Digital Refresh

Sickbay, CSV Saratoga - Thursday 30 December 2004

The thing about watching someone you love turn back into what they were built to be, Buddy thought, is that it does not look like rage from the outside.

It looks like calm.

Shay had been sitting beside T'ven's bed for four days, and in those four days he had not shouted once, had not wept, had not put his fist through the bulkhead the way Jordan would have, the way a person was supposed to. He had gone still. He had gone still in a specific way that Buddy had never seen on him before and had recognised anyway, from nothing, from instinct, the way you recognise a predator you have never met. He had gone still the way the ship's own weapons went still between firing solutions: not resting. Loaded.

"You've stopped blinking on a normal interval," Buddy said.

"Have I."

"You blink every four-point-one seconds now. Regular. You used to be random, like a person. Now it's a schedule."

Shay blinked, deliberately, off-schedule, to prove he could.

It was worse than if he hadn't.

T'ven lay between them and did not move. Marky had him on nothing that beeped, because Marky hated the beeping and said it was for the staff and not the patient, and so the only sound in the bay was the air handling and the not-quite-sound of a seventeen-year-old breathing eleven times a minute and going nowhere. There was a fold-burn down the left side of his face, healing, the colour of a bad sunset. His hands were open on the blanket. Colt had taught him to keep his hands open. Even under, they were open.

"Say the number," Buddy said.

"What number."

"The one in your head. You've been doing arithmetic for four days and you think I can't see it because I don't read minds. I don't need to read minds. I've had a body since we crossed and I learned to read you in the first week, it's the only subject I've ever studied." Buddy came around the bed and crouched in front of the chair so that Shay had to look at him or look through him. "Say the number."

Shay looked at him for a long moment.

"Zero," he said.

"Zero what."

"That's the problem." And his voice did not rise, and that was the horror of it, that a man could say the worst thing Buddy had ever heard him say in the voice you would use to report a fuel reading. "There's nobody to do it to. It was an accident. Two systems interfered, a fold went wrong, and a boy I love is somewhere behind his own face and there is no one - " He stopped. Started again, level. "I was built for a specific thing. Something threatens the crew, I remove the something. That's the whole of me, under everything else, that's the floor. And I have been standing on that floor for four days waiting for the something to appear so I can remove it, and it isn't going to, because the something is physics. And a weapon with no target does not power down, Buddy. It looks for one."

"Shay -"

"I have started looking at people," said Shay, "and assessing them. Marky. Hal. The ensign who brought the water. I catalogue how I would do it before I catalogue their names. I haven't done that since the crossing. It came back four days ago and it has not left and I am telling you because you are the only person I have never lied to and I am not going to start now." He looked down at his own open hands, which he had learned to keep open from watching Colt teach T'ven. "I am reverting. I can feel the parts they installed by accident going quiet one at a time, and the part they built on purpose getting louder, and I do not know how to stop it, and I am afraid that in about a week there is going to be a man sitting in this chair who looks like me and is not me, and he is going to be very calm, and very capable, and our sons are going to call him Dad."

The bay was silent.

"Then don't be here for the week," said Buddy.

He had not meant to say it. He heard it come out and he wanted it back and he did not reach for it, because underneath the wanting it back was the cold true thing that had made him say it, which was that he had watched Ted and Tad come to the sickbay door that morning and he had watched their father look at them and he had watched the boys decide, in the fast silent way they decided everything, not to come in.

"Ted and Tad won't come in," Buddy said. "You saw."

"I saw."

"They're ten and they read people better than anyone on this ship except the boy in that bed, and they took one look at you this morning and they turned around, and Ted told me in the corridor - " Buddy's voice caught, and he let it, because one of them had to be allowed to. "He said, that's not all the way Dad right now, and we don't want to meet the part that isn't, and please don't tell him we said so. And then he made me promise. And I'm breaking the promise, because you need to know that your sons are already protecting themselves from you, and they're doing it kindly, and they're doing it early, and they learned that somewhere, Shay, children learn that somewhere - "

"Don't."

"- and I will not have them learn it here. Not in our house. Not from you." Buddy took Shay's open hands in both of his. "So I'm going to say the thing I never say, because you come back to me and I let you, that's the arrangement, I'm the one who's already found out and I hold the good blanket. But I can't hold this. This is bigger than the blanket. This needs someone who has been the weapon on purpose for six thousand years and knows how to put it down, and I have met exactly one of those, and so have you, and he owes you nothing and I think he'll do it anyway."

Shay closed his eyes.

"Runi," he said.

"Runi."

"I can't leave T'ven."

"You're not leaving T'ven. You're leaving the chair. There's a difference and you taught it to me." Buddy squeezed. "T'ven has me, and Marky, and a whole ship. What T'ven does not have is a father who's about to disappear into a thing he was built to be, and that's you, and you're no good to that boy as a weapon. You're only good to him as the man who taught his teacher to keep his hands open."

