Second Interim, page 3
The space inside consisted of open floor covered wall to wall with blue floor mats. At the far end of it, Coura easily picked out Valerie Coleridge, standing with two others. All three were barefoot and wore uniforms like those of the children, with the exception that their garments were black instead of yellow. Even if Coleridge, like the Martijns and Simon Ascher, didn’t come from different genetic stock than most native Houdans—a difference that in Coleridge’s case included a natural hair color, blonde, that the natives only ever achieved chemically—and even if her two companions hadn’t been male, Coura would have known Coleridge easily.
The others had two arms each, while the left sleeve of Coleridge’s uniform was stitched across, leaving a few inches of empty fabric hanging from the shoulder. Coura knew little about Coleridge, but she did know the woman had lost an arm in combat during her SES days.
One of the companions spotted the new arrivals and called them to Coleridge’s attention. Coleridge turned to look, saw them, and promptly marched a straight line across the mats toward Coura and her parents. She halted a few paces away and regarded them one by one, starting with Simon. Her face, the left side of which was rippled with old burn scars, remained all but expressionless.
The intense stare, the tightly drawn back blonde hair, the battle damage, all contributed to a strong first impression: Coleridge was severe, bordering on scary. Her parents hadn’t been wrong.
“Ascher,” Coleridge said curtly with eyes on Simon. Her tone lacked any sense of familiarity. Looking at Ren, she greeted her likewise: “Martijn.”
Then it was Coura’s turn.
“Baby Kearn,” Coleridge said rather than her name, sending Coura’s heart jumping into her throat. “Academy’s not easy. You looking to get off this dirt-ball?”
“N-not really, no.”
“Don’t call her that, please,” Ren said.
“It’s fine,” Simon admonished in low voice.
Ren glared at her ex and sighed in disgust before walking away, seemingly intent on ignoring the remainder of proceedings.
Coleridge asked Coura, “Have you ever been in a fight?”
“Um, no.”
“Valerie...” Simon intervened, stealing Coleridge’s attention. Given that Coura wasn’t eager to find out where Coleridge’s line of question was headed, she was grateful for the reprieve.
“They call me VC here,” Coleridge said.
“VC,” Simon complied. “This is Coura.”
“I know.”
“We just wanted to introduce you. She’ll be living at the Academy for a while.”
“Yes, you told me. She can contact me anytime.” Abruptly, she looked at Coura. “Enroll in a novice class if you want. No charge.”
Coura answered politely, “That’s... I-I might. Sure.” Coleridge wasn’t easy to talk to. “Thank you.”
“We really appreciate this, uh, VC,” Simon said. Apparently, he didn’t find her any easier to address than Coura did. “This place is... impressive. You’ve done well. You like teaching kids?”
“Depends on who asks,” Coleridge answered without elaborating.
“Do you live nearby?”
“Upstairs.” Coleridge’s unsettling gaze found Coura once more. “Think about enrolling,” she said. “It’ll be good for you.”
Rather than trying to answer, Coura just nodded. For an instant, she also smiled before realizing that Coleridge hadn’t smiled since they arrived.
At a sound from behind them, Coura and Simon turned to see a group of uniformed children, slightly older than the last group, spill in through the main door. They also saw Ren already waiting on the other side of the glass.
Simon jumped on the excuse to leave. “You’re obviously busy,” he said. “We won’t keep you. Just wanted to say hello.”
“Hello,” Coleridge said. The word seemed just to exist, independent of any sentiment.
“Yes... hello,” Simon said. “It was nice seeing you.” He took a step back. “Goodbye.”
With a last, robotic look at Coura, Coleridge pivoted and walked off toward the back with a gait so smooth that her ponytail didn’t even sway.
As they headed for the exit, Simon gave Coura a grimace of mock horror that she didn’t dare return, as Coleridge seemed like the kind to have eyes in the back of her head. Didn’t Simon know not to insult a beast in its own lair? At least have the sense to wait until you make it safely out first.
