Defy the Worlds (Constellation #2)(9)
She settles herself on one of the large cushions. It’s old, patched here and there, the cloth soft with age. The light filtering through the high arched windows casts beams through the vast space of the temple. Breathing in deeply, Noemi smells incense.
In this place, even her noisy mind might quiet down.
Closing her eyes, Noemi calls to mind Captain Baz’s two questions:
What are you fighting, Noemi Vidal? And what are you fighting for?
She doesn’t expect to get much out of that, really. It’s a starting place, no more. Because of course she knows the answers. She’s fighting Earth, fighting its mechs. And she’s fighting for Genesis.
But suddenly she realizes that’s not the answer—or at least, not the complete answer. She’s also fighting her fellow soldiers, because they don’t trust her any longer. She’s fighting for Akide to listen to her, to see her planet taking more aggressive action to defend itself.
And I’m fighting to carry on without Esther. Without Abel.
I’m fighting to continue on alone.
She’s always known most other people don’t like her much, and she’s never expected them to. Her one real friendship was with Esther Gatson, the foster sister who had no choice about whether or not to let Noemi into her home and her heart—and Esther’s death has become one of the crimes the others blame her for.
Before, at least, Noemi had hoped her solitude might be temporary. That someday, somehow, she’d figure out how to get closer to people, or stop scaring them off—that she’d figure out just what her problem was so that she could solve it. And when she was out in the galaxy, meeting Harriet and Zayan on Kismet, Virginia on Cray, or Ephraim on Stronghold, she seemed to have figured it out. Making friends was easier when she could make a fresh start.
No fresh starts here. Whatever lessons in friendship she learned out there don’t seem to apply here. Her isolation has become even more complete, and she’s trying to accept that it’s probably permanent.
Relax, Esther used to say. Let people get to know you! Don’t be so nervous and defensive all the time. If you’re not afraid of being rejected, then people are less likely to reject you.
Esther was telling the truth. Noemi knows how people avoid the loneliest among them. But if the trick to making friends is to stop being lonely, the paradox is inescapable. Bitterly she thinks it’s like telling someone starving to death that they can have all the food they want if they’ll just stop being hungry.
Only a few times in her life has she felt that maybe the famine might be over. Really, though, there was only one time she wasn’t utterly alone—one time a person understood her and cared for her—loved her, he said—
Noemi pulls herself out of the memory. Thinking of Abel hurts, for a thousand reasons but mostly because she knows she’ll never see him again.
Sparing Abel’s life was the one moment of religious grace Noemi has ever been granted, the one time faith became a living force inside her. She’d thought that if she ever had such an instant of profound connection, her questions about God would be answered. Everything was supposed to come clear. But it turns out not to work that way. She is still small in a vast cosmos, unsure what is right and good.
Try again, she tells herself, closing her eyes. Use the mantra Baz gave you.
It doesn’t help. Meditation brings her no peace, only reminds her how alone she is—and how afraid she is that the loneliness will endure forever.
“Will you want toast this morning?” Mrs. Gatson says it the way a server in a restaurant might speak to a customer. A new customer, not one of the regulars. Noemi has lived in the Gatsons’ home for nine years.
After Esther’s death, the Gatsons commissioned a portrait of her from an artistic neighbor. The drawing hangs on one of the walls, a soft sketch in pastels that captures her golden hair and blue eyes. But the silence she’s left behind expands to fill the house every morning, until it feels as though Noemi doesn’t have room to draw a single breath. This place will never completely feel like home.
Their house is a typical one on Genesis—bedrooms underground, general living space above, with large “windows” of translucent solar panels. Vegetables sprout from window boxes that line the perimeter of the one large common room, and herbs grow in long, skinny beams that stretch from floor to ceiling and divide the space into areas for cooking and eating, for socializing, and for work. Entertainment is found outside the home, unless a family is fond of music: Vids, books, and the like are kept in libraries, and pools and fitness equipment are at public gymnasiums. Noemi thought nothing of this until she went on her journey through the galaxy, along the worlds of the Loop, where she saw Virginia Redbird’s lab/hideout/opium den on Cray, Kismet’s luxurious resorts with their lavender seas and lilac skies, and the overwhelming, vibrant blizzard of activities and entertainment that dying Earth revels in to distract itself from its approaching end.
Once, hiding on an asteroid in the middle of a nebula’s rainbow cloud, she and Abel watched an old twentieth-century “movie” together, one with former lovers reunited unexpectedly in Casablanca.
If only I could see Abel one more time, she thinks. Without the weight of two worlds pressing down on us. When we could just… be.
“Noemi?” Mrs. Gatson’s smile is stiff at the corners, like a napkin starched into precise folds. Dark circles under her eyes hint at a sleepless night, and her voice is hoarse. Is she getting sick? Maybe she was crying for Esther; for the Gatsons, grief is private. They don’t share theirs with Noemi, and have shown no interest in helping with hers. “Do you want toast?”