Page 160 of Red Scale Daddy
Pally glances at me, and something like reluctant appreciation flickers behind the irritation. “That phrasing is less suicidal.”
“I’m growing.”
“Do it quieter.”
He zooms in on a narrow path threading the edge of the shelf. “There is a maintenance blind spot along this vector where Throgg’s outer sensor arrays lose resolution for approximately forty seconds during shield recalibration. I have used it twice to avoid detection.”
“Can we use it to get aboard?”
“Getting close is possible. Boarding is another matter.”
“Possible is enough for step one.”
He studies the map, then me. “You are still thinking like a soldier.”
“You say that like it’s an insult.”
“It is a limitation. A soldier sees the breach point. An engineer sees the systems that decide whether the breach point matters.”
“Great. Be the engineer. I’ll be the breach.”
“You are injured.”
“You mentioned.”
“You have vacuum damage, shock trauma, blood loss, and the kind of stubbornness that makes medical triage personally offensive.”
“Put it on my tombstone later.”
“I am trying to avoid tombstones.”
“You’ve been avoiding them for nine years,” I say. “How’s that working out?”
His hands still.
The words come out rougher than I intend, but I do not take them back. He needs the hit. Maybe I do too.
Pally stares at the console, shoulders bowed with more than age. “Every failed escape killed something,” he says. “A system. A route. A piece of confidence. Eventually you learn that hope is expensive.”
“Yeah,” I say, quieter now. “And she paid your bill.”
He closes his eyes.
When he opens them, they look more like Roma’s than ever.
“She did, didn’t she?”
“She paid it with everything.”
He turns toward the far wall, where a small shelf holds a few objects tied down with wire: a cracked mug, an old tool handle, a child’s painted scrap of metal sealed behind cloudy plastic. I notice it properly for the first time. The painted stars are uneven, bright little dots connected by lines that make no astronomical sense.
Pally follows my gaze.
“She made that when she was six,” he says. “Told me it was a map to find me if I got lost.”
My throat tightens in a way I refuse to dignify with attention. “Well.”
He lets out a breath that shakes once. “Well, what?”