Outside, in the cool night air, they rejoined Ren, who remarked on the walk to the still-warm truck, “Well, that was worthwhile.”
She got no argument.
Chapter Three
“My biggest fear is that you won’t ever come back to me. But my second biggest is that you’ll come back a different person. Please don’t let this place change you.”
Those had been among Coura’s mother’s last words to her before leaving her in Spane.
Coura kept them in mind always, even if the advice wasn’t fully compatible with her determination not to be seen as Fruit Stand Girl. Her world was much bigger now. Some change was inevitable. Not all of it was bad.
The most omnipresent change in her lifestyle was sharing a dormitory suite with two other women who began as complete strangers to her. Anji took her studies extremely seriously and was a constant presence hunched over her desk in the common area with headphones on, while Chenhmi, or Mimi, as she preferred to be called, was rarely home after the first few days. As a result, Coura didn’t get to know either too well too quickly.
Classes, meanwhile, proved intimidating at first. To keep her mother’s panic from going stratospheric, she hadn’t chosen her ideal slate of courses for the first trimester. Left to her own devices, she would have stuck strictly to subjects she thought were useful to spacers: physics, engineering, astronomy. In future, she would make that shift, but for now, she consented to enroll in more ‘groundside’ sciences to keep the peace. Since Ren wasn’t strictly entitled to her daughter’s registration records, Coura figured she might eventually get away with hiding her official class list and just telling her mother what she needed to hear.
It wasn’t that she was ‘looking to get off this dirt-ball,’ as Coleridge had put it, so much as that she sensed a connection previously missing in her life. She was the child of spacers—three of them, really. Interstellar travel was her heritage. It was in her blood.
She figured she could probably get away with transferring into whatever courses she wanted, but it didn’t seem right to start lying so soon, if ever. And so instead she was patient and studied things she didn’t care too much about. That was what first-years were intended to do, anyway, apparently.
During her second month at the Academy, Coura let Mimi take her to a party. She should have known better after witnessing Mimi’s astonishment at learning that Coura had never been drunk, or even close. One night out with Mimi remedied that lapse and added as a bonus Coura’s first experience of vomiting into bushes.
After that, she swore off drinking. About ten days later, she had to swear it off again, but bush-vomit number two caused the pledge to stick. Naturally, the incidents got no mention in Coura’s near-daily calls with her mother. Those conversations made her feel guilty enough as it was.
Similarly absent from those conversations were such details as a male classmate’s declaration of affection for her and Coura’s polite rejection of same. She likewise didn’t mention it when the incident repeated a month later with a different, female classmate whose admittedly charming advances Coura turned down for slightly different reasons.
Throughout her first trimester, there was one conversation that Coura regularly talked herself into and out of having. Finally, one cold day when her class schedule was empty, she managed to put herself in front of VC Martial Arts with the intention of making it happen.
She walked into the building steeled for—
Well, talking to Valerie Coleridge seemed like something that was impossible to prepare for. Coura hadn’t even called ahead, wary of trying to talk that way instead of in person. This way, Coura felt she had a chance, however small, of getting somewhere. Not that she knew exactly where she wanted to get. She only knew she had to talk to Valerie Coleridge or, much less preferably, die trying.
Entering the studio, she saw a class in progress on the mats. Children waited in line to spar with each other in a distinctly non-lethal fashion. One of the men she’d seen last time, or someone else—she had been too fixated on Coleridge to commit other faces to memory—actively gave instruction on the mat while Coleridge paced the outskirts, observing.
Near the entrance, a handful of parents sat on three rows of benches. Nervously, Coura slid onto the end of the back row and watched. Unlike the parents around her, she only watched the woman in charge. While doing so, she intermittently wiped sweaty palms on her pants and made fists to keep her fingers from shaking. She began to wonder if it was too late to just leave.
