Niko didn’t expect Janus, but there he was, outside and asking to visit. She went down to meet him.
He squinted at her. “Seems like one of Gnarl Grusson’s own bodyguards turned him in. Showed the authorities where there was a nice little stash, including some of the same batch that killed Biboban.”
“That’s a relief,” she said.
“Strange moment,” he said. “Revelations and confessions all over the station.” He hesitated. “I know your restaurant got closed. That wasn’t part of the investigation. Biboban set that up the day before it died.”
“Part of its revenge,” she said slowly.
Janus’s eyes sharpened. “Revenge for what?”
“For not being the friend it thought I was.”
He held out a plastic sheet. “This states you’re clear.”
She took it and put it away for safekeeping.
“We owe you for the false accusations made against you,” he said. “If there is anything we can do…”
“As a matter of fact,” Niko said, “there just might be.”
The EverRich receptionist looked up when Niko, followed by two others, entered the room. Before she could speak, they declared, “I have told you before, nothing can be done without an appointment!”
Niko shrugged and stepped aside.
Janus stepped up and said, with his usual mild apologetic air, “The lady is to be given every cooperation.”
Their head swiveled and their eyes widened with outrage. “And you are?”
He flashed his credentials. “The man with the powers to shut you down.”
Niko returned with the full sum, plus 3 percent interest for the time the money had been held.
It felt like unfinished business, so Atlanta returned to the Banksin, but this time she took Lassite with her, after telling him the full account of what had happened before.
The tent was still there with its guarding sentinel. She looked at him and he regarded her, but this time he did not beckon.
Still, she made her way through the crowd and stood before him. “I’m going in,” she stated, “and he is going with me.” She indicated Lassite with a sweep of her hand.
The guard nodded once and stepped aside.
Atlanta entered the tent with Lassite at her heels. It smelled as unpleasant as it had the last time.
As before, the Banksin sat on their throne-like chair. “You have returned to tell me your story?” they asked. “It must have gotten longer in the interim. You have brought great changes to this station, and others that will linger in your wake.”
“It sounds as though you know her story already,” Lassite observed. His voice sounded polite, but distant, as he looked around.
“Ahhhhhhh,” the Banksin said, as though spotting him for the first time. “The Sessile prophet.”
“Not a prophet,” Lassite said. “Nor are you one.”
“Why has she returned then?”
“How did you know what to say to scare me?” Atlanta asked.
It peered at her. “That is the question you would have me answer? Because I will answer once, and then you will owe me your story.”
“Agree to nothing!” Lassite interjected sharply. “That is not trade law, and you are a luck stealer, who frightens people into giving up bits of themselves.”
“Mmm.” The being settled back into its throne, regarding Lassite. “Not always because they are frightened,” it said. “Sometimes they want to be rid of something.”
“Your trade is not ethical,” Lassite continued. “The reason they knew what to ask you, Atlanta, is that there are basic questions at everyone’s heart: Why is the world unfair? Why am I not loved? Why am I not happy? Was it something like that?”
“Sort of.” She looked at the Banksin.
“They want your story so they can unravel your luck in listening to its details. They pretend to give you clues and let you construct and solve the mystery, then they take the credit for it.”
This was as animated as she’d ever seen Lassite. He took her by the wrist and tugged her out of the tent. “You cannot give away your luck, you must watch over it!” he scolded.
“I don’t know anything about how to do that!” she protested.
“I cannot teach you magic, but I can teach you that at least. We will begin tomorrow. Do not eat or drink anything before you come to me.”
“Does that help?”
“It makes sure you are not sleepy,” he explained, and she couldn’t tell if he was joking or not.
Atlanta had presented the idea to Dabry first.
“You said the station takes some of our biomass when we go, and some people make a little extra selling it,” she said.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “If it’s something they might want.”
“I had a piece of vine analyzed,” she said. “Here.” She handed him the printout. “Are those things they’d want?”
His eyes scanned the printout. “Oh, sweet Sky Momma, as Niko would say.”
“That’s good?”
“Very good.” He beamed at her. “Well done, Princess.”
For the first time, the nickname had no sting.
“Bio and thaumic mass all together in one package,” the Chief Gardener noted happily. They tabbed up the load and showed Dabry the figure. “You couldn’t have done better if you’d spent six months choosing a cargo.”
Dabry signed the manifest and tucked away the credit slip. Back on the ship, he showed the amount to Niko. She whistled.
“That’s enough to keep us going, what, six months even with a few splurges?”
He nodded.
“Talk about spinning silver out of starlight,” she said. “Well, that’s good news for once.”
This time, Skidoo asked Atlanta to accompany her to the medic. Talon hadn’t been a bad companion, but she needed to tell Atlanta. Atlanta, who had become so special to her that sometimes Skidoo felt herself as a thing coiled around the other’s name. More than her name, the thought of her. The vision of her burning brightly, vines around her, Skidoo reaching out and being part of that, as though Atlanta drew on her essence but at the same time returned it. Made her something more.
