She left the Observatory, but instead of going to her rooms, she headed for another observation deck. From there, you could see the ships flying in and out of the main hangar bay. And soon enough, a small freighter labeled CR-921 flew out of the bay. Ari watched it go farther and farther away until it reached the hyperspace jump-off and vanished into a small, bright point of light.
Maybe Assistant had changed her mind, Ari thought suddenly. Maybe she’d changed her mind at the very last minute, had disembarked after checking in, and hadn’t left the station. Maybe she was back in their rooms right now, getting ready to order dinner and wondering where Ari was.
By the time the doors to her quarters had closed behind Ari, her hands were clenched. When she called out “Assistant?” and received no answer, they were trembling. As she wandered through the garden, checking around every tree, under every leaf, she started having trouble breathing again. By the time Ari reached Assistant’s empty alcove, with its small bed neatly made, tears were running freely down her face.
Then she noticed the little slip of paper on Assistant’s pillow. A note? Ari swooped down on it like a Fetalyn hawk, unfolding it with shaking hands. Maybe Assistant would say something about coming back, or how much she’d grown to care for Ari during their time together.
There were only two sentences.
Thank you for your kindness to me. I will not forget it.
Ari sat down hard on the thin mattress, her breath coming out of her in a painful wheeze. Well. Wasn’t that nice? Assistant appreciated Ari’s kindness and wouldn’t forget it; she hadn’t said that she wouldn’t forget Ari herself. What a difference that one word would have made. I will not forget you.
Yeah, right. Ari’s own father had forgotten her for over a decade. A slave who’d been longing for escape would forget her in a day.
The intercom buzzed. Ari gasped. After a moment of crackling silence, a man’s voice said, “Lady Ariana? Are you there?”
“Yes,” Ari croaked.
“Your Ladyship, we understood that you would be coming to your father’s quarters today,” the voice said respectfully. “To take care of his possessions.”
“Take care of them yourself,” Ari said. “Throw them out. Give them away. Keep them. I don’t care.”
“But Your Ladyship!” Now the voice sounded shocked.
“I said I don’t care,” Ari repeated, and then cried out, “Go away! Leave me alone! Just go away!”
“…Yes, ma’am,” the voice said after a few silent moments, and the crackle and static faded out.
“Just go away,” Ari said to nobody at all and sat down once again at the foot of her oak.
What did she care about her father’s things? They weren’t him. They wouldn’t bring him back. They couldn’t bring anybody back.
She sat there for hours, staring at nothing. Eventually she got up and went to bed and stared at the ceiling, which made for a change of scene. Assistant’s arms did not wind around her and hold her close.
~ ~ ~
The next day, Ari discovered that the voice on the intercom had not taken her at her word. Slaves arrived carrying boxes of her father’s possessions, which they stacked in the kitchen, in Assistant’s alcove, in clear spaces in the garden—everywhere. Ari would be lucky if she didn’t trip over them at every turn. The slaves glared at her resentfully as they left, except for one, who lingered.
“You freed your father’s slaves,” she said. “They found work. One with a family in the station, and three somewhere else.”
“Oh,” Ari said. Then she said, “Did they love him?”
The slave stared at her. “How should I know?” She paused. “Your Ladyship.”
“I just wondered,” Ari said.
The slave gave her a long look and departed with the rest.
~ ~ ~
“Maybe she will come back,” Ari said to her second-favorite oak tree.
The oak tree didn’t say anything. Cranli hopped down on her shoulder, rubbed his front legs together consolingly, and hopped away again.
“Maybe she will,” Ari repeated as she packed fertilizer around some tulip bulbs. “Maybe she’ll get bored out there, once she’s seen…” Everything else in the universe. “She might want to come home.”
The bulbs didn’t answer, either.
“It might take a little while,” Ari acknowledged, dropped her trowel, and started to cry.
CHAPTER 14
“You gave away nearly two-thirds of your cash holdings,” the solicitor said.
