I drop my head. Can’t think of many who lived long enough to learn a different way to be, Falco had said. Would the General, now that she has a chance?
Water drips as the surgeon wearily washes his face. I look over at him, lit by the steady solar lights. No tattoos on his temples, just two small scars upon his neck.
‘Were you in the FL?’ I ask.
‘I joined up for a time. Before they lost their way.’
Beyond the ranch house the wind rushes down the slope of the foothills like water. Exhausted, I lean upon the railing, feeling every bruise and laceration, wondering how my body is still holding itself together.
‘It is quiet here,’ I say.
‘A good spot,’ the surgeon agrees, taking a pipe from his pocket, and a tin. He nods to the small, metal-sided vegetable plots. ‘The shade of the hill keeps the earth from drying out too much.’
‘You get no trouble?’
‘The gangs know we treat whoever arrives at the door, no questions asked.’
‘And the Seekers?’ I stare at his face, at the deep lines of his cheeks as he lights the pipe.
He doesn’t answer straight away, instead takes a long drag. ‘They know I follow The Way. I think they respect that, see it as something similar to their own beliefs about the universe.’
He meets my eyes and smiles, an expression as worn and thin as an old scalpel.
‘Is this peace?’ I ask.
‘No.’ He looks into the night. ‘It’s life.’
* * *
The morning after our escape, Pegeen and Rat and Bui, all of them patched and bandaged, come riding back up to the ranch on borrowed mules and mares, dragging the damaged Charis on a makeshift truck behind them. When she sees the ship’s hold, Falco lets out a shout of laughter. It is stuffed full of plunder: panels and components and chips and power cells, the inner workings from the Iron Slug and the downed Accord fighters.
We sit on the porch with the surgeon and his husband Marti, sipping on cups of precious, watered-down tea, watching the G’hals calculate their profits.
‘If we can shift even half of this off-world, we’ll make a fortune,’ Peg says.
‘We’ll need a good smuggler.’ Falco’s eye narrows, bright with morphine. ‘How about it, flyboy?’
Silas starts to laugh, then winces in pain, holding his torso. ‘Only if you stop calling me that,’ he wheezes.
‘The thing I don’t get,’ Rat says, picking at her teeth. ‘Is why the Seekers left any of this behind. They usually strip ships and bodies to the marrow, right?’
‘They helped themselves to some, definitely to the bodies,’ Bui points out. ‘Maybe it was too much for them to carry?’
‘No,’ Peg says, frowning. ‘Some of this stuff was piled up, portioned almost, like it had been left deliberate.’
I meet Falco’s gaze.
‘Whatever the reason,’ she says. ‘We earned it.’
We stay at the surgeon’s for two days, while the General lies silent, hooked to the medical man’s cobbled together machines, and Falco curses us out and laughs at us in equal measure, and Silas groggily asks me to keep him company on the pallet bed.
Peace, I think, as I lay with my head on his shoulder, careful of his chest, listening to him breathe. Could it look like this for me?
I can’t remember another time like it, on Factus. While the G’hals work on their takings and Silas painstakingly assesses the Charis’s damage, I limp around helping the surgeon with his supplies, watching Marti tend his garden of medicinal herbs and prized vegetables. Later, we sit down together at the scratched metal table, to cricket soup flavoured with ferocious home-grown chillies and fried greens and proteinmeal dough rolled out so thin it almost tastes like noodles. We drink tea and listen to Falco’s plans for expanding the bar and her hold on Landfall with her new-found wealth, Silas’s tales of deals-gone-awry on the satellite stations, Bui’s and Rat’s gossip from the settlements.
A rare day, all the more cherished for being transitory. Away from the surgeon’s ranch, the reality we inhabit churns on, and we will have to step back onto its path, sooner or later. So, as dark falls, and Silas and Marti scrape the dishes with sand, Peg and I help the surgeon rig up his wire transmitter, Rat turning the handle furiously to make enough extra power to receive the latest bulletin.
When it arrives on the sheet, we crowd around the scratched, grey screen, watching the text appear:
AIR FLEET COMMANDER BEATRICE ALINE DEAD IN TRAGIC WRECK
It has been reported that Air Fleet Commander Beatrice Aline perished in a wreck that took place on Factus between Drax and Landfall Five. Commander Aline was escorting two captured fugitives to justice in Landfall, when a navigational error sent her craft off course, into an area of electrical turbulence above the Air Line Road. Tragically, it seems that neither her ship nor those of her escorts were able to regain control before the resulting crash. The fugitives, it has been reported, also perished.
Accord scouts were able to recover the bodies of Commander Aline, the prisoners and her escorts from the site by nightfall on the same day.
Peg sits back with a smirk. ‘All hail the Accord. Spinning a story like a wheel in sand.’
‘“Electrical turbulence”,’ Silas reads incredulously. ‘Who’s going to believe that?’
Falco winces, rubbing her leg. ‘Accord barely have a grip on these moons. They can’t afford to look weak.’
Marti spends a minute or two flicking through the resulting correspondence on the black-market tangle. ‘Seems like most folk think it was a Seeker attack,’ he says. ‘People are saying it was Hel the Converter, reminding the Accord who really runs Factus.’
My neck prickles, and I raise a hand to make sure the mark on my chest is covered. The surgeon must have seen it when he treated me. When I glance his way, he meets my eyes, and says nothing.
Falco
