Page 247 of Reaper Said Mine

Skahar continues, “Revenge is simple because the dead ask only memory. The living are greedy. They ask food, air, medicine, patience, law, compromise, safe corridors, repaired doors, and leaders who can swallow insults without making orphans of them. The living ask everything.”

My throat works.

“And if I fail them?”

“You will.”

I look at him.

He shrugs one old shoulder. “Everyone fails the living. The work is failing less tomorrow.”

I laugh then, not because anything is funny, but because the old bastard has found a way to make despair sound like policy.

“You are terrible at comfort.”

“I have many other virtues.”

“Name one.”

“I did not sedate you.”

“Yet.”

“Yet,” he agrees.

For a moment, the weight in my chest loosens enough to let breath move through it.

My compad vibrates.

Ursa’s message appears, delayed but bright as a blade in a dark room.

Alliance intervention packet gaining traction. Treaty limits are helping, but the capital ship entry is feeding every hawk with a microphone. Send me whatever you have from Bravax and Dakkor. I’m sorry this is happening. I’m angry with you, and I love you, and both are making me insufferable.

I stare at the final line.

I am angry with you, and I love you.

A Reaper song begins somewhere below, low and ragged, joined by a second voice, then a third. It is a shelter song, one sung aboard damaged ships and in caves during storms, meant to tell the frightened that the walls still stand. The sound climbs through the market ring and fills the observation alcove with rough harmony.

Skahar looks down toward the singers. “She is honest.”

“She is furious.”

“Those are often related.”

I type slowly because I owe her care with every word.

Coalition fleets entered in force. Battles have spread farther than I expected. Bravax and Dakkor data attached. My revenge has failed me. I do not yet know how to stand without it, but I am learning where to put my hands.

I send the message before shame can make me revise it into something proud.

Skahar reads my face, not the screen. “Good.”

“You do not know what I wrote.”

“I know what it cost.”

I slip the compad away and look once more over the market. My people have no homeworld. Their history is broken. Their songs remember fragments of a gentler species most of us cannot imagine without mockery. I cannot return what was taken. I cannot unmake what I became to survive. I cannot pull my vengeance from the mouths of enemies who learned to speak it back at me.