Aftermath
- 23 -
Three months pass.
My eyes are half-shut and I'm zoned out and I realize I don't know where I am at all.
As with every time this kind of thing happens I come back to my memory of past events very gradually and in reverse order. You are fishing, again, on an abandoned concrete dock near Laudenberger Square. Seems right. You walked here from Corundum Town. Nice. You live in the back room of a speakeasy called the Hang'd Knight. Sounds good. You held an effigy of a person named Rhodes this morning. I did?
Feeling out of place in my folding chair. My shoulders droop heavily.
I am getting old.
I stand up and crack my knuckles and reel in my lure to set it on the dock so my rod doesn't get yanked into the water by some brave fish while I'm not paying attention. My eyes go to the harbor all around me. Another cruise ship, another few cruise ships, moored to some fancy dock in the northernmost civilian part. Late summer now and warm and sunny as hell, and I have a sun-burn on the back of my left hand. My friend Ceder is lending me his flat-cap with a wide brim to keep most of the glare out, although I really need to pick up some sunglasses one of these days.
I look to the sea. I can see to the horizon clearly, and even at this low angle I can see one hundred and one thousand ships in the Cestabin, all going someplace, all coming from someplace, all running and all willing to stay. I shudder a little at the height of some of them. Superfreighters make me feel puny.
I look to the shore. Along the streetside there is a little parade. Some miscellaneous Tasran holiday I don't know the name of, some great big flags being held aloft on poles mounted to pack animals from the outlands. Been hearing the crackle of cheap fireworks that way, and seeing a few brave bugs dive into the Cestabin like a fishing bird, then out, with their buzzing wings taking them all the way in a perfect arc. Must be a real lively thing, having working wings.
Maybe I should go over there. Get my mind off things, take a break. Not like it's a good day for fishing so far. Go meet somebody new, go be a human being.
I look behind me. The building closest to my spot, the Oro Waterfront Living Apartments, is short and stout and unremarkable, with little tchotchkes in the windows and some lights on in the midday. There's a billboard blotting out some of the oceanview windows, advertising some memorial drive for the Supranendum Disaster. Some knife in my gut returns, or maybe it was not gone at all.
I don't got much to look at after all. I sit back down and put the lure back in the water, and then I pull out some newspaper.
Old habit by now. Old routine. I write a letter to nobody with my metal arm.
-
'RHODES
THERE IS A FESTIVAL FOR SOME TASRAN HOLIDAY I DONT KNOW THE NAME OF, NEARBY ME NOW. IM CONTEMPLATING GOING TO IT AND ASKING WHAT THEYRE DOING. IM NOT VERY SOCIAL TODAY SO PROBABLY WONT. WOULD LOVE TO HEAR YOUR INPUT.
ALSO, NO FISH STILL, SEA SUCKS TODAY. JUST BROWN GRUEL.'
-
I wait for a little while, then I scrunch up the scrap of newspaper and toss it into the sea.
-
Later I feel content taking back a dozen brown gruel and a glassfish, which is a nice and bloated and transparent thing that blobs around the surface during high tide. I lug them in the ice bucket up the long series of steps and alleyways and past a busker playing a piece of resonant metal, and into Laudenberger Square.
Against an old piece of advice I've started to recognize a lot of faces around. Street musicians about, and a couple merchants selling fresh-ish fruit from the western farm arrays, and even some park regulars. Old couple of humans over there playing chess on a stone table, a Tasran with six antennae and a placated expression feeding some of the native city bats. I wave hello, I wave goodbye. Can at least appreciate the feeling of recognition in people's eyes. Not wearing a mask these days.
(No, I don't know. I don't know if I'll get found, hunted, killed, or who by, or why. I've run out of effort to care.)
In the centermost part of the square, where most of the tall buildings on our sides aren't quite tall enough to blot us into shadow, there's a group of Neriak—ferals, I think, not of any religious order, by their clothing—basking and sunning and stretching and, in a couple spots by the bushes in the middle, exercising on mats. I see one Haraadi by their white robes, but much smaller, younger I think, than my friend Ceder.
Heading down into the subway tunnel. The smoky and salty scent of the outside air gives way to something kind of musty and rancid in the Undercity. I go on.
Got my own keyring and it's an easy little trip through the tunnels. Very familiar now, and I got a couple alternate ways to get to Corundum Town that take longer. Once had to take one just to avoid a very awkward-looking couple making a scene in one of the hallways, clothes down and whatnot.
