Chapter 14Front Row

Baxter, Lena

The joint debrief for Faith Park was held in Endurance's main briefing room at ten the next morning, and it was fuller than Baxter had ever seen it.

The Harrier leads had come across from Dauntless by helicopter at nine. The official reason was the debrief. The real reason was the party Endurance had laid on in the hangar bay for the afternoon, because for the third operation running there had been no Federation casualties at all.

Nobody had said so out loud since the strike came home. It was the kind of thing you didn't say, the way nobody at a card table mentions that the deck seems to be running their way.

Baxter took his seat at Joker's end of the table and looked round the room the way he always did, counting faces without meaning to. Queen in their row, Kate at the end of it with her notes squared in front of her. Pike at the board. Dealer, gray and rumpled, in a corner by the projector, looking as if he hadn't been to bed, which Baxter suspected he hadn't. And against the back wall, because there weren't enough chairs, four Marines in flight suits with the 777th's patch on the shoulder.

He noticed them without much interest. Two of them were identical: the same square face, the same close-cropped black hair, the same breadth across the shoulders, as though somebody had made a very good Marine and then, pleased with it, made another. Baxter looked twice, as everybody did, and then took care not to look a third time. Beside the twins stood a tall fair woman with her arms folded, and beside her a girl, or a very young woman, with her cap tucked under one arm.

The young one wasn't looking at the board. She was looking down the length of the table at Joker One, the way Baxter's students used to look at a visiting speaker. Not the bored ones. The ones who had read the speaker's book.

Pike ran the debrief briskly. Queen reported first. Kate gave the solar field in four sentences, the sequence and the timing and the result, without a wasted word, and sat down. Joker's turn came, and Pike looked at the end of the table.

Ray sat with his hands loose on the table and the dog lying across his feet.

“Joker,” he said. “Assigned targets negated. No damage.”

That was all of it.

Pike waited. The room waited with her. Baxter watched it happen along the rows: Cruz glancing at Everson, the Harrier leads at the back wall shifting, Dealer in his corner lifting his head.

Nothing about the riverbed. Nothing about forty miles of canyon at a hundred feet, or a Ladon that had died at the end of its runway nine minutes before the strike arrived, or the thirty-eight targets in that valley that nobody had assigned him and that weren't there any more.

Ray looked at the table. Pike looked at Baxter.

Baxter cleared his throat and gave them the rest, the times and the numbers, because somebody had to and he had been there. He did it as plainly as he could. He found, halfway through, that he was doing it in Ray's voice, and that it didn't sound strange in his own mouth at all.

It took him somewhere he hadn't been in years.

When he was a boy, there had been a shelf at the back of the town library where somebody had put the old flight-test reports, and later the reports from the space program, in blue cloth binders that nobody but Baxter ever took down. He had read all of them, some of them twice.

Later still, when he was teaching, he had put photocopies of them in front of his students and asked what they noticed.

The good students noticed the voice. Men who had just ridden something that very nearly killed them, writing it up afterward in exactly the voice you'd use for the weather. Some vibration noted. Systems nominal. Objectives achieved. It wasn't modesty, he had told his students. It was discipline. It was the habit of men who had learned that if you let the feeling into the report, you would never fly the next one.

He had wanted to be one of them once. That was a long time ago. He had been told, very kindly, that he would make an excellent instructor, and he had.

Ray talked like that. But he talked like a man who had filed a great many reports, about a great many flights, and had stopped expecting anybody to read them.

Pike thanked him and turned to the back wall.

One of the twins came off it and stood at attention. It was the still one, Baxter thought, though he couldn't have said how he knew there was a still one. “Jackpot,” he said. “Nine launched. Nine recovered.”

At the end of the table, Ray looked up.

Not at the twin. Past him, at the back wall, at the Marines standing against it, and for a second too long. Then he looked down again at his hands, and the dog shifted its weight across his boots, and Pike went on to the intelligence summary.

Baxter didn't know what that had been. He thought about it through the rest of the summary and didn't know at the end of it either.

Captain Lena Haugen of the 777th Marine Attack Squadron had been in the Corps for eleven years, and in that time she had formed a low opinion of parties, a lower one of the Navy, and no opinion at all of Endurance, which she had known for six weeks only as a set of voices on the net.