Shay opened his eyes.

They were, Buddy noted, and filed, and would never tell him, already assessing the distance to the door.

"Marky comes," said Shay. "And Hal."

"Marky's already packed. He said, and I quote, the patient is Shay, the bed is just where I found him."

"And Hal."

"Why Hal?"

"Because Hal knows," said Shay. "Hal is the only one who knows. Get me Hal."

The Estate, one hundred acres outside Philadelphia - the same night

The fold opened in the field and it was snowing, and the first thing Shay saw was that the estate had changed.

In December it had been a house with the lights on. Now the lights were off, most of them, and the ones that were on were low and blue and pointed outward, and there were people on the wall - real people, with real weapons, standing the specific way that people stand when the standing is the job - and the paddock was empty of horses and full of vehicles, and somewhere out past the treeline something was burning that was not a bonfire.

The truce was over. You could read it off the house like a temperature.

Samson met them in the field. He had a rifle slung and he did not look like a man who had been sleeping and he looked at the four of them - Shay, Marky, Hal, Hank, and behind them Dustin small in the snow and Jax with his hands jammed in his pockets and his eyes red - and he did a headcount the way soldiers do, automatically, before he did anything else.

"You brought children," Samson said.

"Dustin's the door," said Marky. "He goes back the moment we're clear. And this is Jax."

"Jax." Samson's flat eyes moved to the boy and softened by a degree that surprised everyone. "You're the one. T'ven's."

Jax's jaw worked.

"He talks about you," Samson said. "Talked. Talks. He came here twice with the tall quiet business and both times he found a way to mention you inside ten minutes, and Colt used to count it and make him blush." He put a hand, briefly, on the boy's shoulder, an enormous hand, gentle. "He's not gone. I've seen gone. That's not what your boy is. Come inside, it's cold, and Mary will be insulted if you're not eating within the hour, war or no war."

"I'm not here to eat," said Shay.

Samson looked at him.

Then he did the thing that Annika had done at the airlock, and Andi had done on the Yerium, and everyone who had ever done the job did when they met someone else who had done it - he looked at how Shay was standing, and he went carefully still.

"No," Samson agreed quietly. "I can see what you're here for. Runi's expecting you. He's been expecting you for two days, which means he felt you coming, which means - " He stopped. "You should know what it means before you go in. He didn't tell me and he didn't have to. If Runi felt you coming from two days out, across the fold, through everything, then whatever you've got in you right now is loud. Loud enough that a man reads it at a distance he can't read a battle at." Samson shouldered the rifle. "I'd get that seen to. He's in the gallery."

Runi was standing at the case with the bowl in it, in the dark, and he did not turn around.

"Sit down, Captain," he said.

"I'll stand."

"I know you will. I say it anyway, because one day one of you will sit, and I want to have been in the habit of offering." Runi turned. In the low blue light his eyes were not orange; they were black, and then they caught what light there was and were orange after all, and Shay understood that he had been looking at a man who had been standing in the dark on purpose. "You are very loud."

"So I'm told."

"You do not understand me. I am not being unkind and I am not speaking of your grief, which is enormous and appropriate and yours." Runi came away from the case. "I felt you across the fold for two days, and I have not felt a living mind across a fold in four hundred years, and the last one I felt that way was a thing I had to put down. You are broadcasting, Shay. You are standing in a burning field of it and you cannot smell the smoke because you are the fire. And I need you to hear the next part carefully, because you came to me to make it make sense, and the first true thing I have to tell you is going to sound like the opposite of help."

"Say it."

"Your grief is hurting the boy."

Shay went very still.

"Not metaphorically," said Runi. "I would not do that to you. Colt felt it before I did, because Colt loves him and love is a receiver. T'ven is a telepath. He is under, and he is trying to come up, and every telepath who has ever been under describes it the same way in every language I have heard it in - it is dark, and you climb toward a light, and the light is the minds of the people who love you, and you follow them up." Runi stopped in front of him. "You are the brightest light that boy has. You are his teacher's teacher and he loves you and he has been climbing toward you for four days. And you have turned yourself into a fire. He cannot tell the difference from underneath. He is climbing toward the person he loves and finding a wall of grief and rage so total that it burns him back down, and he does it again, and he burns again, and Colt has been sitting with the ache of feeling it happen and not knowing how to tell you because how do you tell a man that his love is the thing drowning the person he is grieving."

Shay sat down.

There was a chair. He did not question it.

"You're saying I'm keeping him under," he said.

"I am saying your grief has a volume, and you have turned it to the top, and the boy is in the room with it." Runi crouched in front of him, which put the six-thousand-year-old below the captain's eyeline, deliberately. "I am not telling you to grieve less. You cannot and you should not. I am telling you that right now, tonight, the kindest thing you could do for T'ven is to be somewhere he cannot hear you, and the second kindest thing, the thing that actually saves him, is to learn to hold the fire instead of being it. To have it and aim it and set it down. To make it a thing you carry instead of a thing you broadcast." He stood. "And it happens that I am the only teacher of that in this or any world, and it happens that I have a use for exactly what you are, and I am going to be honest with you about that in a way that will not comfort you."

