“No,” Naomi said. “You aren’t. If anything, you ran kind of late.”
“Took a while getting it right. God. Kit’s a good kid. I hope he’s better at keeping a marriage together than I was.”
“He isn’t you. I’m not saying he won’t fuck it all up, but even if he does, it’ll be however he fucks it up. Not how you did.” For a moment she thought of her own son, dead along with his father and the rest of the Free Navy. The memory almost didn’t hurt. That wasn’t true. It would always hurt, but now it was a low-level ache instead of a knife to the belly. Time had done its healing, or at least let the scars go numb.
The piloting subsystem chimed, and Alex hauled himself up out of the couch. “I guess Giselle’s going to be a grandmother.” He grinned. “And she’s going to hate the shit out of it, isn’t she?”
“The title may not fit her self-image,” Naomi said.
“You make a good diplomat,” Alex said, and headed back for the lift. When she was alone again, she separated Kit’s message from the rest of the packet and copied it over to Alex’s message queue. She thought about keeping a copy for herself, but it hadn’t been meant for her, and she didn’t want to presume.
A soft clicking alert, and a new message popped up on her queue. She’d built a system of flags to help her keep track of her cascading responsibilities. This flag was the deep gold color that she’d chosen to mean Home. Issues specific and peculiar to the Rocinante and her little family. What remained of her little family.
The message was the one Naomi had been waiting for. Its tracking headers showed the subtle signs and countersigns the underground used to confirm authenticity. The repeaters echoed back to New Egypt, as she’d hoped. Nothing looked amiss. Anything that touched on the daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, Naomi treated like it was made from snakes and plutonium.
Once she was certain of the message protocols and origins, she isolated her comm system, offered a silent prayer to the universe, and decrypted the message. It was a single line of text:
ADMISSION APPROVED FOR FALL SEMESTER.
Chapter Seven: Jim
Why am I only hearing about this now?” Teresa asked.
Jim couldn’t tell if the tension was anger, fear, or something else, but it had settled around the girl’s shoulders like a shawl. Her eyes were focused someplace just over Jim’s right shoulder, fixed and glaring in a way that he knew from his time on Laconia was her way of listening intently.
It was strange to think that of all of them, Jim had spent the most time with Teresa. They’d lived in the State Building for years, her as the child of the high consul, and him as his prisoner. Or maybe both as his prisoner, just in different ways.
“That was me,” he said. “I didn’t want to float the possibility if it didn’t come through.”
Her gaze flicked to him with a question.
“I didn’t want to disappoint you,” he said.
“But it came through. It’s here. A possibility.”
“It’s a boarding school in New Egypt system. Sohag Presbyterian Academy—”
“I’m not interested in a religious education,” she said.
“It’s not really specifically religious. I mean, there are religious classes and services, but they aren’t mandatory.”
Teresa took a moment, processing that like she’d taken a bite of food and was deciding whether to spit it out.
“A cousin,” she said.
“Elizabeth Finley. She was your mother’s cousin, and apparently doesn’t think much of your father. It’s kind of perfect. She knows who you are, and can take steps to keep you safe, and she’s not interested in bowing before Laconia for personal reasons, so we don’t have to worry about her deciding to hand you over for a bounty.”
“And you’ve vetted her?”
“The underground did what it could. She seems to check out.
There’s not a big presence in New Egypt, Laconian or underground. That’s another part of the appeal.”
Teresa’s gaze floated back over his shoulder as she thought.
Like all the cabins in the Roci, Teresa’s had been designed for Martian military back when that had still meant something. Jim was used to the spartan design for himself or the others. Putting an adolescent girl in the same setting made it seem more like a prison. At fifteen, Jim had been a sophomore at North Frenchtown High. The issues he’d struggled with were how to sleep an extra twenty minutes in the mornings, how to cover over his profound disinterest in Mr. Laurent’s chemistry lectures, and whether Deliverance Benavidez would go out with him. Back then, all of Montana had seemed too small. Teresa only had a few square meters.