She had come across for the debrief because Cris was the lead and Cris was going, and she was Seven, and where the lead went to be talked at by the Navy, it was Seven's job to stand behind him and look as if she had no opinions. Seb had come because it was a party. Seb would have cross-decked to a party on a garbage scow. Betty had come because she had volunteered, very promptly, the moment Cris asked who else wanted to go, with a face of such innocent professional interest that Lena had nearly laughed in it.

Lena knew precisely why Betty had volunteered. She hadn't said so. That was the kind of thing an element lead was for.

The twins stood beside her against the back wall, and the Navy, as the Navy always did, looked at them twice. Cristóbal and Sebastián Perez were identical, and in their early thirties, and built along the lines of a well-made door. They had the same square face and the same black hair cropped close to the skull.

You told them apart by which one was talking.

Cris, older by four minutes and in his own opinion by a good deal more, was the still one. He stood with his hands behind his back as though he were on parade, listened with his whole face, and spoke last.

Seb was never still at all. He had been growing a mustache since Drinwich, for a bet, and the mustache was losing. He had an opinion on everything a little before he had heard what it was about.

Strangers mixed them up exactly once. Seb enjoyed it. Cris corrected it.

Lena watched the room the way she watched a valley before a run, and the room, she thought, was strange.

It was the run of it. Jackpot had flown with Endurance since the tankers: the waterfront at Theve, Drinwich, and now Faith Park. They had flown every one of them, and come home nine of nine every time, and every night Cris wrote 9/9 on the board in the ready room, slowly, in capitals, like a man who expected the number to change. A Marine squadron wasn't used to that. Lena wasn't sure she trusted it. Luck like that, in her experience, wasn't luck. It was being saved for something, the way the Navy saved its good coffee.

Betty stood at her shoulder with her cap under her arm and her hair in the regulation knot Lena had put up for her on the helicopter, because Betty could do Lena's hair and Lena could do nothing whatever with Betty's, and they had arranged it between them long ago so that neither of them had to say so. Lena's spare gloves were in Betty's flight bag. Betty's spare everything was in Lena's. Second Lieutenant Betty Tan was twenty-three years old, the most naturally gifted pilot in the squadron, and by some distance the worst at hiding what she was looking at. She was looking at it now.

Lena looked at it too, because she was fair.

She had heard Endurance on the net for six weeks, and she had formed, from the net alone, a fairly complete picture of the ship. Now she put faces to the voices, one after another, and sized each of them up the way a Marine sizes up a unit she will have to fight beside.

Coster, Joker Four, who told jokes on the net in the long dull legs of a patrol, turned out to be a quiet, rather soulful young man, much quieter in person than on the radio. There was something careful in the way he held his coffee. Baxter, Joker Two, was obviously a father to all of them. He watched Joker the way Cris watched Jackpot, counting them without seeming to. Lena liked him at once and trusted him a little less than she liked him, because men like that will do anything at all for their own.

And then Joker Three, the Growler pilot, whose voice on the net was light and amused and never stopped, and who saw every radar from here to the border and described them all as though she were pointing out the view from a train. She was a slight young woman with a Yuktobanian accent and, of all things, a white jacket, worn over her flight suit as if she had come aboard for an afternoon and simply never left. A visitor's patch was still stuck to the breast of it, on Velcro, half peeled away at one corner and wrong side up. Nobody, apparently, had ever told her, or she had decided not to care, and Lena couldn't tell which and suspected it was both.

She was sitting next to Coster. She was sitting a good deal closer to Coster than there was any need to, given the number of empty inches on her other side, and neither of them seemed to have the faintest idea. When he shifted, she shifted. When she leaned over to read something off his kneeboard, she stayed leaned.

Lena looked at the two of them, and then at the patch, and thought: that's trouble.

Queen were at the front, in a row. Cruz, Everson, Nguyen. They weren't related to their lead or to each other, and they were plainly, ferociously her little brothers. Lena watched them close up round her without seeming to, Everson saying something that made Evans roll her eyes, Nguyen moving her coffee an inch out of range of her elbow. She recognized it at once. It was how she was about Betty.

