Later, in the long middle of the flight, with Eshel asleep in the left-hand seat and the cargo bay dark behind them, Mara asked Sera a question she had not planned to ask.
Sera was at the controls with her eyes on the margin gauge. She had been watching it since they lifted, the fuel figure ticking down slowly as the Tern burned toward Cinder. She kept her eyes on it when Mara spoke.
“Does duty ever stop looking like a good reason,” Mara said, “to hurt your family?”
Sera did not answer at once.
Mara had not meant to ask it. It had come out of the stained page and the soup recipe and the four words in the middle of the notebook. Keep making things. Out of her mother coming back to the station for evidence, knowing it was dangerous, and getting sealed in, and dying there with a coolant schedule in her shaking hands. Out of Tavin’s three years of silence. Out of her own I’m not stopping at eighty-one in the cradle at Lorn.
Her mother had thought the evidence was a good reason. Tavin had thought keeping Mara ordinary was a good reason. Mara had thought the ring was a good reason, and the heart, and Lorn’s Reach. Each of them had hurt someone for it. Her mother had left two children. Tavin had left Mara defenseless against people with facts. And Mara had left Pell at the yard’s table, and Tavin at the gate…
