Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Forty-Eight: Teresa

Teresa pushed through the cold and the darkness of the flood channel, hunched down. A slush of almost frozen water and slime soaked her shoes and the hem of her pants. Clearing the entrance had numbed her hands, and now her fingers were starting to hurt. Not bringing gloves when she left only felt like the most recent in a long line of terrible choices.

Behind her, Muskrat whined.

“I told you to go back,” Teresa said, but the dog ignored her. If anything she stayed closer. And behind Muskrat, the heavy footsteps and rough breath of James Holden.

The slush under her feet grew thicker, more solid. A few more steps, and she was standing on solid ice.

“We’re almost there,” she said. “There?”

“The other side of the flood channel.”

“Is that the pickup?”

“No, we have to get to the mountain.”

“Mountain. Right,” Holden said. “Okay.”

A thin oval of gray the size of her pillow swam out of the darkness ahead. A drift of fallen snow blocked the way out, but not enough to stop her. Teresa stamped forward, pressing the snow down, compacting it, then scrambling forward to do it again. Somewhere in the State Building, an alarm was going off. The security forces alerted to her escape. She hoped that the battle would be distraction enough to lend her time.

“You’re going to get soaked,” Holden said.

“I’m going to get out.”

He was quiet after that.

She scrambled out into the world. The wall of the State Building was behind her, the stretch of the wilds ahead. Holden emerged more slowly, and Muskrat with him. The trees had pulled in all their leaves, and the snow stuck to their trunks like a million featureless masks. Everything was transformed. The same and not the same. For the first time, she felt a prick of uncertainty. This was her place. She knew it and how to navigate it. Or at least she had until now.

She headed down the first path. Her breath plumed white and thick with every exhalation, and moving helped to keep the cold at bay. She wished that the flashes and roar of battle were still there, if just to help light the way. She told herself that it meant the rescue ship was almost there. And that she had to hurry.

The path through the forest seemed brighter than the sky above them. The snow was thicker here, rising up almost to her knees. Muskrat huffed and pushed, forging a path beside hers, and Holden followed along in the furrows they made. The snow was still falling. Small, hard flakes that tapped against her cheeks and melted down like tears.

There were tracks in the snow where animals had passed, and one of the trees had a long, fresh rip in its bark where something looking for food had dug deep into the hibernating flesh. Teresa wondered if animals did that on other planets, or if it was only here. For a moment, the implications of what she was doing rose up and threatened to overwhelm her, but she pushed the thoughts aside. She wasn’t going back now. Not even if she could.

Something moved in the trees to her left, and she felt a moment of panic. A bone-elk leaped across the path and away, the exoskeleton of its legs clattering like stones rolling down a hill. It was nothing.

She made what she thought was the right turn, and the path grew steeper. The mountain loomed up in the darkness. Not really a mountain. An artifact so ancient it was covered in stone. Or one that had been made that way. History so deep, a forest had grown over it, and seasons passed against it like days.

She pushed into the clearing where the evacuation ship was supposed to land. It was wide and flat, with a slope that rose toward the distant summit on one side and a clear view of the State Building on the other. In the falling snow, the buildings with their softly glowing windows seemed farther away than they were. Like something seen from fairyland. With the flash and roar of the battle gone, it looked peaceful. It wasn’t, but it looked that way.

Behind her, Holden came to the clearing. He had pulled his arms inside the shirt for warmth, the sleeves flapping empty against his sides. He squatted down in the snow.

“Are you all right?”

“Out of shape,” he said. “Next time, I’m working out more. I’ll convert a corner of my cell into a gym or something.”

She’d had enough conversations with him now to know he was telling a joke without his voice signaling that it was a joke. No one else in her social life did that, and she found it irrationally annoying. It made every exchange into a puzzle that had to be decoded to see if it was sincere or not. She pushed the irritation away. There were a lot of things people did that she’d never had to be patient about. It was time to start learning that skill.

“This is where I met him,” she said.

“Met him?”

“Timothy,” she said. “Amos.”

