“So,” he said, “this was back on Earth when I was younger than you are now. There was this guy I knew. His parents both OD’d the same night. Upside, he was a registered birth, so someone gave a shit. Downside, he got put into the foster system. It fucked him up pretty good.”
“Abusive foster caregivers are a common issue in aggressively individualist social orders. I had a unit about civil service reform two years ago. We studied it.”
“True, but that wasn’t the only thing got him. He was one of those people that tried to put down roots, you know? Wherever he was, he’d find things and hold on to them. Put him in a new city for a week, and he’d already have a favorite park. That kind of shit. Only it was fostering, so every few months he’d lose it all again.”
“Is this an uplifting story about how he found his real home inside himself ?”
Amos went still for a moment the way he did, then looked chagrined. “Actually, he got addicted to a bunch of home-brewed narcotics and slow-melted his nervous system. So, nah, not really. I was trying to say that you’re not the only one who has a hard time letting go. Moving on to the next thing. I don’t know. Thought it might help to hear that.”
“What about you?”
“I’m good wherever I am,” he said. “But getting to that point was unpleasant. You don’t want to be like me.”
They were quiet for a moment. Her sleeve was still wet. It clung to her arm.
“I’m angry,” she said.
“I know.”
“I feel like he’s throwing me away. Putting me aside because I’m inconvenient.”
“I hear you.”
“It’s like who I am and what I want don’t even matter to him. I know that’s crazy. Or at least I know it’s overblown, but it’s like I have a splinter I can’t dig out. It’s just right there on my nerve ending, and every time I even brush up against it, it hurts.”
“Yeah.”
She sat still, feeling her blood pulse in her temple, her mind agitated. “I’m not really mad at the captain, am I? This is about my father.”
“This school thing could be good for you, Tiny. A lot healthier than hanging around an old warship with nobody your own age.”
“But I like it here. You like me being here, right?”
“No,” Amos said. “I don’t want you to stay.”
It felt like a punch in the gut. “But—”
“Look, Tiny, I’ve watched a lot of people die. Some of them were my friends. I’m mostly okay with that now. But I ain’t ready to watch you die. And if you stay here on this ship, you will. That’s the kind of ship this is.”
“That’s what Jim said too,” Teresa said.
“Yeah? Well, the two of us see a lot of things the same way.”
“You seem very different to me.”
“We are.”
“You’re going to be fighting for the fate of humanity. I’m going to be worrying about algebra assignments.”
“Well, maybe you’ll get lucky and we’ll win and the algebra will matter. Then twenty, thirty years down the road, something else will show up to slaughter everyone, and you can take care of that one.”
She didn’t want to be crying. She didn’t want to be sad. Amos leaned over and put a thick, ropy arm around her. He was strangely hot to the touch, like he was always running a fever. She leaned into him and wept anyway.
She said her goodbyes to Alex and Naomi on the ship just after they touched down. They’d landed far enough away from the school that they wouldn’t damage the grounds, so there was still a little walk from her old life to her new one. She tried not to think about that. It was easier if she could pretend that this wasn’t the last time she would be on the ship. That she didn’t have to start her life over again. She just put one foot in front of the other as if this particular walk didn’t signify anything in particular.
Jim and Amos went with her to make sure everything was all right, but she could tell their minds were more than half on the incoming ship. Like guards from the State Building, they wore light body armor and sidearms. She just had a duffel bag with a couple of folded flight suits and a few days’ supply of dog food. Muskrat trotted along with them, her brown, worried eyes shifting between Teresa and Amos.
The sky was wide and blue with cumulus clouds on the horizon. The valley opened before them, gentle curves of land that looked like erosion and wind and the growth of plants. The local plants were tall and thin, rising up into the air like three-meterhigh blades of blue-tinged grass. The breeze passing among them sounded like radio static. The school’s grounds stood out from the world around it—straight lines and right angles. The air smelled like overheated metal.