“Who designed this place?” Lynn undid her seals and pulled her helmet off. “They could have made it a little more suffocatingly boring if they'd tried.” She scrubbed her scalp with her palm and tossed her helmet on the table. “Going to get out of that?” She gestured at Arron's clean-suit.
“No, I can't stay.”
“Oh.” Lynn shrugged. “As needed. Mind if I change?”
“No, no,” he said hurriedly. “Go right ahead.”
Lynn went into the bedroom. She left the door open just a crack.
“I was really surprised when I heard you were coming,” said Arron from the other room.
“Yeah, well, I thought considering the communications problems we've had, I thought we should be on the spot while the shuttles get ready to go,” she said as she pulled off her shirt and pants and started wriggling her way out of the suit. The ventilator's breeze hit her bare skin, sending goose bumps up her arms. Lynn sighed and wished she had time to enjoy just being out of the damn organic cocoon for a while. She considered telling Arron that she could rely on Praeis to keep her people abreast of what was really going on with the Council of True Blood and the Queens-of-All, but there was no one to keep her similarly informed on the Getesaph side. She decided against it. She did not want to discuss Praeis right now, especially when she didn't know what she was up to. The letter she'd gotten saying Praeis and Res wanted to travel to the Hundred Isles had been unexpected, and nonspecific. Lynn had approved the travel plans more out of old loyalty than anything else. Praeis knew what she was doing. This was her home ground, after all. What worried Lynn was that she hadn't heard a word from her since.
“Coming here to keep tabs on things is probably a really good idea,” Arron said.
Inasmuch as anything we're doing here is a good idea, she could practically hear him adding. She sighed quietly.
“So that's what I'm doing here.” Lynn opened the door. “What are you doing here?”
Arron stood over by the food jobber, running his gloved fingertips over its top. “I'm not really sure. Everything should be handled through channels, but I guess, I wanted to talk to you before you got the memo …”
“Memo?” Lynn flopped down in one of the square, utilitarian chairs. The upholstery felt rough against her skin.
Arron took a deep breath. “The outside sisters of my host family have been designated the leaders of the Getesaph preparatory wave. They've invited me to join the Getesaph aboard the Ur.”
Lynn felt herself beginning to stare. “For how long?”
Arron stalked across the room to the one window. “For as long as I want,” he said to the world outside.
Lynn shoved herself upright. I do not believe this. Not even from you. “How long are you likely to want?”
He shrugged, but still didn't look at her. “I don't know.”
Which means as long as you possibly can, and we both know it.
Arron turned around, and Lynn finally saw his face. For a moment, she thought he was going to start crying. She had never seen such a mix of fear and eagerness on anybody's face before.
She bit back her initial response, and just asked, “Why, Arron?”
His fingers scrabbled at the edge of the windowsill as if he were trying to get a grip on it. “It's insane. I know it's insane. The head-mechanics would probably turn me inside out and yank half my webbing if I went in. The Getesaph are brutal, barbaric, ignorant, prejudiced, superstitious, filthy, and I'm deadly poison to them. And I want to stay,” he said to the backs of his hands. “I've been hauling nets on nights when all three of the big moons swelled the tides up. I've held a baby that crawled from her mother's womb and placed her safe in the pouch. I've dug survivors out of bomb wreckage. I've gone to funerals and howled at the top of my lungs. I've run down the streets beside a father. I've been lost in crowds so huge I couldn't see the end of them. I've talked with hundreds of different people across dozens of cities. I've—” He stopped. “I've been alive, Lynn.”
Lynn looked at him thoughtfully. She remembered back to college, and hearing about Arron's family. They were scattered between half a dozen enclaves. All of them wanted him to come live in their world and join their work. He'd grown up bouncing from territory to territory. Not once did anybody, to hear Arron tell it anyway, even acknowledge the possibility that he might want to strike out on his own.
Here, though, with the Getesaph, he was virtually unique, and absolutely impossible to qualify. He would be accepted as himself, because there was nothing they could compare him to. That should have made him the ultimate outsider, but instead, again, to hear him tell it, it had allowed him to make his own place, possibly for the first time in his life.