex dance of the electrons in the stone and her flesh pushing back. She managed to wonder if she’d been drugged before her awareness was overwhelmed by the immediacy and complexity of the air and her body and the increasingly invisible boundary that failed to really divide her from the world…

Muskrat barked anxiously. She’d slumped down on the cot at some point without knowing she was doing it. Timothy stood up, his expression perfectly focused and his recycler forgotten. The repair drone made a weird yipping sound as it tried to stand up, staggering drunkenly.

“That wasn’t just me, right?” Timothy said.

“I don’t think so,” Teresa said.

“Yeah, all right. It’s been fun, Tiny, but you need to head home now.”

“What was that? Is there something wrong with the air in here? Are there fumes?”

“Nope,” Timothy said, taking her by the arm and lifting her to her feet. “Air’s fine. That was something else. And it probably happened to a lot of people, so they’re gonna be scared, and they’re going to want to find where everyone important to them is, and that’s you. So you need to be not here.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, but Timothy was pulling her forward, toward the mouth of the cave. His grip on her arm was like a vise. His expression was blank. It made him frightening. Muskrat followed behind, barking like she was trying to warn them of something.

In the open air, the world was normal. The strange sensations she’d had before already seemed like a bad dream or an accident. Timothy’s reaction was the only thing that made it frightening. He looked up, scanning the sky, then nodded to himself.

“Okay, Tiny. You and the furball head back home.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can,” she said. She didn’t know why she wanted to reassure him.

“Okay.”

It was the way he said it. Like his mind was already someplace else. She’d had adults treat her like that before—polite and agreeable, but elsewhere. Never Timothy, though. He was different. He was supposed to be different.

“Will you be here when I do?”

“I’ll have to, I guess. I’m not done yet, so—”

She hugged him. It was like hugging a tree. He pulled back, and when he looked at her, she thought there was something like regret in his expression. It couldn’t have been pity.

“Good luck, Tiny,” he said, then turned back toward his cave and was gone. Muskrat barked once and looked after him, as worried as Teresa was.

“Come on,” she said, and started for her secret passage back into the State Building and home. The afternoon was cool. The leaves were starting to retreat back into their winter sheaths, leaving the trees looking stubbly. A sunbird hanging on a low branch opened its leathery wings at her and hissed, but she ignored it. At the horizon, wide clouds bunched and trailed gray veils of storm. If they came this way, the drainage tunnel would be impassable and she’d be stuck outside the walls. She picked up her pace…