SAINT
In all Saint’s years as a ranger with the Guild, and as a soldier with the Earth intercontinental army before that, he’d gotten damn good at a lot of things. Waiting wasn’t one of them. Stick him behind a sniper rifle, and he could hold his ground until the job got done. Hours. Days. But he’d hate every second of it.
He hated every second of this, too—standing at the edge of the roof collapse, peering into the hangar for any signs of movement. Hard to imagine anyone could’ve survived something like that, but he’d heard the woman’s voice through Jal’s comms. Anke. He’d heard the rest of it, too. Only thing worse than a bomb, singular, were bombs, plural. It went against every stay-alive instinct he had to keep standing over top of them like that.
He couldn’t leave, though. He used to be good at that, too, leaving. But knowing there were still people down there, never mind that one of them was Jal, kept his boots rooted and his eyes fixed, no matter how much he itched to put some distance between him and the explosives under his feet.
“All right down there?” he called. Last he’d heard was Jal telling Anke to go, and I’ll be right behind you.
Which was why, when he saw a head of pinkish hair poke out from under the ship’s wing, he expected to see stringy, dirty blond right behind it. Didn’t expect to see the matte black of Jal’s oxygen tank on her back; his pack, his things, but not him.
“Up here,” he said, as the woman righted herself. Still looked a little unsteady on her feet, but for someone he’d heard gasping like a dry fish not two minutes prior, she seemed to be doing all right. She didn’t waste any time making her way toward him, climbing over piles of rubble that shifted more than they lay still and starting up the section of fallen roof on hands and feet. “Careful,” he told her, dropping to his knees to give her a hand.
“Your friend,” Anke panted when she reached the top. People didn’t bounce back from near-asphyxiation; the fact that she kept herself upright said she was tougher than her compact size and rosy color-block coat let on. “He’s coming—” But when she turned, she saw the same thing Saint did: stillness. Settling dust and not much else, and she turned back to him, wide-eyed and confused. “He said he’d be right behind me.”
He’s said a lot of things. The kid didn’t used to be any good at lying, but a man could pick up plenty of new habits in five years. He swore at the gap in the ceiling and hoped Jal had sense enough to know it was meant for him. “Jal, you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he answered in a slow, distracted drawl. Man could’ve had a gun to his head, and he still wouldn’t talk any faster than a trot. “Be with you momentarily.”
“Be with us now.”
“Momentarily,” Jal repeated. “Little tight in here. Sudden movements seem … unwise.”
He had gotten better at lying. Better, but not good. “Goddamn it.” That one wasn’t for Jal, but for the whole damn universe and the positions it put him in. To Anke, he said, “Off the edge, there, there’s a crate. Still a drop, but as long as you go slow, you should be fine. Head toward the other hangar, fast as you can. I’ll—”
“Be right behind me?” she asked, with a quirk of her lips just a little too anxious to be playful. He could like her, Saint thought. He could like her, if his heart weren’t pounding away at his sternum like a hammer to a nail.
“Be down there,” he finished with a nod toward the hole, “dragging a fool-ass man out by his fool-ass hair, if it comes to it.” A small, vindictive part of him hoped it would come to that. He’d tried words, hadn’t had much success. Maybe they were down to just one language the two of them could understand.
He eased himself down the fallen-in roof, boots sliding, gloves sliding, everything sliding until he hit the bottom. “Nash,” he said, “Ranger Ahlstrom’s headed your way.”
“Saint, you’d better not be doing something stupid.”
Never did pull her punches, Nash. “And if I am?” he asked, climbing over a charred I beam and ducking under a tangle of wires and rafters. Way he saw it, he didn’t have much choice. Better doing something stupid than doing nothing at all.
He could practically hear Nash rolling her eyes. “Then do it quick,” she said. “And try to devote at least as much energy to not dying as you do to not listening.”
“I’ll try.” He’d reached the wing, and he realized tight fit didn’t quite do it justice. He had to belly-crawl just to get to the other side, pushing debris out of the way until he could finally stand near the back of the ship. Three bodies, just like Jal had said; he studied them long enough to confirm dead and not a threat, and kept moving. “Must’ve been a party.”
