Things Having Weight, and Weightless Things

an told Iri to go away, once she was back in her quarters. Iri clearly didn’t want to leave her alone, but the sympathy in the curl of her lips, furrowed eyebrows, and soft voice didn’t register for Yan— and even if they had, they might have sickened her. Iri couldn’t possibly understand, and Yan certainly didn’t deserve any sympathy.

She felt flat and dead after closing the door in Iri’s face, and that flatness protected her for another minute or so more, as she cleaned herself up in the bathroom and mechanically brushed her teeth to get the taste of bile out of her throat. The lights were dim, and she didn’t catch the eye of her reflection in the mirror. It was only when she began to take off her cassock and cloak, to change out the sweaty clothing, that she began to return to her senses.

It was the recognition of what she was wearing that made her suddenly feel horrified to exist in her own skin, and she scrambled to get her cassock off, tugging it off without unbuttoning it enough, and her arms and head were momentarily entrapped. She couldn’t breathe, or felt like she couldn’t breathe, and she let out an involuntary wail as she wrestled with the heavy black fabric.

At least Sid wouldn’t hear her, through the shared bathroom door.

She ripped the garment off, breaking the upper button, which fell to the ground and skittered beneath the bed. Yan threw the cassock to the floor, and, breathing heavily, stripped off her shirtsleeves— soaked with sweat— and her undershirt. In the end, she sat down on her bed in just her boxers and socks. She was unable to calm her breathing, and her one and only attempt to get it under control ended with her gasping for air, and tears coming to her eyes.

It was a physical misery. Her thoughts hadn’t caught up with her yet on a level that she could parse. That was coming— she knew it was— but at this moment, the numbness that was retreating from her body had not yet thawed her brain. She was a puppet, animate but thoughtless, and the strings that controlled her arms made her bring her fingers to her mouth, the wire that moved her jaw made her bite down on the flesh as hard as she could manage, till her teeth met the crushing resistance of bone. She choked on spit and tears, disgusting sobbing. How long she sat there on the edge of the bed, she didn’t know.

Her thoughts were creeping back to her, one after the other. There was the first: the horror that came with killing; and the second: the fact that, despite what she had done for the Sky Boat ’s crew, she was nothing like a spacer any longer. When each one of those thoughts became too painful, her attention would switch to the other one, almost mechanically. There was no room for anything else in her mind, just that. Each thought had its own branching, dark paths, but they were visible only by intuition. It would take longer for them to come into focus.

She had left the door between her room and the bathroom only half-closed. When she heard the door on the other side open, the one that connected to Sid’s room, she turned towards it instinctively. Sid didn’t seem to notice or care that she could see him come into the bathroom— he was even more lost in his own world than she was: unable to hear her raspy breathing, and not wearing his glasses. He knelt in front of the toilet, elbows on the seat, and leaned over it as though to vomit, but nothing came out.

Yan stood, stumbling towards him. Of all the people in the universe, Sid was the only one who could understand her at that moment. He didn’t see her coming, and he didn’t move until she put her hand on his shoulder. Then he twisted, flinching like she had hit him, his face red— the border between anger and panic. She could feel him reach for the power, draw it to the surface of his skin, some instinctual reaction.

If Sid had struck her down in that moment, she wouldn’t have cared at all. It might have been a relief. But, no matter how much she welcomed the blow, it didn’t come. His power glanced over her skin, and it was unclear if Sid was trying to hurt her and failing, or if he was reaching out towards her in the only way that he could manage. It didn’t matter; the effect was the same.

Yan fell to her knees in front of Sid, there on the cold tile of the bathroom floor, and clung to him with all her strength. Although it took a moment for him to react, his returning embrace was just as crushing, his hands splaying out on the expanse of her back, just behind her shoulderblades. He pressed his forehead against hers, his eyes squeezed shut. Yan closed her eyes, too.

Sid’s breathing was hitching, little unconscious pain-sounds coming out with each exhale, like he was trying to contain it all in a swollen throat, and it was breaking free one piece at a time. His face was burning hot against hers, and whatever tears were on her cheeks did nothing to cool him.

They already shared so much of the misery that it took no effort whatsoever to fall into each other’s mind in the power. Yan hardly even noticed it happening, except that she realized after some time that she could only hear her breathing when she searched for the sound. Since they were in the same position, kneeling on the floor, even the usual feeling of occupying two bodies was merely an echo.

