Peace. Eva could hardly believe someone like him could use the word without his pants spontaneously combusting.
She had asked him how many people she’d killed, and he had seemed surprised by the question. As if he hadn’t expected she might care.
He told her, and she nodded and thanked him. And when he left, Eva screamed and cursed and cried until her voice was gone, until Pink finally sedated her so she would rest.
Within a week, she and Pink were on Minnow, newly christened La Sirena Negra, and Eva swore she’d never speak to her father or Tito again.
Funny how things worked out.
Eva stared down at the table, unable to look at her crew after she finished her story. She’d told it haltingly, doubling back and repeating details, trailing off and picking back up, because it wasn’t a story she had ever told anyone before and the words were slow in coming. No one spoke, though a few times Sue gasped quietly, unable to stop herself. Eva didn’t blame her.
The thing she most dreaded now was their reactions. Because no matter what, they would hurt. If her crew were angry, upset, ready to bail out, she would understand, but she would be devastated to see them go. If they were kind, though, it was almost worse. Because she didn’t deserve kindness. She didn’t deserve sympathy. All she deserved was scorn.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Eva said. “I’m here if you want to, obviously, but you can talk to Pink instead.” If you don’t want to talk to me ever again, she thought. If you don’t feel safe or comfortable anymore. If you think I’m a fucking monster, because I am.
“Wow,” Min said finally. “Wow.”
Eva didn’t have a response to that, so she stayed quiet. Sue didn’t say anything, either, as if her earlier comments about people thinking they were doing good had crashed into an asteroid, and all that was left of her optimism was twisted metal and chunks of rock.
Vakar, though. When his smell hit her, Eva closed her eyes in a vain effort to keep the tears in them from leaking out.
Cigarettes and fire and rust. He was upset, and angry, and in pain, and how could she blame him? What did you do when you found out your partner was not just a killer, but a mass murderer? And one of them would ask, one of them had to ask, because even though Eva hadn’t come out and said it—
“How many?” Sue asked, her voice small and hesitant.
Eva swallowed spit, as if it would help the dryness of her throat and mouth.
“Three hundred and nineteen,” Eva said.
“Wow,” Min said again. “That’s a lot.”
Is it worse than killing one person? Eva thought. Philosophers tended to focus on questions of life, of whether it was better to save one person or a dozen, a hundred, a million. How many lives would be a reasonable trade for one, and so on. But death? That was the domain of statistics.
In statistics, every person was a number, and numbers didn’t kiss their kids before tucking them in, or bring their partners presents on anniversaries, or laugh or sing or dance or do any of the shit that people did. Numbers just added up, and up, and up.
And none of those numbers ever got to see the local star rise above that massive tree again, the light gleaming through the colorful walls of their homes and workplaces and stores, glinting off the leaves, turning the branches and vines a warm, burnished copper. None of them got to fly up into space, explore the universe, touch down on other planets with different stars and different trees.
They were dead, and Eva wasn’t, and that would never be good or just, no matter what she might do to atone. And she’d done precious little beyond hiding from her guilt, running away from it, and trying not to be the same kind of person who would turn someone else into a statistic.
Even so, she hadn’t left violence behind. She told herself that now she only did it for a good reason, but was there ever a good reason?
“It wasn’t your fault, though,” Sue said finally. “If you didn’t know—”
“That’s not how fault works,” Eva said. “What matters is the outcome, not the intention.”
“Right, but—”
“But nothing.” Eva slammed a fist on the table and looked up at Sue, who recoiled like a kicked puppy. “I did it. I can’t take it back. I can’t undo it. And I . . .” Her lips trembled as she struggled to keep from sobbing. “Even if I’d known, in that moment, I probably would have done it anyway. To save my own life, and my squad. If I had to do it now to save all of you, I’m not sure I’d hesitate.”
The room fell silent again, a silence that stretched and grew like a bubble waiting for a sharp edge to pop it. Eva nearly held her breath, for fear that it would be intrusive.
A sound interrupted. Mala, purring like an engine in Eva’s lap, her claws digging into the flesh of Eva’s thighs.
Another purr joined that one, then another. All of the cats had at some point snuck into the mess, and were clustered around Eva’s chair as if it were the most normal thing in the universe. A sea of furry faces looked up at her, their eyes eerily intelligent as always, but none of them seemed to be trying to hypnotize her or manipulate her emotions—not psychically, anyway. They just sat around her and rumbled gently, their tails neatly curled around their bodies and resting on their paws.
Her tears fell, then, finally. She refused to let herself sob, throttled every urge to run back to her room and hide; she simply sat there, like the cats, in the mess of the ship that had helped her start a new life when she probably should have died on Garilia. She sat with the people who had come to mean so much to her that it ached like the sum of every injury she’d ever had all at once. Not for the first time, she considered that maybe they would all be better off without her. That the universe, the grandest statistical experiment of them all, wouldn’t register her loss as even a fraction of a percent, but that it would nonetheless shift the average goodness that much higher.
That, in itself, was a kind of egocentricity that had made Pink roll her eyes more than once.
And it was Pink who snorted and spoke first. “Sure, y’all would be sympathetic, you bunch of predators. Get out of here before you start shedding on the food.”
They ignored her, as if they were perfectly aware that there was no food to be seen.
Vakar, meanwhile, continued to smell conflicted. Eva didn’t dare look at him, because she was afraid of what she would see. This was bigger than anything else they’d ever kept from each other, bigger than him hiding his past as a Wraith to join her crew, bigger than her being a reformed criminal with delusions of morality.
“So, Cap,” Min said hesitantly, “are we going to have trouble, you know, landing or whatever when we get there?”
Eva shook her head. “I doubt it. I was Beni Larsen back then, on a whole other ship with a different crew and a doctored biosignature. As far as they know, Eva Innocente is a completely separate person, and La Sirena Negra is just a simple cargo-delivery vessel.”
“And they probably won’t recognize me,” Pink said. “The rebels had their own problems to worry about, and I was busy tending to our people who’d gotten busted up in the fight. I was just a field medic.” She squeezed Eva’s shoulder for a moment, the briefest of touches.
Still supporting her, as usual. Pink was the backbone of the ship, and Eva was deeply aware of how much work she did, physically and emotionally, for every single person on the crew. Without her, Eva would have burned out almost immediately, like a comet flying straight into the heart of a star. Without her, Leroy would have kept struggling to stay clean and out of trouble. Min would have withdrawn fully into the ship and her virtual worlds—not the worst fate, all told—and Vakar would have kept to himself in the bowels of the ship, quiet and unassuming and secretly hurting in ways he never told anyone.