The Airship Aurelia (The Aurelian Archives) (50 page)

             
“I get it, Reece.” He glanced over his arm at Hayden, who smiled faintly. “You’re the umbrella.”

             
After a moment, Reece snorted and echoed in agreement, “I’m the umbrella.” He sat down heavily. All his tension was bleeding into a tight, neat knot in his chest, the pressure nigh unbearable and at the same time a strange relief, because at least it was focused, and not just a messy buckshot of feelings.

He was actually starting to feel a little bit better—
again
—when Hayden had to go and break the spell by saying, “This…this is
my
fault.”

             
Reece stared. “Wait…what?”

             
Hayden gestured at his foot in distaste. “This. What happened in the cargo bay. I never even stood a chance against Hannick.”

             
“What’s that got to do with it?”

             
“Everything!” Hayden burst out. Glaring at his glasses where Reece had left them on the nightstand, he shook his head with his jaw tight and set, and Reece didn’t know whether he was about to cry or rage, or which one would startle him more. “You had to talk me into coming along in the first place because I was too scared to leave.”

             
“Come on, Hayden. To leave
your family
. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

             
“Maybe that was part of it, but the rest was just an excuse. Because I knew if I stayed on Honora, I’d go on doing well with my studies and become a doctor and everything would be fine, but if I came with you on Aurelia, it’d only be a matter of time before I stopped belonging.”

             
His words were stretched taut, pulled to a transparent thinness so Reece could finally see what this was really about. He’d always commended Hayden for being the uncomplicated “normal” one, the one who secretly held
The Aurelia
together. Not the metal paneling and bolts and springs, but the real Airship Aurelia—her people, her crew. He did plenty to contribute, but the wonder of Hayden was, he didn’t actually have to
do
anything to make the others feel better, warmer somehow. Reece saw that and called it goodness. It baffled him that Hayden called it uselessness.

             
“Hayden,” Reece said in a low voice, “listen to me. You belong here. That—”

             
Hayden interrupted him with an agitated flick of his wrist. “There’s a difference between belonging and fitting in. You belong with your family. But do you fit in with them?”

             
“Who wants to fit in?” Reece exclaimed. “You bring a stability to the rest of us ginghoos. Don’t discount that.”

             
“A stability,” Hayden murmured, thoughtful, and looked down at his hands. “I suppose one of us needs to be boring.”

             
Now Reece was getting impatient. If not for the stranger on the bed’s bad ankle, he’d shake him till he started to resemble Hayden again. “Alright. So what do you want to
be
?”

             
Hayden dropped his head back into his pillows and closed his eyes. “I…I don’t even know.” After a long pause, he admitted, “When I first decided I wanted to study medicine, it was because I wanted to help people. I still want to help people. But I was wrong when I thought being a doctor would give me any kind of power. I’ve never had real power over who gets draped with a sheet and who walks away with barely a scratch. That’s determined before they ever come to me.” His face was grim and stormy. His eyes opened with sudden sharpness, and Reece felt a little sorry for the ceiling, the recipient of that dark glare.

“
You’ve saved lives, Hayden, whether you want to believe it of yourself or not.”

“
Have I? I had a responsibility to protect Sophie, and I left her on Atlas. I tried to protect Po, and for my effort, I got this.” He gestured angrily at his foot with both hands, his voice raw with emotion. “And I promised Talfryn I would get her away from Neserus, but as far as I know, she could be
dead
there.”

Reece had to swallow to push past that. Because no one knew better than he did right now how the guilt of failing people you cared about twisted the gut like a sickness.
“Alright, but remember Nivy, on Leto? Or how about when Owon got the jump on me at Mordecai’s? You stitched us back together. You fixed us like no one else could have. I don’t understand what more you think it is you need to do.”

“
I need to stop people getting hurt in the first place,” Hayden said, fierce. “That’s the only way I can save them.” He transferred his glare to Reece, looking wild. After a long moment of Reece staring back at him, he deflated, shrinking, small and young and
Hayden
again. He took his glasses back up and put them on resignedly. “I’m sorry.”

Frowning, Reece stood, shaking his head. He was at a loss. He’d come to the infirmary ready to deal with a Hayden who had every right to hate him for what had happened on Oceanus. He was ill-prepared to deal with a Hayden who thought his greatest strengths were actually to blame.
“If anyone has nothing to be sorry about, it’s you.” Hayden snorted humorlessly. “
Hey
,” Reece snapped, “I’m serious! Let me be the bleeding umbrella, Hayden! I make the bad decisions for all of us—occupational hazard, remember? You deal with your foot and whatever’s going through your head right now, but you leave the blame with me. I can handle it.”

“
But I can’t?” Hayden wondered, impassive. Reece wished he could see himself, laying there despairingly like he’d been pushed in front of a bus-ship by his best friend. If this was him handling the blame, losing control of it would probably do him in.

Reece patted him on the shoulder on his way to the door.
“Get some rest, alright? I mean to push us hard to The Ice Ring and get you back on your feet. Have you seen Gid?”

Hayden came out of his gloomy trance with a start at the sudden change of topic and looked around as if just realizing they were alone.
“He was here when I woke up, but he left before I could say much. Do you think he’s…?”

“
I’ll let you know,” Reece promised him, and slipped out of the infirmary, letting out a long breath.

No, he didn’t think Gid was alright. Mordecai was dead; his laughter and his cigar smoke would never warm the cargo bay again. And there was something different about this death. They had all lost someone before—parents, siblings, friends, mentors, even as recently as Tutor Agnes—but for every loss for every one of them, there had been someone else to reassure them the hurt would get better in time. There was no one like that left. Mordecai had died and left every last one of them with a stinging sense of loss and no one on the outside to promise them they’d be happy again. Reece
knew
he’d be happy again. He just couldn’t
imagine
it.

