“Whoever heard of a clumsy cat,” Talbor said. A shower of sparks headed her way. Pendt had had just about enough of him. “Maybe we should trade you for a real one, though you probably aren’t worth as much as one of those.”
Something that Pendt couldn’t name steamed through her and overflowed. She set down the last of utensils and turned to face her little brother. An unholy calm descended on her, some level of self-preservation she didn’t know she possessed. That, at least, stopped her from screaming at him.
“Well, when we get back to Alterra in twenty years, maybe we’ll try to trade your twin for you,” Pendt said. Everyone looked at her, but she didn’t notice. “She’s the one that got star-sense, though, so you’re probably not worth enough to get her back.”
There was dead quiet in the mess. Even the engine hum seemed to stop.
“What did you say?” said Arkady, colder than the void and ten times as merciless.
“My little sister, sir,” Pendt said. She’d spent the resources, and now there was no going back. She had to keep going and hope for the best. “The one we left.”
Arkady struck her with her tray. The empty dishes and cutlery went flying, but the metal rectangle made contact with the side of Pendt’s head, and she went down hard.
This time, there was no blood. Pendt had caught the full force of the blow, but not from the corner of the tray. She’d have a bruise; it hurt like hell, but there was no blood. She tried to stand up, but she was dizzy, and it was hard to find her feet. She focused on talking instead. It never did to keep Arkady waiting when she’d asked a question.
“I didn’t know,” Pendt said, fighting back tears of pain and surprise. Crying would only make it worse. She struggled to her knees. “I wasn’t even ten and I didn’t understand what my magic could do. I just sense her difference in the æther. I didn’t know why until Tanith got pregnant.”
All eyes turned to Tanith, whose hands flew to her belly. The distraction gave Pendt enough time to get back on her feet, leaning heavily on the table as she did. Everyone leaned away from her and she clung to the surface to maintain her balance and clear her head.
“Is my baby—” Tanith was rounding now, a ball attached to the scrawny beanpole that was the rest of her body. She didn’t look healthy or comfortable, but she never said anything about it.
“I don’t know,” Pendt said. Tanith choked on a sob. Pendt felt no pity for her cousin at all. The baby was fine. Pendt wasn’t about to waste her time on another Harland that would grow up to make her life hell. “That’s how I learned. I know what gene-sense feels like in a child because I remember it. I sensed something in my sister, but didn’t know what it was. Lodia felt different from the baby she carried. I can’t tell yours apart from you.”
“Can you change it?” Arkady’s voice had a tone of desperation to it that made Pendt’s blood run cold. Her aunt never sounded desperate, and Pendt didn’t know how to respond to the newness of it.
Everyone on the Harland knew that the ship needed a baby with star-sense. They couldn’t go back for the one they’d given up, but now that they knew Pendt could identify a future child, there were all sorts of new possibilities. Possibilities were not the sort of thing you wanted in the hard certainty of space. Especially not when Pendt was the one exposing them.
“There aren’t enough calories on the whole ship,” Pendt said after pretending to think about it, like changing her own genes to be something else had never crossed her mind. “It wouldn’t work, I’d die, and you’d all starve to death before we reached the next port, unless you ate—”
She stopped short of saying “the crew,” but everyone in the galley froze. Arkady Harland was a hard woman to serve, and no one really believed she’d stoop to cannibalism, but no one had ever heard her sound like this before. There was no telling where she’d strike.
“When we get to Brannick Station, your life is going to change, girl,” Arkady gritted out. “You best stay clear of me in the meantime, in case I forget how much you’ll be worth someday and decide to airlock you anyway.”
“Yes, Captain,” Pendt said.
It was, technically, the first time anyone had ever chosen in her favour.
She didn’t like it.
7.
THESE WERE THE THINGS Pendt Harland knew:
Family was everything, her ship was home, her aunt’s authority was absolute, and as her birthday crept closer, she was descending into an endless abyss of bodily horror she was finally beginning to understand.
When her mother had been pregnant with Talbor, Pendt had been too young to understand. When her period started and her calories were increased, Pendt gained stronger awareness of her body and, though she didn’t realize until Tanith’s procedure, a similarly better awareness of the bodies that surrounded her.
Dr. Morunt had persuaded Arkady to let Pendt study medical texts in preparation for when Pendt would be old enough to hire out to other families and ships. At first, Pendt had been a reluctant student. She hadn’t wanted to learn anything that would take her away from the only home she’d ever known, but as she read each new file, she realized the power in information. She wasn’t just learning about how to diagnose and fix bodies, she was learning how they worked. The patterns she saw in people took on a clearer meaning. She knew their strengths and frailties now.
Arkady, for example, would have grown another three inches taller if she’d been given eight additional grams of protein a day when she was a teen. Lodia’s bones were going to weaken over the next decade. It wouldn’t be dangerous, but it would be uncomfortable. Two of her older cousins had XXY chromosomes. No one asked Pendt for any information and she didn’t answer unasked questions, but she filed everything away for the future, in case it ever became something she could use.
Dr. Morunt was the most fascinating person to read the genes of, and Pendt did so even though she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was intruding. Morunt read everyone else’s genes all the time, after all, though she said she couldn’t read as closely as Pendt could. That was how she calculated everyone’s calorie allotment.
In the doctor’s genes, Pendt could trace the pattern of the power they shared. The pathways of her magic were well-worn and comfortable, because Morunt used her magic all the time. If Pendt looked at herself, she could see that her magic was a wild tangle of unmapped space—no surprise, since she lacked almost all of Morunt’s experience—but it was undoubtedly . . . bigger.
Tanith’s growing foetus was Pendt’s favourite object of study. The existence of the baby still terrified her, and Tanith’s increasingly sallow skin and listless behaviour as the pregnancy progressed wasn’t good for anyone, but the idea of the baby, the newness of it and the flexibility of its growth was irresistible.