Grimspace

“They have great stuffed peppers,” I say, and that seems to startle him.

“Okay, I’ll bite.” He drops down in the chair opposite me. “What’s up, Jax?”

“Dinner?” Maybe he’ll take the news better with a full stomach. Regardless, it can’t hurt, and I really do like their stuffed peppers.

So we eat, but I sense the currents stirring beneath our casual conversation. When the waiters clear our plates and we’re left with just our wine to finish, I wrap both my hands around the glass because I feel the need to hold on to something. This is harder than I thought it would be.

“You want to tell me what’s going on now?” He sits back in his chair, propping his ankle on his knee.

I take a deep breath. “It’s time for us to part ways. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since we left the station, and I just don’t feel this is worth it.”

March starts to smile like he’s waiting for the punch line. “No, seriously.”

That’s when I drop the mental walls he taught me how to build, and now I can feel his presence more than I ever could before. Perhaps it’s a result of his absence; perhaps I’m simply developing a little of my own latent sensitivity.

“Seriously.”

He shakes his head, seeming unable to believe what he’s seen inside my head. “You can’t go…we saved you.”

“Yes, you did,” I say gently. “And I saved you, too. I’ll always be grateful to you for getting me off Perlas, but this isn’t how I want to live. You don’t own me.”

I can tell he’s getting angry. “What the hell do you think you’re going to do, Jax? You have no creds and no training.”

“Doc paid me the wages I should have earned during the time I’ve been with you. He said he didn’t think I should be stuck on the Folly, unable to enjoy myself.” I’m trying not to argue with him because it’s not open for debate. My mind is made up.

“You think that’s going to last forever? What the frag do you think you can do here? Wait tables?” He gestures at the handsome young man, who takes one look at March’s face and heads the other way. “You’d kick someone in the head the first time he complained about the food.”

I smile because he’s right about that, but I’ve done some digging while we’ve been here. “I can probably get work at one of the fetish clubs. Gehenna caters to different tastes, you know.” Scars, piercing, and body art are popular with a certain clientele.

“And that’s what you want to devote your life to?” He sits forward then, elbows on the table, and his eyes sear me. “Letting freaks stare at you until you’re so old they don’t want to anymore?”

“No, but it’ll put food on the table until I decide what I do want. Too many people have died, and I don’t intend to be one of them.”

“Nobody ever accomplished anything this big if people weren’t willing to die for it. Maybe I won’t see Mair’s vision come to fruition, but we’ll lay the groundwork so that others can come behind us and finish our work. One thing’s for sure, though, I won’t allow them to have died in vain because I’m afraid to see it through. You’re a fucking coward, Jax, and you’re running because you’re scared you found something worth dying for, something more important than you.”

I grit my teeth. “You know what I see? Someone afraid of finding something worth living for. Everyone you love dies, so you decided it’s better to be a doomed hero, and you don’t care who you drag down with you. Do you really believe in this cause, heart and soul, or is it just that there’s nothing else for you? You’re a pilot who doesn’t want to fly because his ship’s a monument to his dead sister, and you have the nerve to bitch at me? Get your own life in order before you come at me like you have all the answers.”

As soon as the words leave my mouth, I’m sorry. I see him flinch although nobody else would have known they’d drawn blood. He shoves his chair back so hard that the scraping sound momentarily silences the low hum of conversation nearby.

“Part of that may be true,” he growls. “But I don’t use people, and I don’t fuck my friends over. I get it, Jax, and I’ll tell Doc and Dina you took the opportunity to jump ship as soon as we arrived somewhere you’d rather be.”

“March…”

He doesn’t turn, so I watch until his angry strides carry him out of sight. I don’t have a chance to tell him it wasn’t like that; I didn’t lie to them, pretending to believe in what they were doing until I saw my chance to get away here. The cost just got too high, that’s all. I didn’t want it to end like this, but maybe I always knew we’d never wind up friends. Though I didn’t always agree with him or even like him sometimes, March is a rock, and you don’t run across those too often.

And losing him hurts more than I thought it would because I’ve come to count on him. If nothing else, though, I believed in March, and maybe deep down I hoped he’d see my point of view. If he hadn’t reacted like that, I might have asked him to stay. I hadn’t made up my mind, but his response decided matters for me. I finish my wine coolly, pretending the looks people keep sliding my way don’t bother me.

Like none of you ever argued about anything. Or maybe you never cared enough.

It occurs to me then, he probably came down so hard on me because I hurt him. Maybe it felt personal, like a betrayal. And that pains me, but there’s nothing I can do about it because it doesn’t change my mind. I want a life, not sacrifice.

