SAINT
Saint could hardly see through the rage. Like a brush fire charring his ribs, searing his lungs. He breathed and tasted smoke, and he was grateful for it, because smoke was still better than the bitter taste of admitting he’d been wrong. I wanted to trust you. I tried everything to trust you, and you were lying the whole time.
And for what? What sideways scheme had he dragged Anke into? Playing on her gratitude like that. The Jal he’d known would’ve never—
The screen flickered. The lights in the room were on, albeit dimmed, so it was hard to make sense of it at first. Picture was too dark, blotches of black and green moving across the sloped walls. Took his adrenaline-soaked brain a second to see it for what it was: infrared footage. A night vision camera, rattling and jumping like somebody’d strapped it to a spooked horse and set it loose.
The sound came abruptly. Silence, then a hail of sirens and gunshots and shouting as broken-down buildings and rust-eaten shipping containers whipped by on the screen.
“—cut the lights!” someone yelled. “They cut the lights! I’ve got no visual!”
“Where the fuck’re your NVGs, Fenton?” said a second voice. It was much clearer than the first. Much closer. Much more familiar.
Saint turned back to Jal. “What is this?” That was Jal’s voice in the video. He’d been there, wherever there was. “What the hell is this?” Looked like an op gone wrong. Another old shipping facility, which told Saint exactly fuck-all. Couldn’t spit in the frontier without hitting one of those places. Temp setups to move product while there was product there to move, and left behind like molted husks when the Trust or its contractors finished with them. Could’ve been anywhere. That voice, though, was unmistakable.
Jal didn’t answer. He wasn’t looking at Saint, staring past his head at the screen with his mouth drawn thin and his brows furrowed. Didn’t even seem to be breathing.
“They’re coming,” hissed the first voice. Fenton. “I can hear them, man. Can’t see a fucking thing out here, but I hear them.” No NVGs, then. Had to be a rookie, because a senior ranger never would’ve made that mistake. Now that he’d oriented himself, Saint knew that was who they were watching: rangers. Video had a timestamp in the corner, dated three years prior, and a string of numbers he only recognized with the benefit of context. Serial numbers. Jal’s serial numbers.
“I need your location!” Jal shouted, and for a moment the whole screen went black. Clanging metal—climbing one of the containers, Saint thought, and then he was off again. “Approaching your last-known from the third quadrant of the compound. You still there?” No answer. “Fenton! Get your shit together and listen to me. Have you changed position?”
It was hard to listen to. Even a pear-shaped op shouldn’t have been so chaotic. There were protocols. Backup plans, fallback routes. Where the fuck was their captain? Because hearing Jal like this—like he used to be, younger and trying like hell to sound rougher and tougher than he really was—as he tried to hold it all together in the middle of a full-tilt retreat, it wrung Saint’s stomach like a dishrag. Three years ago might as well have been a lifetime, but he still wanted to shout for the kid to stop, hold his position until he got an answer, because Fenton sounded like a shit-scared hair-trigger, and this was how things went bad. This was how people died. This was—
Flashes lit the screen, and then Saint heard it: the crack of bullets tearing from a barrel. Not behind the camera, but maybe a dozen meters ahead, and the shout next to the mic broke with as much surprise as pain. The frame pitched sideways, then dropped. Not onto the container, but off the side of it, plumes of dirt rising like fog on impact.
This was how Jal almost died.
Fenton’s voice crackled through the sudden, stifling silence. “Red, I think I got—oh, fuck.” Saint wondered what clued him in. The lack of return fire? Maybe it’d finally dawned on him the direction his target had been running from. Failing all that and absent a single firing synapse, he probably caught on when that stunned, pained groan sputtered over his comms.
“Shit!” Fenton swore, with the sound of jostling gear. “Shit, oh shit, oh shit.” Panicked, pitched high over Jal’s choking gasps. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know it was—shit.” Saint could see Jal trying to get up, the dizzying shift of the bodycam as he rolled onto his side and the cry he strangled behind his teeth when his fingers—shaking, crooked, callused fingers—came away dark with blood.
