“That’s your excuse?” I stare. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play?”
“No excuse. This was my fault.” Her eyes are dead when she looks at me. “There was a warning light; solar flares had jammed our signals, and I couldn’t get through to the crew. I went to check myself. A threadbare, grimy scrap of clothing snagged on a panel caught my eye.
“Something felt wrong, but a comms came through from my contact about an incoming search. Because of the flares, it was already delayed. The DTI had us in their sights, and it was too late to evade them, so I activated the eleventh-hour protocol.”
“Which was what?”
“The crew vented anything we couldn’t hide.”
Chills steal across my entire body, my hands spasming. I have a horrible, horrible feeling that I know where this is going and I’m not—
I can’t—
Tanisira won’t even raise her head.
“I’d never had to use it, and I went to watch the crew in action. It was chaos.” Tremors briefly mangle her words. “I will never forget the sound. Crates stuffed with screaming animals, agitated because they could sense something was wrong. The crates were sucked out into space, and it all just... stopped. Silence like death. The crew saw me, but the DTI were about to board, and they had to continue incinerating the shipment.”
Tanisira’s voice breaks. I want to reach out for her, but I can’t make myself move.
“We used the thrusters. No evidence. The officers boarded, and we didn’t put up a fight. The whole time they searched the ship, I was stuck in the cargo bay surrounded by these people I thought had at least come to respect me—people I had started to think I knew, if nothing else. But none of them could look me in the eye, and I just knew that there was more. Once the officers left, I showed the crew the scrap of clothing and told them to take me to whatever they were hiding.
“Five people crammed into a space usually reserved for jailbroken comms chips. Thin, frightened, cold. I think I shouted, I don’t know. There are chunks of that day that are hazy because I was so furious, I literally saw red. The only thing that stopped that poor family from being vented was their silence. I dread to think what would have happened had one of them been a baby.”
The relief that crashes over me has barbs. I’m torn apart by how glad I am to hear Tanisira wasn’t responsible for something so inhumane, even as I think about the poor animals and those abused people. Fuck. I drag my hands down my face,momentarily letting the pain of my fingernails digging into my skin distract me.Raat-SarpameansNight Serpent,and seems appropriate.
I believe her.
There’s agony in her that can’t be faked, a tangible regret laid over her shoulders. She looks wretched, tears rolling silently down her cheeks. I should have held my judgement until I knew the whole story.
I should have done a lot of things.
“We’d been providing exploitable manual labour for private terraformers on Venus. These people thought they were being sponsored to start a new life.” She laughs humourlessly, closes her eyes and presses her hands to her lids.
I find my tongue, hands pressed to my mouth in horror. “That’s—”
“I was duty-bound to protect them. I failed every single one. Aside from the obvious, the worst part is the utter disregard for life from people I’d lived with, eaten with.Trusted.” She looks at me then, her eyes red. A sneer drags her lip up. “All for money.”
“Ryker seemed to know. Was he part of it?”
Tanisira shakes her head, loosens her hair and digs her hands into her scalp as if she can scrape the memories out. It takes her a while to respond, and foreboding and queasiness feed off each other in my stomach. This is sickening.
But a thought gives me pause. Imagine living with this in your head for years, unable to share it with anyone, believing yourself at fault.That’ssickening.
“Ryker acquires things for clients, no matter how depraved the request. We had dealings with him whenever a buyer would only work through him.”
Tanisira takes a deep breath and seems to shake some life back into herself. Straightening up, she tugs her hair back intoits bun and meets my eye as she secures it. She is holding so many pieces of herself right now, and I can’t bring myself to hate her. I don’t know how to.
“Ryker’s unscrupulous—he has a large network on the waystation and friends in high places.”
“That’s why we had to sneak back to the ship?”
“Yes. He couldn’t know who you were, and I couldn’t allow him to track us here. I was prepared to have to evade his lackeys on my own. I didn’t expect...”
Me. She didn’t expect to have to babysit me.
In a moment of clarity, I acknowledge that my actions put us both in danger today. Not just us, but the whole ship. Vee. Yes, Tanisira made a deal with the devil, but I made a wildly irresponsible decision by following her. If that gun had gone off, Vee would have lost a mother. I feel sick at the thought, have to press a hand to my mouth as an intense wave of nausea snatches me in its grip. Shame isn’t far behind; the knowledge that after everything I’ve ever uncovered in therapy, I can still make stupid, irrational decisions.
Tanisira looks at me, eyebrows drawn together, so much pain gleaming bright in her eyes.
