The Galaxy, and the Ground Within (Wayfarers #4)(35)

Ashby was a piece of her life she would grieve if he were gone. Every time she pretended he didn’t exist, every time she dodged her crewmates’ good-natured questions about why it’d been so long since they’d seen her take a lover, it felt as though she were throwing mud in his face. Such deception was disrespectful to who he was and all he’d given her. He followed every rule of hers to the letter, even though no one else in his life would’ve minded in the slightest. He hid and lied and kept her quiet, for her sake. She hated it, fervently.

… and yet.

It was one thing for some modder or artist or crunchy bohemian on Coriol to cast tradition to the wind. It was entirely another for someone like Pei, who was not politically radical and had never been and for whom reputation was the framework everything else in her life clung to. She didn’t have a clear map for what would happen if her relationship with Ashby became public knowledge, but she could guess. She wouldn’t lose her ship over it – that was hers, bought and paid for. But her job as she knew it would be over, once word got around. Military contracts would evaporate, and the big businesses most worth hauling for would probably vanish as well. She could go elsewhere, pursue more work in multispecies space, maybe focus on Aandrisk or Harmagian clients instead. But those weren’t the networks her best contacts were in, and rebuilding a list of people who would work with her would be all the harder while looking for a new crew. Some of hers would leave, no question. Most, probably. She’d confided in her pilot and her algaeist about Ashby and they hadn’t abandoned her for it, but then, she was friends with them to a degree that she wasn’t with the rest. She didn’t know how the others would react. She wouldn’t bet on a positive outcome.

Pei was nothing if not resourceful. If push came to shove, she could start from scratch. What it came down to was … she didn’t want to. But she didn’t want to keep playing in the shadows, either. She wanted to keep her job. She wanted to fuck in a park (metaphorically). She could not see a reality in which those two desires might coexist.

And around and around it went.

She hadn’t told Ashby that this was tearing at her as it was. On the contrary, she’d written to him and told him she didn’t care who knew anymore, that if someone found out, oh well. She’d meant it, at the time. The last drop had been dangerous, one of the worst Pei’d ever taken part in. It had rattled her, but not half as much as when she’d seen the news from Hedra Ka and known exactly which civilian ship the Toremi had fired upon. Ashby was the farthest thing in the universe from a soldier. He had no business finding himself in a situation like that. But as she’d sat there alone in her quarters, clutching her scrib so hard she bruised the screen, she wondered how many times those tables had been turned. How many times it had been him reading the news, sifting between the lines and trying to determine if she was okay?

In that moment, she’d had enough of pretending.

In the moments that followed, the tangle returned.

She thought about what she’d written to him then, scribbled onto a piece of dead tree and shot across the void. I won’t say anything to my crew one way or another, but they might piece it together. If they do, I’ll deal with it. I don’t care anymore. To some extent, that was true. It was a risky thing, for her to spend shore leave on the Wayfarer. She knew some of her crew had found her destination odd, given that they’d been there themselves and seen nothing but a homely tunnelling ship that had lent them a hand. Part of Pei wanted her crew to figure it out, put the pieces together, hit the detonator for her. She normally hated things being outside of her control, but in a twisted way, that felt like the best possible outcome. She’d spent standards trying to determine the right course of action, the right words to say. Having somebody else erase all of those decisions sounded like a relief, of sorts.

She didn’t want it to happen.

But she likewise did.

She began to pant softly, her body’s unconscious way of trying to cool down. The nameless ache in her belly began to ease. She turned her head and pressed her cheek hard against the stone, plunging into the dizzying warmth, trying to sear away the unsolvable.





SPEAKER


Speaker assumed that Roveg could read her about as well as she could read him, but even so, she did her best to mask her sadness as the sib tower let them know that it could not, in fact, establish a transmission path.

‘Damn,’ Roveg said. He returned to the access panel, picking up his tools. Speaker was fascinated by both components of this action: the bifurcated ends of his legs, which could do nothing more than grasp objects between them like pairs of tweezers, and the tools designed for such appendages, which were so slim they seemed fragile. But Roveg wielded these with far more dexterity than Speaker would’ve thought his toes could manage, and he dove back into the access panel to tinker further. ‘All right, let’s give it another go.’

‘Are either of you hungry?’ Tupo asked. Xe paused. ‘Right, you can’t have snacks.’

Speaker clicked her beak kindly. ‘I can have snacks, just not out here. But no, thank you, I’m not hungry.’

‘Me neither,’ Roveg said.

‘Okay,’ Tupo said. Xe paused again. ‘Well, I’m hungry.’

Roveg laughed. ‘You go on, Tupo, we might be a while out here.’

Tupo made an awkward exit without another word, padding up the path to the house.