Chapter 63: Maya

The words hung in the sterile air of the bridge, barely louder than the hum of the cooling lines.

Harper froze.

Her hands stayed locked on the mop handle with her knuckles going so white that the freckles stood out on them like dark flecks on chalk and a violent spike of fury flared behind her grey-blue eyes as her shoulders drew up rigid while her teeth clicked together.

CREAK!

The handle groaned under her grip.

For two seconds Harper looked like she was about to raise the mop and drive the wet filthy head straight into Elena’s face.

Elena, of all people... The girl who’d sneered at their food and mocked every weld seam on the ship, who’d stood on this dais and thrown his little sister in his face like a handful of burning salt and called him an illiterate stray... while his sister was ashes under a collapsed town on a world impossibly far behind them.

’You don’t get to say her name,’ she thought, her whole body shaking. ’You don’t get to have even one piece of her after what you said to him...’

On the bottom step Camila gasped, and Aoi took a half step forward with her hand already lifting.

"You’ve got a lot of nerve," Harper rasped, her voice trembling with an ugly jagged edge. "You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve asking me that, Sterling..."

Elena didn’t pull away.

She stayed on her knees with the rusty water soaking up through her trousers and the dirty yellow rag dripping grey foam between her knuckles, her back bowed under the weight of Harper’s glare.

Slowly, she lifted her chin.

Every defense she’d ever worn had been stripped off her face.

Her honey-blonde hair hung in damp limp strands against her jaw and her icy blue eyes were wide and red-rimmed and hollowed out by a deep bottomless shame, and there wasn’t a trace left of the heiress who used to look down on commoners from high-orbit shuttles... only a girl kneeling in someone else’s blood with a rag in her shaking hands.

Harper’s breath hitched.

The fire in her eyes flickered and wavered and died as she saw the raw misery written across the aristocrat’s face.

’She means it,’ she thought, stunned. ’She actually means it?’

Elena looked back down at the stained plates and pressed the rag flat against the metal.

Every instinct drilled into her since childhood was screaming at her to stand up.

A Sterling did not kneel, and the daughter of Director Arthur Sterling did not scrub floors either.

...An heiress of the orbital shipyards did not sink into soapy water on an iron deck to wipe away the remains of a twenty-one-year-old stray from some valley town.

She pushed down on the rag anyway.

SQUELCH!

The foam squeezed out between her fingers and spread across the dried crust under the console.

The cold water seeping through her trousers, the smell of copper rising off the wet metal and the sheer humiliation of it all meant nothing to her anymore, and she would have spent the rest of her life on her knees with a brush in her hands if that was the price.

The words she’d spat at him on this dais... unlike yours and your commoner little sister... burned behind her breastbone like an open coal.

On the stairs, climbing up to the bridge, she had made a vow to her own soul.

If she ever spoke to him again, she would learn that girl’s name, and she would carry it and say it with the dignity it deserved.

Harper let out a long ragged breath that sounded like a dry sob, and her grip on the handle loosened until her hands trembled.

"Maya," she whispered, and the name dropped into the quiet room like a stone.

Elena’s hand stopped on the deck, but she didn’t look up, and her lips moved silently around the shape of it as if she was afraid to say it out loud yet.

"Maya," Harper said again, her voice cracking around it as she stared at the empty throne. "She was seventeen... Just seventeen when the white light came at least."

She closed her eyes and swallowed the sharp lump lodged in her throat.

"She was a pain in the ass," she murmured, and a faint fragile smile touched the corner of her mouth before it broke. "She used to sneak into Leo’s room every Tuesday and steal his grey college hoodies... the huge ones. She’d roll the sleeves up three times and walk around town like she owned the sidewalk, and Leo would spend half an hour yelling at her through her bedroom door trying to get them back. He never did... He’d just give up and buy another one, and she’d have that one stolen by the next Tuesday too. He always pretended to be mad about it... but he kept leaving the newest one hanging on the chair by his door."

Elena listened with her fingers tight around the damp rag, holding on to every word like an artifact pulled out of an incinerated world.

"She had this stupid little drone," Harper went on, her voice dropping into a thick choked rasp. "Cheap plastic thing... She flew it straight into the exhaust fan on the roof of Old Man Henderson’s shop, and it got jammed in there, and she cried like the world was ending."

Her chest heaved, and Elena’s fingers went completely still on the rag.

"So me and Leo climbed up there to get it back. Three hours, Elena... three hours on that roof in thirty-five degree heat, and the stupid aluminum ladder gave out on us halfway through, so we were stuck up there with half a bottle of warm soda between us. I got fed up and tried to jump down onto the dumpster..." A wet broken laugh came out of her. "And Leo grabbed my belt with both hands and wouldn’t let go. He just held on and yelled at me until I stopped trying."

Her voice broke apart into a raw shuddering gasp.

"He loved her, Elena," she whispered as the tears finally spilled over and dropped onto the wet plates. "He loved her more than anything in that whole damn town and she’s gone... She’s gone, and his parents are gone, and he’s got nobody left."

