Brightly Burning(96)
“It was all for nothing,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “I let Mason get away with it, and she still died.”
“We stopped the worst of it, though. We went to the news media; there were quarantine procedures put in place.”
“Four hundred and fifty-three people died. Those deaths are on me.”
“I think you’ve suffered enough for it.” I stroked his cheek, fussed with his hair, pushing sweat-soaked locks off his forehead. “We’re starting a new life here. You and me. And Xiao. And, oddly, Justine Ingram.” It felt good to joke a bit, to see the corners of Hugo’s mouth quirk. “Hanada came too,” I said. Hugo winced. “We’ll talk about that later.”
“What about Jessa?”
“Still safe on the Lady Liberty, with Orion and Poole.”
“Good.” A coughing fit overtook him, shaking his body painfully. He winced, and I couldn’t help doing so as well.
“We’ll get you pain meds from the Rochester,” I said. “You’ll be okay.”
“I have some now, actually.” Xiao appeared as if by magic. She joined me at Hugo’s bedside, frowning down at his prone figure. “We should get Hanada in here to examine your burns. But in the meantime . . .”
While Xiao administered a shot of clear fluid into Hugo’s vein, I partook of her other offering: dinner. The curry I’d had on board the Empire paled in comparison to this; it was rich, aromatic, perfect. I’d not even finished eating before I looked over to find Hugo asleep. Xiao held on to his hand tightly, stroking his hair.
“I’ve known him his whole life,” she said. “I never admitted it before, but he and Jessa are the closest I’ll ever come to having my own children.” She let out a shuddering breath. “I should have done something, acted like the mother he needed instead of playing the part of the First Officer. I can’t help but feel this is all my fault.”
I settled a hand on her shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “It’s not your fault. Just . . . focus on the fact that we’re here now. We’ll start over. That’s the most any of us can do.”
Reshma came a short time later with a tumble of blankets and a pillow, intuiting that I would not want to leave Hugo’s side. I slept fitfully, waking every few hours with a start, rising to check on him, paranoid he would stop breathing. But everything was fine. The pain meds worked like magic, blurring the next few days as Hugo slept through the worst of his recovery, and I held court by his side. We rarely talked, even when he was lucid enough to do so; all we would do is run ourselves in circles, Hugo castigating himself, me repeating over and over that I loved him. I was here. That had to be enough.
I waited until Hugo was better recovered; after a week he was sitting up, and with yet another, he was walking, albeit with the aid of crutches. I took him outside on a brisk Tuesday evening to watch the sunset; we huddled up close on an overturned tree that had been fashioned into a bench, gazing up at the sky. The words I’d said to Xiao echoed like a new mantra. I shared them with Hugo, hoping he’d find the same solace in them as I did.
“I think we should start over,” I said. “You and me. Well, all of us. But particularly you and me.”
Hugo bristled. “You don’t love me anymore.”
I rolled my eyes at him, refusing to take his histrionics seriously. “I’ve told you a hundred times a day for the last two weeks—?of course I love you. I came down to Earth for you. Don’t be stupid.” I kissed him on the forehead for good measure and wove our fingers together. “But the circumstances of our meeting, our engagement, the people we were—?that was our old life. I don’t want to pick up where we left off. I want to start over. No parties with Bianca Ingram this time.”
That got him to crack a smile.
“We’re not defined by who we were up there,” I continued, looking up, rendered breathless as always by the cascade of colors giving way to pinpricks of starlight. “Who our parents were, or how they died, what jobs they had, the ships we lived on. We’re all equals down here.” I squeezed his hand. “Let’s start over. Okay?”
He squeezed back. “Okay.”
Epilogue
We created a settlement by our landing site and began the long process of learning how to survive on Earth, the next weeks and months full of wonder, frustration, compromise, and, gradually, contentment. It was hard to say which presented the greatest challenge—?learning to understand and live with weather, or the sudden lack of indoor plumbing. Jon could be heard ranting to anyone who would listen that, if only more engineers would come down, we could fix the abhorrent issue that was the indignity of outhouses. I didn’t mind them; in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t kill us to use simple systems of resource management, so long as our population was small and easily sustained. The New Delhians briefed us on myriad elegant solutions for living off the land, from how to filter clean drinking water to animal-based farming techniques. They lent us horses for plowing fields, cows for milk, chickens for eggs.
We lived inside the Ingram on half power until we learned to build houses and while the farmers among us waited for crops to sprout. By that time, Hugo was fully recovered, though he would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and his scars would always tell a story. I did not care one whit how he looked or walked; I was thankful that he was alive.