“The closer we get, the more irritable she is,” Sascha said as he entered the dorm. “Angels on the fields! Even I want to throttle her. What on Mars could possibly be so scary?”
Hirianthial turned onto his side to look at the tigraine.
“And you’re not helping,” Sascha said. “You’ve said maybe two words this entire time. You want me to handle her alone? The least you could do is distract her from me on occasion so I don’t have to deal with the brunt of it all the time.”
That pang in his chest... guilt. Yes, he recognized guilt. “You seem to do well enough.”
“Of course I do. If I stop talking, she’ll brood and the longer she broods, the more explosive she is when she snaps out of it. My only hope is to keep her from getting too introspective.” The Harat-Shar stopped across from their bunks and folded his arms, ears flattening. “Don’t tell me I have to do the same thing with you.”
“No,” Hirianthial said after a moment. “I don’t explode.”
“No,” Sascha said. “You dwindle. You implode. That’s no good either. I wanted this trip to get away from this kind of behavior, not get socked in the face with it again.”
That sparked something in him. “There was trouble?”
The tigraine wavered, eyeing him. Then with a sigh he dropped onto the floor and pressed his back against the bunk frame. “Ah, Angels. My siblings are going to drive me crazy.”
“So it was as you feared,” Hirianthial said.
“And worse. They want me to stay, and playing with them again has reminded both Irine and me about how nice family is.” Sascha stared at his folded hands, resting on his knees. “Nice becomes cloying. And then smothering.”
He could have sensed the shape of the wound in Sascha’s words even if he hadn’t felt the dull red shimmer under the flat gray in the man’s aura. When Sascha didn’t volunteer more, Hirianthial said, “I didn’t know you had other siblings.”
“With my father having seven wives?” Sascha laughed. “He’d have to be chaste. There are seventeen kits in the family, not counting me and Irine. Most of them are nice enough. It’s just there’s... well, there’s some politicking. Even if we don’t like to admit it, a woman wants her children to have the best of everything. Six other women with children makes it a competitive field.”
“Your family seems prosperous,” Hirianthial said.
“Oh, they are,” Sascha said. “Thank the Angels for that.” He scratched his ear. “It’s so hard to say ‘no’ to family. You know?”
A wave of cold anger and mingled regret washed to the forefront of Hirianthial’s mind. He remembered steel and brown blood. “Yes, I know.”
Sascha sighed. “Sometimes you just have to get away. I didn’t want to do anything I’d regret.”
“Wise,” Hirianthial said. “Of course, we’ll be back in less than a week.”
“Hopefully with the money to cut short our visit,” Sascha said. “I can’t imagine you’ll be sorry to leave either. And don’t go all silent on me. I’m not going to get offended if you tell me you hate Harat-Sharii.”
“There are very few things I hate,” Hirianthial said. “Your homeworld is not among them.”
“But?”
“None of us belong there,” Hirianthial said.
“Except Irine,” Sascha said. “And I’m going to have to drag her away. She’ll forgive me for it and the excitement of traveling will distract her, but I’ll know in my heart that I took her away from her family. I don’t like that. I don’t like deciding for her, even though she won’t mind.”
“Perhaps Harat-Sharii isn’t the best place for her,” Hirianthial said.
“How do I know?” Sascha said; his aura had flattened to a morose black, sticky as tar.
“You don’t,” Hirianthial said. “But she’ll choose to go with you and that’s all that matters. It is her choice, alet.”
“Right. Follow me or get left behind.”
“No. To choose the love of her brother or the safety and familiarity of home. Do not belittle her by diminishing the choice just because you know what she will choose. Instead be honored that her love for you is so constant you know what she’ll choose before you even offer her the choice.”
The black lightened to gray, more like rain than tar. After observing his own hands for a while, Sascha said, “I guess that’s love.”
“Such love is rare even in an Eldritch’s lifespan,” Hirianthial said.