She said nothing of that. Instead, she told Atlanta what made her come to the medic in the first place, and what he confirmed. Atlanta listened quietly, not asking questions. Skidoo conveyed what he had said of the second stage.
“We is being going back,” she finally said. “I is being asking him what to do now that it is coming.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Atlanta said. She waited until Skidoo had gone through the lonely office doorway to break down and cry into her hands. At least she was underwater and the tears, so much hotter than the cool water, flowed away as fast as they came.
It wasn’t fair, she thought. For the best to be taken like this. First Thorn, then Roxana, and now Skidoo. Skidoo, who she loved, and who loved her.
A touch on her shoulder. She looked up to see the receptionist offer her a small, chilled, white cloth. The receptionist motioned that she should hold it against her face. She did, and the sensation felt refreshing, like plunging her face in cold water.
“You are all right?” the receptionist asked.
“Sad news,” Atlanta explained. “I had sad news.”
“Often, here.” The receptionist gestured around herself. “Your friend, though…”
“What?”
“Ever since she came, the doctor has been different.”
“Different how?”
“Kinder. Gentler. Do you know what she might have said to him?”
Atlanta shook her head. “That’s just how she is.” She managed, just barely, not to start crying again. “That’s just how she is.”
When the medic entered, Skidoo unrolled her tentacle with a dramatic flourish in front of him so he could see the brown mottling, and waited.
He peered at it. “Hmm.” He turned it this way and that, considering. He gently prodded a mottling with a finger. “Does this hurt?”
“It is not being hurting,” she said.
“Good. I’ve got a spray that will clear that up. Give this chit to the receptionist and she’ll give you a ten-day supply. Don’t stop spraying until the full ten days are up.”
Skidoo, startled, blurted out, “This isn’t the severing?”
He frowned. “Of course not. Have you had any of the symptoms I told you about?”
“No…” She felt like she had been tied into a knot, then forcibly untangled.
“Could be years, maybe decades. No one knows, your case is extraordinary.” He paused. “Something about you changed my bedside manner and at first I thought I was going soft.” He shook his head. “And then I saw how my patients responded.” He coughed. “I’m sorry I was unkind.”
“You is being bringing me good news, which is being very kind,” Skidoo said.
Outside, Atlanta gravely asked how things were.
“Is being a spray to cure it!” Skidoo told her.
“So you’re not experiencing this dissolution thing?” Atlanta said. “Skid, you scared me!”
Skidoo coiled around her, despite the gasp of scandalized delight from the receptionist. “I is being fine,” she said in Atlanta’s ear. “And before we is going back to the ship, we is being going to Lassitude again.”
So they did.
Milly and Gio offloaded bushels of leaves in the antechamber as Atlanta and Skidoo floated past. They paused.
Gio signed to Milly, “Never seen Skidoo act like that.” He grinned.
“Never expected that myself,” she responded, and forked a load of leaves at him, which he returned, and so they went on, offloading and throwing bundles of leaves at each other until Niko came out and kindly suggested that they cease their shenanigans.
Talon and Rebbe worked together for once, stacking boxes under Gio’s watchful eye. It was hot work in the enclosed space, and heavy, but at least it was something to do.
Talon deliberately kept himself from racing the way he would have with Thorn, vying to see who could go the fastest. Instead, he settled into the same slow but steady rhythm Rebbe adopted, and they worked together in silence for some while.
Then Rebbe said, “When I went out, we went to Ganache confluence and that was my favorite. What did you like best?”
“The one where Skidoo and I went. We went swimming!”
“I didn’t try that one,” Rebbe said thoughtfully. After more silence, he spoke, more to the box he hefted than to Talon. “I was thinking about taking another ship, but I don’t have a lot of skills.”
“Bioship skills,” Talon said promptly. Then he parsed out the other’s words. “But I was going to leave!” he said indignantly. “Jezli Farren talked me out of it.”
Rebbe’s expression was almost comical. “She stopped me too! Did she sneak up on you?”
“I wasn’t really paying attention to anything but the boards,” Talon said defensively.
“Yeah, me too.” Rebbe looked at Talon. He had a family, he had a ship, he had people who loved him and cared about them, and he’d been prepared to give all of that up to Rebbe, to leave because he couldn’t see any other choice. “We aren’t brothers, we will never be brothers.”
The breath caught in Talon’s throat at the desolation in those words. But Rebbe continued. “Maybe, though, we can be friends.”
“Friends is good,” Talon said. “Friends is fine.”
“I can’t replace him. He’s gone.”
“I know that. I really do.”
“All right. But I have a favor to ask. Don’t talk about him around me, okay?”
Talon nodded. He held out a hand.
They shook on it.
This was good, Rebbe decided as they went back to work. This was very good. Everything would be fine.
As long as what he feared the most never happened. As long as Thorn never did come back. Once again, he checked his internal echoes, worrying that someone lived inside him without his knowledge, but found nothing there.