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In early drafts, I went back and forth a lot about whose POV to put where. Most scenes could be written from either Rowan or Kelli’s POV. But when my editors and I finally settled on having all the present scenes be Kelli’s and all the past scenes be Rowan’s, that meant there were a few small, non-loadbearing scenes that simply couldn’t be conveyed from the POV of the right character. This is one of those scenes. It’s an interaction between Rowan and Zhaleh just before their spaceship takes off from Io for the Ganymede heist.
Launching a spaceship involved a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. It had to be done at the right time, at the right part of the moon’s orbit, so that the ship would point in the right direction. Point in the right direction was a vast oversimplification of how orbital trajectories worked, but it wasn’t Rowan’s job to understand the non-oversimplified version; these days, a pilot only had to know enough theory to give the right inputs to the ship’s computer, which did most of the navigational math either by itself or in conjunction with ground control.
The result was that, after settling in his seat and doing the pre-flight checks, Rowan had a bunch more time to lie there and stew. Eventually he heard someone picking their way up the ladder, and a bleach-blond head bobbed up into his peripheral vision.
He didn’t like his current position. In zero-grav it wouldn’t matter, but moonside, Rowan’s pilot chair put him distinctly on his back and in restraints, and Zhaleh’s face was somewhere above and behind him.
“You’re angry,” said Zhaleh, looking at him coolly.
“Is that what you came up here to tell me? A blind, deaf, insane, drunken llama would notice I’m angry with you.”
Rowan had once worried that, given how weird and trans he was, no one would want to date him. But as soon as he left high school and experienced the wider world, this had been proven incorrect. He wasn’t good at keeping up a serious relationship, what with flying off on missions for days or weeks at a time. But he’d gotten pretty good at the part at the beginning, the part where he charmed a girl and intrigued her, and then got her alone and figured out how her body worked. He’d even had a few relationships that lasted long enough to start to feel cozy. To start to let his guard down.
Zhaleh had worked for the Brimstone Syndicate since childhood. Her family were immigrants from Venus; her parents had died in a shipboard epidemic on the way here, and Conchita had taken her in. Everyone had a crush on Zhaleh, because everyone had eyes, but Rowan had tried his luck and put on the charm and for some reason she’d decided she liked him back. They’d joked – only joked; everybody joked – about taking over the syndicate together. He’d fallen so hard that he’d started to feel, in the urgent bodily way that he felt things like hunger or thirst, that Zhaleh might be the girl who could love even Rowan’s worst parts. So one night, after dating her for four or five months, he’d gotten drunk and told her about the worst thing that ever happened to him, the worst thing he ever did.
She’d listened with her full attention. She’d held him and stroked his hair. She’d thanked him for trusting her; she’d said that she didn’t think any less of him – she’d even called him clever and brave. And then the next morning she’d gone straight to fucking Conchita and told her everything.
As far as Rowan was concerned, Zhaleh could step out the airlock and die.
“I don’t only mean angry with me,” Zhaleh said with perfect calm. He’d never understood that about her, the way she kept her cool. Zhaleh kept her cards so close to her chest that a person could be lulled into believing she didn’t have any.
“I have zero interest in your insights about my brain,” said Rowan.
Zhaleh didn’t look fazed at that either. Her only tell was that she busied herself tugging on one of those long crystal earrings she wore, in what looked like a pose of idle thought. That was what gave Zhaleh away; when she fidgeted, her icy heart was feeling something, either good or bad.
“I wish you’d trust me,” she said. “I understand why you’re angry. I’m not even asking for you back. I just wish you understood that I did this for a reason, and that I’ve got it under control.”
Sure, Rowan and Kelli were under control, all right. Under Conchita’s control for the rest of their lives. There was no forgiving that.
“I’m also asking,” said Zhaleh, “for temporary command.”
“What?”
“Not operational command, just crew management. In three days we land on Ganymede. Everyone’s got to be working together by then. I know you’re professional enough to function as part of a larger team, even in the mood you’re in now. But you’re too emotional to command Kelli, and she’s too emotional to accept your command. I won’t try to change the heist or fly the ship for you. Just let me be the one to chair meetings, to set a schedule en route, to lay down the law if someone’s endangering the mission. It’s the least I can do.”
Rowan twisted his head so far back that he gave himself a crick in the neck, staring at her. Only Zhaleh could make such a naked power grab, after already stating that this was part of some plan that she wouldn’t explain, and make it sound like she was doing him a favor. If she hadn’t had such a natural poker face, he would have expected her to cackle out loud.
But that was the thing about Zhaleh. She dyed her hair blond, but at the end of a long mission, the roots that poked from her scalp were a deep, glossy black. Her eyebrows were black; her long lashes were black. There was a sense of a secret pain in her – not in her unreadable face, but in the gaps between her words, in the things that she wouldn’t discuss, the things that made her fidget with an earring. She always loved everything evil. Zhaleh’s smiles were always gentle and small; but sometimes Rowan caught himself imagining that they opened out wider, into a villainous laugh. Into the serrated layers of a shark’s grin.
He wished he hadn’t told her Elaine’s name.
Rowan sighed heavily. After the fight with Kelli, he didn’t have the strength to keep yelling at people. “Is this a polite request for me to voluntarily give you command, or is this a mutiny?”
“It’s a voluntary request.”
“You know what, fine.” He uncricked his neck and shook his head sourly; he didn’t want to look at her anymore. “I’m handing over crew management privileges only, and for twenty-four hours only. After that we re-evaluate, and if I don’t like how you’re doing it I’ll take full command back myself. Or give it to Ting. Maybe Ting’s the one with the brain cell.”
“Much obliged,” said Zhaleh, inclining her head. “I hope you understand – some kinds of secrets are liabilities. You wouldn’t have told me what you told me, in the way that you told me, if something in you wasn’t longing to make it known.”
“Sure. Next time, I won’t tell you shit.”
She watched him silently a moment too long. He was relieved when she turned and, without another word, climbed back down the ladder.