The mainway of Corundum Town is nice during the middle of the day, occupied and still spacious, and always with new things popping up or changing. One of the abandoned stores is being refurbished into a barber, I see, with some folk in hi-vis and carrying what must be packs of lumber from the shipyard. A Baldari is not far off, indulging with unseen pals in some weed, crouched around a shuttered hallway entrance. Someone's riding a bike shirtless up and down my route, and some odd Tasran is chittering away and picking at some of the linoleum with their hands, maybe unconsciously, as they sit criss-cross against the floor.
I am enjoying the walk. Lots to see. Time flies and soon enough I'm at the hidden entrance to the Hang'd Knight.
Cup the Baldari bartender greets me. I give him a ruffle on the head and smile some. Nice man, polite to me, barely talks, but I heard he's got a sweetheart somewhere else in the city that he's saving up to visit. I head into the kitchen.
Maxine is in, and so are Gabs and Linda, so I hand over the fish and head to the back office.
Ceder is here. He's been expecting me, heard me come in. His pretty white-and-gold robes are on, and he's seated with the energy of someone ready to go on a whirl. "Good afternoon, Nelly," he says.
"Morning."
"Day off?"
I shoot him a funny look. "Yours too, unless you changed your mind."
"Of course, of course," he says, his deep voice a little mischievous now. "But you're not necessarily meant to do work, like fishing, on your day off."
"Just come on," I say, sighing, and laughing a little, too.
We go have our day off together.
- 24 -
Just to head this off at the pass, I'm not into men, and Ceder's not into women, and besides I've already got some case of heartbreak for one woman in particular and he's got heartache for one man in particular, but we are good friends now, and since the shit that happened with Rhodes we've had nothing but time to chat about our respective lives. We head to go get lunch at a place that makes wraps called jabes, or they're tortilla sandwiches I guess, with loads of chick-pea filling and cheap peanut sauce from a can. My treat, since I'm still very well-off with the money from back then.
We sit out in an old food court which has seen some tidying-up by the Corundum Authority, which is mostly just a bunch of random people on a council who take tax from the businesses. It's nice, though, with mood lighting.
"Poker tonight?" I ask, naturally.
He winces slightly. "Maybe."
"Don't have to."
"If Cup were free, yes, but he's off to Baultriel later."
Something passes by my face. "For..."
"For who-knows-why, but it is not my business." Ceder places his broad hands on our table and gnaws at his jabe. He's too big for it, so he's using the tip of his lizard muzzle to take tiny bites, and the filling is spilling out onto his paper plate.
"Guess so." My jabe is the right size. I take normal bites out of it. Tastes pretty alright, though it's very mushy inside.
We let the quiet dominate the conversation for a little while. No people-watching like me and Rhodes once did. Just quiet.
After a little while, I strike up a subject. "Ceder, I said I, uh, was gonna stop writing Rhodes, but I haven't. Picked it back up pretty quickly."
"Mm. Well, you did say you know she can read it."
I shrug. My shoulders ache again. "...Probably can. Unless she's out of town. Or... or I was wrong at how easy it'd be for her to sense."
His eyes are down to his food, but he holds still. "Are you upset that you have returned to writing her?"
"No," I say, then grumble. "Yes, I guess. Angry still. God, I can't get angry enough for it to leave my system completely. Comes and goes."
Ceder nods. "There was a time..." Then he waves it off.
"Go ahead," I tell him.
"There was a time that I had something of similar ilk, some anger, some long anger, which I'm certain was different enough to be, ah... not helpful to ruminate on. But I mean to say that I'm sorry."
"It's okay. Not your fault."
"Well," he murmurs, "it always can feel my fault, that I did not notice her planning to exit."
"Not sure how much she planned in advance."
He manages a weak smile, tooth showing. "Certainly when she suggested meeting with Jean Jacket she knew the encrypted drive was a lie."
I wave my jabe around a little. "She didn't know what she was saying. Felt guilty, I guess, felt like she had to say something. Wrote herself into a corner. I guess the money was meant to fix the guilt."
"It could not have accomplished that," Ceder says, matter-of-factly.
"Or it really was to get me somewhere safe, get me back home." The visceral scent of mud and sight of dark silhouettes in the distance strikes me, then goes away.
"Well, she knows you haven't done that, if you have been writing her."
"Yeah, but she sure as shit doesn't write back."