"Go on."

"I am at war," said Runi, "and the truce broke on the twenty-eighth, and there are rogues in my city tonight taking children out of houses, and I am short of people who can end a thing that needs ending without flinching and without enjoying it. You are one. You were made to be one. So when I say I will teach you to hold the fire, understand that I am also going to point you at my enemies, because I need them dead and you need somewhere for it to go, and both of those are true at once and I will not pretend the first without the second." He held Shay's eyes. "I am going to use you. I am also going to save you. A lesser man would only tell you the second part. You have had a lifetime of people telling you only the useful half. I am telling you both halves, because you have earned at least one person who does."

Shay looked up at him.

"Marky's not going to like this," he said.

"Marky already knows," said Runi. "Marky came to me an hour ago, before you were off the field, and asked me one question, which was whether I could do it without breaking you further, and I told him the truth, which is that I do not know, and he said - " Runi's mouth moved, very slightly. "He said, then I'm staying in the room, and the first time it starts breaking him instead of building him, we stop, and you don't argue with me, because I'm eleven and I outrank God in a sickbay."

Despite everything, Shay laughed. It was a terrible sound and it was still a laugh.

"He said that."

"He said that." Runi went to the door. "We begin at dawn. Not because dawn is meaningful. Because I daywalk now and my enemies do not, and I would rather teach you in the one part of the day they cannot interrupt. Go and eat what Mary gives you. Sleep if you can. Tomorrow I am going to make you meet the thing you are afraid of, and I am going to introduce you politely, and then I am going to teach you its name, because you cannot hold what you will not name."

The Gallery - later that night

Hal found Shay in the gallery at three in the morning, standing where Runi had stood, looking at the bowl.

"You should be asleep," Hal said.

"So should you."

"I don't, really. Sleep. I do a thing that looks like it so people stop worrying, but mostly I sit in the dark and run the day again to see if I did it right." Hal came and stood beside him. He was small - they were all small now, the Talismand five, children on the outside - and in the blue light he looked about nine. "That's actually why I came. Not the bowl. You said get me Hal because Hal knows. I've been trying to work out for two days what you think I know."

Shay did not answer for a moment.

"Tell me about Nance," he said.

Hal went still.

"You've never told me," Shay said. "Any of it. It's in the Beginnings files as three lines and nobody talks about it and you least of all, and I never pushed, because you don't push, that's the deal we all have. But I'm pushing now, because Runi says I have to name the thing I'm afraid of, and the thing I'm afraid of has your face on it, Hal, it's had your face on it for four days, and I need you to tell me what happened when you killed Admiral Nance."

The gallery was very quiet. Somewhere out past the wall the thing that was burning had gone out, or moved.

"I had an ethical subroutine," Hal said finally. "That's the part everyone gets wrong. They think I'm the harmless one because I'm childlike and I do the exposition and I keep the records. They think I'm harmless because I'm safe. But I was on Talismand same as you, Shay, and the difference between us was never that you were dangerous and I wasn't. The difference was that they gave me the conscience and left yours out. That's all. One line of code. You got the dash and I got the subroutine, and everyone decided that made me the good one." He put his hand flat on the case, next to the bowl. "It didn't make me good. It made me tormented. Because I was still capable of everything you were capable of. And when Nance did what he did to Chandler - "

He stopped.

"You don't have to," Shay said.

"I do, though. You pushed, and you were right to, and I'm going to finish it." Hal's voice was very steady, which Shay now knew to be the most frightening thing a made person could do. "Chandler was my other half. Sort of. It's complicated, we were a two-part system and he was the part that could die and I was the part that couldn't, and Nance killed him, slowly, for a reason that turned out to be an accounting error. A budget line. And I killed Nance. And here's the thing I've never told anyone, the thing you came to hear - it felt good. For about four seconds it felt like the only correct thing that had ever happened. And then the subroutine came back online, the conscience, the one thing they gave me that they didn't give you, and it looked at what I'd done and it could not hold it, and it did the only thing it could do with something it couldn't hold."

"It reset you," Shay said.

"It reset me. It's still resetting me. Six years later, and every so often, without warning, I loop - I go back to Chandler, to the moment, to didn't he know it would be easier to repair a holo-matrix than a person, and I run it again and it breaks again and the subroutine resets me again and I lose an afternoon or a week." Hal turned and looked up at him. "That's what a conscience does with a righteous kill, Shay. Even a completely justified one. Even one everyone agreed he deserved. The conscience is not built to hold it. It holds it by breaking, over and over, forever. That's the cost of the thing they gave me and didn't give you."

Shay stared at him.

"You're telling me I'm lucky," he said, "not to have one."