“If you say it, it must be true,” the Harat-Shar with a flush of green humor. He twisted to look up at Hirianthial. “I hope you’ve known love.”
Faced with such friendly eyes and the suffusion of warmth in the tigraine’s aura, Hirianthial could no more remain silent than he could stop breathing. “Yes.”
“Good,” Sascha said. He took a long breath. “I guess some people are always the actors and some the followers.”
“Sometimes,” Hirianthial said.
“And I’m an actor,” Sascha said.
“Yes.”
“And you’re a follower.”
Hirianthial paused, which gave the tigraine time to fill in the space. “So I’m telling you to pay more attention to eating. And to sleep better. Just looking at you makes me ache. And no more hiding away from the two of us, because Reese wasn’t kidding when she said she’d need us both. I get the feeling it’s going to be even worse when we finally get to Mars.”
Startled, Hirianthial said nothing.
“So start being more intrusive, okay?” Sascha said. “I don’t know how someone six and a half feet tall and dressed like a foreign prince can disappear at will, but you’ve been doing it for days now and it’s not helping. Not Reese, not me and not you. Will you promise?”
“To be more intrusive?” Hirianthial said, finding humor in it despite himself.
“Yes,” Sascha said. “To be more helpful.”
“My help is not always enough,” Hirianthial said quietly.
“Is that any reason not to offer?” Sascha asked.
“No,” Hirianthial said.
Sascha nodded. “Good. So promise. And I mean that. I want to hear it out loud.”
Hirianthial found a short laugh. “You aren’t going to give up, I see.”
“No. And trust me, we might not be very patient as a race, but we’re certainly obsessive. You don’t want me to get obsessive about you giving me your word.”
“I certainly don’t,” Hirianthial said. “Very well. I promise I’ll be more intrusive.”
“Good,” Sascha said. He stood and shook his head. “I don’t know where you get this idea that you’re no good to anyone, you know. Only a few minutes of talking with you and I feel better about everything.”
Hirianthial thought it best not to respond to that and was doing well on that course when Sascha threw a pillow at him.
“Stop that!”
“Stop what?” the Eldritch said, sitting up.
“Withdrawing. You think you’ve got all the answers and that you’re always right. Well, you’re not. Keep that in mind. And go drink some milk before your bones get too old to hold together anymore.”
“Dubious science at best,” Hirianthial said, but he stood anyway and straightened his clothes. “Where did you learn biology?”
“In school, like most people,” Sascha said. “Unfortunately, the teacher was really really cute. I couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying; I was too busy posing him in my fantasies.”
“Harat-Shar,” Hirianthial said.
“To the marrow,” Sascha agreed cheerfully.
Staring at the smoldering orange surface of Mars, Reese suppressed the urge to turn around and head right back to Harat-Sharii. Once upon a time she’d looked upon the polar ice cap and the vast plains and dry seas studded with habitats and felt a thrill that made her body tremble and her breath catch in her chest. Now she saw only a giant, red reminder of her own failure.
“I’m going to get this over with,” she said, turning to the two men. �
�Our shuttle leaves around midnight; check our luggage into a locker and amuse yourself here on Deimos Station. I should be back in a few hours.”
“You’re not seriously going to leave us up here, are you?” Sascha asked. “We didn’t come all this way just to hang out on a glorified asteroid.”
“Oh yes you did,” Reese said. “Besides, what’s wrong with Deimos? If you stay here, there are restaurants, shops, gardens... all the convenience of the Alliance. I bet there’s even a way to entertain a Harat-Shar, if you go to the wrong places.”
“Yeah, but you put a claw on the problem,” Sascha said. “We could go to restaurants, shops and gardens anywhere. There’s only one place to meet the boss’s folks.”
“Well the boss’s folks aren’t interested in meeting you,” Reese said. “You’ll just have to make do.”
Sascha’s ears fell. Even Hirianthial seemed uneasy, though it was hard to tell—he moved so little you had to examine his face, inch by inch, just to figure out how he communicated any emotion at all.
