‘I get it,’ I told her. ‘Doing what I did to that boy who killed Kasia helped. But it made me angry. Angry with the whole world, the injustice of it all.’
‘How it seems like no one cares,’ Katherine muttered.
‘Yeah. All of that. But it was nothing compared to how angry I was with myself. And at the end of the day, that’s the hardest part. Fighting the urge to never forgive yourself.’
Katherine eyed me through strands of her wind-whipped hair. ‘How’d you win it?’
‘I didn’t. I just learned to stop fighting. I learned that’s the way things are, and that I’m going to have to find a way to live with it.’ I met her eyes. ‘And I learned to find people like me and talk about it. Help them along the way.’
A quiet moment passed between us. Eventually, a sad smile tugged at Kowalski’s lips. ‘I’d like that.’
I matched her smile, pleased she’d agreed to the idea. The wind howled around us. The slow trickle of ships like a glowing ribbons streaming out of the tubes. ‘It took me for ever to learn the worst thing you can do is try and forget about them. You do that, you rob yourself of everything they ever gave you. You bottle it up, something inside you will break.’ I felt a faint rip in my chest, like old stitching tearing loose. ‘The people that matter to us aren’t always meant to be in our lives for ever. But the things they did to make you a better person can be. Nothing’s ever going to fill the hole they left behind, but keeping them in mind makes it a little easier.’
Kowalski nodded, her gaze fixed on the endless curve of rippling waves along the false horizon like a long-lost dream. She withdrew and brushed the hair out of her face to offer me a watery smile. ‘Thanks, Vak. Really. This helped. More than I thought it would.’
Everyone grieves in different ways. We all have different shaped holes left in our lives when people we love are gone. But when grief hits hard, it’s not about dimensions or angles. Grief numbs. Turns everything so cold you don’t know what to feel. I could connect with that, even though I couldn’t articulate how it feels. Some days, I woke up realising friends I’d known in the Reaper War were dead. Gone for a decade, buried in some mudhole on a distant war-torn planet I’d never see again, and the pain hit me all over again. Because trauma never goes away. Loss never goes away. Not really. But trying to do your best to face up to it, finding comfort in each other, maybe we could survive it.
We continued our conversation until Grim arrived an hour later, and promptly got to work. We sat in a semi-circle around a wide flexiscreen. The virtual space around us was so cluttered with papers, spreadsheets and comparisons I had to fight the urge to swat them away. ‘I’m guessing you have nothing about their base, right?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. No trace, no log, nothing.’ Grim rotated the orrery of pages around. ‘But there might still be a clue to its location.’
I expanded the image of the chainship until the small spacecraft filled the room. ‘This has to be on Compass,’ I said. ‘Look at the design of the hangar and the flag in the background. I think their base is offworld and they’re using this dock to access Compass.’
‘The only person who could tell us either way is dead,’ Katherine told us. I’d drawn my chair close to hers, our legs touching as we inspected the data together. I saw a slight smile pull across her lips as I brushed my arm against hers. ‘I can’t say I’m mourning his passing.’
‘Wait, wait, wait.’ Grim leaned forward. ‘There’s a “J” at the bottom.’
‘A signature. Jae Myouk-soon,’ I said.
‘We searched the archives for her,’ Katherine told me. ‘Got no results.’
‘Either she’s no got no record, or someone inside Harmony is protecting her.’
‘The more this goes on, the more I’m starting to think you’re right.’
Grim raised a finger, his Harvest tattoos gleaming in the light. ‘Okay. Backtrack. How do you know that name?’
‘It came up in the files. Why? You’ve heard of her?’
Grim eased his body into a bean-bag big enough to swallow him up. ‘Yeah. Myouk-soon was one of the most feared espionage agents for hire on Harvest. Contract killer, you know? She rooted out traitors and threats to Harvest, led the crackdown on Harvest immigrants and war refugees. Made sure that no one could desert or feed information to Harmony. Even before the war, she made her living rooting out security threats.’ My friend’s hands were white, clasped tightly together. ‘They called her The Killer Chemist. She was the only reason I didn’t defect sooner. I was too afraid she’d catch me.’
‘What did she do?’ I asked.
‘If she suspected someone of selling state secrets, or those who had links to threats to Harvest? She’d inject them with genetic viruses, customised to her victim. One made you tear your own eyes out. Another made breathing feel like having glass shards poured down your throat. It’d take her just a few chemicals to drive you insane, or make you kill yourself. The worse the crime, the more imaginative the punishment. She was seventeen when she started. Seventeen.’
I remembered our brief conversation. That blubbering Bulkava was right, you really do look like your brother. What had she done to that poor alien because he’d helped us? Had she punished Artyom too, for not revealing our
