“You hurt my friend,” I told him.Friendwas a compromise word. Stronger thanshipmate,which would have felt artificially distancing. Weaker than what I probably meant. “Or one of you did.”
“Your friend chose a dangerous trade,” he replied. “You’ve no more cause to be wroth at me than you have to begrudge the storm when it rages or the Leviathan when it strikes.”
I didn’t laugh, but somewhere below my heart I felt the irony. “There are those who would.”
“Are there now?” he echoed. And I saw a light in his eyes, the cold gleam of somebody making a bloody calculation. “When first I was captured, your captain asked me if I’d seen the Möbius Beast. Is she the one you’re thinking of?”
Fuck. I should have just stayed disengaged. “Perhaps I think she’s right.”
With the grace of an oil slick, the pirate moved across his cell and brought his face to the bars. “I’d wager you’re the sort as thinks everything and nothing. All tied in knots behind the eyes and always imaginingthisthing will bethething and never finding it. I’ve seen a hundred of you on the corsair-ships. And each one’s come to a short end.”
“Fine words for a prisoner.”
He shrugged with one shoulder. “I’ve no weapons, no books, no music. Talk is all there’s left to me. May as well use it.”
“Think a lot of yourself, don’t you?”
“I learned long ago that nobody else would. Certainly I’ve never had someone champion me the way you’ve championed your captain.”
I didn’t rise to it.
“And new as I may be to this ship, I’ve a feeling she’ll need you. While the hunting is good, your shipmates will be happy enough to follow her in chasing a myth. When it dries up, though. When she starts having to choose between the monster and the mission. Well.”
He didn’t smile. But his eyes showed that this was very much a choice. Still, I forced myself to be silent. I didn’t think that this man was in any danger of persuading me to free him or to turn on my captain, and we’d taken the precaution of isolating him from his crewmates, but he was upsettingly good at touching nerves and pushing buttons, and I didn’t really want him doing either.
Over the next two hours he made repeated attempts to bait me into conversation. I resisted them all, and when I was relieved alittle after midnight ship time I found myself wandering the corridors in…a dazeisn’t the right term. If anything it was the opposite. A focus I chose not to name, because the name of it scared me.
Medbay didn’t have set visiting hours. I could have gone to Q’s bedside. But when I took steps in that direction a panic rose, and I tasted blood and gall and backed away. Now was not, I decided, the time to confront mortality. At least no more than I’d confronted it already.
So I fled. And instead of going where my every instinct had been telling me to go, I let my wanderings take me to the officers’ quarters. Strictly, these rooms were off-limits, but in practice we all went where we wanted and nobody much cared. Hierarchies tended to break down after a year or two in the sky.
Outside Locke’s door, I hesitated. While I was pretty sure that no other officer would have me flogged for invading their privacy like this, Locke was a stickler for the rules, even if they didn’t feel personally affronted.
Of course, the actual worst-case scenario there was that I got the skin flayed from my back, and in that exact moment I was desperate enough to feel something—to feelanythingthat wasn’t this disconcerting mix of naked and alone and terrified—that I’d have taken punishment over nothing.
I buzzed the intercom and heard Locke’s voice crackle out of it. “Who goes?”
I told them who went.
“And you’re here why?” It was a fair question. And a gentler one than I’d feared.
“I thought you’d want my report on the prisoner.”
The intercom went silent for a moment, then sparked back to life. “That’s a lie.”
“I was cold and out of my head and thought you might want to fuck me.”
“More honest.” Locke’s voice sounded almost amused. As far as I could tell at least—the line was bad. “But it raises questions.”
I couldn’t tell if I was giving them too much credit or too little, but I was beginning to think Locke was messing with me. A clearcome inor a clearpiss offI’d been prepared for. This neither here nor there was messing me around. “What sort of questions?”
“Why you came to me, for one.”
Sometimes, tactical insubordination was the way to go. “Because in my humble opinion youbadlyneed to get laid.”
“And you think you’re the ideal solution to that problem?”
“I think something’s better than nothing and out here I’m seeing a whole lot of nothing.”
