Orange Ball of Pain

"The captain made the doctor's rounds, because there was no other. The captain, the captain, the captain and the doctor. He measured, weighed, and comforted, all that he could do. The captain, the captain, the captain and the doctor. He'd sworn once he'd lead his ship, he'd care for his crew. The captain, the captain, the captain and the doctor..."

- "Doctor's Orders", traditional spacer song

Yan had one last task to do, before she could jump the ship out, and that was to disentangle the First Star from the trashed piece of the Vortex. With Iri and Chanam now back and functional, she sent them to make sure that everyone in the med bay was secure, as there was the chance that separating the two pieces would cause a jolt to the ship. She left Kino up to her own devices (she would deal with Kino later), but she got Sylva to come with her in the shuttle.

It was a calculated move, of course, though she wasn't so cynical as to admit that to herself. She wanted to give Sylva some time alone with her, and also to establish, right away, that Yan valued her help. This was an easy way to do it.

Sylva made no protest when Yan asked her to come, and so they climbed back into the shuttle that Sylva had just exited and Yan took them out of the bay, navigating around the side of the First Star with a natural kind of grace, trusting Sylva to catch and get rid of any debris in her path. She could feel Sylva doing it, without complaint or saying that she didn't have the ability, and it struck an odd emotion in Yan's heart.

Yan remembered, before all this, having to cajole Sylva into even the tiniest uses of the power, such as levitating a book to read from when she was cantoring. She had always thought of Sylva as somehow less capable, or as needing protection, and she was starting to realize that was the furthest thing from the truth. It may have been true once, but it wasn't anymore. And wasn't it Sylva who had travelled across the universe to rescue her? And Sylva had been Yan's staunchest protector, wanting to defend her from, well, everyone.

Perhaps they were both looking at eachother as more fragile than either of them really were.

They were both unusually silent as Yan pulled the shuttle away. She flew out far enough that she could see the whole scope of the damage to the First Star, and the chunk of Vortex that was attached to it. It was still a horrible wound, and Yan was going to have to get used to seeing it because it wasn't something that could ever be brought back to the way it had been before. She could patch the holes, yes, but aside from that, there was little she could do to heal the scar on the First Star's side. She frowned as she looked at it, but her bone-tiredness stopped her from making too much more of a reaction. The exhaustion made most things numb, which was really just what she needed right now.

"It's not so bad," Sylva said, breaking the silence. "We can fix it."

"Yeah," Yan said. She took her hands off the yoke and looked over at Sylva. "Are you doing okay?"

"Oh, you brought me out here to grill me," Sylva said, but her tone was intentionally light.

Yan raised her hands. "We don't have to talk if you don't want to. I just figured... You might want to."

"You're doing better than..." Sylva trailed off. Yan supposed that Sylva had borne witness to her in various states of collapse after emergencies.

"Only because it's not over yet," Yan admitted. "Still have to deal with this, and get everyone I pulled out of there back to civilization." She indicated the Vortex wreckage with her head. Even though they were far enough away that they could see the whole of the wreckage and the First Star at once, it still loomed large in the window.

"And then you'll collapse?"

"I don't know," Yan said. "I have an eightyday to get myself together, regardless."

Sylva nodded slowly. "You're better at this than I am."

"Better at what?" Yan asked.

"I don't know," Sylva said. "Dealing with things."

"No, I'm not," Yan said. "You've done so much. And I'm sorry that I didn't give you enough credit for it before."

"That's not what I mean," Sylva said. She shook her head. Her hair, cut short, fluffed out around her head in the gravity-less shuttle. After a moment of silence, she continued, "I just feel, like, not bad. I do things, and there's a part of me that knows that if it was you who did them, or probably even Iri or Kino, you'd feel like, really terrible about it, but I don't feel anything. I just keep going. I don't deal with it, you know? Like..." She trailed off, shrugged, stared out the window. "You're better than me."

Yan didn't know what to say to that. From Cesper's story, she knew that several Fleet agents had been killed on Hanathue, but it hadn't been clear from his retelling who had done it. It seemed like Sylva was indicating that she had, or that, after Yan jumped out with the First Star, she had participated in the fight against the Vortex's shuttles. She waited for Sylva to continue, but realized that Sylva wasn't going to continue, so she spoke. "Do you want to talk about it?"

Sylva laughed a little. "You sound like my mom." Yan always forgot that Sylva had a whole family that she had left, voluntarily on Emerri, probably to never see them again. "I don't know," Sylva said. "Does it help?"

Yan was helpless. "You don't have to if you don't want to."

Sylva laughed again, this time with a nervous tinge to it. "I think you might hate me for it."

"I wouldn't." Yan was firm about this. "You know I wouldn't."

"You might," Sylva said. "I know that you'll say that you've done worse things, because you feel so guilty all the time, so how could you judge me. And you'll also say that if you could forgive Kino, you could forgive me. But that's different, because Kino did things to you, and you're so stupid, you don't care about your own self."

Sylva did know her pretty well, after all. "I care about you, though," Yan said. "I don't think whatever it is, you could make me stop."