“Yes, because smugglers are usually so festive,” Eoan chimed in, cheerfully sarcastic. “Does make you wonder what everyone was here for.” Another mystery; Eoan was probably having the time of their life.
Saint, not so much. The ramp shifted dangerously under his feet, creaking and groaning like it had plans to buckle any second as he jogged into the ship. “Jal!” he called. “Where are you?”
No answer. Not even the sound of breathing, because the crazy bastard had sent Anke out with his oxygen tank. Only so many places he could be, though, and knowing what he knew about Jal, he went the only way that made sense: forward. Through the falling-down throat of the ship, and there he was—a patched-up blue coat bent over the console in the cockpit.
Jal must’ve heard him coming, because he’d turned by the time Saint got through the doorway. Didn’t say anything, but then, it paid to be economical with words when you didn’t have any goddamn air.
“We have to go,” he said, snatching Jal’s collar. He’d barely gotten a hand on him when Jal shoved him away. Not some half-assed little thump, either; Jal knocked him into the lockers at the back of the cockpit, and the cracking plastic promised bruises come morning.
“Go,” Jal spat.
Saint wondered if that made any kind of sense in his head: that Saint would trek all the way down there just to turn around and leave. “I’m not leaving you.”
“Since when?”
Saint had a bad shoulder, from his army days. Healed up a long time ago, but sometimes, when the weather changed, or he slept bad, or he thought about it a little too hard, the ache came back as fresh as the day it was made.
Guilt, it turned out, was a lot like a bad shoulder. One look from Jal, one bitten-out retort, and his insides started bleeding all over again. Some things, you didn’t heal from; you just forgot the pain a little while, until something came along to remind you.
“You want to blame me,” he said, “blame me. You want to hate me, hate me. But we’re getting the hell out of this hangar, whether you want to or not.” The next time Saint went for him, when Jal tried to push him back, Saint snatched his wrist and yanked. Used the momentum Jal would’ve put into another shove to pull him away from the console, twisting him around and hooking an elbow under his chin.
Christ, Jal fought like a wet cat. He struggled every step of the way as Saint dragged him out of the cockpit, snarling through clenched teeth, boots digging into the ground, crooked, callused fingers clawing at Saint’s arm around his throat. The more he fought, though, the more air he burned. Oxygen-starved muscles stopped cooperating, and it got awfully hard for a man to put up a fight when his vision went gray. Halfway down the ship’s hall, Jal started wheezing. His grip got looser; his legs got clumsy, coltish, and the problem turned from overpowering Jal to wrestling the lanky bastard’s full weight down the rockhopper’s ramp and over to the wing.
“Move,” he barked, pulling Jal behind him into the crawl space. Panic crept into those gasps. One thing to hold your breath at rest; something else to try to pick a fight with no oxygen but what you had in your lungs. He could feel it the moment instinct took over, the need to breathe overriding whatever mad idea had Jal lingering in the rockhopper in the first place. He started to crawl, moving with Saint through the cramped space instead of against him, until they emerged on the other side. “Stay with me,” Saint told him. Not that Jal had much choice. Saint kept a hand on the back of his coat, half-dragging him up the slanted roof as they clambered to the top. Graceless, but fast. Saint could only hope it was fast enough, racing against some unknown countdown ticking away in his head.
Three, two, one.
Nothing.
Three, two, one.
Nothing.
Three two one, three two one, three two one, over and over as Jal dropped over the edge onto the crate, Saint just a beat behind him.
“I lost the signal!” a shout echoed from up ahead, near the corner of the warehouse. Anke’s head peeked up over a stack of crates, Nash’s right next to it. “Get down!”
Too late. Saint had weathered a few explosions in his life, enough to know that the light always came first. A flash of yellow-white across the ground, stretching his shadow ahead like it knew what was coming and was trying to outrun him. The sound and pressure came after, a thunderous boom that hardened the air at his back. It was all he could do to dive, tackling Jal to the ground and covering both their heads as a wave of suffocating heat washed over them. Bits of debris rained on them, some pieces as fine as dust, and others the size of fists beating down on their backs and legs.