Sid, she thought.

A dull throb of a question in response.

There must have been something she wanted to ask, some reassurance that she wanted to search for inside him, but it was obvious that he had nothing like that to give.

The thing that occupied Sid’s mind’s eye, which Yan seized on, if only to give herself something to hold, was the image of the last pirate shuttle departing, Sid cradling it within his power’s reach. He had let it slip away, let its passengers live, but in the mental image he had, he was ripping it to shreds. He pulled the engines off the back and let the cabin’s air escape into vacuum, suffocating the passengers. Or he smashed the walls of the shuttle together and crushed them to a pulp. Or he ignited the oxygen in their tanks and left nothing but charred bodies.

They lived , Yan said. You didn’t do that.

Perhaps thinking of something that he hadn’t done was easier than thinking about what he had. He could have killed them. And perhaps he should have finished the task.

He was practicing the hypotheticals, over and over.

Why? Yan asked.

The answer came in an unexpected form. His memory flitted away, back to the past. They were sitting across a desk from Sandreas, who looked at Sid with a cold curiosity. Sid’s apprenticeship interview.

“You lack follow through,” Sandreas said. He took a picture of a statue— a figure raising a sword— out of the manila folder on the desk in front of him. “That’s what your project told me.” In the memory, the words didn’t appear on Sid’s glasses, they simply embedded themselves into the knowledge of the scene. Sandreas’s mouth didn’t even move to speak them. Dreamlike. Hazy.

Sid protested voicelessly.

“You will learn,” Sandreas said. “Or you will fail. Those are the only options in this life.”

Sid held the pirate shuttle in his hand, and then let it go. Without Yan telling him what to do, he couldn’t bring himself to finish the work that they had started. Useless.

No, Yan protested. No, no.

She didn’t even know what she was pushing against: the idea that it would have been better for Sid to kill more of the pirates, the idea that she was responsible for directing him, the idea that Sandreas would have wanted them to destroy the pirates utterly, the knowledge that this was what was required for their apprenticeship— or to take Sandreas’s place. It was a futile protestation, no matter what it was against, but she wanted to shove all of it away. She hadn’t wanted to think about any of this, but Sid was forcing her to see it.

I can’t do it , Sid said. But the slick thought of disappointing Sandreas, of being weak, this was only a cover for the horror beneath— the knowledge that he had been capable of killing, and wondering if he would need to again. It was easier to redirect the horror somewhere else, into something more distant. As Yan recognized this for the cover that it was, they tumbled down together.

You did do it. We did , Yan said.

Being there with Sid, and not wanting to follow his escaping thoughts to contemplate the future, made them sit there with just the knowledge of what they had done. They didn’t have a choice but to face it.

The memory of it played again in their minds, interspersed with flickers of imagination. Stopping the ships, an almost effortless outlay of power, felt too sterile in their minds. So their brains supplied images of gore that they had not seen, and scenes of weeping from the survivors on the nameless pirate ship. It was unclear whose mind was providing the fuel for the visions— but Yan suspected it was her.

The surviving mourners stood in a facsimile of the Iron Dreams ’s hall, bedecked in red as it had been for her mother’s funeral. Though in her imagination, none of the pirates had faces, they towered above Yan’s point of view— like Halen’s genetically modified height, or like her aunts and uncles had when she had been a child.

At least when Yan started to imagine the sonorous tones of the funeral prayer breaking the eerie silence of the vision, Sid stopped her, shaking her free, at least of that scene. It must have been compassion on his part to drag her mind away from the most painful part of her memory.

Even if Yan and Sid had been alone, they probably wouldn’t have been able to stop thinking about it, so it shouldn’t have mattered that they were there together, except that it mattered more than anything else in the world that Yan had Sid to cling to. Some part of her was seeking solace in the fact that Sid did not hate her for what she had done— that crawling part of her was trying to find relief, and Sid was offering it willingly. When she recognized this, she was so disgusted that she almost pulled back out of the shared trance. She didn’t deserve to be forgiven— not by Sid, not by anyone.

But he didn’t want to let her go.

Do you hate me for it? he asked. And even though he was seeking the same thing she was, the answer was no. She couldn’t hate him. She forgave him, though it wasn’t her forgiveness to give.

