Page 29 of Hostage

“She wouldn’t have left us to die, any more than she’d stay on the ship,” I reply. “Grieve her. Mourn her. But don’t dishonor her memory by turning her into a damsel in distress. She was never that.”

Malik’s expression shifts. He sighs. I see tears in his eyes. There are tears in mine too. Losing Zeki is losing a spark we won’t see again in this lifetime. She was perfect and wild, and Malik doesn’t know this, but she and I did once spend an evening together. We were not a compatible match. I was not what she needed, and now she’ll never have what she needed.

“You’re right,” he says. “Zeki chose her own path, and she’d kick my ass if she heard me talking about her that way.”

“Exactly. Let’s have some drinks in her memory. Tonight we celebrate her life, and Tolsten and Vortis and Mhak. Tonight, we drink to all those we lost, and honor their memories for who they were, free men and women who lived as they pleased.”

“YES!” Malik agrees, pounding the table again. “Tonight we make the stars shake with our rage, and tomorrow, we seek out the instruments of our destruction.”

I bend down and wink at the girl beneath the table. Dreamy gives me a little finger wave from her position at the back of the table, pressed up against the wall. Fate is strange. Logic would dictate I end up with someone like Zeki, someone bold and brave, fearless in the face of her demise. Instead, I have Dreamy, who bolts for the nearest corner at the slightest sign of danger. I have to give her credit. She is a survivor, if nothing else.

“Come,” I say, putting an arm around Malik’s shoulders. “Let us make the universe hear our grief and the glory of Zeki.”

10

Dreamy

Over the next week there is much drinking, and there are funerals. I am not a party to any of them. Shah keeps me hidden away, lest I bear the burden of the fury of any one of the many angry criminals he calls his compatriots. His crew processes their emotions with intoxicants and violence. Fortunately for me, he stays largely sober. And he no longer berates me about wanting to stay away from everyone. The mood of the ship has changed. There are no longer frequent comings and goings. There are only goings, an exodus for safer territories. That leaves Shah with a skeleton crew of what should be his most loyal men and women — but still the air of mistrust pervades.

“We are going to see the Seer,” Shah tells me one evening, when the oppressive awfulness of the ship seems too much for even him to bear. “She’s a woman with great talent, who knows that which should remain unknown. If anybody can tell me who has betrayed me, it is the Seer.”

“Does she have data and algorithms?”

“She has spirit and sense.”

That sounds vague to me, and not as useful as he seems to think it will be. But Shah knows best. This is his world, not mine. If we were trying to fold boxes, I might have some input. As it is, I just want to stay out of the way and not be blamed.

* * *

The Seer’s home is located on a wandering asteroid. We leave Shah’s ship on a little shuttle and make land outside her home. It is the most astonishing thing I have seen, a little cave-like growth on one of the ridges and furrows of the large rock. There is a little atmosphere, but no plant life whatsoever. It is a barren place in which surely nobody can live. But there is a light gleaming from inside the little cave, and though we have to wear suits to approach the cave, once we reach it a raven-haired woman with thick bands of white hair running through it bids us remove our helmets.

“Shah, and the one who dreams,” she greets us. “I felt your coming on the solar wind. Sit. Drink tea.”

We do as she tells us. Her little house is bigger on the inside than it seemed to be on the outside, but it is cozy. There are earthenware vessels from which she produces a hot beverage for us to drink.

There’s not as much talking as I thought there would be. We sit largely in silence. Shah seems relaxed. I’ve never seen him this calm and this still. I sit close beside him, sipping the tea with him, and letting the deep isolation of space wash around us. I never considered how much the busyness of the ship pervaded every moment of it.

“Shah,” she says. “It seems you have finally found the one you would die for. The deaths thus far have not been yours, but they have been numerous.”

She must have heard about the space station ambush through whatever passes for a mystical grapevine. As I look around her home, I see a lot of items all apparently jumbled, but I’d be willing to bet there’s some kind of communications device. I wonder how she gets groceries. Back in the Colony, we’d have a supplementary grocery pack delivered once a week. It had gruel and our supply of water. You could drink the water and have the gruel dry or soak the gruel in the water. Your choice. Infinite freedom.

“I am here because of the losses we have sustained, and the uncertainty around the future. There is a traitor in my midst,” Shah says.

The Seer nods and proceeds to practically ignore everything Shah just said. Instead, she looks at me with a piercing gray gaze. She seems very old, and yet not old at all. Timeless.

“You have great empathy and instinct,” she tells me. “You may not understand why it is you do what you do, but you will feel very strongly when you need to do something. Follow your instincts. They will never lead you astray. You have a pure heart and a gentle spirit.”

She looks at Shah. “You carry great darkness.”

He smiles, but she didn’t mean it as a compliment. Her eyes seem to darken when she looks at him, her pupils expanding until the color of her irises disappears almost completely.

“Evil spirits are around you,” she intones. “They stalk you unseen. You are the prey of a predator you are incapable of destroying. Only the pure will save you.”

“I was hoping for some more concrete intel,” Shah says. “A name?”

“Zeki.”

“Zeki passed.”

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