Chapter 15: Hope

Ava learned the carrier through her bare feet.

The deck plates trembled when Haven’s Vanguard lifted, a low vibration that climbed her bones and settled behind her teeth. When the engines throttled down, she could feel pumps working somewhere below—the brief shudder of a valve opening, the steadier pulse that followed. Two centuries had made the world unknowable. Machinery, at least, still confessed what it was doing.

Gabriel found her at the end of a corridor, looking through a reinforced window. Far below, engine wash chased loose snow across a black ridge. Beyond it lay an old city with half its towers sunk in ice.

“You’re supposed to be wearing shoes,” he said.

“Am I under arrest?”

He considered this. “Cora might arrest both of us if you find a live conduit with your toes.”

Ava looked down at the borrowed shirt hanging to her knees and the grey socks balled in one hand. “The boots don’t fit.”

“That sounds like a problem I can solve.”

It was the sort of promise he made easily. Not that people would accept her, or that she would never lose control again. Boots. Food. A door he could open. She was beginning to understand that his smaller promises were the ones he trusted.

He showed her the carrier while looking for the quartermaster. The tour followed no sensible order. Gabriel pointed out the mess, doubled back to the medical bay, and nearly walked her into engineering before a shower of sparks drove them out.

Cora emerged after them with a welding visor pushed up over cropped hair. Grease filled the creases of her knuckles.

“You,” she said to Gabriel. “Do signs mean something different where you’re from?”

“Usually they’re more polite.”

Cora’s attention moved to Ava. It did not soften. “So you’re the passenger who nearly brought the fortress down.”

Gabriel straightened, but Ava answered first. “I’m the passenger who survived it.”

For a second, only the fans spoke. Then one corner of Cora’s mouth lifted.

“Good distinction.” She offered her hand, saw Ava hesitate, and turned the gesture into a point toward a yellow line painted across the deck. “Stay outside that line unless I invite you. I don’t care what your blood does to mutants. A turbine will still ruin your day.”

It was not welcome. It was a rule, cleanly given, with room inside it for a future invitation. Ava found she could live with that.

While Cora went to fetch a pair of smaller boots, Ava studied the crates outside engineering. Several carried the same shipping name beneath crossed-out destinations: Northern Coalition. On one, three different hands had amended the count.

“They supply us?” she asked when Cora returned.

“Sometimes. They keep settlements running up north. We bring parts, they have things we need. When the inventory agrees with what’s in the box.” Cora set the boots down. “Those cost us a repaired pump.”

Ava drew back her foot.

“The crate,” Cora said. “I’m not charging you rent on your toes.”

She crouched to try them. Someone had worn the leather smooth inside the heel. Another woman had needed these, tied them before a shift, perhaps hated the same seam now pressing against Ava’s ankle. She found herself wondering where that woman was and then made herself stop. Every object aboard could become a missing person if she let it.

“Better,” she said, standing.

Cora watched her take three steps. “Tell me if they rub.”

Dr. Malik was easier. He met them in the medical bay and asked how she felt without reaching for an instrument.

“Fine,” Ava said.

“That answer saves time,” he said. “It rarely saves trouble.”

She looked at the cabinets, each latch stamped and numbered. “I don’t like medical rooms.”

“Then we won’t pretend you do. If I need to touch you, I’ll ask. If you say stop, I stop.” He leaned against a counter instead of approaching. “Today I only need to know whether you’ve eaten.”

Gabriel looked at her.

“Don’t,” she warned.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

Malik produced a ration bar from his pocket and handed it to Gabriel, who handed it to her. The absurd chain of custody pulled a laugh out of Ava before she could stop it.

The sound surprised all three of them.

It did not survive the mess hall.

Conversation thinned when Ava entered. Spoons touched bowls. A chair scraped, then stopped halfway. Someone near the galley muttered, “That’s her,” as if Ava might not understand the words.

Gabriel set a metal cup in front of her at the far table. Steam carried a scorched, bitter smell.

“Caf,” he said. “Cora claims the machine used to make coffee.”

Ava tasted it and winced. “What happened to it?”

“Two hundred years.”

“It tastes older.”

His smile appeared, but his eyes had moved past her shoulder.

“Why is she loose?” a man asked behind Ava. Cole, she remembered from the docking bay: young, narrow-shouldered, with a healing cut across his chin. “We all saw what she did.”

Another voice answered, too low for the words to carry. Cole did not lower his.

“People died at the fortress. We put her on the carrier anyway, and now Gabriel’s giving her a tour.”

Ava placed the cup down before her grip dented it. She had already measured the distance to the door.

Stay in the chair.

“Ask me,” she said.

Cole stared at her.

“You’re talking about what I did. Ask me.”

His anger faltered, exposing the fear beneath it. “Can you promise it won’t happen again?”

Every face waited. Gabriel’s hand rested flat on the table, close to hers but not covering it.

“No,” Ava said. The word left a raw place in her throat. “I can promise I don’t want it to. I can learn. I can warn you when I feel it starting. But I won’t lie so you feel safer.”

Cole gave a humorless laugh. “That’s supposed to help?”

“It helps me,” Jenna said from the doorway.