Whose is it? Sid asked.

God’s. Though this felt too abstract. The dead, maybe.

They can’t.

Then the only people who could forgive them were the people left alive, the rest of the pirate family that lived on the ship. Yan remembered— she couldn’t help but remember— what a scar her mother’s death had left on the Iron Dreams . And her mother had been one woman, and her death had been an accident. How many people had she and Sid killed? More than ten. Maybe more than thirty. She hadn’t counted, and didn’t know. But she did know that the family on that ship would never forgive her.

That was just going to have to be something she carried, then.

Her thoughts were turning towards the future again, Sid asking if they could carry it, when Yan noticed something on the edge of their shared awareness. A muted, strange sensation. She realized it was her hearing. Someone was knocking on her door.

Focusing on this knocked her out of the meditative trace, which in turn knocked her heavily to the floor as her legs gave out from having knelt in a strained position for some unknown amount of time. She struggled to stand, the pins and needles making it hard to move. She clutched at the bathroom counter for balance, and Sid crawled out of her way. At least whoever was knocking at her door didn’t seem intent on going away, which gave her time to pull her undershirt back on and wipe some of the snot and tears from her face with the back of her hand.

Expecting Iri, Yan pulled the door open. She instead found one of the redheads that made up the Sky Boat ’s family— this one a boy of maybe thirteen. He was holding a bulging canvas bag at his side, and he flinched back from Yan when she opened the door. Though he didn’t meet her eyes, his gaze flicked across her face, and her visible distress made him less scared and more like he recognized something in her. He held out the canvas bag.

“Here,” he said. “My mom said to give this to you.”

Yan’s throat was unused to being used to generate words, and she took a second of trying before she managed to speak. “What is it?”

“Food,” he said. He looked away, almost sheepish. “Since you’re not supposed to come to the hall.”

“Thank you,” Yan said. The idea of eating turned her stomach, but she knew she should.

“And—” the boy said.

Yan just looked at him blankly.

“Well,” he said with a shrug, “it will help, anyway.”

“Thank you,” Yan said again. But he was already leaving, trotting away down the hallway. Yan closed the door.

Sid had picked himself up off the bathroom floor and had made his way to her bed, where he sat with his legs crossed and her pillow scrunched in his arms, leaning in the corner where the walls met. He watched her put the bag down on her desk and open it, taking out the industrial plastic containers with a few ready-made meals. Two were hot, having come directly from the kitchen, but the rest were cold food that would last them a day or so. Probably long enough to get to Olar. The bottom of the bag held some fruits— plums and apples— and, as she pulled them out and lined them up neatly on the desk, her fingers brushed a small brown paper bag, tightly folded down around something hard.

Yan unwrapped it, not expecting anything in particular, and uncovered a tin of mints. A sudden sense-memory of standing in a bathroom with Kino, who once offered her something from a similar tin, flashed into her mind. Yan opened it, already knowing what she would find. Instead of candy, there were small pills, each with an impression of a flaring snake’s head on one side. She stopped moving and just stared at the pills for a moment. There weren’t too many— about thirty— and she had a vague sense of what this amount of vena was worth, maybe a week or two’s pay for a spacer.

How generous.

“What is it?” Sid asked aloud, getting her attention. His voice, too, was rough and strange.

Yan shook her head and went to put the pills down on the desk, but Sid used his power to float the tin towards himself, all the pills rattling as it flew into his hand. She probably should have protested, taken the pills away from him, but she couldn’t muster the strength. Sid poked at them with one finger, swirling them around.

Without speaking, Yan took the two hot meals and sat down across from him on the bed. She held the container of food out to him and wiggled it in front of him until he took it. He closed the tin of drugs and tossed it onto the bedspread between them.

“Eat,” Yan signed. If she was forcing Sid to eat, she could make herself eat, too. It was a bland meal, mashed potatoes and steamed fish, but that was maybe for the best. She could keep it down, even if it stuck in her mouth. The mechanical act of eating was calming, too. Having cried all she was capable of crying, she now felt loose and floppy, exhausted.

