"Thank you."
The whole thing takes forty-three minutes.
I stand up and turn toward the door, and that's when Petrov lurches. The zip-ties must have been wearing against the chair bolt, because his right hand comes free and he swings, desperate and clumsy, catching nothing but air because I'm already moving. I step inside his reach, close the distance to zero, and drive my forehead into the bridge of his nose.
The crunch is satisfying in a way I don't examine.
He drops. Not unconscious but close to it, slumped in the chair with blood sheeting down his face and his broken nose already swelling. I flex my hands. My knuckles are split where his teeth caught them during the chin grab, and his blood is mixed with mine now, drying to rust on my fingers.
Kesh and Torres come in when I open the door. I give them the information, the berth number, the rotation schedule, Maren's name. They take Petrov to the medical bay. I stand in the empty interrogation room and breathe.
The blood is under my nails.
The fluorescents keep humming.
Dexter hasn't moved from his wall. I'd almost forgotten he was there, which is a lie I tell myself. I was aware of him the entire time. Aware of his silence, his stillness, the way his marks shifted through shades of blue and white as the interrogation progressed. Like a mood ring for the damned.
"You've changed," he says.
The words land on me like rain on metal. I don't look at him.
"You changed me."
The ship issmall enough that avoiding someone is a matter of will rather than architecture. For two hours after we leave Gamma-7, I manage it. I check the nav charts Torres plotted for Haven's End, three days through contested space with no relay coverage. I clean my weapons. I eat a ration bar that tastes like compressed sawdust and obligation.
Then I run out of tasks, and he's in the galley when I get there, and the ship is too small for pretense.
He's sitting at the narrow table with his hands wrapped around a mug of something that steams. The galley lights are dimmed for the sleep cycle, and in the low light his marks glow with soft persistence, mapping constellations across his forearms and up the sides of his neck. He looks up when I come in and doesn't speak, just watches me with those eyes that see too much and that faint luminescence that turns the shadows around him into something almost alive.
I go to the sink. Turn on the water. Start scrubbing.
Petrov's blood comes off in flakes, rust-colored, circling the drain in the grey station water. Underneath, my knuckles are raw. I scrub harder than I need to, and the pain is clarifying, a small bright point of focus in the murk of everything else.
"The first year after Sigma-9," I say, and I don't know why I'm saying it. My hands are under the water and I'm watching the pink run off them and the words come outlike they've been sitting in my throat for six years, corroding the tissue. "I looked for you."
I hear his mug settle against the table.
"Not to find you." The water runs clear. I keep scrubbing. "To hurt you."
Silence behind me. The ship's engines hum through the floor, through my boots, into the bones of my feet. Everything vibrates at its own frequency out here.
"I killed three men who reminded me of you." My voice is flat. Clinical. The voice I used in the interrogation room, stripped of everything except information. "Same height. Same walk. Wrong face."
His bioluminescence flickers. Even with my back to him, I can see it, the shift in light on the wall ahead of me, the shadows jumping like startled animals. And I feel his shock, which shouldn't be possible through my walls but is. It comes through like sound through a bulkhead, muffled but unmistakable. A concussive burst of something that feels like grief.
"They weren't enemies." I turn off the water. Stand there with my hands dripping into the basin, watching the last of the blood swirl into the drain. "They were just similar. And I couldn't touch you. So I touched them."
The word "touched" does ugly work in that sentence and I let it.
The galley is so quiet I can hear the oxygen recycler cycling in the walls, that faint metallic wheeze that means the filters need replacing. I can hear his breathing, or maybe I'm feeling it, that involuntary awareness of him that I can't seem to amputate no matter how many walls I build.
I turn around. Lean against the sink. Cross my arms over my chest because I need to hold something, and if it's myself, at least I know the grip.
"Does that change what you think of me?"
He's looking at me with an expression I can't read, or won't. His marks have settled into a low, steady pulse, the same blue-white as a star through viewport glass. His hands are still around the mug but his knuckles have gone pale.
"No." His voice is rough, scraped raw like mine gets after too long in hard vacuum without proper gear. "It tells me what I already knew. That I broke something in you. That the break became a blade. And that the blade is pointed at me now."
