“I did what I did,” Clarissa said. “You can tell them that. The security people. You can tell them I confessed to it all.”
“If you’d like. I’ll tell them.”
“I would. I want that.”
“Why did you try to kill Naomi?”
“I wanted to kill all of them,” Clarissa said, and each word was hard to speak, as though they were too large to fit through her throat. “They were part of him, and I wanted him not to be. Just not to exist at all anymore. I wanted everyone to know he is a bad man.”
“Do you still want that?”
“I don’t care,” Clarissa said. “You can tell them.”
“And Naomi? I’m going to see her. Is there anything you’d want me to tell her in particular?”
Clarissa remembered the woman’s face, bruised and bleeding. She flexed her hand, feeling the mech’s glove against her fingers. It would have taken nothing to snap the woman’s neck, a feather’s weight of pressure. She wondered why she hadn’t. The difference between savoring the moment and hesitating warred at the back of her mind, and her memory supported both. Or neither.
“Tell her I hope she gets well soon.”
“Do you hope that?”
“Or am I just being polite, you mean?” Clarissa said. “Tell her whatever you want. I don’t care.”
“All right,” Anna said. “Can I ask a question?”
“Can I stop you?”
“Yes.”
The silence was no more than three long breaths together.
“You can ask me a question.”
“Do you want to be redeemed?”
“I don’t believe in God.”
“Do you want to be redeemed by something other than God, then? If there was forgiveness for you, could you accept it?”
The sense of outrage began in Clarissa’s stomach and bloomed out through her chest. It curled her lips and furrowed her brow. For the first time since she’d lost consciousness trying to beat her way through the locker on the Rocinante, she remembered what anger felt like. How large it was.
“Why should I be forgiven for anything? I did it. That’s all.”
“But if—”
“What kind of justice would that be? ‘Oh, you killed Ren, but you’re sorry now so it’s okay’? Fuck that. And if that’s how your God works, then f**k Him too.”
The freezer door clanked. Clarissa looked up at it, resenting the accident of timing and then realizing they’d heard her yelling. They were coming to save the preacher. She balled her hands into fists and looked down at them. They were going to take her back to her cell. She felt in her gut and her throat how little she wanted that.
“It’s all right,” Anna said as the guard stepped into the freezer, his sidearm trained on Clarissa. “We’re okay.”
“Yeah, no,” the guard said. His gaze was sharp and focused. Frightened. “Time’s passed. Meeting’s over.”
Anna looked at Clarissa with something like frustration in her expression. Not with her, but with the situation. With not getting everything to be just the way she wanted it. Clarissa had some sympathy for that.
“I’d like to talk with you again,” Anna said. “If it’s all right.”
“You know where I live,” Clarissa said with a shrug. “I don’t go out much.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: Anna
B
ull wasn’t in his office when she arrived. A muscular young woman with a large gun on her hip shrugged when Anna asked if she could wait for him, then ignored her and continued working. A wall screen was set to the Radio Free Slow Zone feed, where a young Earther man was leaning in toward Monica Stuart and speaking earnestly. His skin was a bright pink that didn’t seem to be his natural color. Anna thought he looked peeled.
“I haven’t changed my commitment to autonomy for the Brazilian shared interest zones,” he said. “If anything I feel like I’ve broadened it.”
“Broadened it how?” Monica asked. She seemed genuinely interested. It was a gift. The peeled man tapped at the air with his fingertips. Anna felt sure she’d seen him on the Thomas Prince, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember his name. She had the vague sense he was a painter. Some kind of artist, certainly.
“We’ve all changed,” he said. “By coming here. By going through the trials that we’re all going through, we’ve all been changed. When we go back, none of us will be the people we were before. The tragedy and the loss and the sense of wonder changes what it means to be human. Do you know what I mean?”
Oddly, Anna thought she did.
Being a minister meant being in the middle of people’s lives. Anna had counseled dating congregation members, presided over their weddings, baptized their babies, and in one heartbreaking case presided over the infant’s funeral a year later. Members of the congregation included her in most of the important events of their lives. She was used to it, and mostly enjoyed the deep connection to people it brought. Charting the course of a life was making a map of the ways each event changed the person, leaving someone different on the other side. Passing through the Ring and the tragedies it had brought wouldn’t leave any of them the same.
The exodus from the rest of the fleet to the Behemoth was in full swing. The tent cities spread across the curved inner surface of the habitation drum like wildflowers on a field of flat, ceramic steel–colored earth. Anna saw tall gangly Belters helping offload wounded Earthers from emergency carts, plugging in IVs and other medical equipment, fluffing pillows and mopping brows. Inners and outers offloaded crates in mixed groups without comment. Anna couldn’t help but be warmed by that, even in the face of their recent disaster. Maybe it took real tragedy to get them all working together, but it did. They did. There was hope in that.
Now if they could just figure out how to do it without the blood and screaming.
“Your work has been criticized,” Monica Stuart said, “as advocating violence.”
The peeled man nodded.
“I used to reject that,” he said. “I’ve come to the conclusion that it may be valid, though. I think when we come home, there will be some readjustment.”
“Because of the Ring?”
“And the slow zone. And what’s happened here.”
“Do you think you would encourage other political artists to come out here?”
“Absolutely.”