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Sid only poked at his food, licking the mashed potatoes off his plastic fork and squishing the fish into a pulp without eating any of it. Yan made some token gestures to get him to eat more, but she didn’t have the energy to fight him when he closed the lid and tossed most of his meal in the trash. He got up and brushed his teeth, then came back. As Yan finished her meal, Sid turned the tin of vena over and over in his hands.

“This is what Kino takes?” he signed to Yan.

She nodded.

“Why did they give it to us?”

“Payment for services rendered,” she signed with a bitter frown. But even as she did, she knew that wasn’t true. That wasn’t what the boy who had delivered it had said. It was meant to help— like the food, it was a gesture of kindness from at least one person on board the Sky Boat , rather than obligation. If someone had been obligated to feed them, the food almost certainly would have been delivered by one of their entourage— Iri, or Sid’s minder, or Lieutenant Cesper, or his staff would have gone to get food for them. But this had been personally delivered by one of the ship’s crew. Sid watched the change in Yan’s expression as she mulled it over. Every thought took twelve times as long as it should have to cross her brain.

“Do spacers usually pay in illegal drugs?” Sid asked. “Especially visiting government functionaries on the way to discuss how to stop drug smuggling?” He knew as much as she did that this was not the real reason. They weren’t meant as currency— the vena was meant for use.

Yan shook her head, watching Sid open the tin again. He studied its contents.

“How many does Kino take?” he asked.

“Don’t,” Yan signed. Sid was only holding the tin loosely in his hand, and she probably could have taken it from him, with the power or otherwise, but she lacked the will to fight him.

“I think Sandreas would forgive me.”

“Why would you…” Yan began. The answer was obvious, of course. But she was hoping that Sid would talk himself out of it. The idea of taking drugs repulsed her— partially a consequence of her upbringing as a spacer, and partially because drugs inhibited the use of the power, and that felt dangerous. Kino probably had such a high tolerance that she could remain unaffected to some degree, but Sid was a different story.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep,” Sid finally signed. “And if I do, I don’t want to dream.” He held out the tin to her. She shook her head.

Sid picked up one pill.

“Half,” Yan signed. “Cut it in half.”

He acquiesced, and used one of the knives that had come with their food to split the pill. He held up his piece, and then said aloud, in a flat tone that was probably meant to approach sarcasm, “For God provides water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, and rest to the weary.”

“Are you really going to take it?” she asked.

“Yes.” But he hesitated, still waiting for her approval, or whatever reassurance she was going to give him.

“You aren’t scared of losing the power?”

“I don’t care,” he signed.

Yan looked at the pill, pinched between his fingers. “Stay here,” she signed. “Don’t leave. I want to make sure—”

“You don’t have to look out for me,” he signed, looking past her.

Not sure what else to do, Yan reached out and put her hand on his knee. He tensed, perhaps expecting her to say something through the power, but she didn’t, just kept the touch as reassurance.

He swallowed the crumbly pill. Yan watched him expectantly, though even in her addled state she realized that was a silly thing to do. It wouldn’t take effect anywhere near immediately. She shook her head and cleaned up the remains of their dinner, then got ready for bed. When she emerged from the bathroom, she found that Sid had stripped off his cassock and had tossed it on the ground next to hers, and was underneath her blankets, eyes closed. He felt her sit down on the bed.

Without opening his eyes, he said aloud, “You should sleep, too.”

Yan didn’t know if she could. He looked small and vulnerable there on the bed, and perhaps his statement was less a reminder for her to take care of herself, and more a request for companionship. If she thought of it like that, she could oblige, even if she wasn’t sure that sleep would come to her. She crawled underneath the covers, and although it was cramped on the bed, they fit, Sid’s back against her chest, their knees crooked together. She used the power to turn off the light, plunging them into darkness.

They were silent for a minute, just breathing.

“Thank you,” Sid said aloud. Yan couldn’t respond without using the power, and she didn’t want to, so she just let him say whatever it was he wanted to say. She sensed that this was intentional, Sid leaving himself space to get thoughts out uninterrupted, communication without the shame of reciprocation. She wondered if he would say something else, and he opened his mouth to, but no sound came out.

The power flitted across the boundary between their skins, and Yan felt the softness of Sid’s thoughts, the slippery, weightless feeling of the drug taking hold. He wavered into and out of consciousness for a while, and Yan’s mind followed his, clinging on to the warm blankness that the vena offered him.