The interior of the shuttle was very dim, lit only by the glowing instrument panel in front of the both of them. Sylva's face was carved out of the shadows by just those streaks of glowing red and green lights: the side of her cheek, the tip of her nose, the soft curve of her bottom lip as she bit it. "That's sweet of you to say."

"I wouldn't lie, not to you," Yan said. "You can tell me what you need to tell me."

"Can you keep a secret?" Sylva asked finally.

It was an unexpected question, but Yan didn't hesitate. "Yes."

"Even from Kino?"

Yan didn't like this line of questioning, feeling like it had something to do with Sylva's jealousy. "I don't value Kino over you," Yan said.

"That's not what I meant. I'm asking, if she's in your head, can you keep her from knowing something that you don't want her to know?"

"I don't know," Yan said. "Sylva..." She didn't know how to finish that question. She couldn't get her brain to formulate the words. It was either exhaustion or confusion, or the way that talking to Sylva went through a completely different part of her brain than her normal logical thoughts.

Sylva was quiet for a minute. "When we were on Hanathue, I guess I can tell you the whole story later, but it doesn't really matter. We knew we had to get off planet, that we were being chased, so Kino and Bina and I, we tried to meet up with Keep, who would take us off planet. But it turned into this nightmare, because a sensitive had gotten to Keep before us, and..." Sylva tilted her head to look at Yan, a pensive look on her face. "You know when you were in the Mother, sometimes your head would be somewhere else, and there wasn't any part of the Mother inside of you?"

"I guess," Yan said.

"That was what Keep looked like. Somebody else was controlling her body, this Imperial woman."

Yan shivered. She had had her body controlled by plenty of other people, of course. The Mother had been voluntary. The Green King had not. She knew exactly what the toll was of being on both ends of that relationship, and she couldn't imagine what kind of control it would take to puppet a full person's body. The thought terrified her, but she kept quiet so that Sylva could continue her story.

"Anyway, we had to fight her. She had these other guys with her, not sensitives, but they were hiding in the shuttle that Keep had brought. And it was, well, they ended up outside of the shuttle, and I picked it up with the power." Sylva reached out her hand, as though she was illustrating the motion, and she twisted it slowly, watching the light shift around her fingers. "And I crushed them with it."

Yan wanted to reach out to her, but Sylva kept talking.

"The woman was still alive, though, and she didn't care about that. She just picked up Bina and put her back in the shuttle. I thought it would be okay, that she would be safe there, so I didn't worry about it really, and I focused on the woman." She laughed a little, a hiccough sound. "It was stupid, though. I think she probably could have killed me if she was trying to."

"What do you mean?"

"She could have snapped my neck," Sylva said. "Or crushed my head in, or anything like that. Kino could resist that, I think 'cause you practiced with her so much, or maybe just because she's so slippery." Yan nodded silently. "But all that woman did was stop my lungs. She wouldn't let me breathe."

Listening to Sylva tell it, rather dispassionately, still was affecting Yan more than she wanted to let on. She couldn't divorce her feelings from Sylva's telling-- it was as though, by listening to Sylva, she was feeling the memory inside her own body, her own lungs freezing up. She just waited for Sylva to continue, trying to stay calm, though this involved clenching her left hand at her side, digging her nails into her palm.

"It was okay, though," Sylva said, maybe intuiting some of Yan's tension behind her. "I was fine. Anyway, that's not important." She stared out the window. "Kino couldn't hit the woman. She had up a power structure that stopped anything from touching her. So, you know. I made something up." Sylva said this matter-of-factly.

"What?" Yan asked.

"I thought that I could, separate the air, you know, take all the oxygen out of it, just around her, so she could breathe, but couldn't breathe."

"That's what you did?"

"Yeah."

"Did it work?"

"I think so?" Sylva said. "I passed out. I couldn't breathe when I was doing that to her, so we were on the same timer. Hah." She laughed, but again, it wasn't out of amusement. "Keep shot her."

"Oh," Yan said. "So, you..."

"That's not what I wanted to tell you about, I guess." She paused again. "You know Bina died, right?"

"Cesper told me."

"Yeah." Sylva stared out the window. "The woman had some kind of explosive hidden in the shuttle. Probably to kill us if we had taken it. She set it off before she died. Bina was inside still."

"God," Yan said.

"Kino went in and got her." Her voice was flat and dull at this point. "And she like, put her on the ground. It was the worst thing I'd ever seen. Kino was just there, and wouldn't let go of her, and Keep was yelling at me because she still thought I was a doctor."

"She was still alive?"

"Yeah," Sylva said. "Yeah." The silence that filled the shuttle at that point was palpable. Yan waited for Sylva to continue. "We had to go. If we didn't, they were going to send more people after us, and then they really would have killed us." Her voice cracked, now, and her breath came in shallow little spurts. "I couldn't get Kino to move, and I couldn't do anything to help her. I didn't know what to do. I mean, she was going to die! Anybody who looked at her could have seen that. Her skin was melted off."

