“I’m going to make sure,” she said.
She turned and marched out the doors. Two armed guards approached her, then backed away. Her hospital gown was slipping off her shoulders, and she grabbed it before she flashed everyone in the corridor her tits. She was probably already showing her ass to half Gewitter Station’s medical personnel. It all seemed very distant.
It felt like hours or seconds before she found the intake desk. The same dark-haired girl was sitting at it. Her soft young eyes went wide as Tanaka stalked over to her.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“Good.” Tanaka took a deep breath, centered her spine, and spoke with as precise an enunciation as she could, given her bandages and her wounds. “I would like to schedule a psych eval.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Jim
Muskrat paddled her legs like she was swimming as she floated down the corridor outside the galley. Her bark was deep and conversational, and she had a wide canine grin. At the far end of the corridor, Xan went still for a split second before letting loose a peal of laughter and opening his arms to catch the floating dog.
“You can do it!” Teresa Duarte said, clapping her hands.
“She won’t bite me?” Xan called back.
“She’s a good dog. She doesn’t bite.”
The excitement on the black-eyed boy’s face was bright. He put out his hands, gray fingers splayed, and chortled with delight. Jim slipped past him, ducked under the floating dog, and pulled himself into the galley proper. Alex and Fayez were already there, Alex held to the floor by magnetic boots and Fayez on the float but steadied on a handhold.
“Looks like they’re having fun,” Jim said as the Rocinante decanted fresh coffee into a bulb. “What exactly are they doing?”
“They’re playing catch,” Alex said, “with the dog.”
Jim sipped the bitter, lovely coffee, feeling the familiar warmth against his palate and down his throat. “Of course they are. I don’t even know why I asked.”
Reconfiguring the Falcon’s lab for a dual dive wasn’t trivial, and it wasn’t fast. Elvi had packed enough supplies in the Falcon for anything and everything to break, so getting her hands on another set of sensors, a second medical couch, and enough backup monitoring units was simply a matter of figuring out which crate in which cargo hold. They couldn’t move the walls of the lab, though, and finding the space for all the equipment and the technical staff was taking time and an apparently endless number of meetings. Added to that were the baseline scans for Amos, integrating the data from the Roci’s medical bay, and a series of long, in-depth interviews with Elvi intended to map the previous explorations of the library to the shifts in consciousness and knowledge that the mechanic had suffered.
As the days moved on, more new faces started appearing on the Roci. First, it was Fayez and Elvi, but as her time became more and more in demand, Fayez started coming over alone. Then bringing Cara and Xan with him, or more often, just Xan. Outside the galley, Muskrat woofed happily as she drifted past the galley’s door heading back toward Teresa.
“Kids are getting along well,” Fayez said.
“You’re just setting Teresa up as a babysitter, aren’t you?” Alex asked. “I mean, she’s old enough.”
“Xan’s twice her age, easy,” Fayez said.
“He’s a kid, though,” Alex said. “It’s just he’s been a kid for a really long time.”
“What do you do when the models fail?” Fayez said, spreading his hands. “Xan and Cara don’t really exist on the kid/not-kid spectrum. They’re just Cara and Xan.”
Teresa’s laughter boiled in from the corridor. Even with the months she’d spent on the Roci, it was an unfamiliar sound, harsh and joyous. Jim didn’t think of Teresa Duarte as the laughing type.
But maybe it was just that she didn’t often have the opportunity for it. There weren’t very many people who could see past her circumstances to the girl she actually was. Jim wasn’t sure he could, even. She was the daughter of the god-emperor, their human shield, the heir to Laconia, and its highest-ranking apostate. All that was true, but it wasn’t complete. There was a kid there too. One who’d lost her mother and her dad, who’d run away from home, who needed things emotionally that Jim could guess at. But he didn’t know. He was probably just as much a cipher to her.
There was something weirdly universal about her laughter, though. And Xan’s. The sound of young humans at play. Jim realized they were being quiet, all three of them, and listening to the kids like it was a piece of music.