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For as long as she could remember, Cee had never taken to sleep easy. Even on jobs, pulls where rest came too dear to be wasted, she’d needed music, muffs on her ears and a melody in her head pulsing fast enough to drown out the noise of her own thoughts. She hadn’t taken downers, ever, hating what they did to Damon, turning her father soft-headed and loose-mouthed, liable to say what he hadn’t intended to say—and no matter that Cee learned plenty she couldn’t have learned otherwise in those moments. Dreams hadn’t bothered her. With Damon, she’d always been on a pull, and on the pull sleep came too dear to waste in dreaming.
Then, time past and Damon gone, in an undercarriage hostel sunk deep into the bowels of a ghost station she woke the whole warren with her screaming. Cee knew that must have been how it happened; her throat was still raw when the keeper wrestled her out, marched her down one of the connects, a grimy vessel-tunnel, and pounded at the shuttered door of one of the private berths.
Said, “Your girl here, is she simple?” the moment the door creaked open.
“Simple?” Ezra standing there, unbalanced to Cee’s eyes and maybe unbalanced on his own feet, no arm. The flesh and blood Cee had carved off, of course, but the hardware they’d haggled for as a replacement was too cumbersome, he’d said, bothersome, chafing his stump tender as a virgin, and Ezra had reckoned, all chances to a toss, that he was better served haggling it off to some other floater, a man or woman resigned to such vexations.
So there he stood. Listing a bit against the doorframe, his face creased and his eyes squinting, staring at Cee, then the keeper, as if he hardly knew what to make of either of them.
Cee thinking, what if he said, “My girl? I have none. Who’s this you’ve dragged before me, this hour of the night?” A stupid idea, seeing as they’d paid their nights together, Cee choosing the warren as it was cheaper, Ezra a berth since he, apparently, knew better than to nest with anybody who could be woken, but then she was still stupid with sleep.
Ezra said, “Hard-eyed, I’ll give you,” his eyes on Cee now, though he spoke to the keeper. “Hard to read, Kevva knows, impossible to cross, but as to simple…well, the girl is hardly uncomplicated. Though hardly diminished in mind or matter, which I am to take is the true bent of your concern, in answer to which I must ask what she has done that warrants this displacement from her bunk, and compels me out of mine, as well.”
How he could talk like that, tired as he was, Cee didn’t know—she’d been unable, herself, to get a word in for her own defense when she’d been dragged out of the warren. Clearly the keeper didn’t care to parse it all, only saying, “She can’t stay in that bunk, waking all the others,” and pushing Cee forward, into the doorway.
Let loose suddenly she stumbled, couldn’t help it. Ezra, leaning more heavily against the doorframe, reached with his good arm to steady her. His hand found Cee’s shoulder, damp beneath her sleeve and the damper fall of her hair. Ezra squeezed to it, as much for his own support as for her comfort.
“Kevva’s sake, girl. You been swimming in a sea of ice?”
“I can’t swim.”
Her voice a croak. Ezra studied her, something in his sleep-creased, sleep-flushed face growing sharp or tender; Cee wasn’t sure of which and didn’t care to be sure.
“That you cannot. Forgive me,” he said, gravely, “I’d forgotten.”
She didn’t answer. The keeper, retreated now by a few paces, said, “Two of you can berth together here if that’s amenable, or leave if it’s not, but I’m keeping her points, and she’s not coming back in the warren,” and, without waiting for an answer, turned and shuffled down the dim tunnel, leaving Cee and Ezra half-asleep and unsteady on their feet, forced back together, as they always were.
***
“I had a dream,” she said. Perched on the raised edge of his bunk, the berth’s only other piece of furniture a low-slung stool Ezra had taken to with a grunt and a crackling of joints. He eyed her in the way she’d never liked—Cee couldn’t face up to him as well when she felt that he liked her. “A nightmare, I guess.”
“On this matter I’d suppose you to possess more certainty,” he said, “as you wakened fit to wake the dead with you, or so I’ve been led to believe, hearing nothing of it myself.”
Cee shrugged.
“These vessel walls have been caulked up thick, birdie. None but the two of us now listening. What is it that troubles you?”
“It was just a dream.”
Ezra, still looking at her, said, “I’m to take it then that this dream sprung from some recollection of our past doings.”