It was over long before Saint realized it was over. Before his head sorted through the shock and disorientation enough to decide not dead and fucking ow, and not necessarily in that order. His neck tingled as he raised his head, like the beginnings of a bad sunburn.
“Jal?” It sounded like he’d stuffed his ears full of cotton balls; explosions and eardrums never did mix. “You all right? You hurt?”
Jal pushed himself to his knees beside him, but that was as far as he got. He stopped, sinking back onto his haunches to watch the smoke rise from the rubble with a stunned-flat expression and a sway to his shoulders that made Saint wonder if he’d stay upright much longer.
He did, as it turned out. He found his feet and kept them, with the help of a reconnected rebreather, as Eoan gave the order to fall back to the ship. Lord only knew what other surprises waited in the depot, and that was one question Eoan didn’t care to have answered.
That flat look stayed with Jal all the way back to the Ambit. Didn’t say a word to anybody as they trudged back through the trees, not even to Anke, who hugged him like an old friend and thanked him for not getting himself “blasted into human confetti.” Woman really painted a picture with her words.
As the cargo bay door sealed shut and the face masks came off, Saint had seen enough. “What the hell were you thinking?” He managed not to yell, but only because he’d tried it already, and he was too goddamn tired to keep beating his head against that particular wall. Wouldn’t snuff out the burning in his chest; it’d just breathe air into the flames. “That was reckless. Selfish. You know damn well it’s not just your life you’re risking when you pull bullshit like that with a crew.”
Jal didn’t even react. Saint didn’t know where that wan, washed-out face was looking, but it wasn’t at him.
“It all worked out, though,” Anke offered, with an optimism just genuine enough that it didn’t chafe. “So, hey, all’s well that ends well and all that. Honestly, I don’t know what I would’ve done if you guys hadn’t showed up. I mean. I know what I would’ve done.” She mimed an explosion with a nervous smile and bumped her glasses up her nose. “But here I am, and here we all are, so I’d”—she licked her finger and drew a W in the air—“chalk that one up in the old Win column, personall—oh, okay, we’re going this way.”
Nash had her by the elbow, steering her toward the doors at the back of the cargo bay. One led to the hall and the rest of the ship, but the one off to the side led back to a makeshift locker room with showers and fresh clothes. Mostly used for post-workout rinsing off, but from time to time, it came in handy for washing a tough mission away.
“We smell like cat piss and cordite,” Nash said. “We’re calling first dibs on the decon showers.” With a look over Anke’s shoulder that said something like, sort your shit, she disappeared with Anke through the locker room doors.
He almost wished he could call them back. Don’t leave me in here with him, he wanted to say to Nash, to Eoan, to anybody who could save him looking into that old familiar face and wondering where the hell everything went wrong. Eoan had set their sights on getting the Ambit back into the black, though, and Nash had made it pretty clear where she stood on Jal: your problems are your problem.
And so they were. He turned to Jal, but all the fire had gone out of his chest, leaving him cold and gritty and riding the special kind of adrenaline crash that came with nearly getting blasted to human confetti.
“Sit down,” he told Jal, nodding toward the weight bench and rubbing the back of his neck like that might ward off the headache creeping up from between his shoulder blades.
Jal hesitated, and Saint thought he’d argue about that, too. He almost wished he would’ve—he’d have taken stubborn mule Jal over this quiet, shell-shocked stranger who wandered over to the weight bench and took a seat. Fell into it, really, like he’d run out of strength to do otherwise.
He looked … defeated. Dirty and sweaty and beaten, head slung so low it could’ve rolled right off his shoulders, and Saint felt a swell of half-forgotten protectiveness he hadn’t realized he could feel for someone who’d made him so goddamn angry.
“Let me take a look at that arm,” he sighed. Blood dribbled stark and red out from under Jal’s right sleeve, smearing between his wringing hands. “Lose the jacket. I’ll be right back.” He’d have liked to say the walk over to the medkit on the wall gave him time to get his head on straight, but the cargo bay wasn’t anywhere near big enough for that. Probably not a cargo bay in the universe that was.
