Page 89 of Tethered
“Tell me that tonight was one big misunderstanding, then.”
Tanisira’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. She says nothing. My gut churns.
“Lied. You lied to me. Illegal weapons, smuggling, and oh, let’s not forgethuman trafficking.” The laugh that I grind out is jagged.
In my whole adulthood, I’ve probably only been in a handful of arguments. It’s not a point of pride, but rather one of contention between me and my loved ones. If something is a big enough issue for me, I walk away. Life is too short to stick around, drowning in discontent. But—and this is another thing that I keep safely buried—I’d rather walk away than create something out of the pain. I leave every time because I’m just not built for it.
I can’t walk away from this and it’s fucking killing me. I’m trapped with this damn poison thundering through my veins, and I wish I could just run.
As a choked sound slips from Tanisira’s throat, it feels like my insides are being tugged every which way. I’m not the one who committed literal crimes, but seeing her face darken with indecipherable emotion makes me feel guilty. We had shared something soft and tender and new for both of us.
Andstill, Tanisira hasn’t denied the accusation.
“I would do anything to keep Vee safe,” she finally says. “And you. I know you don’t believe me now. You’re right, I did lie. I’m sorry—”
“I don’t want your apologies. What the fuck happened out there?”
Hands yanking at her hair, I watch as she starts to pace and then abruptly stops and spins towards me. All I keep thinking is that I want to walk away, walk away now; from that forlorn look in her eyes, from this tangle of emotions connecting us.
Suddenly though, Tanisira looks determined.
“After I left the IAF, a friend reached out. He was smuggling goods, no drugs, and said it was the kind of job I could handle in my sleep.” Her hands curl into fists. “I was struggling to adjust to life as a civilian, and I needed to get out of that house. Being back was slowly killing me—”
“So you became a fucking human trafficker?” I yell.
“It was just meant to be goods,” she cries. “Victimless. Most of the time, clients on one end would load their haul straight into the hold and unload at the other end; we had minimal to no interactions with the delivery itself.”
Her eyes are too bright, a sheen of rain and resin. And I hate myself for noticing how beautiful they look, even now.
“Cargo ships are stop-searched religiously, but there are always officers on the take. If you find one high enough inrank, they can act like an early warning system, but that only makes a difference if you’re quick on the ball. They called me Myth because I was never caught. Ridiculous, but reputation’s invaluable in that world.”
I can’t picture Tanisira as this person, thisMyth. I scrutinise her. If I hadn’t heard Ryker—a man who’s probably never joked a day in his life—call her by that name, I wouldn’t have believed it. But that’s not why my heart pounds. It’s not the most pertinent truth I’m after. Despite all the blustering, I’m terrified to ask now that I know I might get the answer I really, really don’t want. Good or bad, Tanisira will tell me; I can read it in every single grimace, her hunched shoulders, the inward collapse of all that confidence.
There will be no coming back from it. She knows, of course she does, and the skin around her mouth tightens. Her whole body does. If I just push hard enough...
Fear tastes bitter in the back of my throat. Fear that the woman I admire is both a liar and a monster, that I’m a terrible judge of character; that this space we created, of seeing and being seen, has always been false.
“The crew expanded into trafficking.”
I exhale on an explosion as though I’ve been punched in the stomach. The air, at least, is too thin and slippery.
“How could—” I bite off the sentence, shaking my head. That’s not the right question. But what is? Anxiety steals all my words. I’ve let this person talk to my son, bealonewith him. I shared parts of myself with her, truths that I would never have told anyone else in the same situation.
“I didn’t know.”
She’s suddenly so close to me that I can feel her breath against my temple. She reaches out, and I blindly stumble back, avoiding her hand. If she touches me, I don’t know what I’ll do, I’ll—I’ll...
And then her words register. My head snaps up, gaze meeting hers: guilt, shame, acceptance, fear.
“How could you not know? You were the captain.” It comes out as a snarl.
“I didn’t. The ship was my responsibility, and I failed. I’m not denying that.”
My eyes narrow, and I wait for the ‘but’. It doesn’t come. Tanisira seems to be gathering herself, having fallen into pieces I didn’t know she could shatter into.
“I made changes that the crew didn’t like, but they’d stopped complaining, and I thought I’d won them over.” Tanisira looks away.
“I trusted them to do their jobs. They said I made them feel like children, so I backed off. Everything ran smoothly, so we just went on like that. There were...” She swallows hard. “Parts of the ship that I didn’t need to visit. TheRaat-Sarpadidn’t have advanced AI, so if I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I didn’t know about it. After years of running this operation, no one was messing up.”
