Janus’s Apartment, New Prometheus
Lumiara, Survivor’s Refuge
4454.2.3 Interstellar
Callie wiped her hands on a rag and came to give Janus a hug. It was an awkward maneuver; Janus had a half-asleep toddler on his hip, his pack on his shoulder, his heavy jacket stuffed through the strap, and a very excited jungle dragon trying to get in on the action, but he managed to get his left arm around his little sister’s shoulders.
Callie wrinkled her nose. “You smell so bad.”
“Like someone who went three weeks without a shower?”
“Yeah. Want me to take Xander?”
“Please,” Janus said.
Callie deftly got the wrap undone and took her half-sleeping nephew. Xander reached for his father without waking up, breaking Janus’s heart a little, but he really had gone three weeks without anything but camp sanitation, and he needed to get clean.
With space at a premium, even an almighty emissary couldn’t waste space by having an apartment stay empty when he was gone so often, so he shared the space with his sister. One living room, one kitchen, just like back in Sector Six in Prime Dome; two separate bedrooms and bathrooms—more like the time they’d spent with Councilor Bennin.
Janus walked into his bedroom and dropped his pack by the door. The room was exactly like he’d left it—messy. He’d had another argument with Lee, and he’d been in a hurry to leave. “You didn’t pick up?”
“I’m not dad!” Callie said.
Janus chuckled. Their mom, Anika, had been the messy one, while their dad had been the neat one. “You can’t possibly remember that!”
“Wrist comms are forever!”
Janus shook his head and closed the door. Callie had been too young for the implant when their parents had died. Janus had already been twelve, with over eight years of random memories recorded automatically in moments of heightened emotion. Most kids deleted those early recordings in their teens, partly out of rebellion and partly to make room for their own self-absorbed lives. Losing his parents had made those memories precious, and he’d stored them in an external device to share them with Callie when she was old enough.
Janus stripped off his snow pants and his sweat-stained undergarments before stepping into his small bathroom. His face was wind-and-sunburned, and his lips were cracked. He’d done his best to put on UV blocker and grease out there, but he was too pale and too exposed not to take some damage. There was stubble on his jaw; he’d run out of depilatory cream. He had two cracked fingernails, and his cuticles were a mess. That was on top of the countless bruises and small cuts that had become normal and the massive yellow and purple bruise on his side and back from the fall. He was vain enough to be pleased at his muscle tone. He would never be as “perfect” as Mick—Hunters were naturally tall and culturally obsessive about their fitness—but the weeks out on the ice had left him lean and powerful.
Fury pawed at the door.
“No!” Janus said.
The jungle dragon growled.
Janus laughed. “Not this time, Fury! I’m allowed to have a few minutes of privacy!”
He listened, and after a few more seconds of silent protest, the jungle dragon lay down on the other side of the door.
Janus smiled and shook his head. He knew she’d been genetically programmed to bond with him by a mad but brilliant geneticist, but her loyalty to him and his family still warmed his heart.
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He turned on the shower to steaming and stepped in. It was like ten thousand needles, but Janus smiled and let it burn him. He wasn’t frostbitten. It wasn’t harming him. His body had just adjusted to the ice, allowing him to be functional in spite of the fatigue, the wet, and the cold. He laughed again. Lee had been right. The weather had chilled his bones.
He had dispensers bolted to the wall. He started with soap to clean off the dirt, sweat, and dried blood. It felt like he was losing a layer of skin. Then he used the antiseptic, and that really did hurt. He wasn’t worried. He had Cult nanites and a whole battery of immune shots to keep him healthy, but the antiseptic would take care of any surface infections before they got that far.
What was he going to do about Lee? He’d had to make a lot of tough calls in the past two years, but most of those had felt less personal. He’d decided to bring her to Lumiara; she’d been pretty high up on the compartmentalists’ naughty list by then, so he’d probably saved her life. But that wasn’t why he did it.
He brought her here because she was the mother of his son.
