Tiamat's Wrath (Expanse 8)

Was Timothy ever really my friend?”

Holden sat on the cot, his back against the wall. The paper gown he wore was crumpled and streaked with old blood. The sclera of his right eye was blood red and the flesh around it swollen. The cheek below puffy and dark. More than that, there was a carefulness to his movements that meant everything ached. The cell was tiny. The smallest closet in her bedroom suite was nearly twice as large. The only light came from a pencil-thin strip at the top of the wall that was too bright to look at directly but left most of the room too dark to read in.

“If he said he was your friend, then he was,” Holden said. “Amos wasn’t a man who felt the need to lie very often.”

“Why was he here?” she heard herself ask, just the way she’d been told.

Holden swallowed like it was a difficult thing to do. He seemed sad. No, not sad. Pitying. It was worse.

“They asked me all this before. I’m sorry that they’re making you do it too.”

Trejo had told her to stay on script, to only say what she’d rehearsed, but she took the chance now. “Maybe they thought it would be harder to lie to someone you’d hurt.”

“Maybe. I’ll tell you the same thing I told them. I didn’t know he was here. I hadn’t been contacted by him. I don’t know what his mission was or who put him onto it or how long he’s been here. If he had a way to get in touch with the underground, I don’t know what it was. And I don’t know why he had a backpack nuke, except that I’m guessing he at least wanted to have the option of blowing something up. If I’d known he was here, I’d have told him not to.”

Teresa looked up at the camera. Holden had answered her next four questions without her asking them. She didn’t know if that meant she should skip that part or make him say it all again.

“How’s your father?” Holden asked into her hesitation. “No one told me, but I put it together that something went wrong. Plus which, he hasn’t come to question me. I feel like he and I have enough of a relationship, he would have.”

My father’s fine, she thought. She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “Don’t worry about him. Worry about yourself.”

“Oh, I’m on that. Plenty worried for both of us. All of us.”

“What happened to his body?” she asked, trying to get back onto the script.

“Your dad’s?”

“Timothy’s.”

“I don’t know.”

She paused. Her gut was tight, and she felt a knot at the back of her throat. She felt it often these days. “He’s dead. I saw it.”

“So they’ve told me. He was a good… Well, he wasn’t really exactly a good person. He cared enough to try, anyway. But he was loyal as hell.” Holden paused. “He was my brother. I loved him.”

“What is the underground doing?”

Holden shrugged. “Trying to make enough room under your father’s boot that anyone else’s opinion matters, I assume. That’s what I’d be doing. Hold on. Just…” Holden levered himself up and spoke directly to the camera. “Could we cut this part short? It seems kind of shitty for her, and it’s not going to change anything.”

At first, there was no reply, then the hard clack of the magnetic door bolts opening. Holden sat down. Teresa felt the thrill of relief that told her how frightened she’d been, alone with this man. How glad she was that this part of the ordeal was over.

“They wouldn’t have let me hurt you,” Holden said. “Even if I’d wanted to. I mean, I don’t, but even if.”

Rage shot through her, unpredictable and vicious. “You’re not much of a dancing bear anymore,” she said.

Holden leaned against the wall, let it hold him up. When he smiled, she saw that one of his eyeteeth was missing. “Nice to be taken seriously, though.”

The door opened, and two guards came in with Colonel Ilich. Their boots squeaked on the tile floor. The guards had their hands on their batons, but they didn’t draw them. Not yet. Ilich put his hand on her shoulder, and she turned to go out. If he said he was your friend, then he was. She wanted to believe that, but she didn’t.

“It’s okay,” Ilich said as the cell door closed behind them. “You did well.”

The magnetic bolts shot closed again. Holden was contained. She felt a little calmer. They walked down the hallway past half a dozen more doors like it. If there were people behind them, Teresa didn’t know who they were or why they were there. It seemed like every day revealed some other vast area of things she didn’t know.

Ever since the bad night, she’d felt more than a little like a prisoner herself. Trejo had made her go over everything she knew about Timothy—how they’d met, what he’d said, what she’d told him, how he got along with the repair drones, why she’d never told anyone about him. After hours of it, Ilich tried to call a halt, but the interrogation had gone on until she was weeping and then well past that too.

She didn’t know how long it had gone on. More than one session, but whether that had been hours or days, she couldn’t say. There was a timelessness to everything now. Like it had all just started and also it had all gone on forever. She felt like a puppet of herself, controlled by someone else. Whether she was being badgered by Trejo or sitting with what was left of her father or at meals pretending that nothing was wrong, she felt like her real self had been pressed into a small, black place where her heart should have been. Ilich had talked to her about trauma and violence and promised her that with time, she would feel better. Cortázar had taken over her medical care, scanning her brain and drawing her blood, but he didn’t speak to her much. That was fine. She didn’t want to speak.

When she slept, her nightmares were all violent. She never slept without nightmares anymore.