“Oh,” Holden said, and looked around. For a moment, he was silent. “It’s beautiful. I mean, weird. But also beautiful. I wish I’d seen more of Laconia. Not just the gardens.”

“Me too,” Teresa said, and stared at the low, gray sky. “Where are they?”

Without the trees to shelter them from the wind and the effort of pushing through the snow, the cold grew sharper. Holden seemed to fall in on himself, arms wrapped tight, head resting on his knees. Muskrat went and sat beside him, the dog’s wide brown eyes concerned.

Teresa knew about hypothermia. She didn’t feel bad herself, but Holden was older and he’d been in prison for a long time. It had weakened him. She thought about going and sitting beside him too. She remembered stories about people caught in the wilderness making structures in the snow to capture and share body heat, but she didn’t know how that worked. She wondered, if the evac ship came and Holden was already dead, what they would do with her …

A blast of frigid air came down the mountain, pulling the top layers of snow up in brief whirlwinds. Teresa took a step toward Holden. Maybe she could take him to Timothy’s cave. Just until the ship came. Take him there, and then she could come back herself and lead the rescuers to him. If there were rescuers. If this worked.

A trickle of black dread seeped through her body. This had to work.

“I’m sorry you had to find out that way,” Holden said.

Teresa looked at him. She couldn’t remember if delirium was part of hypothermia, but it seemed like it might be. “Find out about what?”

“The whole killing-you thing. Pushing Cortázar into it. It wasn’t personal.”

Teresa looked him. A miserable man, hunched in the snow. She knew that she should feel angry. She was angry all the time these days, and at everyone. She tried to summon up the rage, but it didn’t come. She could only feel sorry for him.

Holden took her silence as something it wasn’t. He kept talking. “It wasn’t supposed to get you hurt. I was putting a wedge between your father and Cortázar. That was all. You were the only thing that would do that. Everyone saw how much he loved you.”

“Did they?”

Holden’s nod was slow to start, like he was already turning into ice. “There was a woman I knew. Long time. She used to say you can’t judge anyone by what they say. You have to watch what they do.”

“She said that.”

“I recognize the irony. But I watched what she did too. How she made people like her. How she made them afraid. I’m not good at the second one, but I was pretty good at the first part.”

“Because of her?”

“In part. And I watched what your father did with you. How he treated you. And I used that. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah?”

“Not repentant,” he said. “Just sorry.”

“So sorry that you’d do it again the same way?”

“I’d try to move it along a little faster, but yes. Sorry that it was my best move.”

Teresa looked up into the clouds again. The snow swirled down at them. Her fingers and toes were starting to burn. There still wasn’t a ship.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I knew you were the enemy. You did what enemies do. It’s worse when it’s your friends.”

“That’s true,” Holden said. And then, “Cart’s coming.”

She listened and heard it too. The electric whine of a security cart. The way the snow muffled sound, it had to be close. She looked around for someplace to hide, some way to escape, but the snow would give her away no matter where she went, and Holden couldn’t run anymore.

“Stay calm,” she said. “I’ll handle it.”

A moment later, Holden rose to his feet, and Muskrat looked up at him, concerned. The dog’s expression said, Maybe you should sit back down. You don’t look steady. Holden scratched between her ears.

There were voices now. She made out two of them. Maybe a third. Down the path that led back to the State Building, a light began to dance. Headlights on a cart moving fast through the fallen snow. Voices calling her name. The cart rolled into the clearing and stopped. Three men in it. Two wore guard uniforms like the one Holden had stolen. The third was Colonel Ilich.

Ilich leaped out, pistol raised at Holden.

“Put your hands up,” Ilich shouted. “Now!”

“Okay,” Holden said, poking his arms back into his sleeves, then lifting them. “I’m not armed.”

“Teresa, get in the cart.”

“No, you get in the cart,” Teresa said. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Ilich turned toward her, shock in his eyes. She watched him understand, confusion slipping seamlessly into rage.

“Get in the fucking cart,” Ilich said.

“Or you’ll shoot me?”

