But she put her hand over mine, passed me a fusing iron.“Work with me.”
And we did. It became… peaceful, in the end. Familiar. Like we knew what we were doing and had always known. Like no more words needed to be said.
That wasn’t true. Not exactly. But that’s a story for later.
We worked on that coffin for weeks. Far longer than seemed remotely necessary. When the modifications to the superstructure had all been made, she started work on the decoration. We paneled the box all over with sheets of Leviathan bone, andthen Q took her laser cutter and began to engrave the surface with beautiful, entwining patterns. And on the lid, she carved the wide, spreading shape that I had still never seen in person but which I was learning to call a tree.
At last, after so much work and heartache and flat-out weirdness, it was done. And there was a kind of mortuary wonder to it. A solemn majesty.
“What now?” I asked Q, looking at the very large, very expensive boondoggle we’d spent so much of our time on.
Without words, Q replied by stepping into the coffin and lying down.
I gave her a seriously-stop-fucking-about look.
She didn’t stop fucking about. “Is this—are you still trying to make some kind of point? I’m sorry. I really am. I was scared of losing you. I didn’t want to confront it. I should have been less of a fuckup, but I am never going to be less of a fuckup.”
But Q remained silent and perfectly still. So with a sigh I played along. I stood beside the open box and looked down at her. She looked peaceful, lying there. And despite the bone-white walls of the coffin and its funereal motifs, she seemed as alive as she always did. Even her stillness gave the impression of just being belayed motion.
Which meant I wasn’t entirely surprised when, only slightly less swiftly than she would have done at full health, she darted up, seized me by the arm, and pulled me in on top of her.
Iwassurprised when the coffin lid closed firmly on top of us, leaving us trapped, body to body, in the absolute black, the low hum of the oxygen diffuser the one thing reassuring me that she hadn’t just killed us both.
“What theactualfuck?” I asked her, my voice in an unnecessary whisper.
“Media vita in morte sumus,” she replied. And then she kissed me.
Looking back, one of the things that still messes with my head is that I knew Q so well in so many ways, and not at all in others. I couldn’t tell in the moment if this whole thing hadbeen an elaborate sex game, a complicated joke at my expense, or something deeper and more complex.
I’d later realize it had been all those things and more, but at the time I was just an unhelpful mix of angry, frightened, and horny.
As it turns out, it’s incredibly hard to fuck in a coffin. Even a mechanized one with synthetically padded walls and a built-in air filter. Buthardisn’t the same asimpossibleand sometimes a challenge is a turn-on, so I went with it.
We weren’t in absolute darkness, of course. The blue-green light of Q’s tattoos provided just enough illumination that I could make out the lines of her face, the path of her hands. And with my limited range of movement there wasn’t much I could do except kiss her and clutch at her and tell her that she was beautiful. That she was remarkable. That for as long as that lid remained closed and the steel-and-bone box remained our whole world I would be always and only hers.
I think she liked that. We’d established very early on that she didn’t mind my having other lovers even if—like Locke and, for that matter, most other members of the crew—she had her concerns about the captain. And since she didn’t always come back to her bunk every night, I’d kind of assumed she was fucking other people too. But—and maybe I’m just flattering myself—for all she said her people didn’t do ownership, I’m pretty sure she enjoyed the idea of possessing me, at least while we were together. One of the sneaky advantages of living the way I do, a little bit unstuck in time with the past always snatching and the future always beckoning, is that sometimes, just sometimes, I can play the same trick in reverse and makenowfeel like forever.
Until it doesn’t.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-FIVEThe Congregation
I tried to make sure, when I was working on this book, that even somebody who knew nothing about Leviathans, or about the hunt, could follow what was going on. Part of that means making sure you know at least as much about how Leviathans work as I do. And yes, in hindsight I could probably have worked that information into the text more elegantly instead of just devoting the occasional chapter to long digressions about biology, but, well, I guess that’s just my time as a schoolmistress coming to the fore. Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em; tell ’em; tell ’em what you told ’em.
One of the things I’ve been telling you for a while now is that leviathans are, by and large, pretty solitary creatures. But as we’ve seen, pretty solitary isn’t the same thing ascompletelysolitary. Pods are a thing, after all, and it’s hard for any species to be completely solitary unless it reproduces asexually. An although another thing I’ve told you is that we don’t know much about the reproductive habits of the Jovian beasts, I do think it’s likely that, unlike a lot of polyps, fish, and other sea creatures, they use internal fertilization.
Which is another way of saying that Leviathans fuck.
Nobody has ever actually seen them mating or found a spawning ground. Nobody has ever recorded… anythingabout them, really. They’re a resource that we kill for parts, not something we document.
But the hunters know. While everybody else just ignores the monsters who keep their lights on, we dig deep inside them, and weunderstandthem. They fuck. They have families. They have nurseries.
And when we find a nursery, we charge into it and start killing indiscriminately.
Q was well around this time, so it must have been either before or after the whole thing with the pirates and the coffin. I’m putting it after, but I don’t remember the pirates being involved. Idoremember Marsh being deep, deep in whatever the voices were telling him to do, and I think that makes it late in the voyage.
Either way, the themes shake out. And besides, who’s going to prove me wrong? Everybody who could is dead.
