Chapter Text
Life on the Rocinante is oddly quiet after they escape Eros. For a change, no one is chasing them and they’re not chasing anyone, either. They simply cruise in circles for days while two very ill men slowly recover in the sick bay.
Alex pilots the ship with his headphones on and blasting cowboy music, playing solitaire on his terminal and scanning the deep space around them at the same time. Amos spends his time doing push-ups and sit-ups. Sometimes they’re able to catch news feeds from Ceres and Ganymede, reports of chaos, death, destruction.
Naomi finds herself back to wandering the shiny, practically new ship, trying to find something, anything, to fix when she’s not busy pretending to know what the hell she’s doing medically. She’s downloaded everything she can find on treating radiation sickness and spends more time than she’d care to admit reading every medical article and highlighting relevant passages. It frustrates her that she’s not a medic and can’t make sense of it all, but then again, Shed wasn’t either.
They all take turns watching over Holden and Miller. From what Naomi can tell, they’re healing as they should be, but she stares at numbers running on the monitors for long minutes at a time anyhow—blood pressure, respiration, blood levels. Mostly, the two men sleep. Occasionally one of them will spike a temperature, moaning and thrashing with fever dreams and she’ll sit by his bedside, stroking his hair and making sure he doesn’t rip out one of the tubes that carries medicine and hydration into his body and urine and shit out of it. Some nights she doesn’t even go back to her cabin to sleep. She simply collapses on one of the spare sick bay beds and dozes, never deeply enough that she won’t wake if Holden or Miller cries out in the night.
Naomi has a recurring dream that she’s smoking with Shed in the hangar bay of theCant, the two of them drinking beer and passing a burning joint back and forth while Shed shares with her everything he knows about radiation. But whenever she wakes from the dream, her eyes blinking in the half-light of the sick bay, she’s always forgotten just what Shed told her.
*
Five days in, both men have improved and she’s relatively certain they won’t die. At least, not right now. They face an astronomical risk of cancer in the future. Holden and Miller both look like they’ve aged ten years, faces ghastly pale and swollen from steroids, eyes bleary and unfocused. They still sleep most of the time but they have brief periods of lucidity when she reassures them that it’s all right, that they’re going to live through this.
She takes to spending as much time at Miller’s bedside as Holden’s. Even though she doesn’t know him at all, he too deserves to have someone worry about his recovery. Care about him. Holden has the three of them, bonded by shared history and tragedy, but Miller is alone and adrift in this strange new world.
Sometimes she reads aloud to them, from a series she loved as a kid, Racing Luna. It’s nice to escape this antiseptic room full of monitors and that smells of sickness and medication to a place where four Earther kids run away from their overcrowded world for adventure on the first off-world colony.
Other times, they play cards, real cards that Naomi found in a cupboard in the galley. She makes Amos hold the cards for Miller or Holden, since their hands are too weak and shaky to do it themselves. They play gin rummy for pretzels. Neither one is able to eat much solid food yet but she keeps careful track of their winnings so that they can each have a binge when they’re feeling better.
When Naomi closes her eyes for just a moment too long, she can see the little girl in the tunnels, walking away with her family to her certain death. She can smell it, the stench of death on Eros, a million and a half Belter lives gone, just like that, their bodies and souls eaten by whatever that thing was on the station.
She pictures Julie, the woman they were sent to find, slumped in the flophouse’s shower, barely resembling a human being. But Julie was a real woman who had hopes and dreams. She courageously escaped certain death on the Anubis only to discover that she was infected too. Julie died alone, probably in terror and in pain.
This is Naomi’s worst fear, to die that way.
Naomi wants to know about Julie—who she was and how she lived—so she’ll never be forgotten.
*
Holden is dead asleep, snoring softly, when she walks into sick bay. Miller is sitting up; the only tube in him now is one for hydration and steroids.
Naomi sits in the chair at his bedside and hands him a glass of juice made from artificial apple flavor crystals. She watches his Adam’s apple bob as he thirstily swallows.
“How do you feel?” she asks.
“Like hammered shit,” Miller rasps.
Naomi feels herself smiling. “I’ve never seen shit that’s been hammered before. Must be interesting.”
“You haven’t spent enough time on Ceres, then.”
“I spent most of my youth there. A lot of shit but none of it hammered.”
Miller croaks out a laugh, a sure sign of recovery.
“Do you have an image of her?” she asks.
He sits up a little more. “An image of who?”
“Julie. Julie Mao.”
“Why?”
“I want to see her. See her as she was before.” Before that thing turned her into something horrible, she thinks.
Something unreadable passes over Miller’s face. “I have some pics of her on my terminal,” he says. “But you’re going to have to go get them. Fingers still aren’t working too good.”
Naomi opens the drawer on the bedside table to retrieve Miller’s device.
“They’re in an image folder called JM, I think,” he says.
She finds the folder and opens it. There are thumbnails of several videos and dozens of still images of Julie. Lovely, Naomi thinks, staring at the pictures of a beautiful, determined young woman. She likes the steely set of Julie’s jaw in some of the pictures, and the fire in her eyes. Julie definitely had courage. Naomi imagines the two of them could have been friends, even if their politics didn’t line up.
Naomi scrolls to the end of the folder, where to her surprise she finds three images of a woman who isn’t Julie.
Her heart starts pounding as she looks at the pictures. She opens each one to inspect it more closely.
Dark brown curls, green-gray-brown eyes, full lips. In one, the woman is laughing at whoever took the picture, her cheeks flushed. In another, she’s lying on her side in bed, her body covered only with a sheet, and she’s giving the photographer a defiant finger. The last image is of her standing with Miller, kissing his cheek. He looks so much younger in the picture. Happy, even, his face soft and relaxed, turned towards the woman and smiling.
Naomi shakes her head, unable to believe what she’s seeing. She knows that woman. Knows her well.
Octavia, Naomi says in her head. Octavia Muss.
A lot of things suddenly make sense.