She rubbed at her eyes, irritation building like a hot grit behind them. “You can take it however you want,” Cee said. “It wasn’t about you.”
“And now you’ve proved yourself weary to the bone—not so sharp.” He leaned forward, the stool creaking. “I meant that in your sleep you must have returned to the Green.”
Looking at her, weary to the bone himself, Cee looking back, saying, “Where else would I return?”
***
The nightmare, if it was a nightmare, beginning here: Birthed out of the Saters’ tent and fleeing from them, legs and lungs laboring to bear her away and neither set doing the job quick enough. Her filter not as clear as it had been, waning, clogged with dust. Cee panted. She ran without stopping, always on the edge of stopping, her legs trembling and her lungs ragged. She ran until she reached the deep forest, in the center of that forest another settlement of sorts, an abandoned camp tent she recognized though she shouldn’t, never having laid eyes on it yet. It was a dream and in her dream she had some recollection, as Ezra would say, of things as they’d really happened, the truth blurry through a fog of sleep and fear. He would be in the tent or should be in the tent. Cee burst inside only to find the interior emptied, cleared out, a pit dug in the earth floor where bunks and scattered equipment should be.
Not a pit, a dig—she scrambled down into it and began to root for the bulbs, the fleshy deposits of aurelac. Cee worked one out bare-handed, nails splitting and packing tight with the crumbling clay earth. No knife, but somehow she ripped into the bulb, reaching the meat of the gem. Beneath her dirty fingers, something moved—not a solid heavy lump, like she’d thought. Cee felt limbs squirming, a fuzz of hair fluid-slicked. Hope knotted in her belly and she began to pull, to hurry and to manhandle, the bulb sloughing empty to the dirt and in her hands—
It was a baby. Something like a baby, writhing around, limbs uncurling. A mouth opened petal-soft in the center of its face and it began to howl, red-hot clamor, furious. One look and Cee knew it wasn’t him, nothing like him. It dripped and smeared over her hands, her palms burning as feverish red as its skin, the acids out of the bulb doing their work—Ezra was gone. He’d sickened from the wound she’d given him—her shot, the thrower shaking in her grip—and with nothing to trade, no juice to flush the rot, he’d gone to ground somewhere in this tangled forest and died.
Cee had killed him. Looking down at the baby in her burning hands she saw how maybe it looked like herself, what she imagined she’d have looked like as a tiny baby. It was still howling; it was all she had left; she’d left herself alone. Still howling: she woke in the dark of the warren squirming, thrashing, soaked in a cold sweat and shouting, calling out for Ezra.
***
“I think about what if you’d died down there. In the Green. I’d have died, too.”
“That’s no certainty,” Ezra said.
Cee didn’t answer.
“In the Green you were canny and quick. Quick on the draw, I might add, if unsteady.”
She eyed his stump, just visible beneath the frayed cuff of Ezra’s sleeve. To Cee it seemed naked and meaty, shameful.
Not from the carve-job. That she’d done well; Cee’s hands were steady, so long as they held a laser and not a thrower. It was her shot that hadn’t held true, wavering too late or just late enough—she was never sure, even now, if she’d gifted herself with a blessing or a curse. A sloppy job, either way. Damon would’ve had something to say for it.
When Ezra had sold off the hardware prosthetic they’d been stranded on Benthea, scrounging for work. Cee hadn’t said a word to stop him and had said barely a word to him for a week’s cycle after. Eventually his earnings bought them a third-rate rock jumper, worse than the stripped workhorse they’d made do with for a couple months’ cycles after it lifted them from the Green, but enough to get offworld, back into circulation on the trade routes.
“That’s what comes of prospecting,” she said now. “Gutter work.”
Ezra leaning back on the stool, his back and the back of his skull pressed to the wall. About ready to nod off, but his eyes at least halfway open and fixed on her.
“I wouldn’t have wanted you to die,” Cee said. “Not even then.” She was either too tired or tired enough to say this. “What does that make me? I don’t—it doesn’t feel right.”
He righted himself carefully, bringing his feet and the stool’s to the flooring in a series of slow, precise movements that reminded her of Damon, the times he was heavy on downers and had moved, Cee thought, like an old man. Wondering now how many years’ cycles Ezra had—more or less than Damon, or about the same? She’d never asked.