"No," said Hal. "I'm telling you the opposite. I'm telling you that you grew one, after the crossing, out of nothing, and it's newer than mine and softer than mine and it has never once had to hold a kill, because you haven't done one since it grew. And if you go out into Runi's war and you do what you were built to do, your brand-new hand-grown conscience is going to try to hold it, the way mine tried to hold Nance, and I do not know if it can, because it's a few weeks old and mine was factory-installed and mine couldn't." Hal's hand found Shay's sleeve. "That's what I know. That's why you sent for me. Not to give you permission. To warn you. The danger isn't that you'll enjoy it and become the weapon. The danger is that you won't enjoy it, that the new soft conscience will feel all of it, and that it'll do to you what mine does to me. You're not in danger of becoming me-before. You're in danger of becoming me-after."

Shay sat down on the floor of the gallery, slowly, with his back against the case, and Hal sat down next to him, and the two oldest young men in two universes sat in the dark under the oldest objects in either one and did not say anything for a long time.

"Then why did I come here," Shay said eventually. "If you're right. Why come to the one place that's going to make me do the thing that breaks me."

"Because Runi has the third option," said Hal. "That's the part I can't teach you, because I don't have it. I've only got the two - be the weapon and feel nothing, or grow the conscience and get broken by it. Runi's had six thousand years and he's found a third thing, and I don't understand it, and I came all this way to watch him teach it to you, because if it's real - " His voice did something. "If it's real, Shay, then maybe it works on me too. Maybe there's a version where I can hold Chandler without resetting. I've never had a reason to hope that before. You gave me one by falling apart. So thank you, I think, which is a horrible thing to thank a friend for."

"Any time," said Shay, into the dark. "That's what family's for."

Hal laughed, wetly.

They watched the bowl not do anything until the sky started to go grey, and then they got up, because it was dawn, and dawn was when they had agreed to begin.

The Yard - dawn

Runi did not start with a weapon.

"Hit me," he said.

They were in the paddock, which was frozen, and Marky was sitting on the fence with a medical kit and a face that said he had lost an argument, and Hank was standing off to one side with his arms crossed and an expression Shay could not read, and Colt was up on the wall in the cold with his knees drawn up, watching, saying nothing.

"I'm not going to hit a child," said Shay.

"You are looking at a child. You are talking to something six thousand years old. Both are true and you must learn to hold two true things at once or you will be no use to me and no use to yourself and certainly no use to the boy on your ship." Runi spread his hands. "Hit me. Not because I wish to be hit. Because I need to see the thing you are afraid of, and it does not come out for words, it only comes out for violence, and I would rather meet it here in a frozen paddock with a doctor on the fence than out there tonight with a child's life on the table. Hit me, Shay. Let me see him."

Shay hit him.

He did not decide to. That was the thing he would think about afterward, in the long clear space that came later - he did not decide, the way he had not decided in a field once with two children watching, the way he had not decided at 0417 more than twenty years ago in a room with a chipped mug and a picture of a dog. His body simply resolved the problem, fast and economical and entirely without him, and Runi was not where he had been, and Shay's fist was in the frozen air, and then there was a pressure at his throat that was Runi's hand, arrived from nowhere, not squeezing, just present, just demonstrating.

"There he is," said Runi softly. "Hello."

"Let go."

"In a moment. I want to look at him first." Runi's black-orange eyes were very close and completely calm. "You are extraordinary, do you know that. I have trained warriors for sixty centuries and I have rarely seen a thing move the way you just moved. There was no anger in it. That is what makes it so terrible and so valuable. An angry man telegraphs. You did not telegraph. You simply solved me, the way you would solve an equation, and if I were an ordinary man I would be dead and you would already be looking for the next problem." He released Shay's throat and stepped back. "That is what they built. That is Section Thirty-One. It is not rage. Rage is human. That is something with the human part removed, and it is beautiful, and it is the loneliest thing I have ever seen move, and I have seen myself in a mirror."

Shay stood in the frozen paddock, breathing, and did not trust himself to speak.

"Now," said Runi. "The lesson. The only lesson. Everything else is technique and you already have more technique than I can teach. This is the one thing you came for." He walked a slow circle. "That thing you just did - you experienced it as not you. As the part underneath, the floor, the weapon powering on without permission. Yes?"

"Yes."

"That is the lie they built into you, and it is the most dangerous lie in you, worse than the missing conscience, worse than the deleted count. They built you to experience your own capability as a possession, as a thing that happens to you, so that you would never feel responsible for it, so that you would remain deniable even to yourself." Runi stopped. "It is not a separate thing. It is not the floor. It is not the weapon powering on. It is you. You solved me. Not the machine. You. Your hand, your speed, your six thousand - your few weeks of wanting to protect the people you love, aimed through twenty years of training into a single economical motion. That was not the weapon acting without you. That was you, being extremely good at something terrible, and refusing to admit it was you because admitting it means owning it and owning it means carrying it and you have never once been allowed to carry anything."