Turn it off, Saint wanted to say. Didn’t want to see any more of it, hear any more of it. For a second, all Saint could think about were the two old bullet scars he’d seen in the infirmary. Who did that to you? He’d wanted an answer then, but now that he had it, he almost wished he could go back.
Wasn’t like the mission reports. The reports said an op in the outer planets went sideways and Jal bailed. Dropped his tags and ran, to hell with his crew and his oath and everything else. He’d never understood what could make the Jal he knew do a thing like that, but the whole crew swore up and down it was the truth, and after a year of searching and turning up nothing, he’d believed it.
Oh, God, he’d believed it.
He saw Fenton a beat later, scrambling around the corner of the shipping container with a flashlight that whited out the screen when it passed over the camera. Too dark for specs; the light would’ve blinded Jal, if the pain hadn’t already. Saint wasn’t even sure he would’ve seen Fenton kneeling over him, grasping at his vest.
“I can walk,” Jal told Fenton in the recording. “Just get me up. I can—I can make it back to exfil.” He didn’t sound sure. Wouldn’t have mattered to Saint, he told himself. If he’d been there, he’d have thrown the kid over his shoulder and carried him all the way back, if that was what it took. Walk, don’t walk. Conscious, not conscious. He would’ve gotten him safe.
If he’d been there.
This is your fault. The thought grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go. You put him there. With people who wouldn’t carry him. People who didn’t care about him the way he deserved. Golden heart, loyal to a goddamn fault, and Saint had thrown him in with the likes of Fenton.
Fenton, who didn’t help him up. Didn’t help him at all. “Fuck, Red’s down. I—fuck, fuck, fuck!” he kept whimpering, until abruptly, he stopped. Froze, head cocked like somebody was talking to him, but Saint didn’t hear anything through the video. Broadcast on a private comm channel, maybe. “I don’t know,” Fenton said in a hiccupping high voice. Pissing himself and desperate for somebody smarter to tell him what to do. “N-no, I don’t think so. Twice, I think, and there’s a fuck-ton of blood, but I—are you sure?” He faltered, then, “No, no, I’ll do it. I’ll—I know how to—”
Fenton grabbed for something on Jal, and with the clink of breaking metal, it became painfully, horrifyingly clear what he’d done. Any doubts Saint might’ve had, any reservations, gone with that single, deafening sound. Fenton had Jal’s tags—the same tags little Bitsie had clung to when he’d told them that awful fucking word. Deserter. The same tags some Guild rep had handed to Jal’s sister with a ready-made letter about revocation of benefits.
“What the fuck are you—?” Jal was never as slow as he claimed to be, though. He’d figured it out, what Fenton was doing. What somebody’d told Fenton to do. “Motherfucker!” And Jal fought; wouldn’t be him if he hadn’t. The feed went screwy, got knocked this way and that as Jal wrestled with everything he had, but even his impossible strength couldn’t hold up through shock and blood loss. Scrabbling, bloody fingers appeared over the lens, and with the pop of the bodycam’s metal casing, the feed went black.
“Shit,” Nash breathed. It was the only sound in the room for … Saint didn’t even know how long. Anke had covered her mouth with her too-long sleeves, tears rolling freely from her beneath her glasses, and Saint couldn’t seem to make his lungs expand. They’d left him. He hadn’t deserted in a hail of bullets; he’d been shot by his own team, left to die in the dirt like a rabid animal. They’d shamed his name, left his family without a single cap for his service, all because some rookie on a shit posting was too goddamn stupid to bring his night vision goggles.
Wordlessly, Jal pushed Saint’s hands away, and Saint let him. Wasn’t sure he could’ve stopped him if he’d wanted to, but Christ. The thought of holding him there any longer, doing anything more to him, brought acid to the back of Saint’s tongue.
“Captain,” said Jal, voice so steady it had to be an act. Saint could practically see the strain of it, and fuck, he’d been carrying that strain since he’d woken up in the infirmary. Saint should’ve picked up on it, then. He should’ve understood it, seen through all the bravado and bad attitude. Jal wasn’t a threat; he was a wounded dog baring its teeth. He was hurt and scared, and he needed help, and Saint hadn’t seen any of it. “Can I be dismissed?”