And Queen One wasn't looking at Joker One, and Joker One wasn't looking at Queen One, and everybody else in the room was looking at both of them. Lena had heard it on the net weeks ago. Kowalczyk, back aboard Dauntless with his cards and his ledger, had called it from the radio alone. She was going to have to tell him he was right, and he was going to be unbearable.

Then there was Joker One himself.

He said almost nothing. He sat at the end of the table with a big shaggy sand-colored dog lying across his feet and looked at the table, or at the board, or at nothing. Lena had heard that voice on the net calling breaks that had saved lives, and she kept waiting for the man to match it, and he never quite did. He was smaller than the legend, and somehow heavier. And he was, Lena noted, with a Marine's flat honesty and a certain amount of irritation, extremely good-looking. He did nothing whatever about it and quite possibly didn't know: it was the kind of face recruiting posters are built around, worn by a man who would plainly never look at a camera if he could help it.

It explained a great deal about Betty. It explained nothing about anything else.

When he gave his report, Lena very nearly laughed out loud. Assigned targets negated. She had been on the sidings at Faith Park, low and slow under everybody, the way Harriers always were. From there she had watched him take the valley apart. She had watched the column of smoke stand up at the far end of it before any of them were even over the ridge. If that was negated, she'd hate to see destroyed.

Then Cris gave Jackpot's numbers, nine launched, nine recovered, and Joker One looked up.

People looked at the twins. Lena was used to that; she knew the look, the double take and the faint smile. This wasn't it. He looked past Cris at the back wall, at the four of them standing against it, and his eyes stopped for a second too long on someone. Lena couldn't have said who. Then he looked down again.

Endurance's party was held in the hangar bay, between the folded wings of two Super Hornets, and it was a better party than Lena had expected. The galley had made a cake, a vast flat thing the size of a hatch cover with FAITH PARK across it in blue icing, slightly smudged at the K. Somebody had strung lights along the overhead. Deck crew and pilots from both ships stood in knots between the aircraft with paper cups, and somebody's speaker was playing something with a great deal of guitar in it.

Betty was enjoying herself enormously and trying not to look as if she were looking for anyone. Lena stood beside her with a cup of punch she had no intention of drinking and watched the room.

Joker One wasn't there. Lena had known he wouldn't be. Neither, after twenty minutes, was Queen One, which Lena noted and didn't know what to do with.

The speaker, on the other hand, was very much there, and so was Joker Four, who had commandeered it. He had a record player beside it, an old portable thing, and was defending his choice of record to Joker Three, who stood in her white jacket with her arms folded and her chin up and her patch still wrong side up.

“It's slow,” the girl was saying.

“It's patient.”

“It's track four, and it's slow, and you've played it twice.”

“It's a party. I'm allowed.”

“You're allowed to play it once.”

They were standing about four inches closer together than either of them seemed to be aware of. It had been about six inches at the debrief. Lena, who had been right about this sort of thing her whole life, revised her opinion upward. Not trouble. A great deal of trouble. The Growler pilot's dog, the same shaggy animal, had apparently given up on Joker One for the afternoon and lay across Coster's feet instead, which he seemed to take as support.

Betty watched them over the rim of her cup with deep satisfaction.

“Those two,” she said.

“Kowalczyk's got them at evens,” said Lena.

“Do they know?”

“God, no.”

Betty sighed happily. It was a small thing and Lena put it away. Betty could see it plainly in other people. That was how it usually went. Lena could see it in everyone, which was not the same thing as being wise, and was a good deal less comfortable.

At three, Betty said she wanted some air, and slipped out of the hangar bay into the passageway. Lena went after her, because Lena always did.

The passageway was cooler and quieter, and painted the same gray as everything else on a warship, and Betty was walking backward along it with her cup, laughing about the cake, and saying that if Dauntless's galley ever produced anything like that she would personally—

Joker One was coming the other way.

He was alone. The dog wasn't with him. He had his head down and was walking the way he seemed to do everything, without any waste in it. And at the sound of Betty's voice, laughing, he stopped dead.

Not slowed. Stopped, the way a man stops when he hears his own name called in a crowd.