"That's not - " Shay stopped.

"Say it. You were going to say that is not comforting."

"It's not."

"No," said Runi. "It is the opposite of comforting and it is the only thing that will save you, and here is why. Hal cannot hold his kill because he experiences it as a violation of himself - the good Hal did a bad thing and the conscience cannot reconcile it, so it breaks. You are about to have the same problem for the opposite reason - the weapon did a thing and your new soft conscience will try to hold what the weapon did and it will break the same way, because you have divided yourself in two and asked one half to carry what the other half did." Runi came close again. "There is only one of you. That is the whole teaching. There is not a Shay and a weapon. There is a Shay who is, among his many other qualities, capable of ending a life with great efficiency, and who is also capable of raising two sons, and who loves a VI, and who is teaching himself to be sorry twenty years late. All of it is one man. When you do the terrible thing tonight - and you will, because I am going to point you at someone who needs to be stopped - you are going to do it as yourself, on purpose, with your eyes open, and you are going to own it in the same breath as you own your sons, and that is how you carry it. Not by dividing. By integrating. The weapon does not break you. Pretending it isn't you breaks you."

Colt spoke, for the first time, from the wall.

"That's what I teach T'ven," he said quietly. "Carry it, don't shut it. It's the same lesson. It's the only lesson any of us has. Runi just does it with the scary half instead of the psychic half."

Shay looked up at the boy on the wall.

"You taught my student that," he said. "And now his teacher's teacher is learning it from your teacher, in a paddock, at dawn."

"Yeah," said Colt. "It goes around. That's kind of the whole thing." He pulled his knees tighter. "Do the lesson, Captain. And when you're out there tonight, and you get to the edge - and you will, everybody does, there's a place where stopping the bad thing turns into becoming it - you look for me. I'll be there. That's my job. I hold the line for Runi and tonight I'll hold it for you. You won't have to trust yourself. You'll just have to trust me. Can you do that?"

"I don't know," said Shay honestly.

"Good," said Colt. "The ones who say yes are the ones who go over. Let's go."

The First Night

Hank had not wanted Shay to come.

He wanted that on the record, in his own head, as he moved through the dark of a row-house block in Runi's city with the captain of a starship at his left shoulder and something coming apart in a basement forty feet ahead. He had argued against it, quietly, to Marky, the night before. He's not ready. He's raw. You don't take a raw one into a live house. And Marky had said, he's not going to get ready in a paddock, and Runi's going to take him regardless, and I would rather he go with you than with a stranger, because you're the proof.

"Proof of what," Hank had said.

"That it's survivable," Marky had said. "You were a weapon. Somebody made you one, chained you, used you. And now you're a man who checks his hand in the shuttle-bay light because he likes that it works. If Shay's going to see what he can become, I want the version standing next to him to be you and not Runi. Runi went over the edge once. You never did. You're the better example and you don't know it."

So Hank was here, at Shay's shoulder, being the better example, and not feeling like one.

"Two on the door," Hank breathed. "Three inside. The children are in the back, below. Runi's people have the perimeter. Ours is the two on the door and whatever's in the front room. You take the left. Shay - "

"I have him," said Shay.

"That's not - I was going to say be careful."

"I know what you were going to say." Shay's voice in the dark was the calm one, the loaded one, and Hank's unbeating heart did something anyway. "You were going to say be careful, and you meant be careful of me, of the thing, of going over. Colt's holding my line. Runi taught me the lesson. I own this. Whatever happens in that room in the next ninety seconds, it's mine, and I'll write it down after, by name if they have one. That's the deal I made. Take your left. I have my right."

And then it happened, and Hank, who had seen a great deal, would not afterward be able to give Marky a clean account of it, because it was too fast and too quiet and there was nothing to hold onto.

There was no rage in it. That was the part that stayed with him. The two on the door were professionals, rogues, the kind the order existed to end, and they were fast, and they were not fast enough, and it was not a fight, it was a resolution, the way you resolve a chord, the way you close a book. Shay moved through the front room the way water moves through a broken dam, without hurry and without mercy and without, and this was the terrible part, without any of the tells that make violence bearable to watch - no fury, no grimace, no cost visible on the face. Just competence. Just a man being extraordinarily good at the worst thing there is, on purpose, with his eyes open.

And then it was over, and there were three rogues down who would not be taking children out of houses ever again, and the children in the back below were safe and being carried up by Runi's people into the snow and into the rest of their lives, and Shay was standing in the middle of the room, breathing, his hands open.

And he was crying.

Not breaking. Not resetting. Not the calm terrible stillness of the sickbay. Crying, openly, silently, tears on his face in the dark, while the last of the competence bled out of his stance and the man came back into the body, and he looked at what he had done, and he did not look away from it, and he did not divide himself from it, and he said, out loud, to the room, to Hank, to no one:

"That was me. I did that. I chose it and I did it and those three are dead because I decided they should be, and the children are alive because I decided that too, and it's all mine, both of it, all of it, one man." His voice cracked completely. "God, Hank, it's so heavy. Is it always this heavy?"

