They held a loose formation as the Ativahikas disengaged.
Connla’s voice broke into my com. “Hang on, Haimey. We’re— Just hang on.”
The Prize began to move in fast. Something caught my attention, rising up from the bottom periphery of my visor.
A faint red mist.
Oh. Bleeding ag—
That was when I fainted.
Cheeirilaq got us both inside. I imagine it swarming through the airlock on segmented legs, two bodies draped over the spikes on its raptorial legs, like something directly pulled from atavistic Terran nightmares. I’m glad I slept through that part.
To catch up on the part I missed: as you’ve probably guessed, I’ll Explain It To You Slowly was coming back to get us. She had encountered an encoded beacon at a waypoint that allowed her to deduce the location of and catch up with a Synarche fleet commanded by SGV I Can Remember It For You Wholesale outbound, in pursuit of the Prize and whatever had hijacked her. I’ll Explain It To You Slowly explained the situation to her sister ships, and the now-combined Synarche operations continued on toward the Baostar coordinates.
Where they met up with the Prize, running away. Connla and Singer managed to explain the situation to the satisfaction of Memory and her captain… who told them to turn right back around and come get us, with all the support a girl bleeding to death in a space suit could desire.
The whole fleet came to save us.
That turned out to be handy, because Zanya Farweather and I were about as badly in need of a cryo tube as it’s possible for a human who is not actually already clinically dead to be.
We think of forgiveness as a thing. An incident. A choice. But forgiveness is a process. A long, exhausting process. A series of choices that we have to make over, and over, and over again.
Because the anger at having been wronged—the rage, the fury, the desire to lash out and cut back—doesn’t just vanish because you say to someone, “I forgive you.” Rather, forgiveness is an obligation you take on not to act punitively on your anger. To interrogate it when it arises, and accept that you have made the choice to be constructive rather than destructive. Not that you have made the choice never to be angry again.
Of course, I could have rightminded the anger out. But it’s a mistake to put one’s anger down too soon.
Anger is an inoculant. It gets your immune system working against bullshit.
But anger can also make you sick, if you’re exposed to it for too long. That same caustic anger that can inspire you to action, to defend yourself, to make powerful and risky choices… can eat away at you. Consume your self, vulnerabilities, flesh, heart, future if you stay under the drip for too long. The anger itself can become your reason for living, and feeding it can be your only goal. In the end, you’ll feed yourself to it to keep the flame alive, along with everyone around you.
Anger is selfish, like any flame. And so, like any flame, it must be shielded, contained, husbanded while it is useful and banked or extinguished when it is not.
But flames don’t want to die, and they are crafty—an ember hidden here, a hot spot unexpectedly lurking over there. Sure, you can turn the feelings off, and I had done that before. But turning off the anger doesn’t lead to dealing with the problems that caused the anger.
Forgiveness is not easy. Forgiveness is a train with many stops, and it takes forever to get where you are going. And you cover a lot of territory along the way, not necessarily by the most direct route, either. That’s why forgiveness is a process, and as much a blessing for the person who was wronged as for the person who did the wronging.
And it’s hardest when the person you most need to forgive is yourself.
I had been very bad at forgiveness, after the terrorists. But I had also been very bad at feeling anger. Feeling angry made me feel guilty. Flawed.
I hadn’t been raised in a place where I was allowed to be angry. Anger was antisocial. Anger was regulated against.
Boundaries of any sort were regulated against, come to think of it. By regulating us, the clade members, the children in the crèche. You can’t mind what you’re not allowed to mind.
I next saw Farweather as the crew of SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly were prepping us to slide our failing bodies into cryo tanks on the chance we might survive the long ride home. She turned her head and looked at me. I only noticed it because she spoke, because I’d been ignoring her as hard as I could. Connla was standing beside me in his dapper pilot suit, his ponytail draping in that weird gravity way. He was trying to look unconcerned. It wasn’t working.
So I wasn’t looking at her when Farweather said, “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t look then either. Connla squeezed my hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“I bet you are,” I answered as the tank lid closed.
CHAPTER 30
I WOKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL. Core General, in fact, because that was how fancy I was now.
I met a nice doctor there. Her name was K’kk’jk’ooOOoo, and she had beautiful gray eyes and was sleek and fast.
Unfortunately, she was a dolphin-like K’juUUuuU who came from a water world, so it never would have worked out. But it turns out that sonar is a really useful sense for an internist.
Also, it tickles.
K’kk’jk’ooOOoo was a specialist in fox interface problems, and she’d been brought in to figure out how to fix the malfunctioning connections in my much-abused one, or replace it if necessary. The rest of my body was already fixed. They’d grown me a new liver and colon while I was asleep in a tank. Good idea. Who wants to be awake for that?
The first thing I asked about was the Baomind, and I was assured that rescue operations were under way. The first wave of Baomind mirror disks had actually been elected by the collective for evacuation and brought to the Core huddled inside the white coils of the Prize and the other ships in the rescue fleet. More ships were en route to bring back the next wave, and as far as anybody could tell from this far away, its primary had not exploded.
Yet.
But any minute now.
The second thing I asked about was getting the war crime removed from my dermis. K’kk’jk’ooOOoo told me regretfully that she didn’t think it could be done without killing me. I hoped she was telling the truth, and it wasn’t just that the Synarche wanted to study me. I mean, of course the Synarche wanted to study me. I hoped they might be close enough to what I still hoped they were not to lie to me about it.
There were good surprises, too, and the best surprise was that Singer was here, in the hospital. He was functioning as a subsidiary wheelmind, operating systems in human resources and logistics, as a compassionate gesture. When I was well enough, we were both to be seconded to the Prize investigation team: me as an engineer, and he would take over as the Prize’s permanent shipmind. Along with our cats.
We’d be stationed right here in the Core. And not too far from Connla, who had a new job flying ambulance ships.
He was really happy about it. You get to go as fast as you want, and other vessels are supposed to get out of your way but are bad enough at it that the flying is challenging.
And apparently, he was good.
After many boring medical adventures, it turned out that the problem wasn’t the fox at all, but the connections.