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The rest of the journey to Olar passed in a blur. Yan and Sid did not leave their rooms, and Sid spent much of his time sedated. When Hernan or Iri came by to check on them, Yan covered for Sid and said that he was sleeping. Both minders expressed a degree of skepticism in their tones and expressions, but Sid’s slumped form in the bed behind Yan as she stood in the doorway at least reassured them that Sid was alive and present.

The Sky Boat docked at the top of Olar’s space elevator, which was otherwise devoid of ships.

“The Neutron Star , with Apprentice Olms, will be arriving in two days,” Iri told Yan as they waited to go down to the surface. She had just finished reading through the updated precis on their task that had been waiting for them as they traveled through space, out of ansible rang. Yan and Iri were floating against a large window in their elevator car, waiting for control to give clearance for their descent. They didn’t have to sit just yet, not until the attendants told them that the journey was starting. Yan gripped the railing that separated her from the window with white knuckled hands.

“They’re a few days behind, because they had to rendez-vous with a few of the Guild Council members who will be attending,” Iri continued.

“Oh,” Yan said, voice flat and dull. She couldn’t bring herself to be curious, but she could bring herself to be dutiful. “Do you know who’s coming?”

“Yes,” Iri said. She was a little cautious as she said it. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

“The Sky Boat is sending a delegate?” She hadn’t seen any of the ship’s crew disembark onto the elevator with them, but the official ship delegate may not have been on board the Sky Boat , and may have been picked up by the Neutron Star from the Guild Council headquarters, which were on a station a few jumps from Emerri.

“No,” Iri said. “But the Iron Dreams is.”

Yan suddenly felt nauseous, and she closed her eyes to steady herself, counting to twelve before she opened them again. “Do you know who they’re sending?”

“Maxes BarCarran,” Iri said, her tone carefully neutral. Iri had access to every scrap of information on Yan that had ever been written down, so she of course knew that Yan’s uncle Maxes had raised her after her mother’s death.

“Oh.”

“He hasn’t heard what happened on board the Sky Boat yet,” Iri pointed out, even though Yan could have pieced it together herself. “He’s still traveling, and won’t hear until the Neutron Star makes it in system.”

Somehow, that made it worse. Maxes was coming because he was proud of her, but as soon as he arrived, there would be nothing but shame waiting for him. She wanted to ask if she could pretend to be ill, to make Sid handle all of their tasks on Olar, so that she wouldn’t have to face the Guild, but when she glanced behind herself at Sid— who was sitting dead-eyed and slack in an armchair, looking out the window and seeing nothing— Yan realized that she couldn’t do that. She nodded silently.

Iri rubbed Yan’s back. “Can I make a suggestion?” she said.

“Yes,” Yan said. “It’s your job.”

“It’s my job to do a lot of things,” Iri said. She paused for a moment, her hand continuing its steady circle across the back of Yan’s cassock, the red cape fluttering free above her hand. “I think you should write to him, so that he hears from you when he docks before he hears from anyone else. He would advocate for you to Apprentice Olms, if it all comes to that.”

Iri was correct, of course. If she could prepare her uncle for the shock, he might be able to forgive her more easily than if he heard the news from someone else. That would be the sensible thing to do. But Yan viscerally couldn’t bear the thought. The idea of writing to Captain Pellon disgusted her, too. Yan shook her head.

“I’ve already written to First Sandreas,” Iri said. “You know that, right?”

Yan nodded. First Sandreas— and Halen— would of course be kept informed of his apprentices’ status. But First Sandreas wasn’t a spacer. “What did he say?”

“I haven’t heard back yet.”

Yan nodded.

“He will expect you to write to him directly.”

“I know.”

“And will you?”

“It’s fine,” Yan said. She looked out the window, though she couldn’t avoid seeing both her and Iri’s reflections in it. “I can, or Sid can. It doesn’t matter.”

“That’s good.” She paused. “Your friend, Ms. Calor, was given an ansible card, by the way,” Iri said. “I got that paperwork squared away for you. So you can talk to her any time you like, now that we’re at Olar.”

The image of Sylva, so removed from all of the recent horror in Yan’s life, was simultaneously something that Yan wanted to reach for and push away. She represented a world that Yan had left completely, and there was the sensation of somehow tainting Sylva by talking to her about this. Nevermind the fact that they had left on bad terms. Yan had never wanted anything between the two of them to change, but nevertheless that change had come, from every direction all at once.

