One of the things she’d grown to like about living on the Rocinante was the way it made the cycles of daylight and darkness arbitrary. If the crew had decided that every day lasted thirty hours, then it did. If night and day cycled through six hours at a time, then that was true. That they didn’t was a choice, and the fact that it was a choice was strangely wonderful. It would have been easy to become unmoored, and it turned out she liked being unmoored. The ability to drift was delicious. Now, lying on a couch in thrust gravity a fraction of what she’d felt growing up, she was aware of the cool gray walls, the almost-dark lit only by her handheld’s standby light. At the same time, she was also on Laconia, in a secondary machine shop that opened off her old bedroom and didn’t really exist, building something that changed every time she roused a little and slid back down. Dreams of other spaces—secret rooms, hidden passages, forgotten access shafts— had become common for her in the last months. They were probably symbolic of something. She was just fitting a wire lead into a vacuum channel adapter when the dream changed, shifting under her like she’d switched to a different feed.
She was still in her real quarters, could see the real walls and light, but they were augmented by black spirals whose fine detail she was more aware of than the dim light could justify. They seemed to weave and reweave themselves as she watched them. Filaments of black thread that reached out, found each other, built together into a new shape that was also part of the old one. Tiny blue lights wove in and out of the constantly remade spirals too, glimmering like fireflies. As hypnagogic hallucinations went, it was probably the most beautiful her brain had ever come up with. She felt like she could watch the black spirals forever and never get bored.
Her father stood beside them, looking down at her. His eyes were a perfect blue that they hadn’t been in reality. He was smiling. Teresa closed her eyes, willing herself to wake up. This wasn’t a dream she wanted to have. When she opened them again, the spirals were gone, but her father was still there. He looked strange. His hair was longer than he’d worn it, and though he was in the tunic and trousers Kelly had dressed him in back on Laconia, he wasn’t wearing shoes.
She sat up slowly, careful of the low gravity. The dream didn’t fade.
“Teresa,” he said, and his voice was like water to someone dying of thirst. Tears began to sheet her eyes.
“Father,” she said, and even though she could feel the vibrations in her throat—even though she was almost certainly really speaking out loud—he didn’t vanish. The sense of being awake grew in her. The sluggishness of dreams loosened its grip, but his image didn’t fade. Not yet.
“Happy birthday,” he said. “Everything is going to be all right.”
She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand. “It’s not, though,” she whispered.
“It will. I only need a little more time, and we will all be together. I dreamed too small before. I can see better now. You’ll see better too.”
Teresa shook her head, and a sharp knock came at the door.
“You decent?” Alex’s muffled voice said.
“Yes,” she said, and the door opened a crack. For a moment, it seemed like her dream and her reality would come together face-to-face, but as the light spilled in, her father blinked back into nothingness. She wiped her eyes again, trying to hide that she’d been crying.
“Hey there,” Alex said. “We’ve got some grub. You hungry?”
“Sure,” Teresa said. “Give me a minute.”
Alex nodded and retreated, but Muskrat nosed the door open and hopped in, barely constrained by her own weight. Her brown eyes shifted around the room like she was looking for something, and she whined softly.
“It’s okay, old lady,” Teresa said. “Everything’s fine.”
It was almost true. Well, it was less untrue than it might have been, anyway. The Rocinante was almost at the New Egypt ring gate, and while the Sparrowhawk—far back down the local sun’s gravity well—apparently hadn’t died, it also was far enough that even a killing burn wouldn’t have been able to catch up with them. About to make a transit without a clear idea of the traffic through the ring space, and with the Laconian military chasing them but out of firing range, was as close to okay as Teresa could expect these days. But Timothy—Amos—had defied death again, Muskrat was still with her, and she wasn’t at a religious boarding school at the ass end of nowhere.
She was surprised how relieved the plan’s failure left her. The immediate aftermath had been fear and shock. The horror of seeing Amos’ shattered body, the violence of the firefight, the anxiety of wondering whether the Sparrowhawk would risk firing on them to get her back. But as soon as that had passed, she’d found herself smiling more. She was still here, and it wasn’t even her fault.