             
He heard Gid long before he saw him. A sharp
clank
rumbled in Reece’s sternum like the footsteps of a giant metal creature as he slipped onto the grated bridge where he had stood for more than a dozen moots and looked out over the cargo bay with his hands rolled in his pockets. Below, Gideon worked in the corner where the bims were parked, loading a crate methodically, the back of his shirt soaked with sweat. Sensing Reece or maybe hearing him, he stopped and squinted over his shoulder. As Reece started down the stairs, he went back to work with a frown, packing the crate a little more forcefully now.

             
Reece drew even with him and peered into the crate. As he’d suspected, Gideon was packing away Mordecai’s personal belongings, namely his guns. His long leather duster carpeted the bottom of the crate and padded the shockguns, ALPS, and hobs Gid had already loaded, along with a flat tin of cigars, the physics book Mordecai had drawn on Sterling Eve, and two small canvas paintings, one of Panteda with its red grasslands and teal-blue skies, and one of his family, of which Gideon was the last survivor. Mordecai’s wife Esther, his sons and daughters and other grandchildren…they were all gone, and if Reece had never really known what to say about it before, he definitely didn’t have the right words to apologize for it now. Gideon went on packing the crate.

             
A few minutes later, he stopped and snatched up the tin of cigars, popped it open, and offered it to Reece. Reece frowned but plucked out a cigar when he gave the tin an insistent rattle.

“
He’d hate it if we let them go to waste,” Gideon muttered before taking one for himself. Reece supplied a spark-starter from his pocket and clicked up a flame that they shared in silence till their cigars had taken and smoke curled about them in a homey fog.

The silence stretched and pulled at the open wound.

Leaning his elbows against the edge of the crate to stare into it, Reece took a gamble and remarked, “You know the first time Mordecai got me to try one of these, I was a Fourteen?”

After a moment, Gideon smirked and blew an expert smoke ring up at the ceiling. It drifted like a ghost before fading into the dark.
“I was six. Thought my ma was going to skin him and hang him out to dry, I was so sick.”

“
What did he do?”

“
Hid his cigars so she couldn’t incinerate ‘em. Acted extra polite for a few days, took his shoes off at the door, that sorta thing.”

“
You know, it’s funny.” Reece ticked his cigar on the side of the crate to dust off the embers. “I never really thought of what it meant that Mordecai was your grandfather. I mean, I knew he was, but I never imagined him bouncing you on his knee as a kid, or bringing you treats at holiday.”

Shrugging his big shoulders, Gideon admitted,
“Yeah, he wasn’t really the type.” After taking another long pull on his cigar, he went on, his words washed in smoke. “Even after the war, when he was supposed to take care’a me, he couldn’t really figure out how to treat me like a kid.”

“
Some people would call that a boon. Abigail still seems to think I’ll never brush my hair unless she does it for me.”

Gideon shot a sideways glance at his unsightly crop of hair and snorted, and Reece grinned, relieved that so far, things were going smoother by far than they had with Hayden. But then, he hadn’t really gotten to the hard part. Gid could still conceivably decide to turn the crate into a coffin.

He decided just to wing it and prepare to dodge.

“
Gid—”

“
Aw, burn it Reece,” Gideon sighed. “We really gotta do this? It’s bad enough, everyone lookin’ at me like I’m liable to explode at any second.”

Reece knew the feeling. At Liem’s funeral, the uncertain glances and significant silences had made him
want
to explode. Still, he owed Gideon an apology and an explanation, even if it was a lousy one that got him punched in the face.

“
I was wrong, Gid.” As he rolled his cigar between his fingers, shaking his head, Gideon scowlingly turned away and busied himself with Mordecai’s luggage. “I thought you’d want to hear at least that much.”

Gideon didn’t answer, just went on unceremoniously shoving faded clothes into the crate until Reece sighed and decided to come back later. His friends were making it impossible for him to be pathetic and contrite when it was the only time he’d ever asked to be allowed to be those things.

              “Where you goin’?” Gid demanded, straightening and frowning at him.

             
Pausing at the door, Reece called back, “You don’t want to hear my apologies, and that’s all I have to deal in right now, so—”

             
“Quit bein’ a ginghoo,” Gideon turned one of Mordecai’s bags upside-down and let socks, bullets, sheaves of papers and assorted trinkets fall out in a clump, “and get back here and give me a hand.” As Reece wandered back and scooped up a bag that still needed sorting, Gideon grumbled, “Just don’t understand why people feel the need to say stuff that’s common knowledge. I know you’re sorry. So why we gotta talk about it?”

             
Reece should’ve picked a different bag. Who knew Mordecai had collected old ink canisters? Reece’s fingers were an oily black mess in a matter of seconds. “Because you deserve to hear it even if you already know it? And I worried you were blaming yourself for…I don’t know. Look, the point is, I went too far, thinking you’d stolen the anai.”

             
“I told ya. If I had, I would’a never been so obvious about it,” Gid said with a simple shrug as he squinted down at a few pages he’d plucked from the sheaves—loose gun design sketches, from the looks of it. He set a few of the drawings to one side before tying the rest back together and tossing them into the crate. Mordecai’s revolver, Reece noticed, had been holstered at his opposite hip rather than packed away with the rest of the armory. Following Reece’s wondering stare, Gideon glanced at the gun and tentatively touched Mordecai’s pearly silver hand guard. His face had darkened again. “Usually when a Handler dies, his gun’s buried with him. But I figured, since there won’t be no burial…”