“I don’t want to talk about it, Iri,” Yan said.

“Of course,” Iri said. “I’m just putting it on the table.”

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Whoever had scheduled their trip had been thoughtful enough to give them time to get acclimated before they met with anyone important. Yan and Sid were cocooned from the various Olar officials who led their group from the spaceport to their hotel. Yan only had to say a few perfunctory words of greeting, to be politie, and then Iri stepped in and began to rapid-fire discuss logistics, which left Yan free to take out her phone and stare listlessly at it, half-typing a message addressed to no one, and then deleting it as she figured that she had nothing good to say. Sid was in a similar situation.

When she could bear to glance up from her phone, she observed a few of the fashions of the people who flitted around their group. Olarians wore thick clothes in layers that could easily be added or removed: a decorative woolen wrap over a jacket over a sweater, fur-lined boots that went up almost to the knee. The people tended to wear their hair long, and most people who could grow beards did. Nearly everyone had tattoos, stripey lines that wrapped around their arms, and hands, some even having decorative patterns across their faces that disappeared beneath their hair. If Yan had felt more alive, she might have stared to try to figure out what the pattern was, if any, between the tattoos that different people had. But as it was, her gaze just slid around dully, registering the information but doing nothing with it.

The drive from the port on Olar to the city where they were staying was short, and though the windows on their limousine were tinted, Yan still got a chance to look at the sweeping vistas of the planet. The elevator was at the planet’s equator, but that didn’t mean it was warm. Olar had only been settled within the past hundred years, and the terraforming process was not scheduled to be completed for many years yet. As it was, it was liveable, and enough food could be grown in greenhouses to more than sustain the population, but Yan’s body heat fogged up the window of the car as she leaned against it, and a few inches of snow crusted every surface that was not regularly cleared off. The capital city, which had the bland-in-the-extreme name of City One, was nestled in the bowl of mountains, and they passed through cavernous, carved tunnels to enter the valley.

It was night, and stars were peppering the sky, even through the shining light pollution of the city. At their hotel, there was an informal catered dinner for all of their party, which meant that by the time Yan could escape to her hotel room, she was beyond exhausted.

Her room and Sid’s were no longer adjacent, and when they went upstairs together, they stopped in front of Yan’s door.

“Do you want to come in?” Yan asked in sign. Iri was standing just down the hall, and so Yan avoided mentioning anything about the vena, though she suspected that Iri already knew about it.

Sid shook his head, not meeting her eyes.

“You’ll be okay without me?” Yan asked.

“I’m not a baby,” he signed, more vicious than he needed to. Yan stepped back.

“Fine.”

He looked away from her. By way of apology, or explanation, he signed, “I need to write to my family. I don’t need company for that.”

“Well, if you need me,” Yan gestured, vaguely, trailing off into a helpless swing of her arm that encompassed her hotel room.

Sid nodded, then shuffled off down the hall. As Yan watched him go, she had the sinking realization that it was not for his sake that she wanted him to stay with her.

Her hotel room was large and empty. People on Olar seemed to like indoor temperatures to be almost stiflingly warm, and her room was no exception. Across from the door was a huge plate window looking out over the city, and the mountains that rose up on the other end of the valley. The whole view was carpeted by lights that outshone the stars.

Now that Yan was alone, truly alone, for the first time in a while, she didn’t know what to do with herself. The thought of really sitting down to write to anyone sickened her, and she had already gone over the documents that pertained to their task on Olar as much as she could bear. The only thing she could think of to do was pray.

During all the time she had spent with Sid over the past few days, he had never brought it up. She knew, from the rest of their apprenticeship, that he did not take the theology as seriously as Yan and Kino did, to the point where Sandreas occasionally chastised him for it. But in these circumstances, Yan thought that if he didn’t mention wanting to pray, it was for a reason— too painful, perhaps— so she hadn’t pushed him on it. But now she was alone, and she couldn’t use Sid’s reluctance as a shield for her own.

Her thoughts, though still jumbled, were now more solidified several days removed from the actual event, so formalizing her thoughts through the ritual of prayer might help her organize them.