In fact, it was. Hardly two minutes after Coura’s arrival, following one more slow orbit of the class, Coleridge changed her path to take her, in no hurry, toward the benches. Though Coleridge’s gaze didn’t settle on her, Coura knew she’d been spotted. Ex-assassins weren’t unaware of their surroundings. Those who were probably ended up the dead kind of assassin rather than ex-.
Unsurprisingly, Coleridge stopped a few feet from Coura’s spot on the bench. A parent tried to address her but was silenced with an open palm as Coleridge spoke to the visitor in the back row instead.
“Hello, Baby Kearn. Have you finally come to enroll?”
Instead of Houdari, Coleridge had used spacer talk, Galactic, something she hadn’t done in their prior encounter.
Summoning her courage, Coura stood. “No, sorry. My schedule is... pretty full,” she said back in the same tongue.
Coleridge looked disapprovingly at her. “Your hair had a blue streak last time. Now it’s pink. You clearly can’t commit to anything anyway.”
After sputtering for a second, Coura said, “Actually, I-I came to... talk to you.”
“I’m not sure anyone’s said those words to me in that order before. Maybe a tax collector once.” She pivoted to walk to a desk by the wall. “I’ll talk to you after we get you enrolled.”
Coura took some tentative steps after her. “But I said I wasn’t...”
With Coleridge leaving conversational range and a plenty of eyes upon her, Coura fell silent as she followed Coleridge and sat across the desk from her.
Coleridge set the fingers of her lone hand on a keyboard. “Coura Kearn, right? How do you spell Coura in Houdari?”
“Coura Martijn, C-O-U-R-A, but I told you, I didn’t come to sign up.”
Coleridge pecked with one finger at the keyboard. “That doesn’t mean you won’t.”
Coura couldn’t prevent a burst of nervous laughter. When she let it out, it felt overdue. “Is this a test?” she asked. “Are you bullying me or something?”
Coleridge’s gaze left her screen and pierced Coura, wiping the remnant of a smile from her face. After a suspended moment, Coleridge resumed speaking. “What did you come to talk about?”
“Kearn,” Coura said quietly.
She could count on Coleridge’s fingers the times that name had ever passed her lips.
Coleridge looked over at the class drilling on the mat. “You can see now’s not a great time. I’ll answer one question. If you want more, what time do you want your private lessons, early morning or night?”
By now, Coura was learning not to feel intimidated. “Private? That’s generous of you,” she said. “But it’s not my kind of thing, plus I’m sure you’ll want to charge me eventually, and I can’t really afford—”
“Spacer discount. Free forever. Make it your kind of thing. Early or late?”
“I... early, I guess,” Coura selected without any real intention of following through. If she could only ask one question, she knew what it would be.
“If it makes you more likely to show up,” Coleridge said, “I can show you how to kill on day one.”
Coura glanced over at the children on the mat. “Is that something you normally teach?”
Coleridge didn’t answer. Pecking a few final characters one-by-one into her keyboard, she looked up. “What’s your one question?”
A chill passed over Coura as she asked the woman a question she had years ago asked of Simon. When he’d claimed not to know its answer, Coura had thought better of accusing of him of lying and decided never to bring it up again. Not in a million years would she ever dare to ask it of her mother.
“After Kearn left us on Houdos... where did he go?”
Coleridge not only knew. She surrendered the answer without hesitation: “Tanris-4.”
Coura’s eyes hesitated even less to tear up. She turned her face to the floor and wiped at them while Coleridge waited wordlessly. Crying in public was bad enough. In a place like this, a place of strength and discipline, the embarrassment was acute.
Before Coura finished composing herself, a soft, yellow square slapped the desk in front of her. She looked up and found it to be a neatly folded uniform.
“Come back tomorrow morning.” The time Coleridge named next was obscene. It might not even be light out yet.
With that, Coleridge strode back to the mats, leaving Coura alone at the desk. For the sake of the eyes on her, Coura departed at a pace that belied her eagerness to leave. Only when she was out the door did she fully realize she had carried the yellow uniform out with her.