The two guards looked at each other nervously, but Ilich walked toward her. He kept his pistol trained on Holden, but his eyes were on her.

“No, I won’t shoot you. But I’ll put a guard on you every moment for the rest of your life.”

“You don’t control me anymore,” Teresa shouted, and Ilich laughed.

“Of course I do. That is literally my first duty. Make sure the girl eats. Make sure the girl sleeps. Educate her. Socialize her. I am your fucking mother, and I am telling you to get your spoiled, egotistical, self-centered ass into that God damn cart!”

“I won’t,” she said, and crossed her arms.

Ilich seemed to deflate. For a second, she thought she’d won.

“You will,” he said, “or I’ll kill your dog.”

He lowered his pistol a degree. It was like the volume of the world turned down. Teresa could still hear everything, but at a distance. She waited for the gunshot, sure it was coming. That she wouldn’t be able to stop it. Don’t do it, I’ll come tried to find its way to her throat, but she was frozen. Her throat wouldn’t work any better than her legs. Ilich shook his head once, just a centimeter one way and then the other. He turned to check his sights on Muskrat, but the shot that rang out wasn’t from him.

Back at the cart, something was happening. Teresa couldn’t tell what it was at first. Her mind tried to make it into the two guards wrestling with each other, except one of them toppled out the side of the cart and fell into the snow. The violence in the cart kept going on. In her peripheral vision, she saw Holden step in front of Muskrat, his arms still lifted, but Ilich wasn’t paying attention to that now.

“Captain Erder! Report!” Ilich barked, but no one answered. Instead, the guard still in the cart shrieked once. Something wet snapped, and the screaming stopped. Everything was perfectly still. Ilich took a step toward the cart, then another.

Timothy boiled out from the shadows behind the cart, sprinting through the snow. His eyes were black, his skin gray. Ilich fired and a smear of blackness appeared on Timothy’s bare ribs. He hit Ilich like he’d fallen from a great height and sent the man’s legs up in the air as Timothy bore his torso down into the snow.

It had all happened too fast. She didn’t know if the pistol belonged to one of the guards or if he’d taken it from Ilich. Only that it looked smaller in Timothy’s hand. Muskrat barked happily and wagged her tail, scattering the snow.

Holden slowly let down his arms. “Amos?”

Timothy—Amos—stood up over Ilich and went perfectly still for a moment, then said, “Hey, Cap. You look like shit.” Below him, Ilich gasped, the wind knocked out of him by the violence of Timothy’s charge.

“You’ve been prettier yourself, one time and another.”

“Well, you know how it is.” Amos turned his dark eyes to her and nodded down at the snow where Ilich lay, still wheezing. “Hey there, Tiny. This guy a friend of yours?”

Teresa started to say yes, and then no, and then she understood what he was asking.

“No,” she said. “He’s not on my side.”

“All right,” Amos said, and fired the pistol twice. The muzzle flash was the brightest thing in the world.

“How did you find us?” Holden asked, swaying on his feet.

“This asshole,” Amos said. “I been tracking him every time he came out from the compound over there. Figured sooner or later, I’d get a shot at him. You made a good distraction.”

“Did you have to kill him?” Holden asked.

“Just evening up the score, is all. Are you sure you’re okay, Cap? You seem kind of fucked.”

A dozen questions pressed at Teresa’s mind—where have you been living, how did you survive without any of your things, how badly are you hurt, why aren’t you dead—but what came out of her mouth was, “Aren’t you cold?”

Amos looked at her, thought about the question. Snowflakes were landing on his bare chest and melting there. The hole in his ribs where he’d been shot wasn’t bleeding. After a moment, he shrugged. “I’ll live.”

Before Teresa could say anything more, a powerful, deep roar came from somewhere high above them. Her first thought was that they’d started an avalanche. She imagined herself and all the others wiped away by tons of snow rushing down the mountain. But then she saw the lights in the sky.

Amos took her elbow, leaned close, and shouted in her ear, “We should get back to the tree line.”

