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“You want a confession, then?” she said.
“If you want to offer one.”
“I did it,” Clarissa said. “I sabotaged the Rocinanteand the Seung Un. I killed Ren. I killed some people back on Earth. I lied about who I was. All of it. I’m guilty.”
“All right.”
“Are we done, then?”
A
“Is that what Tilly says?”
“She’s not as polite about it.”
Clarissa coughed out a laugh. Everything she could say felt trite. Worse, it felt naive and stupid. Jim Holden destroyed my familyand I wanted my father to be proud of meand I was wrong.
“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,” A
“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’? Fuckthat. And if that’s how your God works, then fuck 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,” A
“Yeah, no,” the guard said. His gaze was sharp and focused. Frightened. “Time’s passed. Meeting’s over.”
A
“I’d like to talk with you again,” A
“You know where I live,” Clarissa said with a shrug. “I don’t go out much.”
Chapter Thirty-Five: A
Bull wasn’t in his office when she arrived. A muscular young woman with a large gun on her hip shrugged when A
“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. A
“We’ve all changed,” he said. “By coming here. By going through the trials that we’re all going through, we’ve all beenchanged. When we go back, none of us will be the people we were before. The tragedy and the loss and the sense of wonderchanges what it means to be human. Do you know what I mean?”
Oddly, A
Being a minister meant being in the middle of people’s lives. A
The exodus from the rest of the fleet to the Behemothwas in full swing. The tent cities spread across the curved i
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.”
Chris, her young officer, had asked about organizing mixed-group church services on the Behemoth. She’d assumed he meant mixed religions at first, but it turned out he meant a church group with Earthers and Martians and Belters. Mixed, as if God categorized people based on the gravity they’d grown up in. It had occurred to A