Eoan’s projection hadn’t reappeared, but Saint could picture their softening expression as they said, “Of course. We can discuss the rest later.” The rest. The lies. The hiding. The next steps. If that piece of shit Fenton was still flying under the Guild banner, Saint would hunt him down himself—him and whoever else was on that comm line, telling him to do it.
Saint hadn’t decided what he’d do when he found them, but he knew he’d take his time.
It wasn’t as much comfort as he wanted it to be, as he watched Jal disappear through the door and down the hall. Shoulders and spine straight as a board, hands stuffed in his pockets. Harder to see them shaking that way.
Saint let his head drop forward onto the wall. Fuck.
Behind him, he heard Nash breathe in deep and let it out slow. Grounding herself. A glance back at her shiny eyes said she was holding on to her composure by her fingernails, but he couldn’t talk. Crew was family. The thought of either of them doing that to the other … they just couldn’t stomach it.
“You see him?” she said. “White as a ghost. Elevated heart rate, shortness of breath.” Saint recognized her medic voice when he heard it. Trying to claw back some distance, some perspective. “I have some contacts back in the center spiral … they, um. This sort of thing is more in their wheelhouse. They could probably help him, if he wanted it, when we get back. For now, I think—” She faltered. It’d been a long time since he’d heard her so rattled, but she didn’t let it stop her. “I think if you don’t get your shit together and go after him, Saint, then I will.”
Harsh, maybe. But sometimes there just wasn’t any other way to be.
“Yeah.” He dragged himself straight, rubbing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose like that’d ward off the tension headache cranking its way up the back of his neck. You owe him. Ten minutes of strength—he owed him that, and he owed him so much more. “I’m going.” Maybe while he was gone, Nash could do something about the heartbreak on Anke’s face.
The hall seemed much shorter than he remembered. Some part of him hoped he’d have his head on straight by the time he reached Jal’s quarters, but it was still as backwards and turned around as when the video cut out.
He paused with his hand raised halfway to the door. Knock or don’t? Saint didn’t like that kind of sound when he was caught in his own head, but this wasn’t one size fits all.
“Jal?” That was better, he decided. A familiar voice. He only wished the kid had better things to associate it with. “Can I come in?”
Silence, for a moment. Then, “Why?”
Because we’re worried about you, he thought. Because you just watched yourself get shot and left for dead in high-def. Because I wasn’t there for you when you needed somebody, and I gave up on you, and some stupid, selfish part of me’s hoping this will start making up for it.
He swallowed. “I think you know why.” He didn’t know if that was better or worse than brutal honesty, but it was a hell of a lot easier to say.
It worked. Not immediately, but just when he started to think he’d have to do better, the door hissed open.
Only soft, red-wave light strips along the ceiling lit the darkened room inside. Jal shied away from the hall light, specs abandoned on the bedside table, and he didn’t invite Saint in, but he didn’t tell him to fuck off, either. Saint figured that was about as good as he was going to get.
As the door slid shut and Saint’s eyes adjusted, he watched Jal cross the room and sink onto the edge of the bed. “You’ve got questions, too.” Even in the tight crew quarters, even with just the two of them, the words almost seemed to disappear. “Want to know why I didn’t say anything. Want to know what happened after the video cut out. Want to know why I didn’t call for help.”
Yes. Yes, Saint wanted to know every one of those things, and about a dozen more. But seeing the steel melt out of Jal’s shoulders, watching him shrink into himself with a heavy, bone-weary sigh, only one question really seemed to matter.
“Are you okay?”
He hated how surprised Jal looked, like he really thought Saint would march down the hall and start interrogating him after all that. The way Saint had treated him lately, maybe he was right to wonder, but Jesus. Jal’s black-marble eyes were so damn wide, they seemed to swallow his face.
“I—” Jal started, but that was as far as he made it.
It started in his bottom lip, an almost-tremor and a downward tug at the corners. A hitched breath, a furrow in his brow, and for a moment he looked almost confused. Helpless. Young and overwhelmed and fresh off too many days—weeks? Months? Years?—pretending it wasn’t getting to him. He sat there, blinking up at Saint with his whole body shaking like it was trying to take itself apart at the joins, and Saint didn’t remember ever deciding to go sit beside him, much less put his arms around those rounded shoulders, but he had, and he did, and he’d no sooner settled beside him than Jal crumpled.