He looked at her face. He looked at it for what felt to Lena like a long time, and then down, at the name tape on her flight suit, as if the name were a word he had heard once a long time ago and had been trying ever since to remember.

“Tan,” he said, very quietly. "It's good to see you."

Then he went on past them and round the corner and was gone.

Betty didn't breathe until he had turned it. Lena heard her not breathing. Then she let it all out at once and turned to Lena with her face lit up like a runway.

“He knows my name.”

Lena said something. She didn't remember afterward what it was.

She had moved. That was what she remembered. Before she had thought about it at all, before he had even spoken, she had taken a half step forward and to the side, so that her shoulder was between Betty and the man in the passageway. It was the step you take when something comes toward your wingman too fast. She didn't know why she had done it.

He hadn't looked like a man who had learned somebody's name. Lena had seen that look on a great many men, and it was nothing like this. He had looked like a man who had been told someone was dead, a long time ago, and had just heard her laughing in a corridor.

The helicopter back to Dauntless wasn't until five. Cris took Betty off to the galley, where Endurance was still handing out cake to anyone who could hold a plate, and Lena went looking for the information officer.

She told herself she was doing it for Betty, who would have died before she asked. That was true. She was also doing it because she wanted a proper look at the face that had looked at Betty like that, and she was honest enough to know it, and not quite honest enough to say so.

She was lost within two ladders. Endurance was a far bigger ship than Dauntless, and laid out, so far as Lena could tell, by someone who had never intended to walk around in it. She stood at a junction of three identical passageways and read the deck markings, and the deck markings told her where she was with great precision and no use whatever.

“You look lost, Captain.”

The man who had come up the ladder behind her was nobody she would have looked at twice. Middle-aged, gray, tired, in a rumpled flight suit, with a computer disk in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. Then he spoke again, and she knew him instantly, though she had never seen his face in her life.

It was the voice. She had heard it on the net on every mission since the tankers: dry, unhurried, every consonant in its proper place, the voice of a man reading the shipping forecast at the end of the world. Nobody else on either ship sounded like that.

“Dealer,” she said.

He inclined his head, as if she had said something mildly clever.

He had been at the debrief, she realized. In the corner by the projector. She had looked straight at him for an hour and not seen him at all.

He looked nothing like his voice. That was what struck her. She had imagined, without ever deciding to, someone tall and calm and silver, the kind of man who would sound like that. He was a perfectly ordinary man who had been awake for twenty hours and was not, by the look of him, intending to sleep any time soon. He was going to D.D.'s office himself, he said. He had the Faith Park plot on the disk and wanted to lay it beside the camera footage. He'd take her.

They went down a ladder and along a passageway Lena would never have found. She asked him, because every Harrier pilot on Dauntless had been asking it since yesterday afternoon, and she wanted the answer from somebody who would know: “Where was he?”

Dealer didn't pretend not to understand.

“In the riverbed,” he said. “He went down into it at eleven thirty-one, ten minutes after he crossed the coast, and I lost him in the ground clutter. I called it. Two clicks, very faint. That was the last I heard.” He walked a few steps. “Nineteen minutes. Forty miles. I sat over the strike with my heart in my mouth and looked at the empty place on my display where the symbol ought to be. I had the rescue frequency up. I thought he'd flown into a wall.”

“And then?”

“And then a single contact stood up out of the ground over the north end of Faith Park, as if it had climbed out of the earth. It turned for the end of a runway that I'm fairly sure he couldn't yet see.” Dealer drank some of his coffee. “There was a Ladon on the end of that runway. I told him to let it go. On the net. Not a threat to the operation, let it go, do not pursue.” He was quiet for a moment. “He didn't even change his breathing.”

Lena thought about that.

“From the sidings,” she said, “you couldn't see anything. Just the ridge in front of us. And then there was this column of smoke standing up at the far end of the valley, a mile high, straight up. Before any of us were over the ridge. Before we'd fired a shot.” She shook her head. “Ibarra said on the net, what the hell is that. And Cris said, that's ours.”

Dealer didn't answer for a while. Lena saw that it had landed somewhere. He had only ever seen it as symbols, she realized, a little square that went out and came back. He had never seen the smoke.