“Oh,” Ari said. “Did I?”
“Two days ago. To your slave.”
“She’s not my slave.”
“Whyever did you do such a—Well. You still have your father’s various properties. And his things… I understand he had some valuable personal assets. Have you looked?”
“No. They’re still in boxes.”
“Might I suggest you look?”
“Is the new stationmaster going to let me stay here? I don’t know what to do with my plants, otherwise.”
“He says you can stay,” the solicitor said, and sighed.
~ ~ ~
Ari decided that she couldn’t slip up when it came to the plants. They were her family. Her children. When you got right down to it, they were always the ones who didn’t leave. She owed it to them to care for them. To repay their trust. She’d always known that. She’d just forgotten for a little while.
“We’ll get by just fine,” she said to Cranli, as she let him out of his jar. She swallowed hard. “Or…I mean, we’ll get by.” She closed her eyes. “Just like before. It won’t take long. You’ll see.”
She remembered a line from the poem she’d told Assistant about: Better the bones than the empty grave. Better to have had something wonderful in your life, and lose it, than never to know anything wonderful at all. It had made perfect sense at the time, before she’d lost anything.
It was nonsense now, of course.
That night, she went for a walk. She didn’t go to the Observatory. That didn’t seem like a good idea. Instead she went to the same observation deck where she’d watched Assistant’s ship take off four days ago. Her heart had taken off with it. When the phrasing occurred to her, she wondered if any poets would approve.
No ships were going in or out tonight. She’d heard some mention, in passing, about being more careful because pirates had started to prowl around again after months of silence. Maybe that was because her father was gone. As Assistant had said, even Mír had respected him—and now he was no longer here.
It still seemed unreal, though, that pirates would ever come to this lonely little outpost, no matter how much her father had insisted they would. It also seemed impossible to care. Space was so vast, and Ari was so very small and alone—what were pirates to her?
After she went for her walk, she ordered dinner to be sent from the mess hall and ate it by herself. She used her very best table manners.
She tended her plants until the twelfth hour chimed, and then she went to bed. It was important to get on a good schedule and keep to it.
That night, she dreamed that Assistant was with her again. Then she dreamed that Assistant left her again. She woke up gasping, rolled over, and realized that she was alone in the bed, and that there was no warm spot next to her because nobody had been lying there. She immediately grabbed the second pillow and held it tight to her body, burying her face in it, mumbling a prayer that she would never dare say in daylight.
Please come back. Please, please come back.
~ ~ ~
The next day, Ari decided to return to the Observatory after all. No sense doing otherwise. Her life wasn’t over just because her father was dead, just because Assistant had left to start her own life afresh. There was no reason why she shouldn’t keep doing the things she always did. The sooner she got back to normal, the better, really.
The superintendent came forward to see Ari the moment she entered the room. “My earnest sympathies, My Lady,” he
said quietly, and at his kindness, Ari almost burst into tears again. “I am so sorry for your losses.”
“Thank you,” Ari said. And then she added, “Losses?” Plural?
“Your father and your slave,” he said. “You were always in here with her. I saw that you were fond of her.”
Ari immediately decided to return to her quarters. “Yeah,” she said. “We were…um. Thank y—”
“These are dangerous times,” the superintendent said, shaking his head and looking angry. “To think of our brief respite—and now this. It’s sheer brutality and barbarism, is what it is.”
“Brutality and—” Ari blinked.
“That little freighter never stood a chance,” the superintendent said, shaking his head again. “Not against a pirate vessel that size.”
Ari just stood there and stared at him. And stared, and stared some more, wondering when he was going to laugh at his own joke, because Ari sure wasn’t going to laugh at it for him.
He looked right back, his eyes widened, and he looked horrified. “You didn’t know.”
“Know.”
“About the—but it happened three days ago,” he said helplessly. “I thought everyone knew.”
“Knew.”