I shift my feet a little under the table like I'm a kid, and we descend into a muted silence again. I'd like to say the conversation made me incensed, but it never does with Ceder. His gaze is sweet, his guttural voice is slow and plodding, and nothing at all like other Neriak I once knew. With Pell we were with a great number of Norakkin and Baorin, folks from the other end of the War, who were on great big flaming crusades against colonies elsewhere in the outlands—they called them holdouts, but they were just places where people lived—that had some Confederates still living as loyalists, friendly still to the UCC, even after the War ended. The Neriak I knew then were very fierce and very violent, and Ceder doesn't seem to have interest in being either, at least not most days.
"Nelly," he says, after a few minutes cleaning our plates. "Could I take you to an arcade, or something of that ilk? I've the feeling you'll go back working if you don't have any recreation."
I shrug slowly. "Guess I probably would."
"Or we could simply walk."
-
We go for a walk. The whole east end of Corundum Town is less familiar to me, but there's a decent amount to see—the story goes that it was, itself, once a seaside part of the megamall, that it had a great view, that it was opened during some old Velnias festival and themed after local ecology. In one main trading hall we pass through, there's still an old hanging plaster sculpture depicting an adajanat warbler, something I've never seen in person. Long as hell, spiny, six-eyed. Lives deep and far from the shore. Some people off-world only know it and no other fish in the Cestabin.
Further ahead there's an aquarium, apparently. Not sure if abandoned or operating, but we'll go find out, I guess.
Ceder leads me along with a flowing and patient gait like he's walking up the aisle of some worship site someplace. He glances over at me, walking all straight and without a hunch. "You know, I recall you nursing a leg wound when we met," he says.
"Yeah. Gunshot. Was a glance, though," I tell him.
"Saving Rhodes, is what I heard."
The memory fades in and out. "Never really could figure that out. Think it was, think it might not have been. Got hit in the head after."
"Did you fancy her at first?"
"Ah, god." I shrug. "I doubt it. Actually remember hating her, hating that she couldn't walk much."
"You were taking good care of her by the time you and I met."
I don't love this line of talk so much. I stuff my hands in my jean pockets. "You and your husband, you don't talk about him at all."
He smiles wide, all across his reptilian face is a smile. Funny how it looks. "Well. We aren't hus-bands, to start," he says.
"No?"
"Were you and Pelleratz wives in some official sense? Did some Christian or Lohmanite give vows?"
"Tsh." I chuckle a little at that. "No, course not. Guessing you didn't."
"Well, some words," Ceder says, "around a shrine, in a godly hall. We set an arrangement in law, but any group can do that, of responsibility in a legal way. We share owner-rights, for instance."
"Ah."
He nods. "It also keeps us from hurting one another," he says. "And from betrayal, though the latter is rare to prosecute."
I glance at a shop we're passing that looks like some kind of cobbler. Rugged-looking workboots on display, maybe for outlanders. Really could use new boots sometime, and I bet that's where Ceder got his. I turn back to him and speak bluntly. "Not, uh, hurting him to be so far off so long?"
"I suppose it is."
"Sorry," I say.
He lets loose a soft grunt in the bell of his throat. "I have many years on me, Nelly, I have had many with him. It will be al-right."
The thought strikes me that Ceder will probably outlive me.
We round a corner to a more dim part of Corundum Town's east wing, but not dim for lack of lighting—there are many blue lights ahead, and what looks like some big sign for something. We go toward it.
"Probably going to keep writing to her," I say, not really knowing why.
"Perhaps she'll appreciate it." And Ceder leaves it at that.
-
We get to the front of the Velnias World Fair Aquarium. It has been out of commission for a while from the look, and someone has taken care to remove most of the glass, though whether as scavengers or for safety I can't know. The lights are on, though, old lights run by new electricity, and the pale blue hue everyplace makes it feel a little like it's still running. I get stricken with a memory of some aquarium on Old Tibor, someplace which might be gone by now for all the years passed and earthquakes and storms. I remember seeing a fish twice my size eye me up and pass me gone, like I was its friend.
Ceder and I step in and go exploring a little. No harm in it.
"Nelly is a nice name, I think," he says, as we step over some discarded cable in an empty hall. We're in the North Sea Wing, though some of the plaques are missing. "Came up with it?"
"It was Eleanor at first," I tell him.
He shoots me just the smallest grin. "Yes, well. Came up with Eleanor?"
"What are you implying, Ceder," I ask, though I already know, and I'm already a little suspicious.
"Merely that you've picked a nice name, Nelly, and you are a nice woman."
