And then it gets worse, because I keep going, because I can’t stop. That morning after Cayzor stayed for dinner, with Hook and Leah and the baby, and Andrew asking what we’d talked about, and me — cheerful, proud, pleased with myself — telling him:
I got the schematics. The whole pre-upgrade archive. Load histories, failure logs, everything, going back forty years. It was all sitting on Cayzor’s system, nobody ever thought to keep it after the upgrade except him.
And Andrew’s whole face lighting up.That’s the thing we’ve been missing. That changes everything.
I gave it to him. I handed it to him on a walk to work.
And then —
Oh.
Oh no.
“The maintenance roster. That wasmy idea.I sat in this apartment and I asked you who was supposed to be touching the grid, and you’d never thought of it and you went and pulled schedules out of an archive nobody had opened in decades. Because I told you to.”
“And you said, when you were explaining—” I’m going to be sick. I can feel it arriving. “You said Andrew didn’t need Ordek’s name. That he just needed to see that somebody had started digging in the old maintenance records. That he was in that same system every day.”
Cayzor says nothing.
“He was standing right there,” I say. “He was in your office with us. He watched me ask you for the rosters.”
The room tilts.
“I found Ordek. Nobody had looked at that and I told you to look at it and two days later a ninety-one-year-old man dies.” I don’t finish it.
I’m already running for the bathroom.
I don’t makeit in any dignified way.
I go down on my knees on the tile and throw up everything in me, and then I keep throwing up after there’s nothing left. My eyes stream. My whole face is wet. I can hear myself making a sound I’ve never made in front of another person in my life.
And then there’s an enormous hand gathering my hair up off my neck.
He’s on his knees on my bathroom floor. Cayzor of Eighteen, seven feet of him, folded down in a room that is much too small for him, holding my hair back in one huge careful fist and putting the other hand flat between my shoulder blades.
He doesn’t tell me it’s all right, because it isn’t. He doesn’t say a single word the entire time — he just kneels and holds my hair and lets me be as disgusting and as broken as I need to be. And when it’s finally finished he reaches up without letting go and runs the tap and hands me a cup.
I rinse my mouth. My hands are shaking so hard I nearly drop the glass.
Then I sit back against the wall, slide down and put my head against the tile.
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
“I’m pregnant,” I tell him.
It comes out flat, into the quiet.
I don’t know why I say it. I’ve been holding it for weeks like a stone in my mouth, from the first day, and I had a whole plan about it — I was going to get through this contract and go home and tell Andrew on the transporter platform on New Earth, and start the entire next part of my life somewhere clean and far away from here.
I think the truth is I don’t have any reason to keep it to myself anymore and since everything is coming out today, why not this too.
“I found out my first day of work. That’s why I nap so much and why I was sick this morning and the morning before that. It’s why I’ve been eating like a lunatic. The father’s name is Cole. We had a brief relationship and it wasn’t going anywhere. He left me for my cousin two weeks before I got on that transporter. They’re engaged to be married now and moving to Omega 9. He never wanted children. He said so, repeatedly, the entire time we were together. I’m about ninety-nine percent certain he’ll want nothing to do with this baby. I don’t expect him to. I’m not planning around him. I did the math the first week and decided I’m keeping this baby, even if this means I’m going to raise this baby all by myself.”
I turn my head against the wall to look at him.
“I’m going to be somebody’s mother by myself. That’s the plan. That was already the plan before tonight, when I still had a brother. So…”
And Cayzor of Eighteen looks back at me, steady, with his enormous shoulders against my bathtub. “I know,” he says.
