But even though Naomi had accepted the Laconian armistice, she wasn’t keen on having the Falcon’s system too intimately connected to the Roci’s. When the time came, Naomi and Jim, Amos and Teresa and Muskrat all folded themselves back into their places. The Roci pulled its docking bridge back in, and the two ships turned their backs to the great green diamond and burned toward the gate, together but separate. It felt like an omen of something, but Alex was damned if he could tell what. He kept thinking about Amos and Cara in the airlock, of her anger and his calm. He wasn’t sure whether he was glad the black-eyed girl wasn’t able to cross over at will or worried that Amos would be stuck on the Roci if things went bad on the Falcon.
The burn was hard but not punishing. A little over a full gravity most of the time, backing down to half that at meals. There were more newsfeeds and reports from other ships in the underground now that they weren’t hiding from Laconian forces, and Alex followed some of them. Every time a new packet arrived, he hoped for a message from Kit. Naomi was deep in the coordination, listening to messages, answering them, passing them across to the Falcon for Elvi to see and comment on.
Amos had died and been hauled back from the abyss without it changing much about his demeanor, but Jim and Teresa were both wearing the stress of the moment heavily. Jim kept his usual facade of good humor, but now and then, the deep fatigue showed. Teresa, on the other end of the spectrum, had tapped into a nervous energy that couldn’t find an outlet. From the moment she woke, she ran diagnostics that weren’t due for weeks or cleaned filters that had only recently been cleaned or went to the ship gym and pushed herself through the resistance gel. Alex would have put it down to the bottomless reserves of youth if it hadn’t felt so much like fear.
A day before they reached the halfway point and were slated to start their braking burn, he found Teresa in the galley eating a protein bar and watching video of the ring gate they were hurtling toward. Swirls of highly charged particles and light poured off of it like mist.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Alex said.
“We always knew the gates were energy sources,” Teresa said with a shrug.
Alex changed his meal plan. He’d been going to head up to the flight deck and watch his feeds. Instead he had the galley serve him a plate of rice and black sauce, then sat across from Teresa with a fork. She glanced at him, and then away.
“Seems like something’s bugging you,” Alex said. “Or am I making that up?”
She shrugged a sharp, percussive shrug. He wondered if she’d been having dreams about the bright gates too, or if that was just him.
“I keep thinking about the fight,” she said.
“Yeah,” Alex said, thinking she meant the battle against the things that had killed San Esteban.
“He’s different. I knew the repair drones changed him, but so much is the same that I just thought he was him still. But they killed him on New Egypt, and he didn’t die. The girl who was yelling at him? Cara? If she’d hit you or me, she’d have broken our bones. He just took it. Like it was nothing.”
“Amos was always tough as old leather,” Alex said. “That’s not new.”
“He’s just so different.” She stuffed the last of the protein bar into her mouth, chewed for a minute, swallowed. “I think about my father.”
“Because he changed too?”
Teresa leaned forward, her elbows on the table. Her jaw was tight and the brightness in her eyes looked a little feverish. “I thought he was gone. I thought the whole experiment went bad and he was just . . . People lose their parents all the time. I thought I was one of those.”
“Orphaned.”
“But if he’s only changed, I don’t know what I am. Orphan.
Not orphan. Something else.”
“And now we’re going to see him. It worries you.”
“How much can you change and still be you?” she asked, and it took Alex a few seconds to realize it wasn’t a rhetorical. He took another forkful of rice to give himself time to think.
“Well,” he said, “people change all the time. Not changing would be weirder. I mean, look at you. You’re not the same person you were before you came here. Shit, you’re different from when you first came on the ship. Older, more sure of yourself, better mechanic. I’m not the same guy I used to be. Amos . . . Yeah, it’s more extreme. It’s weirder. Same with your dad. But I think Amos is still Amos, even if it’s a different version of him. I think when we find your dad, he’ll at least be like what he used to be. You know? I mean, I expect he’s still going to care about you.”