Babylon's Ashes

Except that there wouldn’t be, because the transportation was too hard. So they’d die where they stood because there was no way to get them all someplace better fast enough for it to matter.

“You okay, Cap?” Amos asked.

“Fine. Why?”

“Looks like you’re getting ready to hit someone.”

“No,” Holden said. “Wouldn’t help.”

“Over here,” Bobbie said.

The guards outside the administrative offices carried small automatic weapons and wore body armor. They stood aside and let Bobbie shuffle through the wide gray door, and all of the others behind her in a line like ducklings. The offices could have been a different world. Full-spectrum lights glowed like Holden’s memory of a summer afternoon. Ferns and ivy bobbed in the gentle breeze from the air recyclers. The hallways were half a meter wider than the corridors of the Rocinante, and felt luxurious. Only the faint gunpowder stink of moondust and the one-tenth g spoke of Luna. Everything else would have looked at home in the UN offices at The Hague.

Bobbie led them like she knew where she was going, down one hall, past another pair of armed guards, and through a set of frosted glass doors. The room was built like a lounge—chairs and divans around low tables. Eight or ten people were scattered around in pairs and small groups, and for a few seconds, Holden didn’t understand who they were.

At some point, everything had been either black or white, but use had left splashes of color. The brown ring of a coffee stain on a cushion, the greenish scrape along the side of a chair. Avasarala stood at the far side of the room, her orange sari blazing like a torch while she talked to a white-haired woman with dark skin and narrow hips. When Avasarala looked up to smile at him, the woman turned. Holden stumbled.

“Momma Sophie?” he said, and then, like a lens coming into focus, he saw all the others for who they were. The years had changed them all, and seeing them through cameras and screens wasn’t the same. Father Tom had gained weight, and Father Cesar had lost it, but they were there, hand in hand, walking toward him. Father Anton had gone bald, and Mother Elise seemed older, and frailer in person than she had on the screen. And shorter. Everyone seemed shorter, because the system at the farmhouse had been on a desk. He’d been looking up at all of them from that desktop for years and hadn’t realized it until just now.

All eight of his parents crowded around him, their bodies pressing gently against his, their arms around each other, the way they had when he’d been a child. Holden found himself weeping, swept away by the memory of being a little boy surrounded and protected by the loving bodies of eight strong adults. He stood among them now, the strongest of the lot, shaken by the love and the joy and the terrible understanding that both the boy he’d been and the men and women they were then were gone and would never come back. They were all crying too. Father Dimitri, Mother Tamara, Father Joseph. And his new family too.

Naomi pressed her hand to her lips, like she was trying to hold words or emotions in. Alex was grinning as widely as any of Holden’s family, his eyes shining. Avasarala and Bobbie seemed pleased, like people who’d pulled off a good surprise party. Weirdly, Clarissa Mao, standing alone with a pressure cast on her wounded arm, was shaking with barely controlled sobs. Amos looked at all of them like he’d walked in on the last line of a joke, then shrugged and let them get on with whatever the hell this was. Holden felt a rush of affection for the man.

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Everyone, I need you to meet… everyone else. I guess. This is Naomi, everyone.”

His parents all turned toward her. Naomi’s eyes widened a degree. The little, panicked flare of her nostrils was probably something only he could see. There was a pause he hadn’t expected, a stuttering moment when he saw her through their eyes: Here is the Belter girl their son was sleeping with. Here is the ex-lover of the man who killed the world, the representative of everything that had happened. One of them. It lasted a heartbeat, then another. It was vast as the space between worlds.

“I’ve heard so much about you, dear,” Mother Elise said, moving to Naomi and taking her in a wide embrace. The others followed, queuing up to welcome her to the family. But it wasn’t an illusion. The moment had been there. Even when his two families diffused into each other—Father Dimitri and Father Anton and Alex talking about the ship, Mother Tamara and Amos looking at each other with a kind of amused bewilderment—Holden felt the hesitation. They would love her if he said so, but she wasn’t one of their kind.

He barely noticed Bobbie at his side until she spoke. “This is how she does it. She finds a way to pay you.”

She nodded toward the back of the room. Avasarala stood alone, watching with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Holden went to her.