Page 174 of Red Scale Daddy
The little ship slips beneath a slab of wreckage, so close that I can hear tiny impacts ping across the upper hull as dust and frozen particles scrape along the plating. Pally adjusts course by fingertip pressure, easing us between two drifting masses that look ready to crush anything foolish enough to pass between them.
“You ever think about what you’ll do if we get out?” I ask.
His shoulders stiffen.
“Bad question?” I add.
“Unfamiliar one.”
“That makes two of us.”
He keeps his eyes forward. “For years, all future thinking became engineering. Survive the next failure. Find the next power cell. Avoid the next sweep. Repair the next seal. The idea of afterward became indulgent.”
“Yeah.”
“You?”
I look toward the broken light ahead. “After the war, I didn’t plan past the next drink or the next fight. Then Roma walked into my bar wearing the ugliest coat in known space and asked for volunteers to do something suicidally meaningful.”
“Her coat was ugly?”
“Criminally.”
A faint smile touches his mouth. “She dressed like that on purpose.”
“I know. That was the worst part.”
The smile fades, but warmth lingers at the edge of his face. “She used to wear paint on everything. Hands, sleeves, hair. Her mother said she looked like a small explosion in an art supply shop.”
I try to picture it: Roma before grief sharpened her, red hair loose, hands stained with color instead of grease, building stars because she wanted to, not because she needed to reach a dead man.
The image hurts.
“I want that back for her,” I say.
Pally glances at me.
“Maybe not exactly that,” I continue. “Time doesn’t work that way. But something. Something that belongs to her because she wants it, not because the past is holding a blade to her throat.”
Pally returns his gaze to the viewport. “You really do love her.”
The word hits like decompression.
I stare at him.
He does not take it back.
The old instinct rises first, reaching for sarcasm, for denial, for anything that keeps the truth from standing naked in the cabin.
Then I let it die.
“Yeah,” I say.
My voice sounds rough even to me.
Pally breathes out slowly. “Does she know?”
“Probably not.”
