It’s the truth. I do want that drawing, tucked safely behind one of the fake photos on the sideboard, almost as much as I want the gun in my bedroom. Almost—but not quite.
Gideon’s face, what I can see of it through the blur of tears, softens. “I get it, I do. You know that I do.” His eyes go to his pack, and I can see, for the tiniest moment, my grief reflected there in his face. Abruptly I’m reminded of that book he brought with him, the only thing he grabbed from his den that wasn’t computer equipment. “But Sof, it’s just a thing.”
I shake my head, the movement sending another tear to join the first. Even now my memory of the picture—a drawing Mihall made for me, since we didn’t have a camera—is blurring. I try to picture my father’s face, imagine his voice, and the fragments of memory flutter past, fleeting, impossible to reassemble. The particular pattern of calluses on his palm, the half-tuneless ditty he’d whistle to himself while he worked, the shuffle of his boots on the doormat when he came home—each time I grab for one memory the others fly away.
But with that piece of paper in my hands the fragments settle, drawn to the lines of ink and graphite like moths to the paper lanterns lighting the undercity at night.
“It’s not just a thing,” I whisper.
Gideon hesitates a long moment, then sighs. “No. It’s not. Just…be careful, okay?” He lifts a hand, the movement slow enough that I can pull away. I don’t. The edge of his finger brushes my jaw, and the tear clinging there comes away at his touch.
I blink to clear my vision and find his eyes—hazel, with a ring of green—on mine.
He clears his throat and lurches back, regaining his balance as he stands up. “After all, if you get snatched and I have to go to the Daedalus on my own, some socialite is probably going to ask me to dance, and then I’ll be done for.”
Surprise is enough to give me a handhold to pull myself out of my grief. “You don’t know how to dance?”
Gideon raises an eyebrow. “Do I look like I know how to dance?”
I discover a smile trying to fight its way free, despite the tearstains I can still feel chilling my face. “I can teach you.”
Gideon pauses, thoughtful, his eyes on my mouth. I think he sees the smile too, because his grin flashes abruptly. “If there’s going to be dancing at the gala on the Daedalus, then it’d be criminally negligent to head up there without knowing a few steps, wouldn’t it?”
“Well…” I say slowly. “Not really. If asked you can always just say you don’t feel—”
“I said,” Gideon interrupts, stressing each word individually, “that it’d be criminal not to practice dancing, wouldn’t it?” His eyes gleam, and he grabs for his lapscreen to turn up the volume and open a hypernet radio app.
“Find a classical music station,” I say finally, clearing my throat and getting to my feet. “A waltz if you can, those are easy to learn.”
It’s only after I speak that I realize he might not even know what a waltz is—I didn’t, before Dani—but he doesn’t even hesitate. Not for the first time, I wonder if this might not be his first exposure to the upper classes. I know so little about him, about his past and what brought him here, that I might as well be gazing at a complete stranger. After testing a few different spots to find satellite reception, and flipping through a few stations, he finds a brisk, cheerful waltz. I don’t recognize it—I don’t know classical music, or in fact any music, well at all, unless it’s the lively fiddles and bodhrans of Avon.
“Okay, so how does this work?” Gideon straightens, glancing at me and then quickly back at the palm pad, like the source of the music echoing grandly through the arcade might help him more than I will.
He’s nervous. I’d want to laugh, except that my own heart rate hasn’t settled properly in days. Get a grip, Sofia.
“Come here,” I say, trying to sound brisk, businesslike. I can’t fool myself anymore that that’s all this is, but I also can’t let myself give in. My thoughts want to open up, to look beyond the Daedalus, but I know there is no “beyond the Daedalus.” And if I let myself think there could be, I won’t be able to do what I’ve been working toward for the past year of my life. He’s been working to uncover LaRoux’s plans, but I’ve been working just to get close enough to him to make him answer for murdering my father. I can’t let Gideon become more important than killing the monster that is Roderick LaRoux.
Gideon’s watching me, waiting for me to instruct him. Looking at him, I can’t help but think that maybe there could be a life after the Daedalus. I’ve wanted nothing but LaRoux’s death for so long that I’ve forgotten how to want anything else, but here, with Gideon’s face not far from mine, that cold certainty is feeling less solid with every passing second.
“Sof?”
I shove those thoughts aside and make myself sound calm. “Take my hand, like this. My other hand goes at your shoulder, just so, and yours goes at my waist.” I pause. “My waist, Gideon.”
His eyes flick up, revealing a wicked gleam there before he shifts his hand upward. “Must’ve misheard you there.”
“Mm-hmm.” I keep my voice deadpan. “Now, listen to the beat of the music. Hear that one-two-three pattern? That’s how our steps will go.…”
He’s a quick study. If I hadn’t already seen more than enough evidence of his agility while climbing through ducts and elevator shafts, this would convince me that all that exercise equipment in his den got put to good use. He’s got the basic idea down by the end of the first waltz, and the next several songs are a variety of other styles, giving me a chance to explain the differences in a few dances.
Judging by the number of songs elapsed, by the end of our first hour he’s more or less competent. The current song ends, and we pause, left slightly breathless. It was a faster song, and Gideon’s getting confident enough now to spin me around—with only limited success. He’s not a brilliant dancer, but he’s good enough. He won’t draw attention on the dance floor, either good or bad—which is exactly what we’re aiming for.
I know I should propose that we stop for the night—I know I should propose we divide up the blankets again and go to sleep in our separate corners. Turn the lights off and leave this place once more to the dust and the dark.
But I don’t.
The next song starts to play, beginning with a haunting patter of piano notes—and I freeze.
I know this song. It’s one of the only pieces I recognize, and I know it only because of a recording my father’s friend made of a broadcast twenty years before I was born, before the transmission embargo on Avon. When I first heard it I started crying, and my father’s friend—whose name I can’t remember, why can’t I remember it?—gave the recording to me to keep.
It wasn’t until after I left Avon that I learned its name: the Butterfly Waltz in E minor. It was composed by a fourteen-year-old prodigy in a country on Earth called Iran in the twenty-third century. She was killed in a shuttle crash not long after she finished the piece. It was the only song she ever wrote. Somehow, that detail—tragic and awful as it was—made the piece more beautiful. More poignant. She may have died a child, but this song, this part of her, is still here. Echoing through the empty buildings of an arcade abandoned before I was born.