Had I been hoping for something else?
Maybe. Even now, in this dark, cramped room, narrating into a worn-out autostenographer, I find that night hard to think back to. I’d gone to Locke looking for the same thing I always got from a certain kind of sex. A secondhand oblivion to distract me from the firsthand oblivion I’d been staring into since I’d fallen from a skyboat. Since Q had been stabbed. Since I’d been born.
My two other shipboard partners—and let’s be honest,partnerwas a bad term to use for my relationship with A—were take-charge sorts, and that was normally what I wanted. Tell me what you want me to do, or what you want to do to me, or better still just fucking do it. That’s thepoint, in a way. This body is basically a rental anyway. Better to burn it up than let it get repossessed by Aphrodite Pharma State.
But fucking Locke had other ideas. Fucking Locke wanted me to make decisions. And they wanted totalk. They wantedmeto talk. Coherently. About myself. About what I wanted and needed and felt.
It freaked me out.
“Hey,” they whispered, as soothingly as they could when I was bent backwards over a low drinks table and we had our hands down each other’s pants. “It’s okay. If thisis— Wecan stop any time.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to tell them that being able to stop any time was the exact problem. It sounded messed up in my head and was six thousand percent guaranteed to sound even more messed up out loud. “Just fuck me,” I whispered back, trying to sound urgent and fearing I just sounded pathetic.
But they moved their hands to my waist and lifted me up to a sitting position with frustrating gentleness. “Sorry. I’m not the kind of person who’s turned on by crying women.”
Well that was mortifying. I hadn’t actually realized I’dbeencrying. “It’s nothing.”
“I didn’t say it was something. But I’m allowed to stop this just as much as you are.”
Anger was an unhealthy response to humiliation, but healthy responses have never really been my thing. “You’re a fucking coward.”
“Because I don’t want to hold you down and fuck you while you weep uncontrollably?”
Anger was an unhealthy response. Hatred was even worse. But in that moment I hated Locke with a passion. If I’d had any dignity I’d have left, but now that they’d drawn attention to my tears I was helpless. I could barely speak, let alone stand—and as a rule emotions aren’t what I want to stop me standing after sex.
“Your bunkmate was injured in the boarding, wasn’t she?” Locke half asked, while I sat on the edge of the table unsatisfied and eviscerated.
I didn’t dignify the question with a nod. But I didn’t need to. That was the thing about Locke being so fucking officious. They knew the details anyway.
“Go to her,” they said. It wasn’t an order. It wasn’t the kind of thing they had the authoritytoorder. But they said it the same way that they gave commands when the boats were out and the spears were ready to launch.
“She’s no use to me unconscious.”
I should have known better than to rely on empty bravado.
“You know”—Locke looked deep into my eyes in a way that made me feel flensed—“I actually don’t think that’s true.”
They were right, of course. And that was what I hated most of all.
CHAPTER
FIFTYForsaken
Dr. Pierce was off duty but on call, which was the perpetual state of ships’ doctors. Of course these days a lot of the more routine medical work was done by the drones anyway—the doctor’s primary role was to oversee the medbay and to take the blame if something went wrong.
Most of the beds were empty; the sky-hunt was dangerous but a lot of its dangers were the kind that killed you quickly, irrecoverably, and quite often explosively so there’d been a relatively small number of actualinjurieson the voyage. Sickness was more of an issue since we lived in close quarters and breathed recycled air that had been through a hundred other pairs of lungs, but the atmosphere scrubbers and decontamination chambers saw to most of that.
For somebody who had been shot in the back with a spray of subsonic flechettes, Q looked pretty good, inasmuch as I was any judge. For somebody in almost any other context, she looked terrible. Her tattoos, which normally burned with light even when she was asleep, were lifeless traceries of biometallic wire. Tubes ran out of her arm into a set of machines which I assumed were designed to do her some kind of good—although, since they were likely the products of some subsidiary or other of Aphrodite Pharma State, they were also probably charging her by the hour.
There was a stool by the bed for the convenience of visitors and, presumably, the doctor, so I pulled it over and sat down beside her. I’d come straight from Locke’s cabin, so my cheeks were still stained with tear tracks I hadn’t bothered to wipe away and my mouth still tasted of salt and blood.
Even if Locke hadn’t put me off talking for at least a day, I’d have had no words, so I reached out and took Q by the hand. She felt cold. Not void-cold or ice-cold and, most importantly, not grave-cold, but colder than I’d ever felt her, and by that time I’d felt her alot.
In case the weird chronology and constant digressions in this book didn’t make it obvious enough for you, I’ve always been fucking hopeless at being in the moment. In some ways I’ve been more fully aboard the Pequod in the years after I shipped on her than I was on the voyage. To actually ground me in the here and now of where I am I need something sharp. It can be pain, it can be pleasure, it can be a blinding light or a deafening noise, but it needs to be something that grabs me by the throat and says,If you look away you will die.
It isn’t a thing I can find in quiet moments. So as I sat there holding Q’s hand and trying so hard, so mercilessly fucking hard to just focus on the fact of her, on the moment that for all I knew then might have been the last, on the palm-to-palm feeling of her fingers intertwined with mine, my mind slipped its shackles and started wandering.
I failed her, in other words. As I would fail her so often.