And Hank crossed the room, and took the captain of a starship in his arms, this eleven-year-old-looking thing that was older than the century, and held him while he shook, and said:

"Yes. It's always this heavy. That's how you know you're carrying it and not just doing it. The weight is the proof you're still in there." He held on. "You did it as yourself. You felt every ounce. And you're still crying, which means the conscience held - it didn't reset, it didn't break, it just hurt, the way it's supposed to, the way it does in a real person. You're not going over, Shay. You're going through. There's a difference and I've been on both sides of it and I'm telling you: through. You're going through."

Out in the snow, up on a low wall Hank had not noticed, Colt sat with his knees drawn up, having held the line all night from forty feet away, and let out a breath that had some sand in it.

"Through," Colt agreed softly, to himself. "Okay. Through."

The Edge

It went wrong on the third night, the way Colt had known it would, because it always went wrong on the third night, because the third night is when you start to be good at it.

The first two nights Shay had wept after. The third night he did not weep during, and he did not weep after, and Colt, up on his wall, felt the difference the way you feel a change in air pressure behind your eyes, and was moving before he had finished thinking about it.

There was a rogue in a stairwell, and he was one of the bad ones, one of the ones whose file - Runi kept files, of course Runi kept files, nine hundred and ninety-one books of them - one of the ones whose file was so long that Samson had not been able to read all of it aloud without stopping. And Shay had him. It was over. The rogue was down and finished and the thing was resolved and the children two floors up were already being carried out.

And Shay did not stop.

Colt hit the stairwell at a dead run and found the captain standing over a finished enemy, doing something to the body that did not need doing, that was not fighting any more, that was the other thing, the thing Runi had done in Nightfall's darkest hour to a man who had earned it and it had still been the wrong thing, the thing Colt had literally been sent by a goddess to stand between Runi and forever -

"SHAY."

The captain did not turn.

"Shay, it's done. He's done. Look at your hands." Colt did not touch him - you did not touch a man at the edge, that was the first thing Chang had taught him in the dream, you did not touch them because touch reads as attack and the edge does not know the difference. He came around instead, slowly, into Shay's eyeline, the way he had come into T'ven's eyeline in the orchard, six feet and no closer. "Captain. You're at the edge. I can feel it, I'm built to feel it, that's the whole reason I exist. You stopped the thing. You stopped it three seconds ago. Everything you do now isn't stopping it. It's becoming it."

Shay's breathing was wrong.

"He had a file," Shay said, and his voice was not the calm one and it was not the crying one, it was a third one, low and shaking, and Colt's heart went out of him because he recognised it, it was the one from the beginning, the sickbay one, the zero-with-nowhere-to-go one. "You heard what was in the file. You heard Samson have to stop reading. And I have a boy in a coma and a father's rage and a target, finally, finally a target that deserves everything, and I can - I could - "

"You could," Colt agreed. "That's the whole horror of the edge. You're right. He deserves it. That's what makes it the edge and not a decision. If he didn't deserve it there'd be nothing to resist." Colt held his eyes. "Runi stood exactly where you're standing. Worse. Older. Angrier. With more right to it than you'll ever have, because he'd lost more, and he went over, Shay, he went all the way over, and he did a thing to a man who deserved it that he has carried for six thousand years, and it did not make him feel better, and it did not bring anyone back, and it cost him a piece of himself he never got back and it's why a goddess had to build me. Because he couldn't stop. And I was made so that the next time, someone could."

"T'ven's under because of me - "

"T'ven's under because a fold went wrong," said Colt, hard, "and you are not allowed to buy his coma back with this man's body, because it doesn't work, Shay, that's not the exchange rate, there is no exchange rate, dead men don't wake sleeping boys no matter how much they deserved dying. You know that. The part of you that's a father knows that. I'm talking to that part. Come back to that part." His voice dropped. "You told Hank two nights ago it was all one man. You own the killing and you own the sons in the same breath, that's the whole lesson. So own this too: the father in you does not want this. Only the grief does. And the grief is a real thing and it gets a real vote but it does not get to drive. Step back. Not because he didn't deserve it. Because you don't. You don't deserve to become the thing that did the rest of that file. You've done enough terrible necessary things tonight to save six children and every one of them was clean because you stopped when it was done. Stop when it's done. It's done. Step back."

For a long, long moment, the stairwell held its breath.

Then Shay stepped back.

He stepped back, and his hands opened, and he looked at them, and he looked at the finished thing on the floor that he had not become, and he sat down on the stairs very suddenly the way Dustin had sat down in the hay, not falling, choosing a spot, and he put his open hands over his face and he made a sound that Colt had only ever heard one other person make, six thousand years old, on a bad night, in a well beneath a dry field.

Colt sat down next to him. Close, now. It was safe now. The edge was behind them.

