Persepolis Rising (Expanse 7)

“Or suck it up, get the band back together, and die as dissidents.”

“I’m really wishing Titan were still on that list of options.”

“That’s waiting for yesterday, sweetheart.”

He rested his head against her shoulder. The water ration warning cleared its throat. Just the first one, though. They still had time.

“Why do I get the feeling I’m more freaked-out about this than you are?” he asked, and felt her smile against his cheek.

“You’re new here,” she said. “I’m a Belter. Security coming down on you just because they can? Checkpoints and identity tracking? Knowing that you could wind up in the recycler for any reason or no reason? I grew up like this. Amos did too, in his way. I never wanted to come back here, but I know how this all goes. Childhood memories, sa sa que?”

“Well, shit.”

She ran her hand down his spine and pushed him back. The wall was cold against him. Her kiss was rough and strong, and he found himself pushing into it in a way he hadn’t in years. When they came up for air, Naomi’s eyes were hard. Almost angry.

“If we do this,” she said, “it’s going to be ugly. We’re outgunned and outplanned, and I don’t see how we win.”

“I don’t either,” he said. “And I don’t see how we stay out of it.”

“Getting the band back together?”

“Yeah. And we were so close to out.”

“We were,” she said.

The water ration chimed again, a little more urgently. Holden felt some vast emotion move in his chest, but he didn’t know what it was. Grief or anger or something else. He turned off the water. The rush of white noise stopped. The gentle chill of evaporation brought goose bumps up his arms and legs. Naomi’s eyes were soft, dark, unflinching.

“Come to bed,” he said.

“Yes,” she answered.

In the darkness, the control pad on the door glowed amber. Green would have meant unlocked. Red, locked. Amber meant override. It meant that they weren’t in control of it. That, in a fundamental way, it wasn’t their door anymore. It belonged to station security. Naomi was still asleep, her breath deep and regular, so Holden sat in the darkness, not moving to keep from waking her, and watched the amber light.

It was the dead hour of curfew between each shift. Right now, all the hallways in Medina were empty. The curved fields and parks of the drum. The lifts in lockdown. Only the Laconian security forces could travel freely while everyone else huddled in place. Including him. Measured in work-hours, it was a massive tax. If it had just been the Roci, it was the same as losing someone for eighteen hours a day. Medina put a coefficient on that with at least three zeros at the end. Someone in the Laconian chain of command thought it was worth the sacrifice. That alone told him something.

Naomi murmured, shifted her pillow, and fell back into it without ever quite breaching up to consciousness. She would be awake soon, though. They’d been sleeping in the same couch long enough that he knew the signs her body gave out without even being certain what he was reacting to. He felt it when she was heading back up. He hoped she could stay down until it was their door again. Maybe she wouldn’t feel the same kind of trapped that he did.

Over the years, the Roci had done its fair share of prisoner transport duty. Houston had been the most recent, but they’d taken on half a dozen like him one time and another since the Tachi had become the Rocinante. Now that he thought about it, the first had been Clarissa Mao. All of his prisoners had spent months in a cabin smaller than this, staring at a door they couldn’t control. He’d always known in a distant, intellectual way that had probably been uncomfortable for them, but it wouldn’t have been that different from being in a brig, and he’d been in brigs.

It wasn’t the same, though. A brig had rules. It had expectations. You were in a brig until your lawyer or union rep came to talk to you. There would be hearings. If it went badly, there was prison. One thing followed another, and everyone called it justice, even when they all knew it was an approximation at best. But this was a cabin. A living space. Turning it into a prison cell felt like a rupture in a way that an actual prison cell wouldn’t. A brig had an inside and an outside. You were in it, and then you passed through a door or a security lock, and you were out of it. All of Medina was a prison now, and would be for another twelve minutes. It left him feeling claustrophobic and oppressed in a way he was still trying to wrap his head around. He felt like the station had just become small as a coffin.

Naomi shifted again, pulling the pillow over her head. She sighed. Her eyes stayed closed, but she was with him again. Awake, but not ready to admit it.

“Hey,” he said, softly enough that she could pretend not to have heard him.

“Hey,” she said.

Another minute passed, and Naomi pulled the pillow back under her head, yawned, and stretched like a cat. Her hand landed on his, and he laced his fingers between hers.

“Been brooding the whole time?” she asked.

“Some of it, yeah.”

“Did it help?”

“Nope.”

“Right. Spring into action, then?”