Between the damp, freezing, iron-barred journey to the gaol and her sleepless night in the cell itself, Croe was given a lot of time to think things through.
Like standing in a room filled with televisions on different stations, her memories had come at her all at once – such a jumble of pictures and sounds and feelings that it would have been impossible to parse them in the moment. But in extended isolation, she could stroll between the screens. She revisited the scenes one by one, recalling details, remembering context. All of the scattered puzzle pieces slowly resolved themselves into a picture that made sense.
They’d been hidden from her so long that even the painful memories held a sort of exquisite appeal, as if she was seeing intimate details from a stranger’s life. A distant ancestor, perhaps; someone whose history bore some tangental relevance. Someone whose trivial failings and scandalous transgressions and deepest fears and tiny victories and moments of transcendent happiness were all equally interesting. It felt personal, but objective. Somehow.
This time was nothing if not a series of revelations. It was clear, for one thing, that she had been a completely different person before The Boot – before Shaman. And now she was yet another person…the one who was both the celebrated Alliance agent, and the infamous Warbird. A kind of unholy trinity had suddenly appeared in this body of one. For truly, that was the only part of her that had remained constant – a lonely ship cresting the waves of different realities, a shell being occupied by different creatures until each moved on, or was devoured.
She felt a kick, as if to remind her that not even the shell had come through totally unchanged. Her fingers – the same ones that had belonged only to Nepenthe, and then only to the Warbird, and now, somehow, to both and neither – drifted over the warm swell of her belly, to answer the kick with a gentle tap. Knock, knock. Another kick, softer, as if in answer to the silent question. Here I am.
At least her unborn child seemed sure of herself.
Outside of her mind, outside of her body, the cell was quiet. Croe had become inured to the drip of condensation down the stones, the shuffle of feet and muffled voices of guards, the occasional distant clank of iron chains moving. Her own ankle chains did not chafe, for she had not moved. She’d sunk down to a seat on the floor, her back to the cool wall, her legs bent at an awkward angle beneath her, and there she’d remained in a kind of meditative trance. And so, even with senses heightened by experience, she felt Mallos arrive more than she heard him. And she felt his hands on her face before her eyes refocused, suddenly made aware of images that existed beyond the confines of her brain. Her pupils dilated, as if she’d stepped from shadow into light.
“Are you hurt?” Her eyes stung as they drifted across his face, fascinated by the movement of his lips as he spoke. It was, after all, the first time she had heard or seen him since she had been made new. He removed one hand from her face, and she leaned her head into the one that remained, watching his fingers search her callouses and scars and the tan lines where her rings had been removed. The small, tender, animal part of her that remembered being an unloved child, that remembered loneliness and the stark fear of never being known, was wonder-struck by his gentleness. The hard, cold, salt-scoured and sea-battered part of her steeled herself against his ignorance, against her lie by omission. She winced and shut her eyes, took the hand that held her hand and pressed it to her belly. Their daughter moved beneath their hands, perpetually aware.
“I’m sorry. I should have told you.” her voice rasped and creaked, as if her vocal chords had petrified overnight. “I laughed, instead of telling you.”
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