“I gave him some advice once,” he said at last. “But he's not the kind of man who needs advice, is he?” He looked into his coffee. “I've learned that much, since flying with him.”

Lena found that she liked him very much.

D.D.'s office was a converted space the size of a large cupboard on the gallery deck. It held a desk, two chairs, a photocopier, three monitors, an extraordinary quantity of cable, and D.D. himself, who was delighted to see them.

He was delighted, it emerged, to see anybody. He was especially delighted to see someone who was not Navy, and he told Lena so, and told her a good deal else besides, all at once and without apparently needing to breathe.

He was a handsome man in a suit that had cost more than Lena's first car, with hair that had been arranged with great care that morning and had stayed exactly where it was put. He looked her up and down within the first minute.

It wasn't the look Lena had expected. She had expected the usual one, and she would have known what to do about it. It was a different look altogether, swift and expert and entirely impersonal, and she realized after a moment that he was deciding whether she would photograph well, and what she would be for. He would have been the worst kind of shipboard lothario, Lena thought, if he had been anything like as interested in women as he was in pictures.

Dealer gave him the disk. D.D. ran the riverbed for him, because Dealer asked.

Lena watched it over their shoulders. Red rock on both sides of the canopy, close enough to touch. The pale floor of the riverbed pouring away under the nose. Every bend arriving exactly when the nose was ready for it, as though the canyon had been cut to fit the aircraft and not the other way around. She had flown low for a living for eleven years, and she had to make herself keep watching.

Dealer didn't move. He sat in D.D.'s second chair with his coffee going cold and watched the screen, and Lena knew, without being told, that he was watching the place where on his display there had been nothing at all.

“Christ,” he said, very quietly.

D.D. stopped the tape. Nobody said anything for a moment.

Then Lena said what she had come for, because she had never seen the point of going round a thing when you could go through it. “I'd like a photograph of Joker One.”

Dealer raised an eyebrow and said nothing at all, which Lena appreciated.

D.D. went a little pink.

“Ah,” he said. “Well. Officially, there aren't any.”

“There's a poster of Cope in every ready room in the fleet.”

“There is. I made it. I'm very proud of it.” D.D. turned a pen over in his fingers. “But Joker One says no. To everything. Every time. I've asked him four times. Santos has asked him. Commander Baxter has asked him. The XO has asked him, very nicely, which I didn't know she could do.” He looked at the pen. “He just says no. Not rudely. He just says it, and that's the end of it.”

“Officially,” said Lena.

D.D. looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at Dealer, who was examining the ceiling with great attention. Then he sighed, and opened a drawer in his desk, and took out a flat gray folder.

“I'm a professional,” he said, with dignity. “I have a long lens. I've taken a few frames from the island. Without asking.” He paused. “I'm not proud of it.” He paused again. “I'm a bit proud of it.”

He opened the folder and slid out a print and put it on the desk in front of her.

Lena looked at it, and Dealer leaned in to look over her shoulder, and for a while neither of them said anything.

It was Joker One, sitting alone on the edge of the flight deck beside his aircraft, at first light. His helmet was on the deck beside him. The dog was leaning against his leg. He was looking out at something beyond the edge of the frame, and the whole gray sea lay behind him, and the light was coming in low across the water and catching the side of his face. He had no idea anyone was there. You could see that. He wasn't arranged. He wasn't anything. He was just a man sitting by himself at the end of the world in the cold, with a dog, looking at the sea as if he were waiting for something to come up out of it.

It was the most private photograph Lena had ever seen.

“That's a poster,” she said.

“I know,” said D.D., with real anguish. “He keeps saying no.”

She looked at it a while longer. Then she looked up at D.D., and D.D. looked back at her, and sighed again, and went to the drawer, and came back with a smaller print of the same frame. No number on the back. No mark of any kind.

“It doesn't exist,” he said. “You never say where it came from. Not to anybody. Not ever.”

“Agreed.”

He held it out. He didn't ask who it was for. He was quite good at not asking, Lena thought, for a man who asked everybody everything.