She wasn’t operating under the illusion that she would hear God’s voice telling her that she was forgiven— that was the kind of pronouncement she had always looked with mild skepticism on her classmates at the Academy for having, on the occasion that someone had said something like that aloud. Yan’s relationship with God had always been quieter than that— the kind of peace that came from surrendering her mind to a current larger than herself.

This was why she had always enjoyed meditation, more than formal prayer. But meditating alone, trying to clear her mind rather than merely subdue it enough to enter Sid’s, was not something that would come easily. Whenever she closed her eyes, she was back in the shuttle, her power roiling beneath her skin. So the ritual of prayer was the closest she could get.

Yan found her well worn copy of the Book of Songs , turned off the lights in the hotel room, and pushed the couch out of the way of the window. She took off her shoes and socks and knelt on the carpeted floor, facing the window, the book open before her.

For a moment, her mind was unbearably blank, as she searched for any prayer that should have been well-remembered. She eventually though of something from the Song of the Red King , the last part of the song that felt suitable to read. She flipped to it, past most of the story, looking at the harsh illustrations softened by the dim yellow light that came in from the city outside, bouncing off the snow.

In the story, the Red King ruled his kingdom with a terrible fury, so much that no one dared to oppose him except for three young men. One of them was named Zesa. They entered the Red King’s palace by force, intending to kill him. However, Zesa had already been paid by the Red King’s spies to betray the other two. When the three entered the palace, with information that Zesa provided, the other two were captured, and Zesa was ordered to kill his friends, as a final test of loyalty towards the Red King. A long segment of the Song of the Red King was dedicated to Zesa’s lament.

Yan recited parts of it, in a dull voice.

“Zesa went alone to the mountaintop, where none but God would hear his cries. He looked over the land below, and raised his arms to heaven, crying out in a loud voice:

“LORD, in this world I have set myself on high.

I have been given authority from the lowest valley to the greatest peak.

I have been granted power from the desert to the sky-wide sea.

My name is spoken as a worthy name.

All glory and honor comes to me

As I stand at the right hand of my king.

“Though I have been raised high,

I am offered no comfort.

I stand by my king’s side and am as alone

As if I stood on a cliff above the moon-tossed sea.

My king’s voice is like the wind that blows,

And his touch is like the waves, which throw men

To die upon the rocks.

“I once stood at the sides of those

Whose voices were like the songs of birds,

And whose hands offered me every comfort.

For power or glory I shunned them,

And my hands were like the rocks

Beneath the foam-laden sea,

Which offer no mercies but those of the tomb.

“LORD, You are merciful.

You are the wind that carries the sailor

Across the fear-deep sea.

Surely, if there was mercy in the tomb

For one such as me,

You would have struck me down.

“For even the worms in the darkness of the earth

Find some comfort in their brethren.

And the fish in the current-woven sea

Do not swim alone.

“But I have sinned against my brothers.

And I wander in the darkness of the broken and the lost.

If I could be forgiven by those who have crossed the star-circled sea

I would hear their voices in the song of the birds,

And feel the comfort of their touch in all the breezes that blow.

“O LORD— how can I be forgiven?

Surely, my brothers would say,

‘It is easier to endure a thousand years of torment

Than it is to endure the betrayal of a friend.’

Surely, it must be easier to drink the whole of the wine-dark sea

Than it is to earn forgiveness.

What is it that I must do?

O LORD— how can I be forgiven?”

Yan repeated the last line again and again, not moving on to the later parts of Zesa’s lament. He figured out how to find forgiveness, but she could not.

Movement in the distance caught her eye, and she saw that over the crest of the mountains, a huge, luminous red moon was rising, full or almost full. Its surface was scarred and pitted. Compared to even the larger moon of Emerri that she was used to, this one seemed far too close, like it was going to scrape the tops off the mountains as it passed overhead. Yet no matter how she tensed, feeling like it was going to crash down into her with all its strength, it hovered weightless and silent in the sky, continuing on the course that it must have been on for billions of years.

She was transfixed by it, and felt stripped bare in its ruddy iron-light. Her voice faded to whispers, then nothing, as she watched it rise, sweeping its gaze over the city below. She couldn’t move until it had risen past the lintel of the window, vanishing out of sight.

When it did rise out of view, the loss of its light made her dark hotel room feel even darker, and Yan shuddered and hastened to bed.