Can't tell at this point if he's clocked that I changed my name when I was made a prisoner, which I did, or that I changed my name when I learned I was a woman, which I did. Guess for Ceder it could be both. "You got a full name, right? Ceder of something?"
He seems to have played out my internal thought in my head on his own. "And Rhodes is a nice woman, and I believe she was much like you, having made a transition—"
I slap him on the shoulder, hard. "Ceder of something, yeah?"
"Ceder Of Supwater," he says, finally, exhaling, chuckling along with me. We step into a large amphitheater with many seats, and a blank—ripped and blank—canvas board which may have once hosted some movie. He leans against the wall of the tunnel we came through, and glances at me. "Ceder Of Supwater, That Whom Humbles Upon The Inkling Sun."
Can't help but be awed a little at the length. "Was the sun 'inkling' when you were born?"
He shakes his head, smiling broadly. "No, and it has never been, not as long as Haraad has been basked in its glory. Though in some far parts, parts of the north and south where Kbir is inkling, it is said that kind Haraadi are born, wound tightly with their kind, so my mother named me like those who dwell there."
Wouldn't have supposed a Neriak to live anywhere without plenty of heat, though Corundum Town has a sort of cold about it. "It's a nice name."
Another quiet falls on us, which I don't mind. We glance around the amphitheater for a little while, finding nothing that a better scavenger couldn't have found, and then progress someplace else in the aquarium.
-
Lot to read up on. We found a plaque about some of the trawler favorites. For instance, a brown gruel is a sort of symbiote, and has some algae living as its fins, native algae from before all the terraforming. No explanation on why there are so many, or why they're so stupid.
-
We make our way through, at one point stepping into what was once a big enclosure for a big fish, and down some plaster tubes with their paint fading, to the entrance of a small and delicate chamber with some warning signs out front, welded to the wall long after the place got shut down. One reads: 'DON'T BREACH. THANKS.'
We step inside the chamber. Against the far wall is something kind of anachronistic to the place, given it was once aboveground—a window into the Cestabin itself, to the seaboard, poking through some enormous slab of concrete. It's muddy, and stuffed to the brim with bubble-like strands of ambient plantlife, but the enormous exterior lights are still on and we can peek at least a dozen meters into the water. Ceder says it pretty plainly: "Ah, wow."
"Why's it here?"
He grits his big teeth a moment, and puts aside his hood, and squints at the piece of window-frame holding out all this water. "I wouldn't be able to guess. It does not seem right to be here, but here it is."
I peer around. Looks the same as any other one of the rooms in the aquarium, the same fading paint and dim overheads. "How'd the town get buried, even?"
"Lost to time," Ceder says. He has to pause a little while to think. "Likely some... excited project from some excited corporation. The land above is very well-developed. This must have been made after." He pokes at the glass, and it doesn't give at all.
"Well made," I say, but even as I talk, my words feel kind of useless. We're in a little submarine now, having walked into a dream. "God."
We just stay there for some time, and watch the wandering bits of algae move and swerve and float, towards us, away from us. No fish come to visit.
-
After a decent while, Ceder says something, though his deep voice is airy and light now. "I kept bringing up Rhodes, on our walk," he says.
"You did," I mutter.
"I did, because I think you are right to write to her." He swallows, and I can hear something faint cracking in his demeanor. "I think... you should... want for her, Nelly, that you shouldn't move on."
Again, I am quick to it, and something is bunched up in my face. "Fuck, man, I haven't moved on. I'm hurting all the time about it."
"Yes," he murmurs.
"I just want to tell her not to fucking run away." I pause but then I don't want to pause. "I would have told her it's okay. I would have, I fucking would have, and she didn't even give me a chance."
Ceder pauses, then holds out his palm. "So you do not think any part of her note is a lie?"
"No," I say, "not a word. I trust it. 'Cus she thinks she was good as gone."
"Well." He retracts his palm, then, but he has a smile. Sort of makes me angrier, but then it sort of mellows me out. He has a way of doing that to me. "Can I show you something, back home?"
The word 'home' echoes in my ears a second, the notion of a place I call home, the notion that I do, indeed, call the back room of the Hang'd Knight home. So I have to accept, and I accept with the feeling like my head's gonna explode. "Yeah," I say. "Please."
So we go back home.
- 25 -
Quiet, and with low light. I can hear Maxine and the gang readying up for dinner, but it's all muffled past the heavy door to the back room, and we got ourselves some peace. I'm sat in my usual chair, doing my usual thing. Staring at the little figurine of Rhodes that Ceder hewed some months ago, thinking about her.