Jal had just finished peeling his arm out of his sleeve when Saint got back, wincing as he went. “Nasty cut,” Saint said. Deep enough to see the pulpy-white of dermis, and as long as Saint’s thumb along the top of Jal’s arm.
“Must’ve scraped it,” Jal said quietly.
“Looks like it hurts.”
Jal only hummed and let Saint pull his arm out across Saint’s knee. Didn’t tug it back as the antiseptic poured over it, bubbling the dirt from the wound and clearing away the dried-on blood, just clenched his fist and dragged in a breath.
“At least it’s clean.” Must’ve been some sharp metal that did it, but Jal didn’t volunteer any explanations. Didn’t volunteer another word, and Saint had never been a man who shied away from silence, but as he started cleaning up the edges with some gauze, that one got to be too heavy for even him. He sighed. “That boat was never going to fly again. You know that, right?”
“I wasn’t trying to run.” It wasn’t an argument; arguments invited more argument. No, it was closer to a plea. Believe me, it said, weary as it was wary. Just believe me.
Saint traded dirty gauze for fresh, watching the shade of Jal’s knuckles as he worked. The tighter his fist clenched, the easier Saint needed to go, because telling Saint when it hurt was apparently too complicated. “Then what were you trying to do?”
Either that was complicated, too, or Jal was just done being conversational. For a while, he just watched Saint work—watched blood and dirt give way to clean, tan skin and freckles and bruises.
Just when Saint had given up on hearing his voice again, Jal took a breath. “You remember…” His voice, low and ambling, barely made it over the hum of the engines. “Shit, must’ve been the second year we were deployed. You’d been talkin’ about your family’s old, uh.” He paused, searching for the word he wanted. “Fishing cabin. That’s right. Fishing. We were gonna go out, cut some holes in the ice, see what we could catch. Or what we could drink while we didn’t catch anything at all.” He chuckled. “First shore leave in a year, first time I’d been Earthside, and I swore you took me to the coldest little patch of trees you could find.
“But the snow. Never seen snow like that. So thick you could lose your whole boot in it, and I told you—I told you Bitsie’d never seen snow like that, and you remember what you said?”
Saint’s throat felt strangely tight. “I said you should bring them along.” Christ, that felt like a lifetime ago. Jal’s niece, Briley, couldn’t have been more than four or five at the time, and her mom had put up such a fight about it. Didn’t think they’d want her and Bitsie tagging along, crashing their trip. For all their differences, for all Regan’s sass and Jal’s easygoing quiet, the Red siblings had a stubborn streak in common that Saint still hadn’t seen the equal of.
“Everybody should see some snow when they’re still little enough to think it’s magic,” Jal murmured. “Forgot a lot of things, but I never forgot that.”
“I don’t think I was quite that poetic.”
“Poetry’s not just words,” Jal replied, matter-of-fact. “The way Bitsie laughed when you got her out there on that lake, man, that was poetry. Skating around on all that ice like she was dancin’ on air.” His voice had a fragility that hadn’t been there before. A wrinkle in his brows, like the memory brought as much despair as anything else. “Everybody falls, though, don’t they? Split her knee open on the ice, and I swear, blood’s never bothered me much, but.” He shook his head at himself. “My ass just stood there, useless as a glass hammer, and you come swoopin’ in, full-on hero mode. Scoop her up, carry her back to the cabin. You, uh. You had this old table by the fireplace, you remember?”
“My grandpa’s,” Saint managed. His grandpa’s grandpa’s, technically, so solid you could’ve built a house on it and never heard a creak. He could almost smell the woodsmoke, the old leather, the pine.
“That’s right.” Jal nodded. “You sat her right down on that table, and you patched her up just like this. Careful as anything, tellin’ her all about how you busted your ass last time you were out, too. Liar.” Another chuckle, but it hitched when Saint squeezed the dermapoxy into his cut. Stung like a bitch ’til the anesthetic kicked in, contracting and pulling the edges of the wound closed. “You had her grinning, though. Big and bright, the Bitsie Special. That little girl loved you, Saint.”
