Babylon's Ashes

“They told me they were all right,” he said. “When I talked to them, they said they weren’t in danger.”

“It was true, as far as it went,” Avasarala said. “The reactors hadn’t failed there yet. And they had more food stored than most. They might have lasted another… month? How should I know? Canning. Who the fuck does their own canning anymore?”

“But you evacuated them.”

“Another week, another month. Not another year. They wouldn’t have been safe forever, and once they realized they were fucked, all the slots would have been filled. I flagged them as priority evacuees. I get to do that kind of shit. I’m the boss.”

“Where…”

She shrugged. “They’ll have quarters here or on L-4. Not as big as they had in Montana, but together. I can do that much. Maybe they’ll even go back to their farm someday when all this is done. Stranger things have happened.”

Holden took her hand. It was cool and hard and stronger than he’d expected. She turned to look him in the eye for the first time since he’d come into the room. The smile edged into the corners of her eyes.

“Thank you,” he said. “I owe you one.”

Her smile shifted, losing the formality and coolness and distance it had carried beneath the surface. She chuckled deep in her throat.

“I know,” she said.

Chapter Ten: Avasarala

She didn’t sleep anymore, or at least it didn’t help when she did. The bed in her suite was spongy, but she didn’t sink into it the way that a lifetime at normal gravity made her body expect, so it felt too soft and too hard at the same time. And sleep was supposed to mean rest. There was no rest anymore. She closed her eyes and her mind stumbled on like it was falling down stairs. Mortality rates and supply windows and security briefings—all the things that filled her so-called waking hours filled her nights as well. Being asleep only meant they lost what little coherence they had. It didn’t feel like sleeping. It felt like going mad and catatonic for a few hours and then regaining enough sanity to push through for eighteen or twenty hours more before collapsing into herself again. It was shit. But it needed doing, so she did it.

At least she had a shower.

“It seems like Bobbie Draper managed to keep Holden from screwing the mission up,” she said, drying her hair. The suite glowed a soft blue, like the promise of dawn. Not that any dawn looked like that on Earth now. But it had once. “I like that girl. I worry for her. She’s been sitting behind a desk too long. It doesn’t suit her.”

She considered the saris in her dresser, running her finger across the cloth and listening to the sound of skin against fabric. She opted for a green one that shimmered like a beetle’s carapace. Gold embroidery along the edges that caught the false sunlight made it look cheerful and powerful at the same time. And she had the amber necklace with the jade that went with it. Fashion. All humanity shitting itself to death, and she still had to worry what she looked like going into the meetings. Pathetic.

Aloud, she said, “Gies and Basrat sent word today. Everyone thought they were dead, but they were holed up under a mountain in the Julian Alps. Probably didn’t plan to pop their heads above ground until everything was settled, but you know how Amanda is. It’s never real with her unless someone knows she has it better. I don’t know why you liked them.”

She caught her mistake too late, and something vast and dangerous shifted in her heart. She took a deep breath, bit her lip, and went back to wrapping her sari in place.

“Once we have the Free Navy under control, we’ll have to do something about emigration. No one’s going to want to stay on Earth. At this rate, I may take off. Retire on some alien ocean where I don’t have to feel like I’m responsible for making the waves go up and down. Mars will never sort itself out. Smith? He puts a brave face on it, but he’s not a prime minister. He’s hospice nurse for a republic. Anytime I start feeling like my job’s bad, I just have a drink with him.”

They were all things she’d said before, in some variation. There were new things every day—reports from the planetary surface, from the surveillance drones around Venus, from her covert service agents on Iapetus and Ceres and Pallas. With the Free Navy busy making the OPA look measured and rational, Fred Johnson could still be of use making contact with the reservoirs of the Belt that understood how dangerous Marco Inaros was and how the damage already done could spiral into something even worse. God knew he never brought in good news. But for everything new, for every irrevocable tick of the clock, there were the things she cycled back to. The ones she revisited again and again like rereading a favorite book. Or poem. Things she said because she had said them before.