He said, “Well, of all things, I reckon it makes you merciful.”
She shrugged. Probably that was true, but Cee didn’t like to think of herself as merciful. There was something ugly or weak about it—or maybe it was that she’d never especially worried about appearing weak, except to Ezra. Damon had thought of her that way sometimes, but they were blood, stuck together, and he’d known Cee for a quick learner. It was only in the Green, faced across from Ezra and her father with the thrower heavy in her hands, that Cee had felt herself about to tangle with a man who had no connection and no obligation to her.
That same man saying now, “I deprived you of a father, that being no small loss—”
“I know that. You think I forgot?”
He ignored her, continued on. “In return,” Ezra said, “you deprived me of the arm, little else. I might even say you went so far as to restore my life, the rot of that wound casting it forfeit otherwise, but that is a mystery I believe you’d rather not contemplate, the weighing of your father’s mortality against mine.”
Cee said, “So why are you saying this?” Her voice was hoarse. Drying sweat prickled in the roots of her hair.
“You showed me great mercy, girl. Mercy incurs a debt of similar magnitude.”
“It was necessity,” she said. “I couldn’t be alone.”
“We none of us can.” He rose, the stool and his joints creaking all over again in their turn, and stumbled towards the bunk. In the closeness of the berth the distance was barely a step; Ezra caught himself against the edge, reached past Cee to thump at and rearrange the mussed and crumpled pillow. “And such debts are not satisfied by a few months’ cycles paired in gutter work. You understand?”
She watched as he fumbled with the pillow, the threadbare sheets balled near the head of the bunk. He wasn’t so awkward when he wasn’t exhausted. She thought of stretching over to help but didn’t.
Benthea was a rush world strip-mined down to ghostlands and starved rock. Cee had scrambled to find Ezra, hearing he’d laid hands on a ship—she’d kept out of his path, out of the boarding warrens they’d frequented together, too, since watching him barter off the prosthetic. She’d been angry at him then for reasons plain enough that she still refused to parse; searching, she was still angry at him, but angrier with herself, imagining Ezra and the ship already long gone, Cee having given him the perfect excuse to cut his losses and move on unencumbered.
“There you are.” Ezra gave the pillow a final thump.
“What about you?” She glanced between the stool and the bunk.
“In truth that resting couch, whatever it purports to be—”
“A bunk?” She’d meant her suggestion to sound dry. In her sleepless mouth it sounded more a pure suggestion.
“Indeed. It’s hardly softer than the floor. And I’m too roused for sleep as it is.”
Cee eyed him, disbelieving.
“Lie down,” Ezra said.
The pillow smelled like him, the sweat and oil of his scalp; engine grease, a taint of dirt. “I can’t be alone,” Cee heard herself say. A seeping, powerful heaviness pinning her already to the thin mattress, her eyelids drooping. “You saw that. You knew when you saw me.”
Picturing their first encounter in the Green, their eyes meeting in the moments after Damon was shot, Cee darting away. Even without his speaking, she knew Ezra was picturing the same—in the grind of deep space scutwork, you came to know the pathways of a partner’s mind as well as your own, besides which, the past she and Ezra shared was short still, leaving only so much to be remembered.
“When I saw you first, I knew nothing. I saw only—” he interrupted himself with a gaping yawn “—that you were like nothing I’d seen before or am likely to see again. A mystery, and from a mystery a man takes what he’s offered, asks for nothing beyond what he is given.”
“I don’t believe you. You’ve always read me—”
“A fine line cuts between artifice and honesty, girl. Overfine, as some believe, and given the inception of our partnership, I can hardly begrudge you a place in their number. Close your eyes,” Ezra said. He thumped at Cee’s shoulder the same way he’d thumped at the pillow, a well-practiced movement made clumsy by exhaustion. “Whatever works in your head, best sleep it off.”
No sleeping it off, she thought, nothing to do but live with it.
“Close your eyes,” Ezra repeated. His hand passed over Cee’s face, rough and warm—a curtain falling. She felt her eyelids droop shut at his insistence, felt them sag too heavy to lift again, and felt that soon enough she might actually drift free of herself—that the night-cycle dimness and Ezra’s presence and her own slow breathing would carry her beyond the thoughts and dreams and into rest.