He painted where her cybernetic meets her skull, and used a piece of wire for her lone working antenna. Got her wings right, her stiff and useless wings—they got forcibly clipped by somebody a long time ago, and they never got healthy enough to repair. Her weird grin with her mandibles, her slight hunch. Her ruby eyes missing and present only in my memory. I don't know why she didn't trust me. I thought I could be trusted. I did everything to be trusted.
"Found it," Ceder calls from his office. "I have found it. Oh, if I'd lost this, I'd be out of my mind." He lifts up a little shoebox from someplace very high in his stack of miscellanea, and carries it over to the little table. He's delicate like he isn't with anything else. "These are to my Bloom," he says, quieter, and takes off the lid.
Lots of papers, scraps of papers. Folded-up neatly. Some in envelopes, some loose-leaf. "Letters?"
"Yes," he says, with this embarrassed warmth about him. "Whenever I get the inspiration. Sometimes it is when I'm out and about, and I have to retrieve whatever paper is handy."
I think about writing on scraps of newspaper that I throw into the Cestabin Sea. I swallow. "You don't send them, though."
Ceder sits beside me, pulling one free from the very top. It's labeled, it has an address somewhere on it. "No," he muses. "No, because the phone does as well at talking to him as can be. But I do get the urge to write letters."
"And you don't send them?"
"Not yet." He looks to me. "Sometime. When I go back home. All at once, I think, so that he may pick them apart and recount the time."
I lean over to the box and examine one. Dronhas script is thin, angular, full of little boxes and circles and triangles, and small accent-marks between characters. The words trail off past a fold in the paper.
-
Ceder has retrieved a pen, now, and some thin-rimmed glasses that sit atop his muzzle, and has begun writing on a new, neat piece of paper. He pauses to glance off at the far wall for a while, and I speak. "You headed home soon? Anytime soon?"
"I think so," he says. "Whenever this Baultriel escapade from the militia finally comes to some kind of head, whenever they decide what to do. You have surely noticed them stalling out, whirling around. The infighting."
"Hadn't, really," I admit.
"Well, it had better proceed sooner than later." Sometimes it seems like Ceder doesn't care between 'sooner' or 'later'—then other times, like right now, it seems he cares about it a great deal. Bitterness in his tone.
Then I say something I guess I shouldn't, but the knife in my gut compels me. "Was thinking of asking if you'd take me along."
He doesn't turn his gaze to me. "Would have to learn Dronhas to live in Haraad," he says.
That's the only criteria? I mumble something to myself, clear my throat, and speak up. "Having trouble enough with Vasthi," I say. "Dronhas sounds harder."
Now he's whittling his pen slowly on the piece of paper, etching out a word or two. "It is like any language," he murmurs. "And you are not so terrible with Vasthi."
"That's it, though. Just learn Dronhas, and..."
"And I'd take you, Nelly, for I think it would be right to do."
For some reason that hits me in the face, and I scrunch up, and I think about Rhodes again. I think about running away. I think about running away with her.
I pick up the letter I had been looking at, and I squint at the script, and I try to imagine. What if I did learn this? What if I was sticking around a little while? What if I was here, on the Palisade, a very long time?
I sink in my seat, and snatch up the paper beneath the sheet Ceder is using to write, and I nab a pen from his little pen cup, and start scribbling down a letter with my metal hand.
-
'RHODES
YOU MEANT A LOT TO ME. AND SEEM TO STILL.
I KNOW IVE WRITTEN IT BEFORE, BUT I DONT WANT YOU TO LEAVE, AND I DONT WANT TO LEAVE WITHOUT YOU. I WANT TO ASK MORE QUESTIONS AND I WANT TO KNOW YOURE DOING OKAY. YOU NEVER BOGGED ME DOWN. YOU MADE ME COME ALIVE A LITTLE.'
-
I pause for a second and tremble.
'AND I LOVED YOU.'
But that's about all I can manage, so I fold it up and put it aside.
- 26 -
Couple weeks later I find myself fishing at midnight.
Think I must have the day off. Don't know. Been in a malaise for some time, fell asleep an hour, woke up and it was dark as can be. My Universal Audio Player is the only light, a little pale glimmer against my face, but it's turned way down and I can only hear the faintest traces of some bluetimes groove, snare and ride in the cold night air, and a quiet bay, with no boats nearby at all.
