“But why?” she wailed, almost helplessly, as she found the door to her own quarters.
Losing the contract meant that she would be fired, and it meant that she would have to return to Earth, and that her parents would fade away in misery on Callia-14 forever.
But she was resourceful, and smart, and she would find another way, another job, another future.
That was her destiny. The best she could do now was try to handle it with some dignity. Mozok’s priorities were clear, and she should never have ignored him but always taken him at his word— he wanted to save his city. Voso was loyal only to Mozok.
It was insane to have thought there was anything else to what was transpiring between them all this time; when they realized that she was too stubborn to leave, they’d changed their tactic to getting her to stay. Who knew why? Perhaps it had been easier for them or more fun. Maybe there had even been some sentiment there, among them?
But as soon as her heart began to grope for excuses, to feel tenderly for Voso when she thought of him, trying to write a narrative in which their choices were not selfish, she realized that she was repeating the same errors she had made before with her sister’s now-husband. And she had sworn to herself never to be that foolish again.
Once in her rooms, she paced her quarters without a plan or a coherent thought. Raw emotions erupted and burst inside of her, replaced by new and different ones, none of them allowing thought. She felt rudderless. At last, she paused in front of the windows that overlooked the shoreline, and in the distance, the city of Old Celox.
The storm had ended. And therefore, so had Trothplight.
She went over what she had overheard again in her mind. Her thoughts began to wander, back to their shared intimacy, to the feeling of—
She cut herself off as soon as her mind wandered to the forbidden thought about love. She had been tricked, she reminded herself. She could not help that it had already happened. But she would not suffer, or be foolish, or lose her dignity this time around.
She spun around, surveying the rooms she had not visited for many days.
They no longer seemed like a place she had ever stayed at all.
She had nothing with her but her old clothing and her small luggage container, which had been retrieved from the parliamentary buildings and placed in her room. She had ignored them until now, not needing anything from them.
She inhaled deeply, set her jaw in a rigid line, closed and opened her eyes, and then yanked the suitcase from the floor to set it on a bench at the foot of her bed. Robotically, she snapped it open, found her clothing, changed, and snapped it shut.
She folded the beautiful clothing from Voso and Mozok carefully on the edge of the bed before leaving. She wasn’t sure why she did it, but as she walked through the door of her bedroom for the last time, she told herself that she had done it to not appear to have left experiencing any kind of emotion.
They would not, she decided, see her cry or throw a fit.
She would not be foolish, as she had been in previous episodes of her life, and leave herself open to a deep emotional wound, nor the humiliation of having trusted someone only to be betrayed.
In the many weeks that the storm had raged, Mozok and Voso had given her free reign around the fortress. She had discovered—without actively looking for it—a passageway to the tunnel that they had entered through. She would start there, attempting to find a way out.
She saw no reason to end Trothplight officially. She doubted her ability to do so, and for all she knew, it wasn’t even possible. Leaving would be enough, leaving without saying anything would allow her to inflict a wound upon them before they did so to her—even if it was only the appearance of a wound, even if she could not help herself from feeling the deep, heart-scorching pain of losing what she knew to be love.
CHAPTER17
It had always mystified Mina that the air inside her high-end but very tiny apartment could smell so terribly stale after a long journey, despite the advanced ventilation and the supposed care that the robotic servants were to have taken of it. She sniffed the air and crinkled her nose in disgust, wondering what created the smell.
“Well,” she said aloud, surveying the apartment that she had once loved so much. She left the thought unfinished but she let the sentiment settled in her chest. Before her time on Astrogoda-9, the thought of losing this apartment would have depressed her greatly. Now it seemed colorless and empty, and the thought of never coming back here again did not disturb her in the slightest.
Her comms device, set up in a small area enclosed in soundproof glass for working at home, blinked fervently. Messages, no doubt from Paolo, no doubt delivered in a high-pitched scream, awaited her.
She strolled over to the device calmly and let her fingers hover over it. Paolo’s messages would begin with raging disbelief disguised as questions. “How could you do this? Why is someone telling me you abandoned your contract two days after securing it? Do you have any idea how much money we’re going to lose? and then escalate from there to messages telling her she was fired, she could no longer use BKG’s travel fleet, she would need to leave her apartment immediately, and she would never work again, anywhere.
She deleted them all without listening to them and sat down on her very small couch. Her window—the most valuable thing about her apartment, for so few “compartments,” as most people called them, in Capitol City, had any windows at all—looked out on a courtyard of sorts. But mainly, the view was of the gray walls of the opposing building. Most people with windows eventually despaired and installed screen walls over them, like everyone else.
Mina sighed and her stomach twisted a little as her comms device blinked and sounded. But the feeling that facing Paolo gave her was so diminished in comparison to the profound heartache of leaving Mozok and Voso, that it disappeared almost instantly. She answered dryly.
“Yes, Paolo,” she said, not even bothering to make it sound like a question. She knew what was coming, and she wanted him to know that. “I’m just now—”
“Where have you been, you darling woman? I’ve left hundreds of messages, at least. I understand, I understand, if you need some time to rest after your long journey, and I imagine your parents will be arriving soon, but you must make time to come and see us, we’re planning on having a celebratory dinner and you are the guest of honor.”
“Paolo,” Mina began, her tone resolute, just as she had practiced it so many times before deep sleep had set in on her return from the Astrogoda system. His words had not caught up to her, but they did just as she began the next sentence. “I understand that you’re—”
She cut herself off. What was it he was saying?