Sylva collected herself, and when she next spoke, her voice was preternaturally calm. "Kino wasn't going to leave without her, and there wasn't any way we could bring her with us, or even to somewhere where someone could help her. So." Sylva twitched, a half shrug, a half shudder. "I did the same thing I did to that woman. I took all the oxygen out of the air in front of Bina, and I gave her nitrogen instead, and then she died. I killed her."

Sylva stopped talking.

"And Kino doesn't know?" Yan said after a prolonged silence. She didn't know what else to say.

"No."

"Oh."

And then Sylva was crying, the tears pooling up and glinting around her eyes, unable to separate themselves and float away until she moved her head, and she wasn't moving, she was still, taking breaths that ended in soft squeaks, clearly trying to contain it. "You do hate me now, don't you?"

"No, Sylva," Yan said, and she reached across the space between the two pilots seats to hold Sylva, as much as their seatbelts allowed. It wasn't much, and it was awkward, but it was all Yan had in her to give. She could have tried to say something comforting, but she was sure that anything she could say would fall flat. What could she say that Sylva would want to hear? That Bina probably would have died anyway, so it was good to give her as painless and quick a death as possible? That Sylva wasn't actually the one responsible for killing Bina, since it was the fault of the woman who set off the bomb? That she had done the right thing because she had needed to evacuate as quickly as possible? That it was a horrible situation with no good choices, and the alternative was Bina dying slowly in Kino's arms? She could have said about a million things, but she didn't, because none of them would have made a speck of difference to the facts. Bina was long dead and long gone, and Sylva felt responsibility for it, no matter what she had said earlier about feeling not bad.

"I shouldn't have let you go to Hanathue," Yan said finally, running her fingers across Sylva's cheek, scattering the largest blob of tears that had gathered there. "It was a really bad call on my part."

"You couldn't have known," Sylva sniffed.

"I should have." Yan stared out at the twisted wreckage before them, still full of corpses that Yan hadn't touched.

"It's not your fault."

"And it's not yours. Not really."

"Whose is it, then?"

"I don't know." Yan spoke very quietly. Sylva's breath was less squeaky now, apparently reassured that Yan didn't hate her. "I wish I could have protected you from it, anyway."

"Like with the Gatekeeper?"

"Yeah. You still mad at me about that?"

Sylva shook her head. A glob of tears flew loose and hit Yan's nose. She rubbed them away. She was too tired to cry herself, but the action was a familiar one. Comforting, in its own way.

"I'm sorry I was such a shithead to you after," Sylva said, with a hiccough. "I guess I get it now."

"I'd rather you didn't," Yan said. That was, after all, what she had been trying to protect Sylva from, this feeling of guilt that pulled her down beneath the water, like she was always drowning in it.

"It's okay. I guess."

Yan opened her mouth, shut it, then opened it again. She was about to say something that was definitely going to make Sylva unhappy, but it couldn't remain unsaid. "I think you should tell Kino."

"What? No." Sylva jerked back away from Yan's hand on her face and stared at her hard.

"You'll feel better if she knows."

"But she'll literally kill me."

"She won't."

"You haven't seen her," Sylva said, pitch rising. "She's so wrecked about it."

"That's all the more reason for you to tell her."

Sylva shook her head, hair flying in all directions. "I can't."

"I can do it for you."

"Please, don't," Sylva begged, and Yan sighed and relented a little.

"I won't if you don't want me to," she said, even though she knew that keeping this secret was just going to sit heavily on her own heart, every time she looked at Kino. "But I think that you should."

"It would just make things worse."

"Think about it, okay?"

"Okay." Sylva's voice rang hollow. She might think about it, Yan knew, but she had already resolved not to change her mind.

The pensive and cathartic mood in the shuttle had been lost, so Yan straightened in her seat. "I guess I should deal with this, then."

"Are you mad at me?"

"No," Yan said. She was too tired to be mad. She would probably feel some kind of way in the morning, but she couldn't work up the wherewithal to feel it now, or to know what kind of way she would be feeling.

To stop from thinking about it further, she just nudged the yoke of the shuttle, and sent them moving back closer to the First Star and wreckage. She stopped them near the wreckage so that she could get a good look at how exactly the two pieces were attached together. Some of the Vortex had wedged itself inside of the popped open bays, and it looked like a few of the metal pieces had managed to weld themselves together through the sheer force involved in the collision.

Yan signalled the First Star over the radio. "I think I'm going to try this quick, like ripping off a bandaid," Yan said. "I'll try to make it as gentle as possible."

"Do whatever you need to do," Iri said back. "We'll hold on."

"It won't be that bad," Yan muttered.

She reached out with the power, towards the First Star. She was unpleasantly surprised to find that when she touched the wreckage, attempting to move it, she felt the same gut level wrongness that she felt when she used the power on another person. The physical connection, being within the jump radius, they apparently were enough to make the wreckage 'feel' like part of the ship's body.

"Sorry, baby," Yan said under her breath, apologizing to the ship for what she was about to do. She tensed her whole body in a pre-wince, and then used the power to slowly, slowly, pull the whole chunk of twisted metal and rock debris away from her ship. The power screamed and kicked at her, but it came away with a mental 'pop' and then it was easier to move, like a loose tooth that had let go of its last hanging on bit of root.