It had nothing to do with him, Saint told himself. The way Jal turned into him, buried his face against Saint’s shoulder as that first sob ripped its way out—it wasn’t some kind of reconciliation. It wasn’t about all their years together. It didn’t even mean that Saint was forgiven. Jal just needed a port in the storm, and Saint just happened to be the one sitting there.
“It’s okay,” Saint told him, softer than he thought he knew how to be. He was a hard-nosed bastard with a thick skin and a thicker head, but Jal cried like he couldn’t breathe, like he was drowning under all that grief and fear and pain, and Saint hadn’t felt an ache like this since Eoan first gave him the news. Saint, dear, I need to tell you something.
What he wouldn’t have given then to feel every one of the finger-shaped bruises Jal pressed into his arms. To know the truth of what’d happened and have the chance to fucking do something.
Being there now didn’t undo the last five years, didn’t shove all Jal’s hurt back in its neat little box—and even if he could have, he wouldn’t have. Sometimes you took the bad shit and you locked it away where you didn’t have to see it, because if you looked at it too long, it’d break you in a time you couldn’t afford to be broken. Jal had been running when he found the Ambit, and Saint got the sense he’d been running a while before that. If this was the first chance he’d gotten to break that lock, to feel all the bad he’d swallowed since those bullets tore through him, then he needed this.
Selfishly, Saint needed to be the one who helped him through it. All the fuckups in their shared history—maybe he could start to do something right. So he stayed there, even as his bad shoulder started to ache, staring at the door and blinking the burning from his eyes. “It’s okay, kid. I got you. It’s okay.” It didn’t matter that okay was just a platitude, and I got you was years too late to do Jal any good. He said it, and he said anything else he could think of, and he kept saying it all until Jal’s breathing went a little less ragged, and the shakes got a little less violent.
Finally, with a deep breath Saint felt through the fabric of his shirt, Jal pulled back. Poor kid looked wrecked, eyes all shiny and red-rimmed and cheeks so ruddy Saint could see it even in the bad lighting. Seeing the effort it took just to drag himself upright again, Saint had half a mind just to tip him right back over on the bed and leave him to get some shut-eye. Wouldn’t take much, he thought. A strong wind to knock him over, a warm blanket to weigh him down, and Saint wagered he’d be out like a light.
Jal seemed to have something else in mind, though. He hunched over his legs, dragging his sleeve across his eyes. “Ah, fuck me.” He made a sound that tried to be a laugh, but it came out far too ragged. “Sorry, I—” He shook his head awkwardly. “Sorry.”
“Don’t.” It came out harsher than Saint meant it to. We make a hell of a pair, don’t we? “I mean,” he started again, gentler, “you don’t have to say that. Not to me, and definitely not about this.” He rubbed the back of his neck. That headache had found a nice little spot behind his jaws and made itself at home, throbbing in time with his heartbeat as an uneasy silence settled between them. Jal didn’t seem to know what to say.
Saint threw him a bone. “So you really didn’t know what was on the drive, huh?” He had no idea if Jal had just locked that away, too, or if there was something more to the story, but he believed him. He believed him, and he hated himself for doubting Jal in the first place, and he wanted to know everything, and he didn’t want to hear another word of it.
Fuck, this was messy.
Jal shook his head again, no less stiffly than last time. “Wasn’t too careful taking it out of the camera. Was afraid I’d busted it or something.” His voice still wasn’t quite steady, but he seemed determined to say whatever it was he wanted to say. “Then the scavs found me—same ones we were there to shut down before everything went to shit, so you can imagine they weren’t real friendly. Patched me up, shipped me out to one of their sites. Needed workers more’n they needed to make an example, I guess.” He tugged up his pants leg briefly, just long enough for Saint to glimpse the band of scars at the top of his boot.
