“Pain without fear,” whispers her mother as she draws herself to a shaky standing position.
“Pain without fear,” answers Sarya automatically, struggling to stand upright herself. “Did you—” she says, then coughs. “Is he—”
But she realizes she doesn’t need to finish either sentence. She did, and he is. The bounty hunter takes up most of the common room floor, sprawled on his face. He looks smaller than before—and then Sarya realizes it’s because his arms have been removed. The big one rests in the corner while his long whip twitches at her feet.
Unsteadily, she steps over it—with half a mind to stomp it into the floor. She remembers its cold caress on her face and body, and the memory lends her strength. She makes her way to Hood’s torn body, stepping over streaks of fluids of various colors and viscosities. She stands above him, eyes tracing his dented form and sliced tubes. He is oddly beautiful, in a way—and yet she doesn’t feel a trace of sadness. This is on you, Hood. You should have known this was coming when you decided to take the daughter of a Widow.
“This is…not the time for gloating,” says her mother behind her.
But Sarya has already found what she’s looking for, peeking out of a dented compartment. She crouches above the smoking form, hands tracing warm metal. When she rises and turns back to her mother, she is inserting earbuds.
“He took my gift,” she says quietly.
She does not thank her mother for protecting her. That is not the Widow way. Widows speak thanks for small things, for gifts and favors. The large things, the sacrificing of lives and the killing of threats—these are taken for granted.
“You…go first,” her mother says when they reach the door. She seems to be having difficulty assembling sentences. “I will follow and…protect.”
Only now does Sarya begin to realize what has happened here. A dead bounty hunter—yes, that’s only justice. But now she is stepping over a—what is that? The bile rises in her throat. It’s another limb. But whose? Did it belong to the babysitter? To old Baz? To the arboretum caretaker? “Where?” she manages to say, unable to take her eyes off the oozing stump.
“Away,” says Shenya the Widow, swaying.
And Sarya finds that she is able. She strides to the door and barely jumps at all when it opens and a figure slumps into the room, head lolling. She refuses to look down as she steps over it, out into a deserted corridor, but the leaking silhouette in her peripheral vision is unmistakable. That was the babysitter. A variety of emotions are fighting for attention now, but she keeps it to the essentials. I am Widow. My rage is my weapon. I am Widow. My life is my own. I am Widow. There are no secrets between Mother and do not panic do not panic Mother is injured do not panic— No. A Widow does not panic. Not even when she has to help her wounded mother step over her disemboweled babysitter.
From the ceiling, an alarm is blaring. Two more bodies lie out here, formerly the property of intelligences strong enough to escape the apartment but not durable enough to make it to a medication station or the hospital deck. Trails of multicolored fluids lead in both directions, alternating streaks and drips. Sarya attempts to view the scene abstractly, like a Widow would. Isn’t it interesting how many intelligences are full of some kind of fluid? Yes, yes, it is. And tactically speaking, this much fluid on the ground means eliminated threats. There, that is how a Widow thinks. Much better. Except it’s not much better because she is not a Widow, she is a Human, and Humans leak from everywhere all the goddess-damned time and seriously what is with her eyes right now because these people were enemies, they betrayed her, they deserved everything they got—
But the tears keep coming.
“May I have your attention, residents of Watertower Station,” says Ellie’s voice from everywhere, suffused with an unusually businesslike edge. “For those of you who missed my previous announcement, I would like to stress the fact that there is absolutely no need to panic. There is no reason there should be any loss of life or even injury. There may not even be a serious problem, but you know how we like to be safe. That’s the Watertower way! All that said, please make your way to the nearest airlock and prepare for evacuation. You have thirty-six minutes at the outside.”
Sarya swallows, attempting to focus on the problem at hand and not the mess at her feet. She must have been unconscious for the previous announcement, the one where Ellie surely explained what the hell was going on. She considers asking Helper, but decides she really doesn’t need its cheerful voice in her ears at the moment. She wonders, for just a moment, if she is the problem. Would they evacuate an entire station due to a Human sighting? It’s happened before. Helper has dug up a half-dozen different events that led to evacuations.
“We must go,” hisses Shenya the Widow, trembling limbs clattering against the doorway. “They must not find us here.”
In the light of the corridor, Sarya can see that her mother’s carapace is cracked across the front, and her mandibles are barely moving. And that sentence—well, Sarya would never say this aloud, for obvious reasons. But her mother sounds…frightened.
Sarya wants very badly to ask questions. She wants to know what could frighten Shenya the Widow, the hunter-killer who just took down a three-meter titanium-plated nightmare on her own. But she also knows that this is the time for action, not questions, not fear of mysterious corporations, not internal crises over slaughtered neighbors who maybe didn’t even want to be there, who maybe just got caught up in the moment or got scared, or—
She takes a sudden, violent breath. She doesn’t have time. She has thirty-six minutes at the outside.
Her mother spends the last of her strength dragging herself to the nearest utility hatch, which means she can no longer protest when Sarya wrenches it open and hauls her, bodily, into the darkness beyond.
“I…just need to rest,” says her mother in a tortured whisper.
“Not yet,” says Sarya, supporting her as the outer door drifts closed. “Just a few more meters and then you can get off your blades for a minute, okay?”
“I am Widow,” murmurs Shenya the Widow, so quietly that Sarya is not sure she heard it at all. “There are no secrets between—” And then the inner door opens, and the rest of the proverb is lost in the roar of Watertower’s maintenance corridors.
[You’re not the Human, are you?] says the nearest cart as they approach.
“I have no idea what you are talking about,” shouts Sarya, dragging her mother forward.
[It’s just that there’s been talk of a Human. I don’t really know what a Human is, but everybody seems really scared and that makes me scared, so I was just making sure that you’re not the Human.]
“This is my mother,” says Sarya. “She’s injured.” Badly.