The Cold Between (14 page)

W
hy did you say that to her?” Elena exploded, as they headed up the sidewalk. “You've no idea if we're going to catch anyone. If this is some big Central cover-up, we're not going to find anyone. These people are
professionals.
You can make all the promises you want, but it's not going to find us a killer.”

Trey looked over at her. She was walking fast, oblivious to their direction, and she would not look at him. “I do not think there is any harm in offering her hope,” he said. “What has made you angry, Elena? It is not what I said to Ynes.”

“It is, though. Who are you to decide what she should and shouldn't know? She's young, but she's not a fool. Of course she should worry, and she knows it, and you're telling her what she knows is wrong.”

“But that's not the only thing, is it?”

She shook her head. “It's just like with Greg. ‘No, Elena, MacBride's totally on the level, this bullshit story he's telling is the
truth,
of
course,
' and the real problem is that I'm just not understanding the circumstances. ‘Just be cautious, Chief, and I'll
look into it.'” She spat the last sentence out. “He doesn't have to lie to me at all, does he? He just tells me half truths and pats me on the head like I'm a fucking
idiot,
and why wouldn't he think so, because I
am.
”

He put his hand on her arm, and she shrugged him off, stopping in the street to glare at him. “Danny was
stupid,
did you know that? I figured
stupid
meant
sweet,
that he'd never lie to me, that I was such a bloody marvelous judge of character he'd never be able to pull it off. But Greg is right, Trey. I
am
an idiot. I
don't
understand the circumstances. And Danny knew that, and he used it, and I should have known he would, I should have seen it—”

She buried her face in her hands and collapsed against the corner of the building. He moved closer to her, wanting to touch her again, uncertain of what she would do. He could hear her breathing through her hands. He did not think she was crying. He wondered if she had cried for Danny at all.

“I trusted him,” she said, her voice muffled by her hands. “Even when he kept after me over and over about retiring, settling down, living on some bloody piece of rock—I
trusted him.
”

“Elena,” Trey said softly. “
M'laya,
what happened to you? Tell me.”

She lowered her hands and closed her eyes, dropping her head back against the wall. Her eyes were swollen; he thought perhaps she had been crying after all. But when she spoke, her voice was calmer. “About three months ago,” she said, “I had a miscarriage.”

At that Trey reached out and put his hand on her arm. “My dear,” he said, “I am so sorry. Had you been trying for a long time?”

She did not answer at first. “I was sick for two days. I couldn't work. First time in my whole career. I told everyone I had the flu, and I hid in my room until it was over. It was entirely unexpected. I have never wanted children,” she told him. “But to lose it . . . Doctor Hastings told me it was nothing I'd done or hadn't done, that sometimes it just happened like this, that if I wanted to I could—could still have a child. And I know it, in my head. But in my heart? It's like . . . it couldn't stand to be with me. That something about me made it leave.” The tears spilled over, but she still did not sob.

“I take it Danny did not handle this well,” he said, keeping his hand on her arm.

At that she laughed, and he could not remember when he had last heard a sound so bitter. “Oh, no, he was lovely,” she told him. “Stayed with me, took care of me, held me while I cried, told me over and over it wasn't my fault. But he was never much good at sitting with difficult emotions, and after a few days he started trying to cheer me up. He kept saying we could try again.”

Trey wondered at the mind-boggling stupidity of the boy. “His timing was unfortunate.”

“He didn't understand,” she said. “I wanted to explain that I hadn't changed my mind, that I still didn't want a baby, but it hurt so much and I feel—I felt so guilty, so I told him how mad the odds were, with both of us on the shot, and he said, ‘Well, about that.'”

Trey swore under his breath and looked away from her. Not stupidity then; irredeemable selfishness.

“We'd been on Cygnus a month before, and he said he'd bought this drug. He said he'd been taking it daily and he hadn't
had any side effects at all, and clearly since I got pregnant it had worked. He said even with my allergies it wouldn't hurt me, but we could talk to Doctor Hastings if I was worried. And he had no idea why I got so angry with him.” She met Trey's eyes, and he almost shrank from the intensity of her rage. “He did that to me.
On purpose.
He made me pregnant, and when I lost it all he could think about was doing it to me
again,
making me go through all that loss
again,
and he thought I'd be glad because that explained everything, didn't it, him going off the shot, and wasn't I pleased it would be so
easy
?” He watched as the rage in her face dissolved into agony. “I trusted him with everything. I had no one else. Jake was gone, and Greg was horrible, and Jess was too busy doing her duty. He was all I had, and he tore it all away from me, all because he wanted to turn me into someone else.” She finally began to sob.

Trey was done second-guessing himself. He reached out and put his arms around her, pulling her against him, one hand cradling the back of her head. After a moment she wilted, wrapping her arms around his back, and she buried her face in his shoulder and cried. He whispered to her, kissed her hair, and let her weep. The tears went on for a long time.

“Have you talked this through with anyone?” he asked her, when she began to quiet.

She shook her head. “Doctor Hastings is the only other person who knows, and he doesn't know all of it.”

“Would you have told your captain, if you had still been friends?”

She gasped with laughter. “God, Greg would have put him out an airlock before I even finished the story.”

Trey thought perhaps he might like Captain Foster after all. “You protected Danny,” he observed.

She nodded against his shoulder. “Sort of. I didn't want people talking about me. I knew it was going to be bad enough, just breaking up with him. On a small ship, gossip is cheap entertainment. And I didn't think—” She swallowed. “I've always figured I was hard to fool, or that my friends were lousy liars. But they don't have to be, Trey. They don't have to lie at all. They tell me the truth—just never enough of it.”

He kept his arms around her. “Your captain may not know the whole truth to tell you, Elena.”

“If
I
can figure out MacBride was following some PSI-related order when he got hit, you can bet Greg knows all of it.”

