“Eva, stop building your escape pod while the ship is on fire and think ahead.” Pink shook her head. “If you want to try going back down to Abelgard, fine. We’re already here. But if we come up empty, and you don’t get another lead from your mama, we need to work with what we’ve got.”
Eva could feel the walls closing in around her. “I’ve got to get out of this fucking suit,” she said. The Protean armor became twice as oppressive, her breath coming in tense inhalations that didn’t seem to fill her lungs, made worse by the injuries she’d already sustained to her rib cage. She leaned forward and rested her hands on her thighs, eyes closed, desperately wishing she could run somewhere, anywhere else in that moment.
“Error 13,” the suit repeated. “Command failure.”
The purring of the cats intensified, and waves of calm washed over her, but her mental beach was all rocks and broken glass. Instead of being soothed, she was drowning, and it took every scrap of self-control she possessed to stay above water.
“All right,” Pink said, suddenly next to her. Eva hadn’t even seen her move. “You’re going to the med bay now. If you argue, Vakar is carrying your stubborn ass.”
Eva didn’t argue.
The med bay was always clean, Pink’s many tools and gadgets and supplies tucked away into cabinets or other storage containers. A new remote-imaging device had been attached to the ceiling once Pink started her q-net practice, but otherwise it was the same room it had been since they started flying together on La Sirena Negra over eight years earlier.
After Garilia.
Eva lay quietly on the examination table as Pink and Vakar determined how to get the Protean armor off. She stayed quiet as they flushed the suit with a solvent to dissolve the protective insulation inside, as they slowly and carefully disassembled the exterior components one at a time in the order described in the manual. Bit by bit, piece by piece, Eva was freed from the confines of the protective layers, but she was also exposed. Unmasked.
By the time the helmet was fully removed, the last of the parts packed away into the briefcase, Eva had more or less calmed down. Except it wasn’t so much peace as it was exhaustion, a mere absence of her earlier agitation instead of the presence of positive feelings in its place.
When Pink finally spoke, Eva flinched, then blushed in shame that she’d been distant enough from her surroundings to be so taken by surprise.
“Vakar, would you mind?” Pink asked.
Vakar smelled uncertain for a moment, then shrugged in the quennian equivalent of a nod and left the room, the scent of incense trailing after him. As the door to the med bay closed, Pink turned her attention back to Eva, flipping up her eye patch to let her cybernetic eye do its work.
“You have a few bruised ribs and other minor injuries, and that solvent is gonna leave a rash, but you were lucky as hell.” Pink’s nose wrinkled. “Bot fights are fine when there’s no one inside, but that was reckless.”
“When have I ever been reckful?” Eva asked, the corners of her lips turning up when Pink snorted. They both fell into a thoughtful silence as Pink tended to her injuries.
“You wanna talk?” Pink asked quietly.
Eva sighed. “Do I have a choice?”
“You know I’m not gonna twist your arm, hon.”
Eva stared into the dark sphere of the holovid projector, its glassy surface reflecting a distorted image of the room, including her own tight-jawed face. Pink waited, applying the appropriate creams and bandages and otherwise letting Eva take the time she needed to get her head together.
“Are you sure Nara took Miles?” Eva asked.
“I watched her do it myself,” Pink said. “Dragged him through that hole in the wall like a cat with a naughty kitten.”
Eva winced as Pink tagged her with a shot. “I could ask my dad for Nara’s contact info. She might—”
“She’s a bounty hunter,” Pink interrupted, gentle but chiding. “If Miles was her target, she’s not going to turn him over to you. She probably won’t even take your call, and she’ll trash your q-mail faster than we can jump through a Gate.”
“We could try.”
“We could,” Pink said, laying her jet injector on the counter. “Or we could go to Garilia.”
Eva closed her eyes, willing them to stop filling up with tears like she was a baby who needed a nap.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said finally. She aimed at a firm tone, but it sounded strained even to her ears.
“I know,” Pink said.
“It’s three cycles to get there, and to get back. If it’s another dead end, then we’ve wasted six cycles, which is almost half the time they gave us to find this guy, and it’s already been a week.”
Pink pulled off her gloves and tossed them into the recycler. “Floating around in the black with no leads isn’t any better, is it?”
“We could look for more leads while we floated,” Eva said.
“We could do that while we fly to Garilia,” Pink countered. “And if we did find something, we could haul ass back, or call Mari and let her do her own damn job while we stuck to our plan.”
Eva exhaled, shoulders sagging in defeat. “Yeah. You’re right.”
“I know, and you knew that before you opened your damn mouth.” Pink leaned back against the counter and flipped her eye patch down. “Have you told anyone else about Garilia?”
Eva shook her head, unable to speak.
“Not even Vakar?”
Eva shook her head again. Her fingers moved to her cheek of their own volition, tracing the scar there, the ridges and raised tissue, slowly fading over time as her skin replaced itself but never completely disappearing.
The thing about scars was, they stayed with you. You could almost forget they were there, but then you’d catch a glimpse of them while taking off your pants, or rubbing expired pain gel on a new bruise, or god forbid while looking at your face in the mirror to be sure it wouldn’t worry your crew. Sometimes they itched. Sometimes they burned. Sometimes they got stuck like a bad seam of sealant, and they’d stretch the skin around them until you thought you’d tear a new hole in yourself just doing something normal like holstering your gun.
Scars were your body’s way of reminding you how you fucked up. And once a thing was well and truly fucked, there was no unfucking it. All you could do was hope the scar would fade over time. That you learned from your mistake so you wouldn’t fuck up again.
Eva had a lot of scars. Garilia was the worst of them.
“I think you should,” Pink said. “Tell them, I mean. Get it off your chest.”
It was all Eva could do to choke out a hoarse “No. I can’t.”
Pink raised her hands, palms out. “I know. I was there. And I didn’t approve of what you did, regardless of what you knew or didn’t know, but I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Eva hid her face. “I don’t deserve you. I never have.”
“Hey.” A dark finger tucked under Eva’s chin and raised her head so that Pink’s eye met hers. “I told you before. You don’t get to decide that.”
That didn’t make Eva feel any better. If anything, it made her feel worse, that someone knew the darkest part of her and stayed anyway. Because she probably wouldn’t have been so understanding if the situation were reversed. She would be full of righteous indignation like a ship whose fuel was topped off and ready to burn for a month straight.