I am fishing. Lure in the water, my hand on the rod to feel for any jitter and buzz. Caught mostly brown gruel, of course, and threw them all back. Just doing it to kill time and listen to the waves.
Always more intimate when you can't see the white-caps and crests far away, when you can only make out the black water splashing and un-splashing against the concrete, and it feels and sounds as if you're just in it, surrounded, held.
You know?
I know. How I feel about some things, anyway, but I couldn't get into fishing. I don't have the patience for it. I know you don't, Pell, that's alright. I stuck around to do it with you. Did we ever have this conversation? Is this a memory?
But I did like the waves, and the dashing of them against our boat, when we went on a ride across Black Hook Lake to get to the little settlement there. Maybe you recall it... you probably don't, it was so long ago now. I do. Of course I do. We were headed there to pick up some munitions, get you a fighting gun from a nice gunsmith. It had a nice stock, so I didn't want you to drop it. You didn't have your new arm yet. Could barely hold the thing. I laugh a little in the empty sea air. But that doesn't matter now. We've done a lot of trips like that, trips for business. Sometimes I worry that's all I am to you. I worried the same. All the time worrying if my life meant anything to anyone. I hope not, Nelly. I hope when you're up and about again we can forget about the Rebellion, I hope we can just cast it aside.
I remember. She thought I was asleep. I was nursing a wound.
I just remember the waves, I remember the peace of it. God, can you believe how little we get to know peace? Call it a flaw in my character, I don't know anything else but what we do. But I want peace. I want that for us. I do. I know I seem like I'm lying when I say it, but I do.
I want peace for you. I wanted it for you, too.
Then I reach my hands out to try and touch it, touch at the memory, but it fades again, and I'm left beached on the dock, sobbing to myself.
I remember. I do remember. It's all a haze, but it's not gone from me. All those stupid warring hours against silhouettes in the brush, I keep seeing silhouettes, I keep thinking of myself holding a gun tight on my shoulder and letting the recoil carry my aim from one to the next to the next. Many a time. You made me a sniper, too, Pell, you thought I had very delicate hands and good eyes, and that I'd make a good one. I—God I don't even know if I was aware I was doing it at any point, but I did it, it's what we did.
Trembling now, trembling worse.
Something brushes the line, catches the lure. I reel it up unsteady. Just a brown gruel. Just another dumb fish doing the same fucking thing again.
I throw it back.
I keep seeing silhouettes, I keep seeing the same ones. They were from the loyalist camp, I'd bet. Look at this one's clothes all torn up, those are UCC clothes. Were they? Pell, are you still there? I want to know if they were.
I want to know. Pell? Are you there?
But she's gone again.
I slack my shoulders and sit back and wait for the fish to come along.
-
Sleeping again. Conscious that I'm sleeping but not conscious enough to be awake. Rod flitting gently in the water, something grabbing on, suckling, failing to pry it loose. My body feels so heavy.
-
Are you awake, Nelly?
No.
I was thinking to myself some terrible shit. Like I've done you wrong, or made you wrong somehow. I know I don't normally talk like this.
You never talk at all anymore.
I'd like it if you got to sit on some shore someday, somewhere sunny.
Not for me.
And when I picture what's best for you, old woman, I don't picture myself. I think I'll be here until I get shot and die. And I know you figure the same for yourself.
I know the same.
But it doesn't have to be true. These things aren't in stone.
-
Someone grabs at me, but I'm too tired. I'm too weak.
-
There's nice places. That's all I mean. Don't you want a nice place to live?
Stopped wanting.
No. I guess you... I don't know... what you want. You've been so absent. I've been pushing you too far.
Stopped being. I'm too tired. Can I have five more minutes?
I've made you the wrong kind of person. I've made you like me, honey.
Five more minutes. Stop touching me.
I'll leave you be. You're sleeping.
Five more.
Stop grabbing me.
-
Stop touching me. Stop grabbing me, Pell. Stop. Need immediate assistance.
-
Need immediate assistance. Stop yelling at me.
-
Need immediate assistance. Who needs me. Who wants me. I'll get out of bed in five minutes. Karinger said we're going on a run. There are some slavers from Port West who are in Finch's territory and we have the go-ahead. Need immediate assistance. I'm coming, I'm coming. Give me five more minutes.
-
Just give me a second, Pell, I don't want to be a person.
-
Gonna be a person today?
-
Need immediate assistance. I wake up and look down and my hand is slamming my leg like a battering ram.