Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

happened if she hadn’t started crying, those tears like a shield, like a weapon she’d fashioned from her weakness. I’ve always loathed the sight of tears, for no sane reason, and I like to think everything would have played out some other way if she just hadn’t started crying. But that’s probably bullshit, and even if it isn’t, it wouldn’t matter, would it? So, whatever I said earlier about not being the sort of woman to interfere in another’s decisions, forget that. Remember this, instead.
    Sailor left that night, and I haven’t seen or heard from her since. I waited for a summons to appear before the quarter magistrate on charges of assault, but the summons never came, and one day I returned home from my morning classes to find that most of her clothes were gone. I never found out if she retrieved them herself or if someone did it for her. A couple of weeks later, I learned that three Fenrir priests had been arrested near Kepler City, and that the district marshals suspected they’d passed near Molesworth and Herschel earlier in Pisces, that they’d been camped outside Mensae sometime back in Capricorn.
    And that morning in Hope VII, all those months later, I sat and listened to Jun’ko’s billygirl sobbing because she was afraid, and I dug my nails into my palms until the pain was all that mattered.
     
    “I think you must miss her,” Mikaela said, looking back over her left shoulder at me, answering a question I hadn’t asked. “To have left Herschel and come all the way out here, to go poking around Jun’ko’s place. Lady, no one comes to Heaven, not if she can help it.”
    “I’ve been here before,” I said. “When I was young, about your age.”
    “Yeah, that’s what Jun’ko was telling me,” she replied, and I wanted to ask what else the mechanic might have told her, but I didn’t. I was following Mikaela down a street so narrow it might as well have been an alleyway, three or four blocks over from the dome’s main thoroughfare. Far above us, sensors buried in the framework of the central span were busy calibrating the skylights to match the rising sun outside. But some servo or relay-drive bot responsible for this sector of Hope VII had been down for the last few months, according to Mikaela. So we walked together in the lingering gloom, the patchy frost crunching softly beneath our feet, while the rest of the dome brightened and warmed. Once or twice, I noticed someone watching us through a smudgy window, suspicious eyes set in wary, indistinct faces, but there was no one on the street yet. The lack of traffic added to my unease and the general sense of desolation and decay; this was hardscrabble, even by the standards of Hope’s Heaven. That far back from town center, almost everything was adobe brick and pressed sand-tile, mostly a jumble of warehouses, garages, and machine shops, with a shabby handful of old-line modular residential structures stacked about here and there. If Mikaela were leading me into an ambush, she couldn’t have chosen a better setting.
    “You hang close to me, Councilor,” she said. “People around here, they don’t care so much for outsiders. It’s a bad part of town.”
    “You mean to say there’s a good part?” I asked, and she laughed, then stopped and peered down a cross street, rubbing her hands together for warmth. Her breath steamed in the morning air.
    “No,” she said. “I sure wouldn’t go so far as to say that. But there’s bad and there’s worse.” She frowned and looked back the way we’d come.
    “Is something wrong?” I asked. She shook her head, then pointed east, towards the cross street.
    “It’s that way, just a little piece farther,” she said, and then she changed the subject. “Is it true you’ve been offworld? That’s what Jun’ko said, that you’ve been up to Eos Station, that you’ve seen men. Men from Earth.”
    I nodded my head, still looking in the direction she’d pointed. “It’s true. But that