“Okay,” Naomi said. “We’ll keep quiet.”
The rage flared in his breast. Speaking was suddenly easy.
“I won’t,” Holden said. “We’re talking about an insane member of the Mao clan, the people who’ve twice tried to kill everyone in the solar system, who followed us all the way to the Ring, tried to kill us. To kill you. She blew up a spaceship full of innocent people just to try and make me look bad. Who knows how many other people she’s killed? If the UN wants to space her, I’ll push the damn button myself.”
There was a long moment of silence. Holden watched Anna’s face fall as he crushed her hopes. Alex started chuckling, and everyone turned to look at him.
“Yeah,” Alex said in his drawling voice. “I mean, Naomi only got beat half to death. She can cut this Clarissa slack, it’s no big deal. But the captain’s girlfriend got hurt. He’s the real victim here.”
The room got quiet again as everyone stopped breathing. Blood flushed into Holden’s face, rushing like a river in his ears. It was hatred and pain and outrage. His mind seemed to flicker, and the urge to strike out at Alex for the insult was almost too much to resist.
And then he understood Alex’s words, saw Naomi’s eyes on his, and it all drained away. Why, he wanted to ask, but it didn’t matter. It was Naomi, and she’d made her decision. It wasn’t his revenge to take.
He was spent. Exhausted. He wanted to curl up on the floor there with his people around him and sleep for days. He tried out a smile.
“Wow,” he finally said. “Sometimes I am just a gigantic ass**le.”
“No,” Amos said. “I’m right there with you. I’d kill this Clarissa myself for the shit she’s pulled. But Red asked us to let it go, and Naomi’s playing along, so I guess we gotta too.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Holden said to Anna, his voice cold. “I will never forgive this woman for what she’s done. Never. But I won’t turn her over to the UN, as a favor to you, and because if Naomi can let it go, I guess I have to.”
“Thank you,” Anna said.
“Things change, Red,” Amos said, “you let us know. Because I’ll still be happy to kill the shit out of her.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven: Clarissa
S
he didn’t know at first what the change was. It presented in little things. The decking she’d been able to sleep on like she was dead suddenly wasn’t comfortable. She found herself wondering more what her father did in his cell, five billion kilometers away and, for all she knew, in another universe. She tapped her hands against the bars just to hear the subtle differences in tone that the different bars made when struck. And she hated.
Hatred was nothing new. She’d lived with it for long enough that the memories of the times before all carried the same colors of rage and righteousness. Only before, she’d hated Jim Holden, and now she hated Clarissa Mao. Hating herself had a kind of purity that she found appealing. Cathartic. Jim Holden had shifted out from under her thirst for vengeance, refusing to be consumed by it. She could live in the flames and know she deserved to burn. It was like playing a game on easy.
She tapped the bars. There wasn’t enough variation between them to play a melody. If there had been she would have, just for something to distract her. She wondered whether her extra glands would be enough to bend the bars or lift the door off its hinges. Not that it would matter. At best, leaving her cell would have meant being gunned down by an OPA guard. At worst, it would have meant freedom.
The captain had stopped talking to her, at least. She watched the stream of visitors coming to him. She had a pretty clear idea which of the guards answered to him. And there were a couple of Martians in military uniforms who came, and a few UN officers too. They came and met with Captain Ashford, speaking in the low voices of people who took themselves and each other very seriously. She recognized the sound from eavesdropping on her father. She remembered that she had been impressed by it once. Now it made her want to laugh.
She paced her tiny world. She did push-ups and lunges and all the pointless exercises that the light gravity allowed. And she waited for punishment or for the end of the world. When she slept, Ren was there, so she tried not to sleep much.
And slowly, with a sense of growing horror, she understood that the change was her coming back to herself. Falling awake. After her failure on the Rocinante, there had been a kind of peace. A disconnection from everything. But even before that, she’d been in a sort of a dream. She couldn’t tell if it had started with the day she’d killed Ren or when she’d taken the identification to become Melba Koh. Or earlier, even. When she’d heard her father had been arrested. Whenever she’d lost herself, she was coming back now, and it was like her whole consciousness was suffering pins and needles. It was worse than pain, and it drove her in circles.
The more she thought about it, the clearer the mind games that the red-haired priest had played on her were. The priest and, in her way, Tilly Fagan too. Maybe Anna had come thinking that the promise of forgiveness would need to be dangled in front of her in order to get the confession. If so, the woman was double stupid: first because she’d thought Clarissa wouldn’t admit to what she’d done, and second because she’d thought forgiveness was something Clarissa wanted. Or would accept.
I’d like to speak with you again, she’d said, and at the time it had seemed so sincere. So real. Only she hadn’t come back. A small rational part of Clarissa’s mind knew that it hadn’t really been that long. Being in the cell changed the experience of time and made her feel isolated. That was the point of cells. Still, Anna hadn’t come back. And neither had Holden. Or Naomi, whom Clarissa hadn’t quite killed. They were done with her, and why shouldn’t they be? Clarissa didn’t have anything else to offer them. Except maybe a warning that the power on the ship was about to change hands again, as if that would even matter. Who got to sit in the doomed ship’s captain’s chair seemed like a terribly petty thing to worry about. It was like arguing about who was the prettiest girl in the prison camp.
Still, it was the only show playing, so she watched.
The voices from the other cell had taken on a new tone. An urgency. Even before the well-dressed man came down toward her, she knew that their little drama was about to play out. He stood at her door, looking in. His white hair, brilliant and perfectly coiffed, just made him look old. There was a darkness in his professionally avuncular eyes. When he put his hands around the bars, it looked like he was the one imprisoned.