She let herself be led, Holden and Muskrat following close behind, as a huge ship fell from the sky. The plumes of its maneuvering thrusters melted the snow in the clearing away in an instant and set the security cart rolling. Teresa huddled back among the dormant trees, her hands over her ears, until the roaring stopped and Amos tapped her shoulder.

The ship was a fast-attack frigate. A very old Martian design. Its sides were a patchwork of different plating materials. Steam rose all around it, and the cooling metal and carbon-silicate lace ticked and popped. Teresa walked out toward it with a sense of awe and joy and profound accomplishment. She’d done it.

The airlock opened, and a man in no kind of uniform looked down into the darkness and the mist and the snowfall.

“Who’s there?” the man’s voice called.

“Alex?” Holden shouted.

Almost conversationally, the voice said, “Well, holy shit.”

A rickety metal stair ladder descended. Holden went up first, his steps unsteady at first, but more sure the higher he went. Muskrat paced at the bottom of the stair anxiously.

“I don’t know,” Teresa said to her. “This is why I told you to stay in my rooms.”

“Go on up,” Amos said. “I got this.”

Teresa put her hands on the bright metal and climbed up toward the hands of strangers reaching out to help her aboard. And behind her Amos, balancing without his hands because his arms were filled with dog. The black wound on his side didn’t appear to bother him. The man waiting for them laughed when he saw Muskrat, and the dog wagged uncertainly at first.

The locker room seemed to be on its side, Holden and a bald, dark-skinned man embracing and grinning at each other. Timothy—no, Amos hauled up the ladder, and the airlock door closed behind her.

She’d practiced for this moment. I’m Teresa Duarte, and I’m giving you back this prisoner in exchange for passage out of Laconia. Now that it had arrived, it seemed like that was all just given.

“You got to come up to the flight deck,” the dark-skinned man said. Alex, Holden had called him. “We gotta get out of here, but I’m not letting either of you two sons of bitches out of my sight.”

Teresa followed them, unsure what else to do. Amos walked with her through the sideways lift and flight deck. A beautiful older woman with curly white hair pulled down almost over her eyes was waiting there. When she saw Holden, she took a long, shuddering breath. The prisoner took her hand.

“All right,” Alex said. “Everybody strap in. We’re off this mudball.”

A rough cheer rose all around her, and Teresa surprised herself by joining in. Amos took her by the shoulder and led her to an ancient-looking, thoroughly disreputable crash couch.

“You’re gonna need to strap in, Tiny. I got an idea what to do with this one,” he said, pointing a thick thumb at Muskrat. “So you just stay here with Naomi and the captain.”

“Naomi,” Teresa said. “That’s Naomi Nagata?”

“And this is the Rocinante,” Amos said. “And I don’t know who most of the rest of these people are, but one way or another, we’re home.”

And then he was gone, leading Muskrat into the belly of the ship and leaving her to stare up into the monitor. It felt strange, like she was in a dream, but also mundane as walking down a slightly unfamiliar hallway. She was here. She was leaving.

The ship shuddered, hissed, started to rise up.

“You want me to kick on the main drive?” Alex asked over the sound of the thrusters burning. “I could slag that whole palace if you want.”

“No,” Holden said, “leave it be. We still have friends there. Elvi, for one.”

“Oh,” Alex said. “Should we go get her?”

“No,” Holden said. “She’s where she needs to be.”

The Rocinante rose, pushing Teresa back into the cool, blue gel of the couch. The ship shuddered and hummed as it rose, and then when they were high enough from the ground, a new, deeper thrum began, and they leaped upward. Into the darkness of space. Leaving everything behind. She closed her eyes, trying to decide what she felt. If she felt anything, or maybe everything all at once.

Her home, everything she’d ever known, was falling away behind her, and all she was certain of was that she never wanted to go back. The princess was getting hell and gone from fairyland.

A sharp alert caught her attention at the same moment the pilot—Alex—said something obscene. She looked over at him, and his face was ashen.

“Alex?” the woman said.

“We been target locked,” Alex said. “We took too long. It’s the Whirlwind.”