Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(10)

As the bay sprayed down his suit and collected the water for recycle, a sudden thought struck him. Beck might not even realize that was an option. He certainly hadn’t bothered to research the divisions within the Watch before his parents were lost. Like most citizens of the Protectorate, he had seen them as a monolith.

He spent the rest of the cleaning cycle and all of the dinner following working out a way to approach her and explain the possibilities without pressuring her. Certainly he would respect her decision should she not change her mind, but it would be a travesty for her to make it without all the facts.

Eshton had no way to know the decision would be made for them both, no matter what either of them wanted.





5


Over the next few days, Beck had all the time she needed to learn about grief. Her terminal pinged two hours before her shift, reminding her that she was off work for two weeks. This was, like all Protectorate policies originating in the Tenets, not negotiable. She understood it in an objective way. The goal was to make certain as many people survived as possible, which meant every rule and law was bent toward achieving it. Just as every person in the Rez was required to undergo checkups every four weeks and accept treatment when called for, those who endured powerful trauma had to take time to themselves.

Mental health was a more nebulous concept, but a cold and purely rational series of experiments conducted by the protectorate showed this was the method that worked best. Beck knew this on the same fundamental level as mathematics or English grammar. Such things were taught alongside those lessons, after all. Of all the lessons never learned by the failed civilizations that came before, the Protectorate took this one to heart: require the populace to be educated on why decisions were made, not only how.

All of which was background noise in Beck’s head as she muddled through those next few days.

Staying with Fisher made things easier in many ways. She tidied up around the place when he was busy. She helped him in the bar. Sometimes she sat on the narrow staircase winding up behind it, watching patrons speak in a low buzz, wondering how they could go on with happy lives.

Beck understood that her grief was not their own, at least on an intellectual level. But in the parts of her brain that refused to accept logic or fact, the idea that anyone could laugh and find even a moment of unchained joy was bizarre. Didn’t they understand that at any moment, everything could be taken away from them? That life and happiness and even contentment were fragile beyond belief?

And slowly she began to grasp the elemental truth that yes, of course they could. That was why some people seemed hell bent on wresting every scrap of joy from life. Because it could all be gone in a blink.

The realization wasn’t a comfort. Beck looked back on her own short existence and found it wanting. She had never been one to explore, not outside mechanical or computer systems. Her taste for close friendships withered after Lacey joined the Deathwatch. Regret clawed at her guts, though more softly than it had yesterday, and far less than the day before. She had never stinted in showing her family how much she loved them. That knowledge tethered her when the seas were rough.

Which was another lesson she learned about grief. It could be powerful, even deadly in its own way, but was inherently unsustainable at those extremes. Her missing family was still a gaping void, but like any injury the pain began to dull. There were whole minutes when she forgot it was there at all, and these were a blessing and a curse. In those brief flashes, Beck could begin to see what life might be like on the other side, through all the immediate hurt and loss and into a world where she had to live with it as a reality. But then she would remember and the immediacy of it all, mere days into what would surely be a lifetime of coming to terms, reasserted itself that much more powerfully.

Fisher made her laugh. She could understand why her dad liked the man. They shared—had shared—an aura of gentle earnestness. Just being told it was okay to laugh was nearly revolutionary. Every dark part of her said otherwise. Demanded otherwise.

Beck was sitting on the landing where the staircase turned before dropping the last few steps to ground level when someone new walked into the bar. The crowd was thick and the new arrival apparently short enough not to be easily seen through the press of bodies. She heard the bell tinkle and saw the movement of the door, but couldn’t get a good look.

The relatively quiet atmosphere let her hear his voice, however. The muted hum of conversation momentarily bordered on silence as the new arrival spoke from behind the line of people sitting at the bar itself.

“Can I get a beer? And maybe one for Beck, if she’s here. I was hoping to talk to her.”

The words themselves weren’t what sent a chill down her spine. That voice. It couldn’t be.

Others in the room were put off, but for different reasons. The stranger was just that; someone none of them had seen before. Which was incredibly rare in Rez Brighton. The larger, older Rezzes were close enough to each other and metropolitan enough to allow for fast Loop travel between them and populations that could afford the luxury to do so. Brighton was not one of them. There might be too many people inside its wall for everyone to know each other, but this was balanced by the almost clannish way citizens clustered together. When every day brought the risk of an incursion by Pales, or the chance of a dust storm that could shred your lungs to red pulp, it bred a deep reluctance to travel far from home.

Strangers were incredibly rare. No one in the room knew the man.