The Churn: An Expanse Novella (Expanse 3.5)

“Yes.”

“So I kill him for you,” Timmy said. He could have been saying, So I’ll pick up dinner on my way. There was no bravado in it. Burton sat, tilted his head. The friendly smile and the empty eyes met him.

“All right, I’m curious,” Burton said. “Did you game this? This was your plan?”

“Shit no, chief,” Timmy said. “This here’s just happy coincidence.”

Either it was truth or the best deadpan Burton had seen in a long time. The shower water turned off. On the newsfeeds, a woman in a Star Helix uniform was saying something, a dour expression on her face. Burton wanted to turn up the volume, see if the press statement was something useful to him like reading fortunes in coffee grounds. He restrained himself.

“I will need proof,” Burton said. “Evidence, yeah?”

“So what, you want his heart?”

“Heart. Brain. Windpipe. Anything he can’t live without.”

“Not a problem,” Timmy said. Then a moment later, “Is there anything else, or should I go?”

“You watched out for this kid your whole life,” Burton said. “He vouched for you. Got you in with me. And you’re really going to put a slug in his brain just like that?”

“Sure. You’re the man with the plan.”

When the boy left, Burton came to stand beside Oestra, watching him walk away down the sunlit street. The thinning reddish-brown hair and wide shoulders made him look like some kind of manual laborer twice his age. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets. He could have been anybody.

“Think he’ll do it?” Burton asked.

Oestra didn’t answer for a long moment. “Might.”

“He does this for me, he’ll do anything,” Burton said, clapping Oestra’s shoulder. “Potential for a man like that.”

“If he doesn’t?”

“There are a lot of ways to dispose of someone disposable,” Burton said.

Burton walked back to the chair, shifted the newsfeed buffer back to the start of the Star Helix woman’s press announcement. The woman started talking, and Burton listened.

Timmy’s ruin had long since become a misery for Lydia, and misery had become a kind of pleasure. Their days had taken a kind of rhythm. Erich woke first in the morning, his uneven footsteps playing a tentative counterpoint to the rough sound of the waves. Lydia lay in the warmth of her cocoon, the slick fabric wrapped around her until only her mouth and nose were in the free air. When she could no longer pretend sleep, she emerged and made tea on the little stove, and when she was done, Erich transferred the solar charger to his deck and squatted over it, scanning the newsfeeds with a ferocity and single-mindedness that made her think of a poet chasing the perfect rhyme. If Timmy was there, she would walk with him to the boats or survey the newest supplies he had smuggled to their private island: fresh clothes, carryout tandoori, charged batteries for the deck and the lamp. More often, he was not there, and she haunted the shore like a sea widow. The city glowered out at her from across the water, like a great angry gray face, condemning her for her sins.

Is this the time? she would wonder. Has he left now, never to return? Or will there be one more? Another time to see his face, to hear his voice, to have the conversations that we can only ever have with each other?

She knew that the churn was playing itself out there, across the narrow waves. Security had likely come to her rooms on Liev’s word and found them already abandoned. The men and women she’d worked with these last years were part of the past now. Part of a life she’d left behind, though nothing else had begun. Only this island exile and its waiting.

At night, Erich would eat with her. Their conversations were awkward. She knew that she was uncanny to him, that he thought of Timmy as his own friend, a character from his own past. Her appearance and the reticence she and Timmy had to making her explicable were as odd to Erich as if lobsters had crawled up out of the sea and started speaking Spanish. And yet if they did, what could anyone do but answer them, and so Erich and Lydia reached the odd peace of roommates, intimate in all things and nothing.

That night, Timmy crossed the waves unnoticed by her or Erich. Lydia was looking east over the ruined island to the greater sea beyond. Erich curled in the room that common habit designated as his, snoring slightly as the deck ran down its charge to nothing beside him. Timmy arrived quietly and alone, announced only by his footsteps and the smell of fresh ginger.

When he emerged from the darkness, two thin plastic sacks hung from his left fist. Lydia shifted, not rising, but coming up to rest on her knees and ankles in a posture she imagined to be like a geisha, though she’d never met a real geisha. Timmy put the sacks down beside her, his eyes on the shadows past the doorway. Far away across the water, gulls complained.

“Two?” she said.

“Hmm?” Timmy followed her gaze to the sacks. A glimmer of something that might have been chagrin passed through his eyes fast as a blink. “Oh. The dinners. Hey, is Erich back there?”

“He is,” Lydia said. “I think he’s asleep.”

“Yeah,” Timmy said, straightening. He put a hand into his pocket. “Hang on a minute.” He walked back toward the black doorway as if he were going to check on the other boy, perhaps wake him for his supper.

“Wait,” Lydia said as Timmy reached the doorway.

He looked back at her, twisting at the shoulders, his body and feet still committed.

“Come sit with me.”

“Yeah, I just gotta—”

“First,” she said. “Come sit with me first.”

Timmy hesitated, fluttering like a feather caught between contradictory breezes. Then his shoulders sank a centimeter and his hips turned toward her. He pulled his hand from his pocket. Lydia opened the sacks, unpacked the food, laid the disposable forks beside the plates. Every movement had the precision and beauty of ritual. Timmy sat facing her, his legs crossed. The bulge of the gun stood out from his thigh like a fist. Lydia bowed her head, as if in prayer. Timmy took up his fork and stabbed at the ginger beef. Lydia did the same.

“So you’re going to kill him?” Lydia asked, her voice light.

“Yeah,” Timmy said. “I mean, I ain’t happy about it, but it’s what needs to get done.”

“Needs,” Lydia said, her intonation in the perfect balance point between statement and question.

Timmy ate another bite. “I’m the guy that took a job from Burton. Used to be the job was one thing. Now it’s something else. It’s not like I get to tell him what to do, right?”