No wonder he’d recognized the ankle monitors back in the depot. Fuck. Guilt seized violently in Saint’s chest. That was where he’d been. All the time Saint had been looking for him, that was where he’d fucking been—trapped in a scav worksite, imprisoned and exploited and abandoned. And when Saint gave up searching, when he gave up believing anything but the bullshit stories Fenton and his crew put in those reports, that was where he’d stayed. Deserted. They’d had it wrong, every last one of them. They’d called Jal a deserter, when he was the one they’d all left behind.
Saint never should’ve stopped looking.
“Didn’t manage to give them the slip ’til a few months back,” Jal finished in a rush, like he couldn’t wait to put that part of the conversation behind him. Saint couldn’t blame him. “I tried out the drive as soon as I could. First port I came to, got my hands on a GLASS and tried to get into the Guild system, but it locked me out the second I put in my credentials. Would’ve sent up a fuckin’ fugitive alert, but I snapped it and chucked it out an air lock before the signal went live.” He cleared his throat. “I’d kind of wondered, you know? What they told everybody.”
They, he said, not Fenton. Jal really didn’t miss much. He’d have worked out Fenton had a devil on his shoulder; Saint just wondered how much else he knew. “Could you hear them? Whoever was on the other end of Fenton’s comms?”
Jal’s lips thinned. “No,” he said. “Must’ve switched to a private channel. It, uh. It wasn’t the first time. Whole op was shady from the jump, you know? Said we were there to shut down some scavs running an illegal trafficking post. People trafficking, I mean. But when I got in—’cause they sent me in ahead to kill the scavs’ security. Lot of the temp crews liked me for that. Send me in at dark o’clock, follow when security’s down or I’ve got the layout or whatever.”
Send me in alone, Saint heard. Let me take the risk. No wonder Jal didn’t trust the Guild. The way he’d been treated, and across more than one crew, didn’t exactly inspire loyalty.
Jal winced. “Sorry, shit, I’m telling this all out of order. There’s just … there’s a lot to it, and I had a long time to think about it, and I can’t—”
“Breathe, kid.”
Jal took a breath so deep it stretched his ribs like bellows under his threadbare T-shirt. “I didn’t see anyone else, is the thing,” he told Saint, finally. “They said human trafficking—that we were there to save those people. Preservation of life, right? That’s what the Guild’s supposed to do, the only time it’s supposed to interfere, but I swear there wasn’t anybody there but scavs. No sign there ever had been, either.
“Just looked like the scavs were there to strip the place for parts. And shit, maybe it was just a mistake, but that’s a big damn mistake. Tried to report back to the crew, but they just told me to sit tight and went real quiet on me. Got the feeling there were some conversations happening offline, or at least off my line. Must’ve been twenty minutes in dead silence before I finally got the order to return to the ship, and that wasn’t ’til after the mercs’d shown up. It was … shitshow doesn’t even come close.” He took another bellows breath and let it out long and slow, but it didn’t stop his voice from catching as he said, “What if that’s why they did it?” Jal looked over, and Saint had to remind himself to breathe under the weight of that stare. Uncertain and searching, like he couldn’t quite make sense of things himself and desperately wanted Saint to make sense of it for him. “Because they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and if they’d brought me back busted, or even told folks I was dead, people would’ve asked questions. But calling me a deserter … didn’t anybody look too closely at that.”
Saint knew it wasn’t an accusation; for someone who’d been on the receiving end of so much hurt, Jal had never been quick to dole it out himself. Still, it felt like one. Maybe because Saint knew he deserved it. He’d given up. Even knowing Jal was too damn loyal to bail on his crew, even with Jal’s sister insisting every goddamn chance she got that the reports didn’t make sense, he hadn’t looked hard enough, and Jal’d paid the price.
He must’ve felt so alone. Three years, help hadn’t come for him; and when he finally escaped on his own, it was to a world that thought the worst of him. Branded a deserter by the ones that deserted him. A cruel goddamn trick played by a cruel goddamn world, and Jal deserved so much better.
“I don’t know why they did it, kid,” Saint had to tell him, because all he had left was honesty. “But I promise you we’re gonna find out. I just—” He swore under his breath. “I just wish we’d known sooner. This whole time … that’s why you pulled that stunt on the rockhopper, isn’t it? You needed a Guild computer to check the bodycam drive.”