Jackpot's ready room aboard Dauntless was a third the size of anything on Endurance and smelled permanently of coffee and hydraulic fluid and Seb's cigarettes, which he did not smoke in it, he said, and which nevertheless smelled. By eight that evening most of the squadron was in it. Kowalczyk had the cards out. Whitlock was asleep in a chair with her boots on the table. Cris was at the board.

Lena came in and crossed the room and put the print into Betty's hands without a word. She did it the way you'd hand somebody a speeding ticket, face down, and kept walking, and sat down in her own chair and picked up a manual.

Betty turned it over.

She looked at it for a long time. Lena watched her over the top of the manual and didn't pretend not to. Then Betty looked up, and Lena would remember the expression on her face for a long time. It wasn't giddy. Not yet. It was stunned, the way you would look at somebody who had handed you something you had never known you were allowed to have.

Seb, at the card table, had seen it too.

“Hey,” he said, delighted. “Hey, Nine's got a boyfr—”

Lena looked at him.

It was not a long look. It was flat and complete and entirely without heat: the look a captain gives a lieutenant in the field when the lieutenant has started to say something that will get somebody killed. Lena didn't use it often. She didn't have to.

Seb, who had a twin and knew exactly what that look meant, held up both hands and went back to his cards. Kowalczyk, opposite him, very carefully did not write anything in his ledger. Only Lena was allowed to tease Betty. Everybody in Jackpot knew that, and Seb had known it too. He had just, for a moment, been Seb.

At the board, Cris uncapped the marker and wrote 9/9 in slow capitals under yesterday's date, and gave every appearance of having seen nothing at all.

By eleven the others had gone to their racks, and Betty got giddy, and Lena let her.

It came all at once, as it always did with Betty, like a pressure door letting go. First she wanted to show Lena her collection, which Lena had seen in pieces over a year and never all at once. It lived inside her locker door. Cope's poster from before the war, the famous one, with the corners gone soft from being moved from ship to ship. Newsreel stills. A page torn out of a magazine, a grainy aerial shot of a gray Super Hornet low over a coast. The still from D.D.'s Faith Park release, the mirrors going up in the northwest like a sea breaking, which Betty had taped up only that morning before the helicopter.

And now this, which could go in none of those places, because it didn't exist.

“You know what it is?” Betty said. She was sitting on the table with her feet on a chair, holding the print in both hands, very carefully, by the edges. “It's not the poster thing. Everyone thinks it's the poster thing. It's that we see him from underneath.”

She explained it the way only a Harrier pilot could. Jackpot flew low and slow, under everybody, she said. Under the fighters, under the strike, under the whole war. So they had seen him from below since the very first day at Theve. The guns on the waterfront going quiet one after another, before Jackpot could get to them. Drinwich. That column of smoke at the far end of Faith Park, before any of them were over the ridge. She hand-flew it as she talked, the way pilots do, her free hand banking and rolling in the lamplight.

“He's never left anybody,” she said. “That's the thing. Not once. Not in any of it. Everybody he's ever flown with has come home.”

Lena had heard all of it before, in pieces, on patrols and in the mess and in the helicopter. Tonight she let her tell it from start to finish.

And then Betty, because she was giddy and twenty-three and it was eleven at night, stopped talking about his flying, and Lena let her get there too.

The face. Betty had cataloged it with the thoroughness of a pilot doing a walk-round. Dark hair, a little longer than regulation, as though nobody aboard Endurance had the nerve to tell him. Dark eyes, very steady, that looked at you as if they were memorizing you. Good bones. A mouth that never smiled, not once, not even at the party, she'd been watching. A pale scar at the hairline, just there, on the left. The way he moved, which was like his flying, economical, nothing wasted. His hands.

Betty on the subject of his hands went on for some time.

Lena threw a glove at her.

“He's beautiful, Lena,” said Betty, catching it. “He's actually beautiful. Nobody tells you that, because there aren't any posters.”

“He's all right,” said Lena, grudgingly, because she wasn't blind.

“He's all right?”

“He's very all right. Go to sleep.”

Betty didn't go to sleep. She looked at the print again, holding it up to the lamp.

“He doesn't even wave,” Lena said, gently, once. It was the only time she teased her all night.

“He said my name.”

Lena had nothing to say to that, so she didn't.