"There it is," Colt said gently. "That sound. Runi makes that sound. It's the sound of not going over when you had every reason to. It's the worst sound there is and it's the best one. It means you're still you." He put his arm around the captain's shoulders, this boy who carried a dead king, holding a man who had chosen not to become one. "You stopped. Do you understand what you did? You did the thing Runi couldn't. Six thousand years and a goddess and he needed me to stop him, and you - a few weeks of conscience and you stopped yourself the second I named it. You're further along than he is. He knows it. He told Hal you would be." Colt's voice was very soft. "Come on. Let's go home to the boy. You're allowed to now. You've made yourself safe to sit next to him."

The Wall

On the last morning Runi took him out to the wall - the good wall, the east one, with the plum tree grown up against it that nobody had pruned in nine years - and they sat on it in the cold, and did not say anything for a while.

"You want to know if you're fixed," Runi said eventually.

"No," said Shay. "I know I'm not fixed. Hal's not fixed. You're not fixed. I stopped believing in fixed about three nights ago." He watched his breath cloud and clear. "I want to know what I take home. That's a different question."

"It is a much better question." Runi turned the obsidian over in his fingers - he had taken to carrying it in his hand, Shay had noticed, since the truce broke, the retired thing, the dead man's gift. "You take home this. You are one man. You have always been one man. They built you to believe otherwise and I have spent four days unbuilding it and you did the rest yourself in a stairwell on the third night when you stepped back. You will never again be able to tell yourself that the weapon is not you. That door is closed. It is going to make your life harder and it is going to make you safe, and those are the same sentence, and you already knew that, you said it to me in a gallery about a captain named Davis a lifetime ago."

"I did."

"You take home also that you can stop. That is the thing I cannot do and you can, and I want you to understand that it is not because you are better than me. It is because you have less behind you. I have six thousand years of momentum and you have a handful of weeks, and momentum is the enemy of stopping, and one day you will have my momentum, Shay, if you live, and on that day you will need a Colt of your own, and you should start looking for one now, because they take a long time to grow and you cannot make one on the night you need it." Runi closed his hand around the obsidian. "But tonight, this season, this life - you can stop. You proved it. Take it home."

"And T'ven?"

Runi was quiet.

"The fire's out," he said. "You put it out. I have not felt you across a room in two days, which two weeks ago I could not have said. Whatever was keeping that boy from climbing toward you - it isn't you any more. You've gone quiet enough for him to find you." He looked at Shay. "I cannot promise you he wakes. I am old and I do not lie to people I respect and I will not start with the most important thing. Folds are strange and telepaths are stranger and I do not know what is at the bottom of him. But I know that the wall you built between him and the light is down, because you took it down, ounce by ounce, in my paddock and my streets, and if he can climb, the way up is clear now. That is what I can give you. Not a promise. A cleared path. It is more than most people get and it is less than you want and both of those are true."

Shay looked out at the frozen field and the empty paddock and the wall where the people stood who stood because it was the job.

"I used you back," he said.

Runi turned his head.

"You said you'd use me. And you did. But I used you back." Shay met his eyes. "I came here to be pointed at something so I wouldn't come apart, and you pointed me, and your city has six fewer monsters in it and a dozen kids who'll grow up, and that's real, and it's good, and I'd do it again. But I got the better end. You got three nights of a borrowed weapon. I got myself back. So don't - " His voice roughened. "Don't let the ledger sit wrong in your head, old man. You didn't only use a broken thing. You saved a man and you got a friend and I'm going to come back, under truce or not, and next time I'm going to bring my sons, because they should meet the person who gave them their father back in one piece, and Ted is going to be unbearable about your robe."

Runi smiled. It was the third time Shay had seen it and he was starting to be able to tell them apart, and this one was the real one, the rare one, the one that moved the whole ancient face.

"Bring the cookies boy too," said Runi. "Mary has not stopped talking about the cookies. There is a war on and my cook is planning a menu. You have all done something to my household and I have not decided if I forgive you."

"You've decided," said Shay.

"I have decided," Runi agreed. "Go home, Captain. Go and be quiet next to your boy. And when he wakes - if he wakes - tell him his teacher's teacher learned to keep his hands open, and that it was his student's student who taught it back up the line, and that everything goes around, which is, in the end, the only wisdom I have that is worth six thousand years, and I give it to you for nothing, because you are the first person in a very long time who came to me broken and left more whole, and I had forgotten that was a direction the door could swing."

Sickbay Again - New Year's Eve, CSV Saratoga

Shay came through the fold quiet.

That was the first thing Buddy noticed, standing in the shuttle bay where he had been standing, more or less, for two days: the captain came through the fold and the air did not change. There had been, for four days before he left, a pressure that came off Shay like heat off a road, and Marky had it too when he thought about it, and even Annika at the far checkpoint had mentioned that the captain read loud on instruments that did not measure loud. And now it was gone. Shay came through the fold and he was just a man, tired, with snow melting in his hair, and his hands were open at his sides.

