Nemesis Games

And now, she would break her rule of silence, and the thing they had between them would either survive or it wouldn’t. It was a terrible thought. Marco might still be able to empty her, and he wouldn’t even have to spend the effort of being aware of it. Existing was enough.

“I don’t,” Jim said, then stopped. He looked up at her through his eyebrows, like he was the one feeling guilty for it all. “We all have pasts. We all have secrets. When you took off, I felt… lost. Confused. Like part of my brain was gone. And now that you’re here, I am just profoundly happy to see you. This right here? It’s enough.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to know?”

“Oh lord, no. No, I’d pretty much cut off a toe. I’m pretty much made of ragingly deep curiosity and floating jealousy. But I can deal with those. I don’t have any more right to make you tell me anything you don’t want to than I ever did. If there’s anything you don’t want to say —”

“I don’t want to say any of this,” Naomi said. “But I want you to know. And so we have to get through this part, no?”

Jim shifted, pulling his legs up under him, kneeling at the foot of the bed, his face to hers. His hair was the color of coffee with just a little cream. His eyes were blue as deep water. As evening sky was supposed to be.

“Then we’ll get through it,” he said with a simple, boundless optimism that caught her by surprise and drew out laughter, even here.

“Well,” she said. “When I was in my middle teens, I was living with a woman we called Tia Margolis and burning through the engineering courses on the networks as fast as I could, and there were ships that came through dock. Belter ships. Hard-core.”

Jim nodded, and then – to her surprise – it was easy. In her mind, the idea of unpacking her past to Jim – to anyone – was a thing of anger and disgust and recriminations. Or worse, of pity. Jim, who for all his faults was sometimes capable of perfection, listened carefully and completely. She had been Marco Inaros’ lover. She’d gotten pregnant young. She’d been involved – at first without knowing it – in the sabotage of inner planets ships. She had a son named Filip who had been taken from her as a way to control her. She described the dark thoughts, and realized it was very nearly the first time she’d talked about them openly, without a veil of ironic humor. I tried to kill myself, but it didn’t work. Just saying the words out loud felt like being in a dream. Or waking up from one.

And then, somehow in the depth of her confession, the baring of her blighted soul that was always supposed to be a trauma and a terror, it was just her and Jim having a conversation. She’d found a way to get a message out to him during the battle, and he told her about getting it, and the conversation he’d been having with Monica Stuart, and why he’d felt betrayed by her. And then backtracked to how she’d been kidnapped, and then before that to her plan to use the protomolecule sample as a Ouija board to investigate the missing ships. And then they went back to the Chetzemoka and Marco’s fallback plan, which brought up the way he always nested one scheme inside another, and before she got back around to Cyn, Alex and Amos and Bobbie were back, their voices burbling over each other like birdsong. Jim closed the bedroom door against them and, when he came back, settled beside her, his back to the headboard too.

When she did talk about killing Cyn during her jump, Jim took her hand. They were silent for a moment while she examined her grief. It was real, and it was deep, but it was also complicated with anger at her old friend and captor. She hadn’t let herself be aware of that at the time, but looking back, her whole stretch on the Pella seemed like an exercise in retracting into herself. Except when she’d defied Marco. She remembered saying that Jim was all the things he only pretended to be, wondered whether she should tell that part of the story, and then did. Jim looked horrified and then laughed. They lost track of their stories and spent ten minutes getting the timeline back: the Chetzemoka left the Pella after Jim and Fred had already departed from Tycho, or before? He’d told Alex to go investigate the Pau Kant before the rocks dropped on Earth? Oh right. Okay. She got it now.

They got sleepy together, her arm curled in his. The pauses grew longer, and softer. She thought Oh, we should really talk about Amos and Clarissa Mao, but then she was dreaming that she was on a ship that was burning at a full g for everyone else while she was on the float. All the other people in the crew, pressed to the deck while she moved through the air, reaching the tools and ducts they couldn’t get to. In the dream, Alex was explaining that it was because she had so much built-up inertia that the rest of them would take a while catching up. In context, it seemed to make sense.