Then, because it had been in her mind all evening and she was a coward about very few things, she said lightly, as if it were nothing: “Kowalczyk's got a column for Joker One and Queen One.”

“Oh, that.” Betty waved it away. “They don't even talk. She can't stand him. You heard her on the net. She says Joker One like it's a swear word. And he doesn't look at her.”

Lena had heard exactly the same net, every day for six weeks, and drawn exactly the opposite conclusion. He doesn't look at her. No. He didn't. He didn't look at her in the way that a man doesn't look at the sun.

She let Betty have it. She could see everything in everyone, and for once she decided not to say.

She was worried about it, privately. She was worried the way you worry about a little sister who has fallen for someone who will never look at her. And she was a little relieved, too, if she was honest. A crush on a man on another ship, who didn't even wave, was a safe place to put your heart in a war. Safer than most.

Then she thought of the passageway, and his face, and wasn't sure any more that it was safe at all.

Betty didn't put the print in her locker with the others. When she finally climbed down off the table, she put it into the breast pocket of her flight suit, the one over her heart, and buttoned the pocket.

Lena pretended not to see.

It was past one when Lena woke and knew, without looking, that Betty's rack was empty.

She found her where she had thought she would, in the ready room, which was dark except for the lamp over the board and 9/9 in Cris's capitals under it. Betty was on the floor with her back against the lockers and her knees drawn up and her phone in her hand. Scrolling. The screen lit her face from underneath. The print was still buttoned in her pocket.

Lena had seen her like this before, on other nights. She had never asked. She sat down on the floor beside her, without asking now either, and put her own back against the lockers, and looked at the phone rather than at Betty.

She had known since July.

The night of Expo City, half of Dauntless had crowded into the wardroom to watch it, because there was nothing else on any channel and nobody could stop watching. Lena remembered the woman on the roof exactly. An older Asian woman, small, straight-backed, in a good jacket, with her newsreader's make-up still perfect and not a hair out of place, and the whole city burning behind her. Her voice had been perfectly level. She had been as poised on a rooftop at the end of the world as she had ever been behind a desk at six o'clock, and only her eyes had given her away. Lena had watched her say my daughter is a pilot, and something about the set of the woman's jaw had been familiar in a way Lena couldn't place, and she had turned round in her chair to look for Betty.

Betty wasn't in the room any more. She had walked out before it got that far.

Tan was her father's name. Lena had worked that out in the next few days, quietly, without asking anybody. Betty had enlisted under it so as not to be Madison Haskell's girl in a Marine ready room. Lena had never said a word about it, and as far as she knew, Betty had no idea she knew.

“She's Madison Haskell,” Lena said. “Isn't she.”

She said it the way you'd mention the weather, without any weight on it at all, looking at the phone.

Betty didn't look up. Her thumb stopped.

“How long have you known?”

“July.”

That was all. Betty nodded, slowly, and her thumb started moving again. Lena waited. After a while, without looking up, Betty began to talk.

It came out the way things do at one in the morning on a warship: quietly, in no particular order, as if it had been waiting a long time just behind her teeth. Because Lena knew already, Betty could talk about her, really talk, for what Lena guessed was the first time since July. Maybe the first time since long before that.

She had grown up watching her mother read the news at six o'clock on XTB. Telling the whole country the truth every night, in a good jacket, in that voice. She had done her homework on the studio floor under the anchor desk, she said, because there was nobody at home to watch her, and the floor manager used to bring her juice. She had learned to keep perfectly still and perfectly quiet while the red light was on, before she had learned to read. At home her mother had practiced her sign-off in the kitchen while she cooked, over and over, the same two sentences, until they were exactly right.

“She could tell the whole country anything,” Betty said. “Anything. And she couldn't once tell me she was proud of me.”

Lena sat very still and said nothing. She knew that wasn't true any more. She had watched it stop being true.

Her mother hadn't wanted her to fly. That was the fight. Not flying at all, at first, and then not the Harriers, and then not the Marines, each fight worse than the one before, until the last one, when Betty had said things she could still hear.

“Things you can't,” she said. “You know. The kind you can't take back. I said she'd never once been on my side in my life. I said she only cared about me when there was a camera on.” Her thumb moved on the screen. “Then eleven months of nothing.”