Jal wet his lips and nodded. “Don’t need credentials for onboard access, just need to actually get onboard. Saw my chance on the rockhopper to test it out, and I took it.”
“You almost died,” said Saint. Seemed an even bigger waste, knowing what he’d gone through just to get that far. “Christ, Jal. How may ships did you pass before you got to the Ambit? Any Guild rig could’ve gotten you that encryption key.”
Jal shot him an incredulous look. “You kidding? You shot me the second you saw me, and I reckon you almost kind of liked me once.”
Damn it. That riot round seemed so much less benign now. Jal had needed help, and Saint gave him a bullet in the back and not a moment’s chance to explain himself first. “I wish I hadn’t done that,” he rasped. Wished he hadn’t done a lot of things he had, wished he’d done a lot of things he hadn’t.
“I know,” Jal said, and nobody in that much pain was meant to sound that kind. That forgiving. “What I’m trying to say is, what do you think a ship of strangers would’ve done? Deserter ain’t a pretty word.” He dropped his gaze, picking at the edge of the bandage on his arm. Suddenly made sense why that cut was so clean; hell of a place to hide something for three years. “Not real keen on rangers lately, anyhow.”
Well, no. He wouldn’t be, would he? “Could’ve told us, then,” he said. Us sounded better than me. “We would’ve helped you.”
“Right,” Jal mumbled. “Historically, telling you my plans don’t ever seem to work out well for me.” There it was. An open door and a dare to step through it.
Fine. Saint was tired of tiptoeing around it, anyway. “I couldn’t let you come with me on the Ambit back then. I know what you thought—”
“The hell you did,” Jal grunted, but Saint acted like he hadn’t heard. If he lost steam this early, he’d never get through this.
“—but it wasn’t right for you. Out at the end of the goddamn universe, doing the mad shit no other captain would touch. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve made it back to the center spiral in the five years I’ve been on this ship, and that was fine for me. Out of sight, out of mind … I was tired when I started, kid. Should’ve retired when I blew my shoulder, but I just couldn’t take the quiet.
“You, though—you had your whole life ahead of you. You had your family. You think you could’ve gone whole years without seeing them? Because I know you better than that. You’d have followed me out there, and in a few months, maybe a year, you’d have realized it was a goddamn mistake. You’d have realized that you didn’t want to watch your niece grow up through a vid comm. That you didn’t want to die in the middle of nowhere. That I wasn’t fucking worth it, and if I’d let you throw in with me and Eoan, you would’ve resented me for it.”
“You think I didn’t resent you for ditching me?”
A wry, self-deprecating smile. “I’m sure you did,” Saint admitted. “I just didn’t have to see it. Easier that way.”
“For you.”
He nodded. Seemed in poor taste to try to defend himself, under the circumstances.
“You were wrong, anyway,” said Jal. “I wouldn’t have resented you.” Quieter, he said, “I couldn’t have resented you.”
Saint had considered that, too. “That would’ve been worse,” he said. “Because then you would’ve stayed, and the way we ran things those first couple of years, the crazy shit Eoan and I did … I’d have gotten you killed, kid. I could live with you hating me, but you dying for me? There wouldn’t have been any coming back from that.” Saint wasn’t somebody you died for, and he’d never wanted to be. “Besides, I wanted something better for you.”
“What about what I wanted?” Jal snapped. He scraped his fingers through his hair angrily. “Enough money to help Regan out and a crew that didn’t give a shit where I came from or what I was made for. Those girls and you—that was everything I had. But you left and locked the goddamn door behind you, and I was stuck with all the bullshit. Nobody wanted me. Passed me around crew to crew, whoever needed the coal-eyed miner boy for a blackout op, then they’d ship me off to the next in line. You think I was any safer with them than I’d have been with you?”
“I didn’t know. I didn’t think—”
“That people are judgmental pricks? Try again.”
“I didn’t know they wouldn’t see what I saw.”
Jal’s laugh was full of rusted nails and broken glass. Cutting. “Right,” he said. “’Cause everybody’s supposed to see things your way.”