“That freighter going to Carellian,” he said. “The CR carryall. They captured it the moment it exited hyperspace in the Carel sector, as if they were waiting for it.”
“Captured,” Ari said. Her body was going numb. It was a very strange feeling.
“And…and left behind.” Ari kept looking at him, until he finally said softly, “A wreck. They left no survivors. It was all over the newsfeeds, Your Ladyship.”
“Assistant’s the one who reads the newsfeeds.” Then she said, “Thank you for telling me,” and walked away very quickly.
He did not try to stop her.
On the way, she stopped at a public access console and surfed to a newsfeed. There was nothing about a destroyed freighter today. Maybe the superintendent had been wrong. Then she remembered he’d said it had happened three days ago. She searched the archives of the last week’s news.
And there it was. CR-192. A picture of it, just as it had appeared when she’d seen it leaving the station. With the caption, “WRECK AND RUIN: The freighter from Nahtal Station found ravaged by pirates.”
Below the caption was a picture of a gutted husk—the remains of the freighter. An expert said that it was the work of Mír’s pirates—that she had reappeared after months in hiding, and was already up to her old tricks. “This kind of efficient savagery,” the expert said, “can be the work of nobody else.”
Ari tried to read the whole article, but the only phrase that mattered was, “No survivors found.”
“The mercenaries were quickly and cleanly killed,” Assistant had told her. “That is mercy, in the world of pirates.”
The corridor swayed a little as Ari returned to their rooms. Her rooms. She thought maybe people were looking at her funny as she passed by, but that didn’t matter.
Then she was standing in her kitchen and walking toward her garden. The kitchen floor stopped, the soft dirt started, Ari felt something hot gathering in her throat and behind her eyes, and then everything went all weird for a little while.
When she opened her eyes again, her whole body hurt. She was curled up in the dirt and panting for air. She raised her head painfully and saw that somebody had torn down her shelves from the wall and that all her precious jars had crashed to the floor.
She sat up and her elbow slid back into something sharp. Ari looked down, then blinked, trying to understand what she was seeing. Cranli’s jar lay smashed under the edge of a fallen shelf. Amid the dirt and glass, she could see him, still lying beneath his branch, pulped. Ari had wood splinters in her hands. She moaned and swayed where she sat, but she didn’t pass out, even though her head hurt something fierce. But that didn’t matter, either.
Assistant wasn’t coming back. Assistant was dead. Assistant was dead, Ari’s father was dead, Cranli was dead, and nobody was coming back, ever.
“You’re just a bunch of stupid plants,” Ari said to her garden. The garden didn’t reply. “I wish you were dead.” She dug her fingernails into her scalp. “I wish you were all dead and they’d come back.”
If she hadn’t let Assistant go right away. If she’d detained her for another day. Or even another few hours. If Assistant hadn’t been aboard that freighter. If Ari had acted differently.
But she hadn’t, and she couldn’t change any of it. She didn’t get to make those kinds of decisions. She didn’t get to decide anything at all. She never had, she’d never been used to making decisions, and the one time she’d decided, when she’d let Assistant go, she’d done it wrong. She’d made the wrong decision, and now everyone was gone.
Ari stared down at the dirt and figured that if she just sat here and didn’t move, she wouldn’t have to decide anything else for a while.
CHAPTER 15
That night, Ari finally got up from the ground and started cleaning up the mess she’d made, trying to avoid the broken glass and mostly succeeding. She worked all night long.
The next day she checked meticulously on all the saplings. Every single one. Every single leaf. And after that, funnily enough, she sort of lost track of the days. She forgot to wash and eat, because nobody was there to remind her, or make her. She slept wherever she lay down. And after a few days (who knew how many?), when she opened her eyes from sleep, she couldn’t get up again. She couldn’t move. Oh. Maybe she should try again later. She closed her eyes once more.
When she opened them again, everything was bright white and her arm hurt.
“She’s awake,” a voice said.