“From her?”

“From both of us.” Betty was quiet for a moment. “I kept it going just as much as she did. Longer, probably. Because I was right about the Harriers, and I wanted her to say so first.”

She tilted the phone so that Lena could see it. It was the first time Lena had seen the thread.

There wasn't much of it. Eleven months of nothing, which on a phone looks like nothing at all: one message, and above it a date and a gap. The message was Betty's. She had sent it after the first strike on Expo City. Mom get to a shelter. Now. Please. Underneath it, in small gray letters, it said Read.

Nothing had come back. Then the second strike. Then nothing at all, ever since.

Betty scrolled up, past the gap, past eleven months of nothing, to the last thing her mother had sent before the fight, which Lena couldn't read and didn't try to. Then she scrolled back down to the one message, and Read, and stopped.

“I do this every night,” she said.

“I know.”

Betty looked at her then, briefly, and away again.

“I could have had eleven months,” she said. “My birthday. Christmas. I could have gone home at Christmas. I could have just been wrong, about one stupid thing, and had eleven months.” She swallowed. “I don't even know if that's the last thing I'll ever say to her. That. Get to a shelter. I don't know if she's alive. And when I sent it, I didn't know it might be the last thing. You never do, do you? You never know it's the last time.”

Lena didn't answer that, because there wasn't an answer.

“I've never watched it,” Betty said. “The roof.”

“I know.”

“Everybody's seen it. It's on every screen in the Federation. People talk about it in the mess, and I go out.” She looked down at the phone. “If I watch it, that's the last of her. That's it. There won't be anything after it. So I don't.”

Lena had watched it. She knew exactly what was in it. She knew what Madison Haskell had said on that roof, with the city burning behind her, looking straight down the camera as if she could see through it: I'm proud of you, Betty. She had the words in her mouth. She very nearly said them.

She didn't, because they weren't hers to say. They ought to come in her mother's voice, when Betty was ready to hear them. Lena sat on the floor of the ready room with them inside her and hated it.

After a while, because it was the only thing she had to offer, she offered her own.

“I write home every Sunday,” she said. “Have done for eleven years. Dull letters. The weather. The food. What the censor lets me say, which is nothing. My father writes back in two lines and draws a fish at the bottom. Every time. I don't know why. He's never fished in his life. And my mother adds a postscript.” She thought about it. “I've never once written love at the end of one. Not once, in eleven years. It's not a thing we say, at home.”

She heard herself saying it, and realized that she had never thought about it before. Not once.

Betty was looking at her.

“You don't know it's the last time,” Lena said. “That's the thing. Nobody ever does. Don't go deciding it was the last time before you know it.”

She held out her hand for the phone. After a moment Betty gave it to her.

She couldn't send anything. Nobody could. The task group was under emissions control: no personal transmissions from any ship, phones locked down, nothing radiating that a Sotoan receiver could find. The only link out of the whole group was D.D.'s, aboard Endurance, through Enso's strange private satellite, which nobody quite understood and everybody was grateful for, and pilots didn't get to use it.

So Lena opened a new message under the old one and gave the phone back, and Betty sat for a long time with her thumbs over it.

Then she wrote: Mom. I'm alive. I'm sorry.

She saved it as a draft. It sat on the screen under Read, gray and unsent. Betty looked at it, and then put the phone face down in her lap, and laid her head back against the lockers.

She fell asleep against Lena's shoulder about twenty minutes later, with the phone in her lap and one hand over the buttoned pocket.

Lena sat there until the deck watch changed, so as not to wake her. Then she got Betty up, mostly asleep and protesting, and into her rack, and put the phone on the shelf beside her where she'd find it. Then she went to her own rack, and sat on it, and wrote her Sunday letter a day early.

The weather, which was cold. The food, which was terrible. As much of Faith Park as the censor would let through, which would be the word successful and possibly the date. A line about Seb's mustache, for her father, who would draw a fish.

At the bottom, before her name, for the first time in eleven years, she wrote love.

She looked at it for a long time.

Then she sealed the envelope and put it in the mail sack by the hatch, and went back to her rack, and lay down, and went to sleep.