“Let us accompany you,” the Eldritch said, voice gentle.
“No,” Reese said. The word came out harsher than she intended. She sighed. “Look, they don’t like off-worlders. Having the two of you around will just make it harder for me to do this so... just let me do it alone, okay? I promise nothing will happen to me. I’ll be back before you two agree on a place to eat lunch.”
“But—”
“We’ll be here,” Hirianthial said, interrupting Sascha. For once, Reese was glad of him. Just this once, though. She had desperately wanted the escort to Mars—the thought of making this trip alone, the same way she’d made it when she’d left, had proved too much—but she couldn’t bring them with her. She just couldn’t.
The shuttle down to Landing One rattled just as noisily as it had the first time she’d taken this trip. Reese gripped the thick restraints that held her in place while staring out her pinhole window. Joining the Alliance hadn’t inspired all that much change in Terra’s solar system, and the humans she’d grown up with had fallen into two groups: the bitter isolationists who were glad there were so few reminders that the Pelted existed, and the star-eyed expansionists who wished the Alliance would come and renovate until all of Terra’s colonies and stations glimmered with the same wealth and technology as the many starbases planted throughout the Neighborhood. There had been little room to walk in the middle. Reese herself had never wished for a complete overhaul... but she wouldn’t have minded much if someone had found some way to replace the older ships in the civilian space fleet.
No, she hadn’t wanted the Alliance to come to her. She’d wanted to go meet it. If it had already swept through Terra’s system, what impetus would she have had to leave?
What excuse, more like.
Landing Port had never looked dingy until she’d left and seen what passed for a port in the Core. Now Reese stood in the milling rush of people and smelled their sweat and the acrid high note of poorly recycled air and thought the port looked especially small. Had any Alliance engineer seen the high ceilings crossed with gray girders, he would have hung banners from them. Or found trained vines to climb along the ceiling as combination decor and air freshener. Some enterprising Tam-illee would have spray-painted the place a neutral but friendly color... or knocked the entire ceiling down and replaced it with windows. But Landing had been built when humans had been lucky to reach Mars, much less cling there, and the war that had disordered the Martian economy had also given natives a certain fatalism about remodeling.
Melancholy made her angry. Already clenching her teeth, Reese forced her way through the crowds disembarking from the Earth and Deimos shuttles and headed for the blue-station people-mover that would take her home. The township that included her family residence was the sixth stop down the rail and it wasn’t a quick ride. Reese hooked a hand through one of the overhead loops and stared out at the naked Martian landscape as the people-mover glided through its protective steel and plastic tunnel.
Reese stepped off the rail and squeezed her way out of the station into one of the planet’s giant hemispherical habitats. Here at last there was at least some room to breathe; trees stretched tall and thin by the low gravity helped the air-recyclers handle the load of the one thousand people living beneath the dome. This township, barely larger than the crew complement on the Alliance’s warships, had been Reese’s childhood. It was the largest group of people in one place she could handle.
It still wasn’t large enough to keep her from getting home too quickly.
The Eddings household looked like a cottage, but hid a basement in the dense red earth that was twice as long as the ground floor. The property abutted the Wall; as a child, Reese had tried climbing over the hedges to touch it but had found an electrified fence awaiting her. She remembered staring at a landscape distorted by the thick plexiglass that shielded the habitat from the not-quite-right conditions outside... feeling safe. She didn’t trust the invisible glass walls of the Alliance.
The flowers that lined the walk to the door looked much the same, but the tree—the eucalyptus Reese had hidden in, had climbed nearly to its topmost branches, had hung her hammock from—was gone. When the door opened for her knock, the first thing she said to Auntie Mae was, “What happened to the tree?”
“Your mother got tired of it raining kernels on the roof,” Auntie Mae said. “We cut it down. Good gracious, child! You’ve lost weight! What are you eating out there?”