Saint wished he could say he didn’t deserve that, but if he had to be a flawed man, at least he was self-aware. “I shouldn’t have made the choice for you,” he said. Wasn’t an easy thing to say aloud, even if he’d spent years saying it to himself. “Even before I saw what—” what Fenton did to you. Fuck, he could still hear the sounds Jal had made, lying there bleeding from his own man’s bullets. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Before I saw the video,” he said. “I knew it was wrong, and if I could do it all over again, I would’ve done every bit of it different. You trusted me, and I turned on you, but.…”
“But what?” Jal said. “What else is there but that?” The anger had leached from him, left him so tired and ragged he couldn’t even hold the weight of Saint’s sorry gaze. “I would’ve followed you to the end of the ’verse, you know?”
Saint sighed, throat aching. “I know.” He knew now; he’d known then. It’d terrified him. Life in the Earth army had chewed him up and spat him out, a fucked-up head on fucked-up shoulders, so scared of the quiet that he’d thrown himself into the Guild just to die fighting.
Meeting Jal had changed so many things, but it hadn’t changed that—couldn’t have changed that. The scars had been too fresh, and he’d been too goddamn tired, and when he’d seen his chance in Eoan’s crew to finally go out swinging, he’d jumped at it. He’d thought he was doing the right thing, keeping Jal from jumping with him. Instead, he’d damned the man he’d wanted to save, and saved himself in the process.
“I know,” he repeated. “And I know I didn’t deserve it, and it’s about five years too late, but I’m trying to now. I can’t do shit for you if you won’t let me, though. Why didn’t you tell me what you were doing? Where you’d been, what’d happened to you … did you think I wouldn’t believe you?”
“No,” Jal said, face half-hidden behind his shaggy, mussed-up hair.
Saint waited for something more, but as the seconds stretched tense and quiet between them, he realized more wasn’t coming on its own. “No?” he said. “No what? I need something to go on here. Would you—kid, would you at least look at me?” The time had come and gone where Saint could look in Jal’s eyes and know his thoughts, but he figured it couldn’t hurt.
And lo, Jal raised his head. Raised it like it weighed ten kilos, but Saint would take whatever crumbs he could get. “Ain’t because I thought you wouldn’t believe me,” he said, roughly. “It’s because I knew you would.”
Frankly, the silence had made more sense. “You kept it a secret,” Saint began. “Because you were afraid you’d tell me you needed help, and I would believe you?” He tried his best to keep it neutral. Deliberate. Mulling aloud, not passing any judgments, because the last thing he wanted was for Jal to clam up again.
Jal’s scoff said he’d somehow missed the mark. “No, see, that’s the problem. I didn’t say a thing about helping me. But you’re still so damn—you’re you, and you’d do what you do. You’d—” He scratched his head again, rough and agitated. Whatever he wanted to say, it wasn’t coming out right. “Drive or no drive, you’d bend the ear of every captain on the Council ’til you got Fenton martialed. But if I didn’t have proof, it’d just be my word against his, never mind whoever he had whispering in his ear. Who do you reckon wins that fight, old man? Fenton’s a three-generation legacy with a jacket full of rec letters, and I couldn’t even get a good word out of my own fucking partner. Never mind the crow the Captains’ Council would have to eat if they copped to what happened. And you wouldn’t care about that,” Jal said, before the words could even leave Saint’s tongue. “You’d tank your whole career trying to plead my case, and I wasn’t gonna let you.”
“I wouldn’t have cared,” Saint agreed.
“But I would’ve.” Jal arched an eyebrow and paused. “Sucks when folks make choices for you, don’t it?”
Ouch. “It was reckless,” he told him, firmly. Because if he couldn’t take the moral high ground, he could at least try for the practical one. “Not just the rockhopper. You let us think you were playing us. Damn near had Eoan on a warpath just now, and I would’ve taken you to the Captains’ Council myself after we got this Deadworld bullshit sorted.”
“Could’ve tried,” Jal said. “But I’m gettin’ home to my family, Saint. One way or the other, with my shield or on it. Y’all were never gonna change that.” His eyes glinted as he said it. More fire, more zeal than Saint had seen in him since they’d picked him up in the outpost.
For a second, it felt a little like the old Jal sitting next to him.
“So I did what I did, and I didn’t tell you, and it worked out all right. Like the Weald.”
