“Priority message for you from the Rocinante, ma’am.”
“The fuck does Johnson want now?”
“It’s not from Colonel Johnson. Captain Holden sent it.”
She hesitated. In his window, Said waited. “Send it to me,” she said.
Said nodded as she closed his window. She threw the readout to the cart’s screen. Whatever was going on, she wanted to be able to see it without squinting. The message appeared, flagged with red. As soon as she opened it, she knew. Death was on Holden’s face as clearly as if it had been written there. When he spoke, his voice was careful and controlled. Hospital tones. Funeral.
He laid out what had happened briefly, not giving any details she di
dn’t need. The Pella had led the attack. They’d managed to fend off the Free Navy. Fred Johnson was dead. And then, as if Holden were having a stroke of his own, he stared for a long moment into the camera. Into her eyes, without seeing her.
“All the OPA groups Fred called together at Tycho are waiting there. We’re on course and starting our deceleration burn. But I’m not sure if we should still be going there or if there’s someone you want to send. Or how long they’ll wait. I don’t know what to do next.”
He shook his head. He looked young. Holden always looked young, but usually it was young and impulsive. The lost expression around his eyes was new. If it was even there. Maybe she was only seeing it because she felt it in her own heart, her own belly.
The message ended. The terminal prompted her for a response, but she only sat with it in her hand as the highspeed came to a halt, the cart pouring itself into more familiar corridors. She looked at her hands, and they seemed to belong to some other woman. She tried sobbing, but it seemed forced and inauthentic. More like playacting than grief. If she’d been in control of the cart, she might have let it drift into the wall or down any random corridor, all unaware. But it knew where to go, and she didn’t think to take it to manual.
Fred Johnson. Butcher of Anderson Station. Hero of the UN Navy and traitorous voice of the OPA. She’d known him in person and by reputation for decades. He’d been her enemy and opposite and occasional untrusted ally. The part of her that was still thinking noticed how odd it was—how implausible—that his death should be the drop that made her cup overflow. She’d lost her world. Her home. Her husband. If she’d kept any of those, maybe this wouldn’t have destroyed her.
Her sternum ached. Actually ached. Like there was a physical bruise there, and not only emotion left too long pressing at her flesh. She probed it with her fingertips, tracing the boundaries of the pain like a child fascinated by a dying insect. She didn’t notice the cart had stopped until Said opened the door.
“Ma’am?” he said.
She stood. The lunar gravity seemed less like a force of nature and more like a suggestion. As if she could rise against it through simple force of will or the beating of her heart. She noticed Said again, noticed that she’d forgotten he was there. He looked distressed in an officious, too-pretty way.
“Please cancel everything,” she said. “I’ll be in my rooms.”
“Do you need anything, ma’am? Should I get a doctor?”
She frowned at him, the muscles in her cheeks seeming to exist at a distance. She was piloting her body like it was a mech with failing controls. “What would that help?”
In her rooms, she sat on the divan, her hands cupped in her lap, palms up. Like she was holding something. The air recycler’s fan had a little noise to it, resonant and unsteady. Wind passing over a bottle’s mouth. Mindless, idiot music. She wondered if she’d ever noticed it before, and then forgot it. Her mind was empty. She wondered if there was something coming. Some overwhelming flood that would carry her away. Or if this was simply who she was now. An empty woman.
She ignored the knock at her door. Whoever they were, they’d go away. Only they didn’t. Her door slid a few centimeters open. And then a few more. She thought it would be Said. Or one of the admirals. Some functionary of governance come, like Gorman Le, to ask her to carry the weight of loss and uncertainty for them. It wasn’t.
Kiki wasn’t a little girl anymore. Her granddaughter was a woman in her own right, though a young one. Her skin was deep brown like her father’s, but she had Ashanti’s eyes and nose. A glimmer of Arjun in the color of her eyes. As much as Avasarala tried to hide it, Kiki wasn’t her favorite granddaughter. The girl always had an air of observing judgment that made being with her difficult. Kiki cleared her throat. For a long moment, they looked at each other.
“What are you doing here?” Avasarala asked. She’d meant it to drive the girl away, but it didn’t. Kiki came in and closed the door behind her.
“Mother’s hurt that you rescheduled us again,” Kiki said.
Avasarala twitched her hands, fingers splayed, palms up. Exasperation without the energy behind it. “Did she send you to lecture me?”
“No,” Kiki said.
“What, then?”
“I was worried about you.”
Avasarala snorted in derision. “Why would you worry about me? I’m the most powerful person in the system right now.”
“That’s why I’m worried about you.”
That’s not your fucking job floated at the back of her throat, but she couldn’t say it. The ache in Avasarala’s sternum sank deeper, pressing in past bone and cartilage. Her vision went blurry, tears sheeting across her eyes with too little weight to pull them down. Kiki stood by the doorway, her face expressionless. A schoolgirl before her principal, waiting to be scolded. Without speaking she shuffled forward in the scant gravity, sat at Avasarala’s side, and lowered her head to her grandmother’s lap.
“Mother loves you,” Kiki said. “She just doesn’t know how to say it.”