That was the root of their problems. Having Xander had been his pleasure, her choice. It didn’t give him any authority over Xander or her unless she wanted him to have it—not in Promethean culture, and definitely not in Hunter culture. That was unfair because he loved Xander, and the boy was a piece of him that would go on after he—maybe—died on the way to the Core, and it was unfair because Xander loved him, but that was life, unfair from the first breath. Xander had been her choice, grown in her body, birthed out in the dust of Irkalla. If she’d asked for his support, maybe that would have given him a leg to stand on, but he’d gone and made the decision on her behalf without asking. She’d had every right to be mad.
She hadn’t been. Lee had jumped at the opportunity to come to Lumiara. She’d had this whole romantic idea of the two of them—her and Xander—hitting the roads of the ice world and visiting all its surface settlements.
Janus forbade it. She defied him.
Good for you, Lee.
He would have done the same.
Janus let the thought run from his mind and let the water wash over him. Unlike Irkalla, Lumiara had plenty of water. As long as the Reef didn’t cut them off, they had plenty of power, too. He could afford to give himself a few moments of not carrying the world on his shoulders.
For that moment, he just listened to the rush of the water, felt the burn, and breathed in the hot, humid air. He felt the heartbeat in his neck, the ache of his sore body. His brain tried to side-slip him, to think about what delayed the opening of the colony door or why Nikandros really wore his mask, but Janus fought it. Just a few minutes, he pleaded with it. He just needed a moment during which he didn’t need to deal with everyone's problems, let alone his own.
Lunch is ready, Callie sent him over the comm.
Janus shut the water off. He didn’t know how to fix things with Lee without endangering his son or separating them. He couldn’t endanger his son, and Lee would never let him separate them, not in time for him to know he was safe before he left. It was an impossible problem. But he was wet, so he grabbed a towel. He was hungry, so he was going to eat. Just because some of his problems were unsolvable didn’t mean his life was. He’d start with the little things, and that would have to be enough.
***
Janus took another mouthful of the rolled-up yellow protein. It was an interesting texture—a bit rubbery and thready at the same time, but rich and salty as well. “You said this is an egg?”
“Uh huh,” Callie said around a mouthful of her own.
“What kind of egg?” Janus asked suspiciously.
“Something called a ‘chicken,’” Callie said. “We don’t actually have chickens, but one of the colonies on level forty-four can fabricate the stuff.”
“What did you trade for it?”
“Twice the caloric equivalent of blue-green algae.”
Janus nodded. That was a good trade.
Callie had gotten taller and leaner in the past two years. She wasn’t an adult yet, but she wasn’t a kid anymore, either. She was working full time with colony maintenance, trying to predict where the next system failure would happen before it did. “I heard you stopped by maintenance admin while I was off shift.”
“I did. The main door jammed.”
“It didn’t jam. It self-stopped while it ran a diagnostic and then shunted to a secondary system.”
“Can you force it open?”
“We can,” Callie said, setting her chopsticks down. “Big blue button in the security station, right next to the big red button to force it shut. We try not to do that, though, even if there’s someone really important waiting to get in.”
“What if they’re really, really important?” Janus asked with a grin.
Callie rolled her eyes, but he could tell she wasn’t actually upset.
“I’m sorry I overstepped.”
“It’s fine,” Callie said, digging back into her food. “A little ‘fear of the aspirant’ will squeeze a little extra work out of the teams.”
Until I leave for the Core, Janus knew.
Xander finished digging the last of the creamy soy and fruit mix from his cup with a little polymer spoon. He looked at Janus.
“I’ll get you some more, little man.”
Janus took the cup and kissed the top of Xander’s head before heading for the fridge, with Fury lumbering after him. He wasn’t worried about not having enough food for his family or getting exiled. No one could fire him for being an outsider, and he didn’t have to make any more life-or-death decisions today.
This was the life he’d always wanted. He was doing everything he could not to fixate on the fact it was about to end.