James Corey - Nemesis Games

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “Right through here.”

The hallway was brutal concrete; green-gray metal doors in a line with identical windows of thick green-tinted glass that made the rooms beyond look like they were underwater. In the first, four guards in the same armor Amos’ escort wore were forcing a man to the ground. The woman from the waiting room huddled in the corner, her eyes closed. She seemed to be praying. The prisoner – a tall, thin man with long hair and a flowing beard the color of iron – roared again. His arm flashed out, quicker than Amos’ eye could follow, grabbing one of the guards by the ankle and pulling. The guard toppled, but two of the others had what looked like cattle prods out. One of them landed on the prisoner’s back, the other at the base of his skull. With one last obscenity, the iron-bearded man collapsed. The fallen guard rose back to her feet, blood pouring from her nose as the others teased her. The old woman sank to her knees, her lips moving. She took a long, shuddering breath, and when she spoke, she wailed, her voice sounding like it came from kilometers away.

Amos’ escort ignored it, so he did too.

“Yours is there. No exchange of goods of any sort. If at any point you feel threatened, raise your hand. We’ll be watching.”

“Thanks for that,” Amos said.

Until he saw her, Amos hadn’t realized how much the place reminded him of a medical clinic for people on basic. A cheap plastic hospital bed, a steel toilet on the wall without so much as a screen around it, a battered medical expert system, a wall-mounted screen set to an empty glowing gray, and Clarissa with three long plastic tubes snaking into her veins. She was thinner than she’d been on the ride back from Medina Station before it had been Medina Station. Her elbows were thicker than her arms. Her eyes looked huge in her face.

“Hey there, Peaches,” Amos said, sitting in the chair at her bedside. “You look like shit on a stick.”

She smiled. “Welcome to Bedlam.”

“I thought it was called Bethlehem.”

“Bedlam was called Bethlehem too. So what brings you to my little state-sponsored apartment?”

On the other side of the window, two guards hauled the iron man past. Clarissa followed Amos’ gaze and smirked.

“That’s Konecheck,” she said. “He’s a volunteer.”

“How’d you figure?”

“He can leave if he wants to,” she said, lifting her arm to display the tubes. “We’re all modified down here. If he let them take out his mods, he could transfer up to Angola or Newport. Not freedom, but there’d be a sky.”

“They couldn’t just take ’em?”

“Body privacy’s written into the constitution. Konecheck’s a bad, bad monkey, but he’d still win the lawsuit.”

“What about you? Your… y’know. Stuff?”

Clarissa bowed her head. Her laugh shook the tubes. “Apart from the fact that every time I used them, I wound up puking and mewling for a couple minutes afterward, they’ve got some other drawbacks. If we pull them out, I’d survive, but it would be even less pleasant than this. Turns out there’s a reason the stuff I got isn’t in general use.”

“Shit. That’s got to suck for you.”

“Among other things, it means I’m here until… well. Until I’m not anywhere. I get my blockers every morning, lunch in the cafeteria, half an hour of exercise, and then I can sit in my cell or in a holding tank with nine other inmates for three hours. Rinse, repeat. It’s fair. I did bad things.”

“All that shit the preacher pitched about redemption, getting reformed —”

“Sometimes you don’t get redeemed,” she said, and her voice made it clear she’d thought about the question. Tired and strong at the same time. “Not every stain comes out. Sometimes you do something bad enough that you carry the consequences for the rest of your life and take the regrets to the grave. That’s your happy ending.”

“Huh,” he said. “Actually, I think I know what you mean.”

“I really hope you don’t,” she said.

“Sorry I didn’t put a bullet in your head when I had the chance.”

“Sorry I didn’t know to ask. What brings you down here, anyway?”

“Was in the neighborhood saying goodbye to a bunch of my past, mostly. Don’t see how I’m coming back this way, so thought I’d better say hi now if I was going to at all.”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and she took his hand. The contact was weird. Her fingers felt too thin, waxy. Seemed rude to push her away though, so he tried to remember what people were like when they had an intimate moment like this. He pretended he was Naomi and squeezed Clarissa’s hand.

“Thank you. For remembering me,” she said. “Tell me about the others. What’s Holden doing?”

“Well, shit,” Amos said. “How much they tell you about what happened on Ilus?”

“The censors don’t let me see anything that involves him. Or you. Or anything involving Mao-Kwikowski or the protomolecule or the rings. It might be disruptive for me.”

Amos settled in. “All right. So a while back, Cap’n gets this call…”

For maybe forty-five minutes, maybe an hour, he laid out all the stuff that had happened since the Rocinante turned Clarissa Mao over to the authorities. Telling stories that didn’t have a punch line wasn’t something he had much practice with, so he was pretty sure that as story time went, it sucked. But she drank it up like he was pouring water on beach sand. The medical system beeped every now and then, responding to whatever was happening in her bloodstream.

Her eyes started to close like she was going to sleep, but her fingers didn’t lose their grip on his. Her breath got deeper too. He wasn’t sure if that was part of the medical whatever it was they were doing to her or something else. He stopped talking, and she didn’t seem to notice. It felt weird to sneak out without saying anything, but he also didn’t want to wake her up just to do it. So he sat for a while, looking at her because there wasn’t anything else to look at.

The weird thing was, she looked younger. No wrinkles at the sides of her mouth or eyes. No sagging in her cheeks. Like the time she’d spent down in the prison didn’t count. As if she’d never get old, never die, just be here wishing for it. It was probably some kind of side effect of the shit they’d pumped into her. There were kinds of environmental poisoning that did that too, not that he knew the details. She’d killed a lot of people, but he had too, one way and another. Seemed a little weird that she’d be staying and he’d be walking out. She felt bad about all the things she’d done. Maybe that was the difference. Regret and punishment the flip sides of the karmic coin. Or maybe the universe was just that fucking random. Konecheck didn’t look like he had a lot of regrets, and he was locked up just the same.

Amos was about to start trying to get his hand free when the Klaxons went off. Clarissa’s eyes shot open and she sat up, present and alert and not even sort of groggy. So maybe she hadn’t been asleep after all.

“What is that?” she said.

“I was about to ask you.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

It seemed like the right time to get his hand back. He went to the door, but his escort was already there coming in. She had her weapon drawn, but not pointing at anything.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, and her voice was higher than it had been before. She was scared. Or maybe excited. “This facility has been put on lockdown. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to remain in here for the time being.”

“How long are we talking about?” he asked.

“I don’t know the answer to that, sir. Until the lockdown is lifted.”