She crossed the room in her command coat, tired enough that a fastening sat crooked at her throat. “Ava stays under agreed precautions. Malik monitors her health. I monitor the risk. Anyone with a concern brings it to me without turning the mess into a tribunal.”

“And when monitoring isn’t enough?” Cole asked.

Jenna looked at Ava before answering. “Then we adapt. That is how this crew is still alive.”

The room loosened by degrees. No one apologized. No one offered Ava another seat. But spoons moved again, and Rhea resumed a story loudly enough to give everyone something else to hear.

Afterward, Ava hid in an unused cargo hold.

Before she reached it, she stopped in a washroom and checked that it was empty. There was food caught between two teeth. She stared at it in the scratched mirror, then began to cry with an anger that made the first sound almost a laugh. She had sat before all those people trying to answer for the dead, and part of her was humiliated because she had looked untidy.

“This?” she demanded of the woman in the mirror. “This is what breaks me?”

She rinsed her mouth. Her face was still her face in small places: the asymmetry when she pressed her lips together, the way she lifted her chin to inspect a mark. She could recognize those things and dislike the unfamiliar eyes above them. No one was here to tell her they were beautiful.

On the way out she smoothed her hair, then let her hand fall. She was tired of preparing a version of herself other people might tolerate.

It smelled of dust, machine oil, and old canvas. Empty rack frames divided the room into narrow aisles. The carrier’s vibration came through the floor here without carpet or wall panels to soften it.

Gabriel arrived carrying her abandoned cup and a tray gone cold.

“You found me,” she said.

“You picked the one room without a working lock.”

He sat on the deck opposite her. He did not tell her Cole was wrong. That would have been too simple, and both of them knew it.

“I killed people,” she said. “Some were already changing. Some were trying to kill me. I don’t remember enough to know whether that makes a difference.”

Gabriel rubbed a thumb over a burn mark on the cup. “It makes a difference. It doesn’t make it disappear.”

She looked at him then.

“I keep waiting for you to tell me I’m not a monster.”

“Would you believe me?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I know.” He counted on his fingers. “You stopped and spoke to me at the cell. You came back for me. You told Cole the truth when a lie would’ve been easier.”

He pushed the tray toward her. “And you haven’t eaten.”

“You make that sound like a moral failure.”

“Malik does. I’m only afraid of him.”

She managed half the ration and made him finish the caf.

During the next few days, the hold kept drawing her back. Cargo crews had abandoned several sacks of seed there: old rescue stock, scavenged packets, grains kept too long in cracked seals. Ava opened them one at a time. She rolled seeds beneath her fingertips, split a few with a scalpel, and sorted the living from the dead.

When Gabriel found her again, she had covered the deck with labelled cups.

“How attached is the crew to this room?” she asked.

“Emotionally?”

“Structurally.”

He crouched beside a tray of wrinkled seeds. “What are you planning?”

Ava picked up a bean with a pale seam showing through its coat. “Food, if the lights still work. Better air, eventually. Work for anyone who’s tired of being useless.”

The last part was hers. Gabriel was kind enough not to say so.

Cora inspected the hold that afternoon. She complained about drainage, power draw, corrosion, weight distribution, and civilians who believed water disappeared after they poured it into soil. Then she marked two safe power junctions on the wall and promised three grow lamps if Ava helped strip the bad wiring herself.

Marcus brought tubing and mismatched planting trays. Rhea found a coil of copper line. Malik surrendered a dented water tank after making Ava swear she would not drink from it. Even Cole appeared once in the doorway, left a sack of compost without speaking, and did not return.

For ten days, Ava imagined having to tell Cora she had wasted the power. She measured the dampness with a fingertip long after the readings agreed, then worried that checking had disturbed the seeds. There were evenings when the work felt so much like her old life that she turned toward the door expecting to go home afterward.

Once she stood there with an empty tray in her hands, unable to remember what she had intended to do next. Home was a few corridors away, she told herself. It was still an instruction she had to give.

The first green hook broke the soil on the eleventh day.

Ava was alone when she saw it. She knelt until her knees hurt, afraid that standing might disturb the thing. The stem was crooked and one cotyledon had split inside the seed coat. It was not beautiful. It was alive.

Please live.

Gabriel came in with a parcel under one arm and stopped when he saw her face.

“What happened?”

She pointed.

He lowered himself beside her. “That’s very small.”

“It’s a bean.”

“A terrifying one.”

She laughed and struck his shoulder with the back of her hand. He stayed close enough that their sleeves touched.

“I brought you something,” he said.

The parcel held a weathered journal, its cover rubbed pale at the corners. Several pages had been torn out, but most were blank.

“For your crop records,” he said. “Or anything else you want to keep.”

Ava opened to the first page. Blank paper had once meant field notes, tomorrow’s work, a life she assumed would continue. Her thumb rested against the grain.

“There’s no lock,” she said.

“I can find one.”

“No.” She closed the cover, then held it against her chest. “I want to learn to live somewhere I don’t need one.”

Gabriel looked at the small green stem between them. “All right.”

The carrier banked, and a tremor passed through the deck. The seedling bent nearly flat beneath the grow lamp. Slowly, stubbornly, it lifted again.