“I got the shit knocked out of me in the Weald.”
“We all got out,” Jal replied, unrepentant. “Might not’ve done, if we’d stood around arguing, and I couldn’t take that chance. It’s gotta mean something, damn it. Everything I’ve done to get this far, if I don’t get back … I just want to see them again.” His words wavered. Desperation. “I want to tell them I’m sorry. All the shit I put them through, all the things I missed … Bitsie’s turning twelve in a few months, and I just want to be there.” And as fresh tears welled in Jal’s eyes, Saint found himself wiping his own. Three years of birthdays Jal hadn’t gotten to see. Three years of laughter and skinned knees and childhood and growth, and Saint had never loved anything or anybody the way Jal loved his family.
But God, he’d come close.
He reached out and wrapped an arm around Jal’s shoulders. “You’ve got it now, though,” he said. “Your way back. Council sees that footage, they’ll know you did nothing wrong. Can’t say it won’t be messy, but they shouldn’t fight you too hard, and Cap’s got friends on the Council. They’ll make sure their people back you—get you reinstated, if that’s what you want. Let you go, if it’s not.” Problem was, that footage wouldn’t do him a lick of good in the middle of nowhere on a radio-silent ship. Fuck. “We have to go back.”
“What?”
“To Sooner’s Weald. We go back, put some caps in your pocket, and get you a ride to the center spiral. This isn’t your fight, kid.” They’d lose a day, maybe, but Jal had come through hell just to get this close. Didn’t seem right to risk all that.
He wasn’t expecting the elbow to his ribs, or the tired chuckle that came after. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?” Jal said. His smile, though tight at the edges, looked closer to real than it had any right being after the night he’d had. “You see this cut?” He lifted the edge of the bandage on his arm. “I stashed a hunk of metal under my skin for three goddamn years, and stood in a hangar full of ticking bombs, just so I could prove I wasn’t a deserter. You think I’m gonna go back on that now?” He shook his head. “I meant what I said about getting home; don’t think for one second that I didn’t. But that video is the difference between going home a free man or a wanted one. I needed it, and one way or the other, y’all helped me get it. So now I need to help you.”
“You don’t owe us that.”
“It’s not about what I owe,” Jal said. “It’s about what’s right. This virus, it’s just a different verse to the same goddamn tune the Trust’s been singing since they shot their first rocket into the stars. They wreck lives and make bank, and the watchers ain’t watching shit, so they do it again, and again, and again. It wasn’t the scavs firing on us in that footage; it was Trust mercs, there to clean up a Trust mess, and decent people got caught in the crossfire. Decent people are always gonna get caught in the crossfire, and nobody’s stepping up to stop it.
“I just—fuck, old man. I’ve spent so long just trying to make it. Make it out, make it through, make it home. Feels like I forgot how to do anything else. How to care about anything else. But these last couple days, even with all the crazy shit that’s happened … I don’t know. I feel kind of like myself again, like how I used to be. And maybe.” He gave a small, uncertain shrug. “Maybe I just want the me that gets home to be a little more like the me that left it.”
He was going to have to talk about it, Saint thought. With Saint, or with Regan, or with an actual fucking professional—it didn’t matter who, and it didn’t have to be now, but Jal had to tell somebody what he’d really been through all those years. Saint saw the marks it left behind, the scars and the shadows and the cutaway pieces, but seeing it wasn’t good enough.
“Besides.” Jal rocked into Saint’s side, too weary to be playful but trying to be. “Y’all barely made it off Sooner’s with my help. Hate to see how you’d fare without me.”
Saint wanted to argue, he really did. Not just for Jal’s sake, but for the family who thought they’d lost him. The words just wouldn’t come. Stubborn and honorable and too damn faithful for the universe he’d been born in—it was Jal all over. Jal the way he’d always been, and at the end of the day they’d have all been better off if he’d trusted that sooner.
So he didn’t argue. “Then we’ll get you home after,” he said instead. A fool’s promise, maybe, when he had no idea what waited for them on Noether. He made it, though. He made it, and he meant it, because for all he didn’t know about what lay ahead, there was one thing he did.
Whatever it took, if it was the last thing he did, Saint would get Jal home.