She didn’t return to VC’s the next day, or the next, but one day not long after, at the crack of a freezing dawn, wearing the uniform under an overcoat, she did return.
The tinted glass door was locked, but a knock produced a result. After several minutes that Coura spent spent shivering, Coleridge pushed the door open from within. What she didn’t do was step out of the way to allow Coura to enter.
“What are you doing here?” Coleridge asked, as one might of a salesman or transient.
“I’m here because you invited me. Relentlessly.” The cold increased Coura’s irritation, along with her willingness to show it. “Can I come in or not?”
Coleridge made way and let Coura in from the cold. The main lights were off in the studio, as well as the heat, it seemed, since it was only moderately warmer inside. Coleridge was dressed in her black uniform with hair pulled back tight. Whether she already had been that way before Coura’s arrival or had quickly readied herself prior getting the door, it was as impossible as it was pointless to guess.
“Tanris-4 is why you’re here,” Coleridge said with the force of a declaration as the door swung shut.
“What?”
“You’ve been thinking about it.”
“No.” Yes, if she were to be honest.
“You looking to follow him.”
Coura scoffed. “I’m not stupid. Even if the next ship to put in here happened to have Tanris as a destination, I’d be, what, seventeen ship-years behind him?”
“At least. There’s an inbound ship due in a few months, but I bet you know that. Do you know where it’ll be headed?”
“No—do you?” Coura tried to sound defiant rather than hopeful.
“No. Say it was Tanris-4. Would you want to be on it?”
Coura had no clue how to answer. She was feet from the entrance, overcoat still buttoned, and she was being interrogated by someone who’s sole purpose in life seemed to be to make others uncomfortable.
Declining to answer, she posed her own question. “What do you want from me?”
Coleridge threw its echo back, with changed emphasis: “What do you want from me?”
With a disgusted sigh, Coura took a backward step toward the exit. “Now that I think about it, nothing that’s worth dealing with—whatever this is. Bye!” She spun and set a hand on the door.
“He was a jerk,” Coleridge said.
The way was clear, and Coura wanted to leave, but her hand refused to push the door further. She knew Coleridge’s words were bait, but she couldn’t help taking it.
“What?”
“Mayweather Kearn was a jerk. I didn’t like him at all.”
Coura looked back at the strange, strange, one-armed woman in astonishment. “That’s just sad. Am I supposed to be offended? I don’t like you, and I bet he didn’t either, so—”
“Would you go?” Coleridge asked. “If you could? You didn’t answer.”
One thing kept Coura from walking out, and that was the possibility that Coleridge wanted to help her do something she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do, something that the merest whisper of would break her mother’s heart.
“Luckily, I don’t need to answer that question,” Coura said, “because in addition to the fact that there never will be a ship to Tanris, if there were, it would cost more to get on it than I’ll ever see in my lifetime.”
“Say someone paid. And say the destination weren’t Tanris but just wherever the next ship is going.”
Coura scoffed. “I see. You’re just asking the same thing you did when you first met me. Do I want off this dirt-ball? No, I don’t. Not even if you paid for it.” Coura turned back to the door before finishing, under her breath but audibly, “Crazy bitch!”
The glass and metal door in front of Coura made a sharp clicking sound. She pushed on it, but it refused to budge. She jiggled and pushed harder, finding it futile.
Suddenly afraid, she demanded, without turning around, “Open it. This is illegal. If you don’t let me leave, I’ll get you arrested. I... I shouldn’t have called you that. I’m sorry. Let me go.”
“You know what I was before.” Coleridge moved closer until Coura was practically sandwiched between cold glass and a colder killer. She saw Coleridge’s icy eyes in reflection. “You think that doesn’t mean anything? If I got arrested, I’d be released within the hour. Ex-Interim practically run the police here.
“Please...” Coura begged. Survival instinct made her keep trying the door even though she hadn’t heard it unlock by whatever remote means Coleridge had used to lock her in.
