“I’m serious,” Fayez said. “You still have command codes for the Falcon, don’t you?”
She pulled back to look him in the eyes. He wasn’t joking. She knew all his smiles, and this was a serious one.
“There are two separate navies out there ready to shoot us down,” she said.
“Maybe. Or maybe we could defect. Or just run and take our chances. It couldn’t be worse. This place is made out of palace intrigue and fear as much as it is concrete. And that’s before it was the target of an ongoing rebellion looking to nuke it to glass. Say you’re going to look for residual transdimensional radioactive ectoplasm or something. They won’t know. With the shooting war going on, they’re not going to come after little old us. We could make a break for it.”
It was crazy, and worse, it was tempting. Elvi imagined waking up under some other sun. In a hut on a mountain on a world without a name.
“You’ve wanted out since you got here,” Fayez said. “You’ve put a brave face on it, and I have too. But this is killing you by centimeters.”
“Let me think,” she said. “I’ll think about it.”
They walked to the ballroom together. For a quinceañera, there weren’t many teenagers. Even as large as the room was, Elvi felt like the air was close, stale, rebreathed. She got a glass of wine, hardly aware of who she’d gotten it from. Pulled by her exhaustion, trying to make sense of Holden, her fear of the fighting in the system, and the beautiful dream of leaving Laconia behind, she was in a fog.
“Is everything all right?”
Teresa Duarte was at her side. Elvi had been aware the girl was speaking, but she hadn’t listened. “Fine. Everything’s fine.”
Teresa smirked. “Well. Except.”
“Yes. Except.”
The dinner chime came, and Elvi tried to move away, but Teresa stayed at her side. The girl was working herself up to something. With a forced casualness, Teresa said, “I was wondering, Dr. Okoye. The Falcon.”
Elvi felt a chill of fear. “What about it?”
“I wondered how the repairs were going. With everything that’s going on…” The girl put on a smile that was meant to be calming. Innocuous. “I mean, it is built for sustained high burn. It has breathable liquid crash couches.”
“Those are unpleasant,” Fayez said, trying to move the subject away.
Teresa would not be turned aside. “But still. If the fighting got close? You’d be able to use it to get away?”
Elvi glanced at Fayez. His expression went blank. So he was wondering it too. They’d been in their private rooms, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be monitored. Was Trejo watching them? Was this a test?
“Unfortunately,” Elvi said, choosing her words carefully, “the Falcon was deeply, deeply compromised.”
Fayez followed suit. “I got a new foot, toenails and all, but that ship’s still in pieces.”
Teresa’s expression shifted, but Elvi wasn’t sure what it had shifted into. Elvi kept going, saying the things someone who had never thought of fleeing would say. “I really don’t think it’ll come to evacuation. None of those ships are even going to get close to the planet. And everything Admiral Trejo has at his disposal will be used to keep us all safe.”
“Maybe you should put a push on the repairs, then,” Teresa said, harshly. As if there is anything I would rather do, Elvi thought, and chuckled.
“Maybe I should,” she said as they entered the dining hall. Teresa finally had to go her own way. It felt like escaping something. Fayez put his arm around her waist and let himself be guided to their table.
“That was uncomfortable,” he said.
“Don’t read too much into it,” Elvi said as they found their chairs. “Also? Don’t forget it.”
The dinner proceeded, the conversations stayed on safe ground. Elvi put Holden and his role in Cortázar’s murder plot out of her mind. She didn’t think of it again for weeks, and by then things were already out of control.
“Holden escaped,” Ilich shouted. The speaker on her hand terminal overloaded a little, flattening his voice. She tried to bring herself back to consciousness. It was hard to believe she’d actually drifted off, but the dreams still had their claws in her.
“The attack,” she said.
“They’re here. They’re fighting right now, and Holden’s free.”
She sat up