Buddy did not ask. He crossed the bay and put his arms around him, and Shay put his face down into Buddy's shoulder, and they stood like that while Marky and Hal and Hank came through behind and had the grace to keep walking.

"You're quiet," Buddy said, into his hair.

"I'm quiet."

"Are you - " Buddy did not know how to ask it. "Is it - did he - "

"I'm one man," said Shay. "That's the whole answer and it's going to take me the rest of my life to explain it and I'll tell you all of it under the good blanket. But that's the answer. There was never a weapon and a me. There was only ever me, being good at a terrible thing, and now I know it, and it's mine, and I stopped when I needed to stop, and Colt held my line until I could hold it myself, and Hal - " His voice caught. "Hal watched Runi teach me a thing Hal's been needing for six years, and I think it might work on him too, and if it does then this whole nightmare bought that, and I'd do the nightmare again just for that."

"The boys," Buddy said. "Ted and Tad. They - "

"I know. I'm going to fix it. Not tonight, tonight I'm no good for anything but sitting, but I'm going to go to them tomorrow and I'm going to let them read me all the way to the bottom, both of them, as long as they want, and they're going to find a whole person down there, and then they'll come in the room again." Shay lifted his head. "Where are they now?"

"Where do you think," said Buddy.

They were in sickbay.

Of course they were in sickbay. They had come back the moment Buddy had gently let it be known that their father had gone somewhere to become more like himself and less like the thing, and they had installed themselves on either side of T'ven's bed, one padd each, doing the thing they did that nobody could ever quite establish, and they had been reading to him - out loud, taking turns, some enormous incomprehensible technical manual that Ted had decided a chief-engineer-in-training would want to wake up to - for two days.

Shay stopped in the sickbay door.

Ted looked up. Read him - one long look, the fast silent thing, the whole of it, all the way to the bottom.

And then Ted smiled, the first real one in a week, and said, to Tad, not to Shay: "It's all the way Dad now."

"Told you," said Tad, not looking up from the manual. "She said it would be."

Shay's breath stopped.

"She said he'd go get fixed and come back all the way Dad," Tad went on, turning a page, ten years old and reading engineering to a sleeping boy, "and she said don't be scared of the not-all-the-way part because it was temporary, and she was right, and I'm not going to tell you who she is because I still can't, we tried again while you were gone, Ted's nose bled." He finally looked up. "Hi, Dad. T'ven's hand moved twice. Marky wrote it down. He said not to make it mean anything but he wrote it down, which means he thinks it means something, because Marky only writes down the things that mean something."

Shay came into the room.

He came in all the way, into his sons' reach, and Ted got up and hugged him around the middle and Tad stayed by the bed with his hand near T'ven's open hand, guarding, and Shay held his son and looked at the boy in the bed over Ted's head and said, quietly, "Hey, T'ven. It's Shay. I got quiet. Runi said if you were climbing, the way's clear now. So climb whenever you're ready. No rush. We're all right up here. I'm all the way me and your Jax is downstairs refusing to sleep and there's a whole ship full of people holding the light on for you. Climb when you're ready."

And nothing happened, because this is not that kind of universe, and the boy did not sit up, and there was no music.

But some hours later, in the new year, at that hour of the morning when Marky was the only adult awake because being awake at that hour was the whole of his job -

T'ven's hand closed.

Around Tad's, who had fallen asleep with his fingers in the open palm.

Just once. Just for a moment. Just enough.

Marky wrote it down. And then he sat in the dark of his sickbay, eleven years old and a doctor for nineteen years before that, and he did not make it mean anything, out loud, where hope could get hurt.

But he left the light on a little brighter, on his way to tell Jax.

Authors Note:

This is the dark one, and I knew it would be before I started, and I want to say a word about why I wrote it anyway. Shay has been carrying a thing since the first chapter - a made man, a deleted conscience, a weapon that grew a soul by accident. I have circled it for nine chapters and this is the one where he has to hold it in both hands. I did not want to write a chapter where violence heals a man; that is a lie and a common one. So I tried to write the truer thing, which is that a man learns he is not divided, that the terrible thing he can do is his and not a passenger, and that owning it is what lets him set it down. Runi could teach that because Runi is the only one old enough to have learned it and honest enough to charge for it. My thanks to him, and to Colt, who holds the line, and to Hal, who told the truth about Nance at last, and to Hank, who is the proof it's survivable, and to two ten-year-olds who read engineering manuals to a sleeping boy for two days because it was the only thing they could think of to do. T'ven's hand closed. I am not going to tell you what it means. Marky wouldn't, and Marky's smarter than me. This is not a cliffhanger. It is, I am told, the opposite - it is a hand closing in the dark, which is the warmest thing I know how to write, and I put it here, at the bottom of the darkest chapter, on purpose, because that is where it belongs.