Yan shoved it away from the First Star with a sigh of relief, then settled it so that it wouldn't go sailing off into nowhere. The Fleet might follow them here, after all, and they would probably be interested in collecting their dead. Yan might as well make it as easy for them as possible, by leaving this debris in the same spot she had left.

"Good job," Sylva said.

"Thanks," Yan said, and flew them back towards the First Star.

One more thing to do, which was jump the ship. She was glad that there was no gravity. If there had been, she would have barely been able to walk, dragging herself forward through the air was hard enough. Sylva tagged along after her, seemingly through lack of anything better to do.

On the bridge, Yan bid farewell over the radio to the Warrior II, wished them well, made sure they didn't need anything else from her, and then, with a blessed kind of relief, jumped away, towards the nearest inhabited planet, which was, unfortunately, Hanathue. She didn't say that aloud to Sylva. They weren't going to stay long, just long enough to get rid of their prisoners. It hardly even mattered the system they went to; Yan just wanted the closest, so that those who needed medical attention could get it.

It didn't matter. None of it mattered.

Sylva tugged her arm. "You good?"

"Yeah, I'm done," Yan said.

And Sylva dragged her away, down towards the suite they shared, which Yan hadn't really been in since she left. It hardly even mattered that there wasn't gravity. Yan took one of the blankets that was floating around the room (as were all the rest of the untethered belongings), rolled herself up in it, and passed out before Sylva had even turned off the light.

Yan woke up before Sylva did. This wasn't surprising. Yan had developed an acute internal clock based entirely around jumping the First Star. She could feel in her bones when the clock ticked over to allow the ship to jump again, and that sensation would pull her out of even the deepest sleep. She was feeling fairly refreshed, if sweaty. She couldn't shower: without gravity in the rings most of the plumbing did not function.

The horror of the previous day had not faded in her mind, but it also didn't press urgently upon her, at least not yet. There was still too much to be done-- she didn't have the luxury of wallowing in guilt or self pity.

Her first stop after jumping the ship was to visit the medical area. Chanam was there, floating upside down outside the door.

"You don't have to guard them, you know," Yan said. "It's not like they have anywhere to go."

He shrugged. "Didn't have anything better to do."

"Oh, I see, you're just hoping they'll say something juicy."

He grinned, a cheeky thing, and righted himself so that he was facing the same direction as Yan. "I wouldn't be a spy if I wasn't."

"You take that a little too lightly," Yan said. Despite everything, Chanam was growing on her. She didn't mind the kid. "Anything interesting happening in there?"

"The one everyone thought was going to die did."

Great way to start out the day. She pulled open the door a crack and looked inside. Cesper was near the entrance, awake, though most of the other people in the medical area seemed to be sleeping. It was quiet. Yan gestured him over outside the door. He came out, the inflatable cast around his leg squeaking as it rubbed past the doorframe. Yan gave a sympathetic cringe and shut the door behind him so that their conversation wouldn't disturb the sleepers.

"Morning," Yan said.

"It's actually middle of third shift," Cesper said.

"Close enough." She rubbed her eyes. "Someone died?"

"Yeah, Bennet Klein was his name."

"Shit," Yan said.

"I think everyone knew it was inevitable."

"It probably wouldn't have been if he had had a doctor." Yan knew that the fastest way to get the wounded to a doctor would have been to jump back in to the area around Xuanhuan, and hand people over to the Fleet there, but that would have been certain death for Yan, so that was not a decision she would have ever made. It had cost that man, Klein, his life. Just another thing she was going to live with, wasn't it?

"What did you do with the body?"

"There were... bags... and a freezer," Cesper said. "This is a well stocked ship."

"It had to be, for Sandreas. Now I guess we're lucky for his preparedness." She took a heavy breath. "Are you going to want the body, or should we give him a spacer funeral?"

"Are you asking me as a representative of the Fleet?"

"Yeah."

"I think they would prefer the body." Yan nodded. "How long until you are planning on letting us go?" Cesper asked.

"We're four jumps away from Hanathue," she said. She turned to Chanam. "You. Don't mention to Kino or Sylva that that's where we're going. It's not a secret from Iri, but I don't want to upset them."

"Sure," Chanam said.

Cesper watched this exchange with a melancholy expression. "If it's any consolation, I'm sorry about Ms. Mejia's sister as well."

"It's not, and I recommend you don't bring it up to her if you see her." She at least wanted to get a chance to talk to Kino, before Cesper accidentally stuck his nose into something he wasn't prepared to get the full brunt of.

"Fine," he said. "Though I do know how to handle Ms. Mejia. I spent a long time with her."

Yan shook her head. If Cesper messed with Kino, it would make the whole bad situation worse. "Do you need anything?" Yan asked. "I'm going to go see what the food status is."

"Maedes brought food a couple hours ago. We're fine for the moment."

Thank God for Iri, Yan supposed. "Is everyone, like, okay in there?" Aside from the one person who had died, anyway.

Cesper smiled, a thin and tight expression. "Considering the situation, sure."

