“Then stop filling.”
So I do.
The Lamplight hums around us, carrying two stubborn idiots through subspace toward a mission with poor odds and too many ghosts. Blue-white light slides over Roma’s cheek, catching the bruise, the defiance, the exhaustion she keeps locked beneath competence. She is so young for all that iron. Iknow better than to say it. Youth is not weakness, and grief ages people in crooked ways.
“You need something after,” I say.
“I need to get him home.”
“And after.”
Her throat moves as she swallows. She looks toward the forward canopy, but there is nothing to see except subspace glare and our reflected faces floating over it.
“I used to draw,” she says.
The words are quiet enough I almost think she did not mean to say them.
I keep my voice careful. “What did you draw?”
“Ships. Cities. Animals I made up. My father said my impossible creatures had better skeletal logic than most government procurement designs.”
“He sounds smart.”
“He is.”
“Is,” I echo.
She looks back at me then, and something in her eyes shifts at the correction. It is not gratitude. Not trust. Something more dangerous because it is smaller and less guarded.
“I stopped,” she says.
“Drawing?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because it did not help.”
“Help what?”
Her hand curls around the edge of the console. “Bring him back.”
There it is. The whole ugly altar. Every joy weighed against the mission and found insufficient. Every human piece of her stripped for parts because love became a machine she thought she could build if she fed it enough of herself.
“That’s what I mean,” I say.
She pulls away from the console and faces me fully. “No, what you mean is that my life fails to meet your preferred definition because it lacks drinking, fighting, and whatever charming disaster you planned to call Tuesday.”
“I never said my life was full.”
“Then do not call mine empty because I had the discipline to make it useful.”
The heat in her voice changes the cockpit. Irritation has been between us since the bar, easy and bright. This is not that. This is closer, sharper, personal enough that I feel it under my scales.
“You did not make it useful,” I say. “You made it narrow.”
Her eyes flash. “Narrow focus gets impossible things done.”