Saint tried to focus on cleaning up the weight bench. Capping the dermapoxy, picking up the wrappers and used gauze, eyes on anything but the bob of Jal’s throat and the barely-there tremor in his hand. “She loved you, too,” Saint said. “Loves you.” Dead or alive, in Saint’s head, he’d buried him. Hard to shake the past tense when the man in front of him still felt like a ghost. It really is him, he thought, eyeing the crook of his fingers and the scarred-up knuckles. Mining was a hard trade to grow up in; it left its mark. In a way, it hadn’t really sunk in until then. Until he’d shared a snowy old memory and heard the sunshine in Jal’s voice when he talked about his family. Somewhere along the way, he’d convinced himself it wasn’t his Jal who’d bailed. It wasn’t his Jal who’d turned his back on everything he held dear. His honor, his crew, his family.
But if this was him … if this was the Jal he’d served with, then so was all of that.
“I don’t know what they look like.” It was so quiet, Saint almost missed it. “I imagine it. How tall Bitsie’s got to be, now. They get so big so fast at that age. Regan must—she must have her hands full, running around after her all on her own.” Jal sat back, raking his good hand through his overgrown hair. “I just want to see ’em again,” he whispered. “That’s all. I just … I want ’em to know I didn’t leave ’em.”
“But you did.” The words felt like a stone in his throat, heavy and hard.
Jal’s flinch said they landed that way, too. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about what I did or what was done—” He closed his teeth around the rest, letting out a long hiss of a breath and straightening his specs across his nose. “I just want to see them,” he repeated, wearily. “But I don’t even know where they are.”
Saint cleared his throat, sealing the edges of the waterproof bandage over Jal’s arm. “That what you were doing on that rockhopper?” Saint wished he could’ve seen Jal’s eyes. They’d always been so damn expressive. Saint used to wonder if that wasn’t part of why Jal kept them hidden: to some folks, they made him a freak. A mutant. To others, the ones who knew better, they made him an open book. “Jal, we’ve got access to the same records Anke did. You should’ve said something.”
“Because you’ve been so accommodating of all my other requests.” He raised his head, drawing his arm back toward his chest and prodding at the edges of the bandage. “You know, you’re so convinced I’m trying to run. Maybe you ought to start asking what it is you think I’m running from. I ain’t seen the reports from the old crew, but I can hazard a guess what they say. What do you really reckon’s waitin’ for me at the end of this? Fair shake with the Captains’ Council, a few years in lockup to reflect on all the wrong I’ve done? Everybody always said I was the dumb one.”
Saint bristled. “Oh, but getting yourself killed, that’s a much better bet. Tell me something: What good is it to know where your family is if you’re hell-bent on dying before you ever make it back to them?”
Maybe it was for the best that the locker room door picked right then to open. Head off the start of another fight, when neither one of them had the energy to finish it. Still, Saint swore under his breath as Nash poked her head in. “You’re up,” she called, nose pinched. Saint didn’t blame her; the smell was eye-watering. They’d have to vent the bay just to get rid of it. “Eoan wants us in the galley ASAP.”
As Nash ducked back out, Jal gave him a sad, ragged-edged smile. “I don’t want to hate you, Saint,” he said, softly.
You want to hate me, hate me. The hangar was such a fucked-up blur, he barely remembered saying it. Saint had never been the type to panic, but for a moment—for a moment, he’d forgotten that wasn’t his best friend in there with him. His partner. He’d forgotten the last five years ever happened, and he’d nearly lost his damn head. He sighed. “And I don’t want you to die, kid.”
Somehow he’d picked the wrong thing to say. Saint watched Jal’s smile tighten and shift into something that was somehow both bitter and strangely … forgiving. Consoling, even. “You killed me the minute you hopped this crew and left me behind, old man,” he said. “You’re just back to finish the job.”
Then he lumbered off toward the lockers, whistling something sunny while his blood dried slowly in the lines of Saint’s hands.