"You'll all be out of here soon," Yan said. "Look, Cesper..." Yan waved her hand in a kind of helpless gesture.

"Ms. BarCarran."

There were several things she wanted to say, but she picked the stupidest one, possibly. "How has Sid been?"

Cesper actually did smile at that. "He's mostly been fine."

Though the words themselves didn't strike a lot of confidence in Yan, they were delivered with a clear warmth and affection that did. "I'm glad to hear that."

"He misses you."

"Yeah. Well. That's not going to make me give myself up."

"And he was amused by your message to him."

"Message?"

"The front cover of your book."

Yan laughed. "Oh, that. That was just a joke. I thought it was funny. I didn't really mean anything by it." She was surprised one had gotten into his hands already, since there were so few copies.

"I'll tell him you said that."

Yan sighed and looked away from Cesper's face for a moment. "I wish that we could still be friends."

Cesper was silent.

"What?" Yan asked, taking his non answer as a pointed message.

"It's not exactly my place to comment."

"It's not like anything you say here is going to make its way back to your higher ups," Yan said. "I'm certainly not going to tell them."

"I don't understand your crusade here, Ms. BarCarran. It's doomed to failure."

"Maybe."

"You don't think so?"

"You're not going to get me to spill any secrets to you accidentally," Yan said with a smile. "But even if it is doomed, it's worth doing."

"It's worth all of this?" Cesper didn't move to indicate anything, but since everything was included in that this, his message was clear.

"I have to believe it is."

"And if you stopped believing that?"

"I won't."

"But if you did?"

"Then I'd take the First Star just become a regular pirate," Yan said. She knew that wasn't going to happen, so there was no harm in saying it. "I'm led to understand that it's not as bad of a life as it could be."

Cesper shook his head. "I don't understand you."

"You've never felt that what the Empire does is wrong?" Yan asked.

"I don't have the luxury of doing anything about it, even if I did."

Yan studied him for a second, the way he held tension in his shoulders, the way he stared past her, down the hallway, as if waiting for someone else to arrive. "You could stay with me, you know," Yan said, making her offer. "You don't have to go back to the Empire."

He twitched a little. "You're asking me to defect?"

"I'm asking if you want to make the choice that will take some of the burden off your soul," Yan said. "That's what this is."

"I can't."

"I'm giving you the luxury of opportunity." She didn't think that Cesper would take her up on the offer, but she was compelled to offer it regardless. She could use someone like him: competent, well trained, easy to get along with. Her motives weren't entirely utilitarian. She did want to give him an opportunity to ease some of the guilt of being part of the Empire, by giving him a chance to leave. "I'll give everyone else in there the same chance." She nodded at the med suite.

Chanam was watching this exchange with an amused expression. "He's not going to say yes," he said to Yan. Yan just waited for Cesper to speak. She knew Chanam was right, of course.

"I have duties that compel me to stay," Cesper said, putting it very diplomatically and with an even tone. "But I thank you for your offer."

Yan nodded. "Sid?"

"Among others."

Yan's smile was tight. "See, I would hope that if enough people left him for this, he would consider joining me himself."

Cesper laughed at that. "And I'll tell him you said that, too."

"Go ahead," Yan said. "He already thinks I'm crazy."

"If you wanted to change the Empire, you should have stayed with First Sandreas," Cesper said. "I think you should lay your hopes that the Empire will change for the better at Sid's feet."

"There's a reason I couldn't stay," Yan said. "I don't think I can just close my eyes and hope that Sid will do the right thing, even if I want to believe he's capable of it."

"Why not?"

"Being in the center of power changes you, I think," Yan said. "Like, there's this whole apparatus surrounding you on all sides, and forcing you into these channels of action. You can't step out of it without feeling like the whole system is going to come crashing down on you." There was more to it than that, of course, mainly the overwhelming power of the Emperor, and the way that the apprenticeship system trained people to not be able to even see the alternatives to what their predecessors had done, but she couldn't explain all that to Cesper. He wouldn't understand, since he wasn't a sensitive.

He nodded. "How did you get out, then?"

"I couldn't stand to watch Kino get hurt the way that someone once hurt me. It was a selfish thing, I guess." She smoothed her hands down the side of her jumpsuit, wiping her sweaty palms. "The rest of the justifications came after."

"But you're committed now?"

"Yeah."

"I respect your bravery, at the very least."

"Hah. I don't think I have much of it. I just do what I have to."

"I think that history might come to argue about what one 'had to' do, Captain," he said. Yan was startled by the address, since Cesper had foregone titles up to this point.

"The specifics may be under debate, but I think the broad strokes are clear."

"I don't know if there's been anything like this, in the rest of the history of the Empire," Cesper said.

"Just because you don't know about it, doesn't mean that there wasn't," Yan said. "I'd be surprised if no one had gone against the Empire before. Now that I've got some distance, it seems like the most obvious thing in the world."

"May I give you some advice, Captain?" Cesper asked.

"Sure, though I can't tell you that I'll take it."

"Don't lose yourself in this little crusade. If you couldn't explain to your past self what you're doing, maybe you're going wrong."

