It was strange to think of an afterward. The more she imagined it, the more she could see herself relaxing back into Melba’s life. There was no reason not to. Clarissa Mao had nothing, commanded nothing, was nothing. Melba Koh had work, at least. A history. It was a pretty thought, made prettier by being impossible. She would go home, become Clarissa again, and do whatever else she could to restore her family’s name. Honor required it. If she’d stayed, it would have meant being like Julie.
Growing up, Clarissa had admired and resented her older sister. Julie the pretty one. The smart one. The champion yacht racer. Julie who could make Father laugh. Julie who could do no wrong. Petyr was younger than Clarissa and so would always be less. The twins Michael and Anthea had always been a world unto themselves, sharing jokes and comments that only they understood, and so seemed at times more like long-term guests of the family than part of it. Julie was the oldest, the one Clarissa longed to be. The one to beat. Clarissa hadn’t been the only one to see Julie that way. Their mother felt it too. It was the thing that made Clarissa and her mother most alike.
And then something happened. Julie had walked away from them all, cut her hair, dropped out of school, and disappeared up into the darkness. She remembered her father hearing the news over dinner. They’d been having kaju murgh kari in the informal dining room that overlooked the park. She’d just come back from her riding lesson and still smelled a little of horse. Petyr had been talking about mathematics again, boring everyone, when her mother looked up from her plate with a smile and announced that Julie had written a letter to say she’d quit the family. Clarissa’s mouth had dropped open. It was like saying that the sun had decided to become a politician or that four had decided to be eight. It wasn’t quite incomprehensible, but it lived on the edge.
Her father had laughed. He’d said it was a phase. Julie’d gone to live like the common people and sow a few wild oats, and once she’d had her fill, she’d come home. But she’d seen in his eyes that he didn’t believe it. His perfect girl was gone. She’d rejected not only him, but the family. Their name. Forever after, cashews and curry had tasted like victory.
And so Melba would have to be folded up when she was done here. Put back in a box and buried or burned. Clarissa could go live with one of her siblings. Petyr had his own ship now. She could work on it as an electrochemical engineer, she thought with a smile. Or, in the worst case, stay with Mother. If she told them what she’d done, how she’d saved the family name, then Clarissa could start to rebuild the company. Remake their empire in her own name. Possibly even free her father from imprisonment and exile.
The thought left her feeling both hopeful and tired.
A loud clang and the distant sound of laughter brought her back to herself. She reviewed the maintenance schedule for the next ten-day cycle—maintenance on the electrical systems of three of the minor warships and a physical inventory of the electrical cards—marked the ship’s time, and shut down her terminal. The mess hall was half full when she got there, members of half a dozen other teams eating together and talking and watching the newsfeeds about the Ring, about themselves going to meet it. Soledad was sitting by herself, gaze fixed on her hand terminal while she ate a green-brown paste that looked like feces but smelled like the finest-cooked beef in the world. Melba told herself to think of it as pâte, and then it wasn’t so bad.
Melba got herself a plate and a bulb of lemon water and slid in across from Soledad. The other woman’s eyes flicked up with a small but genuine smile.
“Hoy, boss,” she said. “How’s it go?”
“Everything’s copacetic.” Melba smiled. She smiled more than Clarissa did. That was an interesting thought. “What did I miss?”
“Report from Mars. Data, this time. The ship that went through? Not on the drift.”
“Really?” Melba said. After they’d picked up the faint transmission from the little cobbled-together ship that had started all this, the assumption had been that it had been crippled by something that lived on the other side of the Ring. That it was floating free. “It’s under power?”
“Maybe,” Soledad said. “Data shows it’s moving, and a lot slower than it went in. And the probes they sent in? One of them got grabbed too. Normal burn, and then boom, stopped. The signal’s all f**ked up, but it looks like the same course that the ship’s on. Like they’re being… taken to the same place. Or something.”
“Weird,” Melba said. “But I guess weird is kind of what we expect. After Eros.”
“My dad was on Eros,” Soledad said, and Melba felt a strange tightening in her throat. “He worked one of the casinos. Security to make sure no one hacked the games, right? Been there fifteen years. Said he was going to retire there, get a little hole up where he didn’t weigh so much and just live off his retirement.”
“I’m sorry.”
Soledad shrugged.
“Everyone dies,” she said gruffly, then wiped the back of her hand against her eyes and turned back to the screen.
“My sister was there,” Melba said. It was truth, and more than truth. “My sister was one of the first ones it took.”
“Shit,” Soledad said, looking up at her now, terminal forgotten.
“Yeah.”
The two were quiet for a long moment. At another table, a Belter man no more than twenty barked his knees against the edge of the table and started cursing squat little Earth designers, to the amusement of his friends.
“You think they’re still there?” Soledad said softly, nodding at her terminal. “There were those voices. The transmissions that came off Eros. You know. After. It was people, right?”
“They’re dead,” Melba said. “Everyone on Eros died.”
“Changed, anyway,” Soledad said. “Some guy said it took the patterns off them, right? Their bodies. Their brains. I think about maybe they never really died. Just got remade, you know? What if their brains never stopped working and just got…”
She shrugged, looking for a word, but Melba knew what she meant. Change, even profound change, wasn’t the same as death. She was proof enough of that.
“Does it matter?”
“What if their souls never got loose?” Soledad said, with real pain in her voice. “What if it caught them all, right? Your sister. My dad. What if they aren’t dead, and Ring’s got all their souls still?”