A woman leaned over her. Dr. Eylen: the physician who’d attended her father’s deathbed and who’d told Ari earlier that everything was fine. Ari wondered if Dr. Eylen was dead, too, then realized that didn’t make much sense. But what did?
“Lady Ariana,” Dr. Eylen said in obvious relief. “Welcome back.”
Back? Ari tried to say, but her mouth was too dry. She licked her lips. The doctor waved her hand, and a nurse pressed a cup of water to Ari’s lips. Ari sipped. It tasted wonderful.
“You have been unconscious for two days, maybe more,” Dr. Eylen said. “The new stationmaster arrived two days ago and expressed a wish to see you. You didn’t respond to intercom calls, and eventually we got worried enough to check on you.” She took a deep breath, and let it go. “Lucky thing, too.”
The new stationmaster. Oh, that was right. Ari’s father was dead, and so was Assistant. Ari opened her mouth, tried to say something, but all that came out was a very strange noise, a low, animal moan.
Dr. Eylen put a hand on her shoulder. “I know you grieve your father,” she said. “And your slave, too, or so I hear. But shutting yourself up to starve to death is not the answer to that.”
Ari wanted to say that she hadn’t meant to do any such thing; it was only that nobody had reminded her to eat. But that would probably sound stupid to a doctor.
“We’ve got you on a nutrient drip,” Dr. Eylen continued. “When you’re well enough, you can go back to your quarters, as long as you understand that we’ll be checking on you.”
Ari nodded.
“But for now, you stay here. Stay and just rest.” The doctor patted her arm. “Just rest, that’s all.”
“I killed Cranli,” Ari said. “My praying mantis.” She shut her eyes, wondering if she could keep them closed forever.
“Did you?”
“It was an accident. But it was my fault. He was her favorite, too.”
“I’m sorry. It’s all right. Rest,” Dr. Eylen said again, and her voice was kinder than it had been in the corridor, when Ari’s father had still been alive.
“I killed both of them.”
“You killed no one.” Now Dr. Eylen’s voice was much firmer, though not sharp at all. “The pirates killed your slave. Not you. You must understand this.”
&n
bsp; “She wasn’t my slave. She belonged to my father.”
“Shh, Your Ladyship.” Dr. Eylen reached up and touched a button. “I’m sending a sedative down your nutrient tube. Now—rest.”
“It won’t make me dream, will it?” Ari said, but then she fell asleep before the doctor could reply.
~ ~ ~
Ari spent a week in sickbay. She had a room to herself, a small one, like a pod—it was like being a seed, perhaps. But she never felt shut in, and she was free to come and go as she pleased so long as a nurse or orderly accompanied her. That meant she didn’t really go anywhere, since she felt bad about depriving the medical unit of on-call personnel, who probably had more important things to do than walk aimlessly around corridors with her.
She was made to talk to the station’s only counselor, who was overworked and underpaid, and who asked her a series of questions that basically amounted to, “Are you going to try and airlock yourself into space?” Ari was not, and she had no desire to “talk through her feelings,” even though everyone strongly encouraged her to do so.
“Maybe later,” she kept saying, and they had to be content with that.
She figured by the third day that she was well enough to get around on her own, but the medical staff kept an eye on her anyway. It was all right. Although she didn’t leave sickbay, the same two nurses tended to her on rotation, and sometimes Dr. Eylen, so she didn’t feel too overwhelmed by lots of new people. And the nurses were nice—caring, compassionate, and they never took no for an answer. They didn’t condescend to her or treat her like a freak. They made her talk, even if it was just about silly stuff—her plants (which they assured her were being cared for), goings-on at the station, trends that were finally making it all the way out here from Homeworld, whatever.
Often Ari just listened uncomprehendingly to their chatter—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d read a society newsfeed—but it was better than the aching, endless silence that enveloped her at night. She still needed sedatives to sleep.
She liked the sedatives. She even came to like the nurses’ chatter. She liked anything that wouldn’t let her think.
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