Yan shook her head. "I appreciate the sentiment, Lieutenant, but I think it's more important for me to explain myself to the future than to the past."

"You've changed," he said.

"No, I don't think so. At least, not since you met me. All these pieces were already inside me. I just needed some reason to put them together."

"I didn't take you as ruthless back then."

"Am I now?"

"Do you want my honest opinion?"

She hesitated for a second. "Sure."

"I think that you can justify almost anything to yourself, if you say that you had to do it. That strikes me as dangerous."

"There's a world of difference between dangerous and unjustified, and again between dangerous and cruel."

"None of those things necessarily exist in opposition to eachother."

"I won't be convinced to back down by this line of argument," Yan said.

"I'm not trying to convince you."

"Good." Yan wanted to get out of this conversation, as she was growing uncomfortable with it. "Let me know if you need anything."

"I will," Cesper said. He pulled at the handle of the door, understanding that this was a dismissal, but paused before he pulled himself in. "Captain, I don't believe that you are evil, or even in all things wrong. But it would be for the best if you remembered that Sid, and by extension myself, are not your friends. I am your prisoner, and he is your enemy. Not admitting that to yourself will only hurt you in the long run. So either change your mind, or do what you need to do."

He closed the door before Yan could respond, and she looked at Chanam with a kind of helpless expression. "He's not wrong," Chanam said. "If Jeepak were here, he'd say you were too soft."

"If Jeepak were here, we'd have a whole different set of problems." Yan shook her head, trying to clear it of the anger that always came when she thought about the Green King. "Have you had breakfast?"

"I had a meal," Chanam said. "And I slept, if that's your next question. You don't have to take care of me."

"You're a kid. It's my job."

He just laughed at that and flipped himself back upside down. "There's a reason captains usually don't have kids of their own."

"Don't patronize me. You're not a spacer."

"And you shouldn't patronize me, either," he said, saying it in a clunky, heavily accented way.

"Do you even know what that means?" Yan asked.

"No." He laughed. "But you don't speak my language, so you'll have to forgive me not being good at yours."

"It's too bad you're not from Olkye. I speak that one."

"Too bad."

She noticed now that he wasn't wearing shoes (maybe that didn't matter at all, since the rings were still down, no walking was necessary). He kicked at her face lazily and Yan dodged out of the way. "What's that for?"

"Go eat your own breakfast, Captain," he said with a grin.

"I feel like I'm being made fun of." But she took it in the good humor that it was intended and left, leaving Chanam to guard or spy on all the wounded Fleet soldiers, whichever way he preferred to call it.

The kitchen looked like a disaster area when she got to it, but at least it hadn't caught on fire at any point. There would be no cooking until the rings were moving again, so Yan would have to make do with whatever didn't have to be cooked. That limited the selection quite a bit, and she had to fight her way through a veritable cloud of cutlery, loose produce, and pre-packaged foods in order to find the plastic container full of cereal she was looking for. She had no desire to fight with liquids in zero g, so she satisfied her thirst by eating a cucumber. It was a distinctly unpleasant breakfast, and she kept having to use the power to summon cereal bits back into her hand as they floated away.

Sylva and Iri found her while she was enjoying her feast.

"You could have woken me up," Sylva said.

"All I was doing was jumping the ship and checking on the prisoners," Yan said. "Figured your sleep is more valuable than that."

"Didn't we used to have packaged juices?" Sylva asked Iri as she poked her way through all the floating foodstuffs. "Like, for just this occasion."

"I gave them all to the people in the med suite," Iri replied. "We need to get gravity back," she said to Yan. "This is just getting ridiculous." A bag of sugar drifted past her head, and Iri grabbed it. "I thought the cabinets were supposed to be secure so this wouldn't happen. And the cutlery's all magnetic to keep it still, too."

"I'm sure the impact was more than it was designed for," Yan said with her mouth full. She didn't mind the lack of gravity as much as anyone else (save Chanam, perhaps), but that was because she had been used to it most of her life. "I don't want to start the rings until we get rid of our guests," Yan said. "Half of them have broken legs. Don't want to deal with that in gravity."

Iri made an unhappy sort of grunt. "Still annoying."

"You'll live. It's only for a day or two."

"I was born on a planet. I'm not made for this kind of lifestyle."

Yan didn't deign that comment with a response. Instead, she said, "Have you seen Kino?"

"In the way that one is liable to see any ghosts. I sent her to bed after we all arrived back here last night, but I think I caught a glimpse of her in the hallway earlier."

"You say last night like we're operating on anything resembling a standard schedule," Sylva commented.

"You can adjust your sleep on your own time," Iri said.

"Did you see where she went?" Yan asked, focusing back on Kino.

"What are you going to say to her?" Sylva asked, narrowing her eyes at Yan, out of Iri's line of sight.

"I just want to make sure she's okay."

"She's not," Iri and Sylva said in unison. They glanced at eachother and half laughed, though it wasn't a topic that one could really laugh about.

"Okay, but where is she?" Yan asked, finishing her cereal.