Elena kept her head bowed over the soapy crimson puddle.

"Maya..." she whispered.

The name came out soft and almost sacred.

She didn’t rush it, and she gave every vowel its full weight, letting the sound settle deep into her memory until it was carved into the bedrock of her mind.

’Nobody left,’ she thought, her throat closing so tightly she could barely breathe. ’He had nobody left, and he still came back for us... Maya.’

’Maya,’ she thought again. ’I will remember. I will hold it and when you wake up from that tank, Leo... I will look you in the eye and say her name right.’

A single hot tear slid off her lashes and splashed into the pink foam under her fingers, then another... and then the dam broke.

SOB!

A strangled breathless wail tore out of her chest.

She bent double over the deck with her forehead nearly touching her wet hands, her shoulders shaking violently as great racking sobs broke through her lips, and the pride and the pedigree and the haughty mask all dissolved into the soapy water pooling around her knees.

Beside her, Harper let go of the mop.

CLATTER!

The handle rolled across the dais and came to rest against the base of the throne.

Harper dropped to her knees beside the bucket and buried her face in her rough hands, her back heaving with silent sobs.

The two of them knelt side by side on the wet stained deck, crying over a rusted bucket of water, while the rest of the bridge sat in frozen stillness around them and Jin-Ah had to look away.

By the astrogation table, Aoi Tachibana stood with her hand resting against her split swollen cheek.

’Seventeen,’ she thought as a scalding wave of self-loathing twisted through her chest. ’Ah, I’m such an idiot.’

On the bottom step of the mezzanine, Camila pulled her knees tighter to her ribs and buried her face in her apron.

Behind station three, Jin-Ah sat with her hands clasped tight over her slate and her dark eyes wide and wet as she stared at the floor.

’A human life is more than a set of probabilities,’ she thought. ’He carried his whole family’s grief on his back, and my numbers filed his caution under irrational variance. There’s no formula for loyalty. I was blind, and I hid behind my logic like a coward...’

Her hand drifted to the pocket where the frozen chip still sat against her thigh, cold even through the fabric, and she pressed down on it until it hurt.

For long minutes the only sound on the bridge was the ragged weeping of the two girls on the floor.

Slowly, the sobs wound down into heavy trembling breaths, and the hum of the cooling lines crept back into the room.

Harper wiped her nose with the back of her forearm, leaving a streak of grey water across her freckles, and reached for the mop. Elena stayed on her knees, dipped the yellow rag back into the murky water and went back to scrubbing the plating under the flight console.

The two of them worked side by side without speaking, and nobody on the stairs moved to help, because all of them understood without saying it that this belonged to those two.

There were no words of reconciliation and no easy forgiveness, only the wet rhythmic drag of the mop, the scrape of the rag against the dried crust and the cold water splashing into the bucket as they cleaned their captain’s blood off the iron of his ship.

’Maya would’ve laughed herself sick at this,’ Harper thought somewhere in the middle of it, wringing the mop out for the twentieth time. ’Sterling on her knees with a rag and me crying into a bucket... she’d have taken pictures.’

They scrubbed the baseboards and wiped the black spray off the leather of the throne.

They dragged the heavy ladder up from the back of the bridge and Harper held it steady while Elena climbed it to wash the long rusty streaks off the inside of the canopy, until the glass was clear again over the silent unblinking stars.

Forty minutes later, the Graventhal plating gleamed under the white ceiling lights, damp and smelling of disinfectant soap, without a single drop of blood left on it.

CHIME!

[This unit observes that the bridge floor is now cleaner than it has been since launch,] the AI said from the ceiling. [This unit is not impressed... This unit is merely observing.]

Nobody answered it, but Harper’s mouth twitched at one corner for the first time in hours.

Camila got up off the bottom step without a word and went down to the galley, and she came back a few minutes later carrying two cups of water she’d filled by hand at the tap because the dispensers were dead.

She pressed one into Harper’s hand and one into Elena’s, and Elena looked at the cup for a long moment before she whispered thank you.

Harper carried the bucket to the disposal hatch at the rear of the bridge and dumped the rust-colored water into the reclamation cycle with a dull echoing gush.

Elena stood by the secondary console washing her red raw hands in a small plastic basin, looking down at the chipped ruin of her manicure without a flicker of interest though her eyes had gone soft under a heavy new gravity.

Aoi stepped into the middle of the deck and cleared her throat.

"The ship is clean," she said softly, looking at the four of them gathered around the dais. "Now we have to deal with the Black Kite."

Every head turned toward the starboard side of the bridge.

Past the bulkhead and down the corridor, at the end of forty meters of dark freezing docking sleeve, the raider was still clamped to their airlock with its emergency lights blinking red in the dark... and on its bridge, exactly where Chloe had left them, the bodies of Ren, Voss and Dekker were still waiting.

Camila’s stomach turned over as she remembered the sounds Chloe had made in that room, and she realized none of them had looked at the bodies once since they’d stumbled out of it.