Page 57 of Red Scale Daddy
The words come out smooth, practiced, and awful.
I sit back slowly. The chair creaks, but I barely hear it over the sudden hard pull in my chest. I have heard soldiers say things like that. My life is the front. My life is the fight. My life is the unit, the order, the next hill, the next breach, the next ugly little piece of ground somebody decided mattered. It never sounds as noble as people think. It sounds like a grave being measured.
“That’s empty,” I say.
Roma turns her head. “Excuse me?”
“Your life. The way you just described it.”
Her eyes sharpen. “Careful.”
“No.”
The word surprises both of us, maybe because there is no joke in it.
She faces me now, posture controlled, but the air around her has changed. “You do not have standing to evaluate my life.”
“I have eyes.”
“You have opinions.”
“Yes, and this one is generous. You have built a ship, a plan, a cage, and a funeral road. Somewhere along the way, you moved into them and called it purpose.”
Her face goes pale beneath the bruise. “You think devotion is emptiness?”
“I think devotion with nothing after it is a slow way to disappear.”
“My father is alive.”
“I believe you.”
That stops her.
Good.
I lean forward, lowering my voice because this does not belong to the whole ship. “I believe you. I think there is a man out there who should have been found years ago, and I think the people who stopped looking deserve to choke on every excuse they signed. I also think that if we bring him back, you have no idea who you are when you’re not chasing him.”
Her breathing changes. Not much. Enough.
“You don’t know me,” she says.
“No. But I know what it looks like when somebody mistakes motion for living.”
She laughs once, cold and wounded. “Is that what you think you are doing? Living?”
“No.”
The answer strips the anger from her face for half a second.
I do not soften it. She would not thank me. “I told you I don’t care much whether I survive. That makes me a bad example and a useful warning.”
“You are not a warning. You are a complication.”
“I’ve been called worse by prettier.”
Her eyes narrow. “That was not charm.”
“It was filler because the truth got uncomfortable.”