"I'm sure she's in one of her usual haunts," Iri said. "She might have just left her room to find a bathroom that was working."

Yan frowned. "I guess I'll go look for her, then."

"What do you want us to do?" Sylva asked. "Or are we just going to sit around until we get rid of the Fleet people."

"If you're itching for something to do, you can always start taking inventory, and figuring out how bad things are broken. Be careful, though. Check and double check before you open any doors."

"Yeah, yeah," Sylva said, as though she didn't need reminding.

Yan searched the ship for Kino. She wasn't hiding, but she was hard to find because Yan couldn't just feel her out in the power, a mild nuisance. Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised Yan that Kino was in the greenhouse, but it was one of the last places that she looked.

The whole place was a mess, obviously. Yan and her tiny crew hadn't exactly been stringent about putting tools and supplies away in their approved places, the ones that were supposed to keep things contained even in an event of ring stoppage. Even if they had, Yan's manoeuvring with the First Star probably would have knocked most of it loose. Funnily enough, the big fish tank was in the best shape, as it had a well sealed lid, and its water could keep circulating even in event of gravity failure. No one ever wanted to have to restart their fish stock over something stupid like that.

Everything else, though... It was messy. Tools drifted through the air, and clods of dirt and dislodged plants followed them. Most of the beds were supposed to have netting laid down over top of them, to prevent dirt from flying away, and the plants were supposed to grow up through the netting, but that wasn't a foolproof thing, and it had also not been strictly applied to every planting bed. Additionally, a couple bags of dirt had burst during the collision, and that didn't help the matter.

Kino floated in the middle of this, staring silently at the fish tank, watching the fish dart back and forth in lithe little clouds.

Yan came up beside her, plucking onions from the air as she went and holding them by their stems, just because they were there to be picked up. They were silent for a long minute. It didn't bother Yan, the quiet, and she knew Kino almost lived in it.

"We're always here, aren't we?" Yan asked, referring to the many times they had met in a greenhouse of some sort. It was like a ritual now, of a kind.

"Where sky and sea so soft do lay, with God's broad hand between," Kino said, quoting a famous poem. "We met there once, far from the shore, with naught to see or dream..." She trailed off.

Yan jumped to the end of the poem, the last lines that basically everyone knew, or at least everyone who had taken literature classes at the Academy knew. "With all the world of God at play, and all of time behind us, we gather such love within our hearts, and cross the bridge of kindness." Yan didn't know why Kino was thinking of the poem-- it was a rather sentimental poem about greeting the new year, beloved by literature teachers as a vehicle for discussions of poetic structure, but so very known as a poem that students read that it had lost much of its other merits in the popular imagination.

Kino seemed loath to say anything else, so Yan supplied, "I heard about your sister."

Kino jerked her head in an approximation of a nod. She wasn't otherwise moving, and Yan noted that she wasn't wearing her metal prosthetic, either.

"I'm sorry for sending you to Hanathue," Yan said. "I should have known that it was too dangerous."

"It's not your fault," Kino said, her voice barely louder than a whisper.

"Thank you, for earlier," Yan said. "Yesterday, I mean. For telling me what to do."

Kino shook her head. "You would have figured it out if I hadn't."

"Sid had told me that you were dead," she said. "Over the radio. I'm glad you're not."

They were close enough to touch, but they weren't touching. Yan wanted to reach out and wrap Kino in her arms, but she didn't know if that was what Kino wanted.

Perhaps she should just be direct, and offer things that she thought that Kino might want. "Do you want to hold a funeral?" she asked.

"No body," Kino said, which didn't answer the question.

"Did I ever tell you about what Sid and I did, after the pirate attack on the Sky Boat?" Yan asked, a kind of indirect way of re-approaching the previous question. Kino shook her head. "I was so messed up from that." She took a breath. "I needed to do something, right after. I wanted to get out of my own head, and I wanted to do something to somehow..." She struggled to find the words to describe what she had needed, aboard the Sky Boat. "Compartmentalize, I guess, the guilt."

"What did you do?" Kino asked. Yan was glad to hear her voice.

"We said the funeral prayer for them," Yan said. "All the pirates, the ones I killed." She still had trouble saying it out loud in so many words, even now, after so much else had happened.

"Did it help?"

"I don't know. Maybe. I don't think I could have done anything different, though. I had to do it."

"Her family probably held a funeral," Kino said. "Already."

"That doesn't mean you can't."

"Why are you trying to make me do this?"

"Because I want to help you," Yan said. She felt like she was pleading with Kino somehow.

"This is not a burden that you can share." The words were flat and dull, delivered with a conviction and clarity that Kino had not previously spoken with.

"Let me try?" Yan asked. "Please?"

"Why?"

Yan paused and thought before she spoke. She didn't want to say the wrong thing here, and it was a delicate act, a delicate space that she was existing in. "Before we met with the Emperor," Yan said. "You asked me to keep Bina safe. I feel like I failed you."

Kino shook her head again.

