‘Lina, you don’t have to tell me this. . .’ Halman started, embarrassed by her sincerity. He took a large gulp from his beer — the situation seemed to warrant it. Some things were best left unsaid. Halman was a great believer in that theory.
‘And she left him. Or, more precisely, she told him to leave her. I told her she could take him — it would have been fine. We were really finished by then. I was all the time with Marco. Jaydenne was always a selfish bastard, when I look back at it. I should have seen it before then. I couldn’t devote enough time and attention to him, so he found it elsewhere.’ She shrugged. ‘Simple.’ After a while, she looked up into Halman’s face, her expression intent. ‘You know why she told him to go?’
Halman shook his head. The beer, amazingly, seemed to be calming the burning in his stomach, but he still felt a little queasy. He wanted Lina to shut up, in all honesty. He liked Lina a lot — hell, if he’d been younger, better-looking and more her type, he might have tried his own luck — but he didn’t want her to tell him something she’d regret. ‘Why?’ he asked, sensing that this was required of him.
‘For me, Dan. And because she wanted to do right. She thought that I might regret being okay with it later. Regardless of what I’d said. She thought that I might grow to resent her. She hardly knew me back then — she was still working in the refinery. But she gave up the man she loved because she thought she was doing something wrong. For me, it was easy to give him up. For me, it just kinda happened. But for her. . . well. . .’ She shook her head, making an errant tangle of hair fall across her face. ‘I don’t know. . .’ she finished lamely.
Halman felt tears well in his eyes, and turned away so that she wouldn’t see. He was not a man who usually wore his emotions openly, and he didn’t want to start now. He wiped his hands over his face, clearing his blurry vision, and turned back to her. He lifted his glass in salute. ‘She was a good woman, Lina. Whatever may have happened in the past. Family.’
Lina lifted her own glass in return. ‘Yeah,’ she said, meeting his gaze. And then, by silent consensus, they drank.
Chapter Fourteen
Eli awoke at around five in the morning, although as a long-time shift-worker, the artificial times imposed by the station clock were of little real meaning to him. His neck ached, and one of his arms had gone numb where he had lain on it. He looked around himself and saw that he was in Lina’s quarters, lying on the sofa, washed in the flickering witchlight of the holo.
He knew, somehow, that Lina was back: something felt different, although he wasn’t sure what. Maybe some secretly-awake part of his brain had been alerted by some small noise that he hadn’t been consciously aware of. He sat up and swung his feet down onto the cold steel floor. He rolled his head in a gentle circle, trying to bring his neck back to life. There was a glass of water on the small table next to the sofa, and he took a drink from it. He had slept without a blanket, fully-clothed, and now he wanted a shower. Marco, of course, hadn’t stirred or caused any sort of concern whatsoever. Eli had known the kid would be fine, but Lina wouldn’t leave him alone all night. As she usually got back late from shift, this seemed a trifling distinction to Eli, but he had humoured her. She had needed to get away for a bit, and she had needed not to worry about her son.
He stood up, trying to smooth some of the wrinkles from his flight suit, and went to Lina’s room. He gently pushed the door ajar and peeped in. She was asleep under a virtual mountain of duvet, snoring gently and almost-certainly drunk. He considered staying, making sure she was okay in the morning (Hey, it already is morning, a little voice protested in his head) but he decided she would probably rather not have to deal with him hung-over. He knew her well enough, he judged, to say that he’d be better off leaving her be.
He stood and watched her for a minute, staring at the shock of blonde hair that spilled from beneath the covers, listening to her breathing. She was beautiful. But he knew that she was also damaged. It was hard sometimes to suppress his instinct to protect her, to somehow prevent further damage. But despite her delicate appearance, he knew that she could take care of herself. They had to, out here. Far-off in the bowels of the station, something groaned vastly in an almost inaudibly-low frequency.
He went also to Marco’s room and checked on the boy. He was an undefined hump in the bed, breathing quietly in the darkness. Eli watched him for a moment. Marco was like the son he had never had, another member of Eli’s family-that-wasn’t-actually-family, and in truth he loved the boy greatly. How would Marco take the news of Sal’s accident? It would definitely be better to let Lina deal with it. Some things were a mother’s prerogative.
Sal. Such a shame. Eli was not a native of Macao originally, but he had been here since before Sal had come aboard. That had made her a member of his family. Dead now. He shook his head, standing in the dark, envying the others their unconscious state. He would let himself out and come check on them later, when Lina had had a chance to talk to her son.
He went back to the living room and found a datasheet by the light of the holo. He scrawled a note on its screen with one finger:
MARCO — LET YOUR MOTHER SLEEP IN, OKAY?
SHE’S HAD A HARD NIGHT.
– ELI
With that, he killed the holo, fumbled his way to the door in darkness, and let himself out.
Chapter Fifteen
Carver came to with the typical grogginess of the sus-an transportee. Wherever he was, it was entirely dark. Maybe, he thought, this is the hell they always told me I was going to, but he didn’t really believe that. Hell? He wasn’t a bad person. Okay, so he’d killed that one woman pretty good, but anyone who had heard the bitch speaking would have sympathised. And there had been that thing with the kids, of course. But he wasn’t a bad person. Neither, for that matter, was he a religious person, so that kind of ruled that one out.
Where, then, was he? He tried to rise but his muscles didn’t want to respond. Those fucking drones at Platini Dockyard had told him he’d feel like shit by the time he got to Macao Penitentiary, that such illness was normal in those awoken from sus-an, so he guessed it was just that.
But if he was really at Macao, the genuine asshole of the universe, then why was it so dark?
And then the darkness was suddenly lifted away like a blanket and the world was flooded by blinding light. Carver cried out, trying to shield his face, but his hands wouldn’t move properly. His arms just flailed weakly, flopping uselessly like dead things.
‘Put this on,’ said a voice from the light.
Carver squinted into the brilliance, trying to see who had addressed him, but there was only the light. For one terrifying moment his reason failed him and he decided this was Hell after all, that the light must be either God or the Devil, come to pronounce judgement upon him. He shook his head, feeling sick, unable to think.
‘Oh, right,’ said the light-voice. ‘You’re still a little sleepy. Take a moment.’
Carver moaned aloud and lay wincing in the unbearable brilliance for a minute or two, feeling like a piece of meat on a slab. Slowly, slowly, his surroundings began to congeal out of the pervading glow: low, metal-panelled ceiling; some rack of crates; a sign whose lettering he couldn’t read. He was still in the machine rooms of the shuttle, where the passengers’ casks were, so he guessed that meant he had arrived at the prison station after all. He wrenched the straps away from his body and tried to rise again. This time he made it to a sitting position.