The waiter comes toward me like a child afraid of being slapped, so I muster up a smile and settle the bill. I collect my bag and leave with my head high. It’s time to put all this behind me. I need to find work and a place to live. This is my new life, exactly what I wanted, and if I have a pain in my chest that won’t go away, then I’ll push it back.

That survival trick, you see? I’ve taken the old Jax and boxed her up. It’s time to move on to the next Jax incarnation, but at this moment, even I can’t see what kind of person she’ll be, what she’ll do for a living, or whom she’ll love.

My future seems misty, shrouded just like Gehenna’s sun, and maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

CHAPTER 39

Have you ever watched a child learning to walk?

Before this week, I never had, but there’s a certain grace to it. Well, if not grace, then tenacity. Fall down nine times—get up ten. And the tenth time you get where you’re going, you don’t stop, not for obstacles, not for other people telling you to stop. You don’t listen to anything but that inner voice until you arrive where you want to be.

When do we lose that? Of course, maybe that inner voice needs some refinement because it apparently also tells us to eat what comes out of our noses, and that it’s funny to hit people in the head, but I think maybe it carries a true message, too, something we shouldn’t lose. I learned that working with children this week, not school-aged ones with the start of civilization impressed upon them. No, these are hardly more than babies, just learning to walk, little schooners of self.

It’s strange how it worked out. I went to Hidden Rue, expecting to take my place on the stage. By all accounts it’s a hard-core fetish club, where my scars might be an asset, but the old woman who owned the place took one look at me, and said, “You’re too old, too scrawny, and your burns aren’t interesting enough. What else can you do?”

For a moment, March’s mocking words came back to me, and I almost said, “Not a damn thing.”

Instead I did what I do best, spun a nice line of bullshit, the result of which is me, helping to watch the dancers’ babies. Hidden Rue is a decent place to work. Domina, the owner, takes good care of her girls. Furthermore, she looks like she probably danced here in her day since she’s tattooed, rit-scarred, and probably pierced in places I don’t want to know about. They say an interesting life leaves its mark on your face, and if that’s true, she’s got one hell of a story. She’s the one who told me that Sapphire is a line of cosmetics favored by strippers and joy girls.

The women have to stick together here because patrons tend to be rougher than what you get in a regular bar, guys who wish they’d inflicted those scars, those wounds. Or it’s the other side of the spectrum, timid little submissives who imagine each dancer as their own personal princess of pain. Occasionally we get others, too, mainly aliens who don’t seem to realize the club’s skewed west of the human norm.

I don’t work the floor, though, so my contact with the public is minimal. Instead, I spend my evenings trying to entertain fractious toddlers who want their mothers, wail for no reason, and upchuck whenever it’s likely to do the most harm. I’ve been hired to assist a woman named Adele, who glows with serenity like nobody I’ve ever known. She’s short and round, skin the color of choclaste, so of course I like her on sight. She wears her hair in loose graying curls and might be anywhere between fifty and a hundred, though her smooth skin makes the latter unlikely.

We see a steady stream of dancers in costume in the crèche during the course of a night. They want a quick cuddle between sets, but it usually leaves the little one crying. Still, I think it’s nice of Domina to offer child care, although she does take a small cut from the dancers who use the service. That seems fair enough, no reason she should pay us entirely out of her own pocket. The babies I’m less sure about, although ironically my time with baby-Z has prepared me somewhat.

Adele even comments, “I can tell you’ve done this before. What happened to your little one, honey?”

“He died.” I feel suffused with guilt all over again.

If they knew what happened, they wouldn’t let me work here.

She accepts that with a shake of her head and says nothing more. Instead, there’s a spill to clean up, and Mattin has hit Lleela in the head again. There’s justice to dispense, and tears to dry; we’re constantly moving until we get them to sleep one by one. This is my fifth evening on the job, and I go home bone-tired, but it’s not a bad feeling. Instead, there’s satisfaction in it, like I’m living a good life if not a large one.

It’s penance. There’s a reason I ended up here. I didn’t do right by baby-Z, so I’ll make it up as best I can. It’s not what I’d choose to do, but I don’t even know what that would be. The most important thing is that I’m accomplishing it by myself.

In the mornings, I like to shop. So first thing, I get up and head over to the market. Sometimes I look at the diaphanous veils and the belly jewels laid out, then at the next stall over I find totemic carvings and blessed kirpan waiting for those who believe in luck and talismans against evil. I linger over pottery and paintings. It seems as though I’ve never had a place of my own to decorate. In my parents’ house, I had a room, of course, but I was never permitted to change it or make it mine.