She spoke with absolute confidence, and he had no reason to disbelieve her. She knew Captain MacBride better than he did. But there was someone else who knew him as well, and it was past time he spoke to her. “There is more than one side to this story,
m'laya,
” he said.

She pulled back, studying his face. She had heard something in his voice. “You don't have to,” she told him.

He had not been in touch with any of his people in six months. When someone left PSI, contact generally decreased; but there were letters, and sometimes visits, like those of a child after leaving home. He would not have chosen to sever ties himself, and now it seemed he needed to reconnect them. Something stirred in his heart: despair, defeat, relief, he was not sure. On some level he had always known he would turn back to them. He belonged with them more than he ever had belonged in this place, despite how long he had dreamed of coming home. He
was as alone as Elena was; it had just taken him more years to see it.

“We must comm from my flat. She will not be monitoring the main network.”
And with the way things were between us when I left, I'm not sure she will answer even then.

She shifted away from him, sliding one palm down his arm as she moved, and instinctively he caught her hand and laced her fingers in his. She looked briefly surprised, but he was almost certain she was pleased as well, and they turned together and headed back up the street.

They were back on the tram, still hand in hand, before she spoke. “That word you used back there,” she said. “
M'laya.
I don't know that one. What does it mean?”

“Hm.” He felt his face grow warm; she had caught him out. “It means darling, or sweetheart. One who matters. My niece, Sarah—my sister's daughter, who is twelve. She is also
m'laya
.” It mattered, somehow, that she understand the word did not connote a lover, necessarily, but there was no escaping that it implied a closeness he had no right to claim.

She smiled, and he thought she was blushing again. “It's a nice word,” she said. “Warm. Is it gendered?”

He shook his head. “Like all good terms of endearment, it speaks to everyone.”

“I'm sorry I shouted,” she told him. “I'm not angry at you.”

“I am thinking you should have shouted sooner,” he said, and squeezed her hand. “You are carrying a lot of anger.”

She sighed. “I suppose I am. I forget. Day to day, there's too much to do.”

“And you have no one to talk to.”

“Not really, no.” She looked away. “It's not that I'm without
friends. It's just most of them are used to me being competent. I tend to hide before I fall apart. After Jake . . . I fell apart around Greg, but that was all. Most of the crew cursed and got drunk for weeks. I just hid.”

“Who was Jake?”

“Commander Jacobs. Chief of engineering before me. I knew him from way back, when I was working as a mechanic for my uncle. I came up under him.” She moved closer to him. “We were trying to stop this skirmish. A couple of traders getting stupid enough to shoot at each other. One of them hit us. It was a one-in-a-million shot; it hit a heat vent, and shot straight into the machine room.” She met his eyes. “It was strange. He was standing there, like he always did, and we were grumbling about having to mediate this stupid fight, and there was a sound, just this quiet noise in the wall, and then this blast of flame went right through him. My eyes went to the opposite wall, like he would have been thrown by the force of it . . . but he wasn't thrown. He was incinerated, right there, right in front of me, this man I had been talking to seconds before.”

He wanted to put his arms around her again. “You were close to him.”

She nodded. “I always thought of him as my father, really, although most of what we talked about was professional. He was always pushing me to learn more. He was never shy about telling me when I'd screwed up, either, so when he told me I'd done well, I knew he meant it.” Her voice grew soft. “I was happy with him.”

So she'd had a family, of sorts. A father who was proud of her, and a lover. One friend who understood, another who pushed her to try things she would otherwise not. She had lost so much so fast. He wanted to tell her that life would settle down, but he
did not know that it was true. He had spent four decades seeking normalcy with PSI, then tried to find it by coming home. And yet, to this day, the closest he ever got was when he was trying to teach Sarah to cook.

“How long afterward did you argue with your captain?” he asked her.

She gave him a sad smile. “We never argued,” she told him. “That was the thing. We went back to Earth a few months after Jake died, and when we left again, he was different. He completely shut me out.”

“You do not know why?”

She shook her head. “I didn't think much about it at first,” she said. “He's often moody when we come off Earth. It's not so uncommon, really; a lot of people are like that when they leave their families, and he doesn't get to see his wife more than five or six times a year as it is. But this time it lasted, and after a couple of weeks I came to realize it was just me, that with everyone else he was pretty much back to normal. But now—I wonder, Trey, about what else is going on here. If maybe that's part of what has been bothering him.”

She was trying so hard to understand.

“Did you ask why he changed?”

“Oh, of course. But it just started getting worse and worse, to the point that people would leave the room if he and I were both in it. He was sarcastic and mean, and I hate that kind of thing. He knows I hate it.” Trey could feel her tensing. “And why, if it was a professional problem, would it just be me? A few weeks ago I tried to have it out with him, but he shut me down. Told me we were never really friends, that he'd felt sorry for me all these years.”

Her dark eyes looked sad and resigned. Whether or not this was a bigger loss than death, it certainly hurt her more than losing her lover. Trey released her hand to put his arm around her waist, pulling her closer. “I must believe,” he said, “that whatever happened is nothing to do with you, my dear. For him to change so much—we all have our own demons. You simply ran afoul of his.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, and gave him an unconvincing smile. “But it's the same thing. I do not forgive him. The reasons don't matter anymore.”

“You are a holder of grudges.”
Just like Valeria,
he thought, but he was past the point where such observations surprised him.

“I take it you are not.”

“If I were to say that,” he told her, “I would not be entirely truthful. On the whole, I do not easily take offense, but there are things I have not forgiven, and probably never will.”

“Like the police arresting you for everything.”

“For that, I think perhaps I will hold a grudge,” he said, smiling. “But I will fix the blame squarely on the shoulders of the chief investigator, and not the junior officers doing as they were told.”