“Who’s at the door, Mae?”
“Oh, it’s Reese.”
“Well for the love of blood and planet, tell her to come in! No use letting in all the dust.”
Reese set booted foot on the braided mat inside the door and reconciled herself to actually having come home. Mae led her down the hall over wooden floors to the breakfast room, where her grandmother, a hunched figure with skin pink as dry flowers, was knitting by the table.
Her mother was pounding bread dough on the kitchen counter. “Well, lookie here! She’s come home at last. How about that, Mother? Here’s your granddaughter, just as you said.”
“I told you she’d be back,” Gran said, knitting needles clicking.
Ma Eddings wiped her flour-dusted hands on a purple apron and walked around the counter to clasp Reese’s arms. She hadn’t changed much: there were new creases around her mouth and the line between her brows had become more pronounced; perhaps her figure was rounder, or the gray in the short hedge of her hair a little paler. Reese couldn’t tell. As her mother hugged her, Reese tried to unbend and hug back.
Auntie Mae took her place at the breakfast table. “You need some feeding, girl.”
“I’m not hungry,” Reese said.
“Of course you are,” Gran said. “You just sit right down, Theresa, and let your mother make you breakfast.”
“Nonsense,” Ma said. “She’s family, not a guest. You come over here and help.”
So Reese donned the older battered apron, the white one that had faded to a soft apricot color, and helped her mother with the baking as the pink sky beyond the kitchen grew paler. Her aunt and grandmother fell into relaxed gossip about the neighbor’s daughter, the mayor’s new pet, how indecent behavior was yet again on the rise.
Butter on the table, glistening and warm; apple preserves and fresh honey; new eggs, cracked and sizzling. Within an hour, a hearty meal appeared on the table and Reese had heard more than she wanted to know about how her schoolmates had fared in her absence. She asked after Aunt Mabel and Great-Aunt Charla, discovered what had become of some of her cousins and heard that Gran had survived another routine heart operation.
They waited until the end of the meal to begin the real discussion. It had always been that way: difficult topics waited on the food.
“I don’t know why you’ve chosen to come home,” Gran said. “But I’m glad you finally have. You’re getting old, Theresa, and your body won’t be good for anything much longer.”
“Gran, I’m only thirt
y-two.”
“Yes, yes. You’ve only got three years.”
“The operation takes better if you’re thirty-five or younger,” Auntie Mae said. “You know that.”
She hadn’t, but it didn’t seem like the time to volunteer. “I’m not here to have a baby.”
“We wouldn’t expect you to start the moment you came home!” Gran exclaimed. “You need to settle down. Find the rhythm of Mars again.”
“I’m not here to settle down,” Reese said. Her stomach clenched at the ensuing silence. “I’m here to ask for a loan.”
Another few moments of quiet. Then her mother: “What?”
“I need money,” Reese said. “For repairs.”
“You came here for a hand-out?” Auntie Mae said.
Reese flinched, but said, “Yes.”
“You already have your inheritance, girl,” Mae said. “Why are you coming back here for more?”
“I’ll pay the family back,” Reese said.
Gran lifted her head and squinted past Reese at Ma. “This is out of hand.”
“What am I supposed to do?” Ma said. “I can’t make her stay home. She’s an adult now.”
“She’s not acting like one,” Gran said.
“Not proper at all,” Auntie Mae said, eyeing Reese. Unlike Gran and Reese’s mother, Aunt Mae had brown eyes to go with her caramel-colored skin. They were all different colors, the Eddings, thanks to the traditions of Mars. “Haven’t you been listening, child? You need to settle down. Send away for a baby.”
“I don’t want a baby,” Reese said, stunning them all into speechlessness. She’d never had the courage to say those words out loud before. Recklessly, Reese went on. “I’ve never wanted a baby. And even if I did want one, I wouldn’t want a... a mail-order baby by some man I don’t even know the name of!”
Earthrise (Her Instruments Book 1) Page 21