"And you're my friend. I care about you." There was more she could have said, and what she did say sounded trite and awful, but the fear of somehow failing Kino overwhelmed her. She reached out the distance between them, took Kino's soft right hand in hers. She tried to send a thought in the language that she knew Kino processed best, an image, a feeling. It wasn't Yan's strong suit, precisely, recalling memories like that, but what was a memory if not half imagination?

Through the power, Yan sent Kino the image that Kino had once shown her: standing on a rock above a rapidly flowing waterway. They looked out together over the grey and empty plains of Falmar, with birds swooping and wheeling overhead. It was silent and cold. The feeling that Yan tried to express was that she was grateful for this calm image that Kino had given to her, months ago, and she was trying to return the favor.

Kino tried to turn her head in the imagined memory that Yan was creating, looking behind her, but there was nothing there, just a barren field stretching out forever, and the image fell apart. Kino had been looking for something, something that Yan couldn't possibly provide, having not known it existed. Yan felt that sensation keenly as they were both jerked out of the vision.

Back in the reality of the dirty greenhouse, Kino squeezed her eyes shut, and her breath came in little gasps. Yan had never seen her cry before, not once, not even after the Emperor. She was moved by compassion, then, and she pulled Kino towards herself, wrapping her in her arms, stroking the back of her head as Kino wept onto her shoulder, not quite embracing Yan back.

"Please let me help you," Yan whispered. She whispered it several times. Somehow, the thought of helping Kino was one that she clung to, perhaps in order to keep her mind off her own emotions, waiting to spring themselves upon her the moment she lost focus on the tasks around her. It was selfish, then, what she was doing, but she didn't allow that thought to take root, pressing it back with the others into a distant corner, where she wouldn't touch them until she had time.

"How?" Kino asked, which was as much permission as Yan needed.

She pulled back a little from Kino, put her hands on her cheeks, stared into her eyes. Kino's eyes skittered away, not wanting to meet her there. Yan closed her eyes instead, then, and she felt Kino place her hands on her wrists, pulling her arms down. They held hands, then, in the silence of the bay. How easy it was for Yan to tap out a rhythm on Kino's palm. How easy it was for them to slide down into nothingness together.

In the beginning, there was light. That great empty plain that Yan had imagined once, it was always there for Yan to return to in her head. Quiet. Perfectly still. A place where nothing could happen that wasn't in Yan's control, or Kino's. She was so careful not to let herself slip down into that free associative state, where memories would come floating to the surface and overwhelm the present moment. It happened to her too often, and she had no desire to burden Kino with it.

It was not a burden that she could bear.

What wasn't?

Kino was telling her that she didn't want to know, yet she was holding out a little ball of light, one that cast their silent bodies into wild shadows on the floor of the white plain. Yan knew if she touched it, there was something that she wouldn't want to see, but Kino was offering to share it anyway. Sensing this line of thought, Kino withdrew the glowing ball. This is not a burden that you should bear.

Yan reached for it anyway. Let me try.

Kino's memory was unusually hazy, sounds sounded as though they were coming at her through a hundred foot long tube, someone yelling something indistinguishable, lights flashing above that had no meaning, and then there was stillness and blackness for a long time. She couldn't move. She was laying down, the surface cold and flat beneath her. She stared up into that blackness, and knew she was going to die.

Then the light came in, and a familiar face came into view. Halen stood above her, reaching out to gently touch her face. He was speaking with her, but the words weren't quite registering, or perhaps this memory was on fast forward, like things were happening all too fast for the sake of getting through it, of not living through it all again. Yes, that was it. Go forward in time to when the pain began in earnest.

Kino had offered this white hot ball of pain out to Yan, and she had taken it, but the pain in that shared memory space was not the pain that Kino remembered, it was the pain that Yan remembered, and that was familiar to her. The memory-pain of the Green King breaking her fingers was not something that would shake her out of this dream, even if instead of the Green King, it was Halen standing over her.

"You have a sister," Halen said.

The fear shot through Kino then, far worse than the pain itself, and if they had had the ability to move, they would have shuddered with it.

"Don't worry," Halen said. He moved the knife. "I have a personal prohibition against killing people's families. If that makes you feel any better."

It did.

And then the scene shifted, and it didn't anymore. They were sitting in the mud, and Bina was on the ground in front of them. She was hardly recognizable, and the smell of burning things was somehow the most potent memory sense. The shouting and yelling was distant, inconsequential to this moment, Kino crouched on the ground over her sister, holding her hand for the first time in ten years, having carried her out of the burning shuttle like she had once carried her off Falmar. Except this time, Bina was not going to live.

They could have stayed frozen in this memory forever. Time was completely still. But Yan shook Kino gently out of it, back to that smooth, blank nothingness. A refuge. A place where nothing ever happened.

Is the burden lighter when shared? Yan asked.

No. The weight was overwhelming.

I know, Yan said. I want to help.

How?

Put it out of your mind for a moment.

How?

Think of nothing.

How?

They opened their eyes, looking out at the greenhouse. Yan took Kino's body in her control for a brief second, reached out into the air where a trowel floated by. Kino grasped it in her hand. Yan picked up the onions she had left in the air.

You do what needs to be done, Yan thought. Fix what can be fixed.