Spin State - Chris Moriarty [136]
Bella started and pulled out of Li’s arms.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, picking up Sharifi’s copy of Xenograph from the floor where Li had dropped it when she fell asleep. “It’s Hannah’s.”
“I took it from her room.”
Bella looked at her, and that calculating look drifted across her face again. “Read to me,” she said. “Like Hannah did.”
Li hesitated.
“Please. I just need to hear your voice.”
Li thumbed through the book, wondering what passages Hannah would have read to Bella. What she would have said about them. She remembered the secretive habits she’d developed during a childhood of reading library books: cracking their spines so the next person who checked them out couldn’t spot her favorite passages, couldn’t read over her shoulder and trace her own reactions in the rut of her reading. Had Sharifi been like her, a private, furtive, guilty keeper of secrets? Li doubted it; the Sharifi she remembered watching, the Sharifi that Bella and Sharpe and Cohen talked about, hadn’t been interested in hiding.
She held the book up and let it fall open. Sure enough, she saw a line of Sharifi’s neat writing in the margin. She read out the words Sharifi had underlined:
I write these words sitting in our field camp. Behind me rise the eight thousanders of the Johannesburg Massif, still unclimbed every one of them. To my left lie the salt flats of that ancient ocean whose banks I spent two years walking. To my right, the highlands that Cartwright and Dashir mapped. All untouched, alien, perfect as it was on the first day we saw it.
But on my way to camp, I passed the terraforming plant. I passed algae flats, the furrows of farmers’ fields. And I have now a wheat ear lying across the page I write on. I plucked it from the trailside. Life in a blade of grass.
Life for another planet. For this one, death—and the slow, fatal rot that follows the map of our best intentions.
We were mapmakers. Monks and worshipers. We came into the country like saints coming to the desert. We came to be changed.
But nothing changes. Everything men touch changes.
And in the margin, Sharifi’s scribbled words—words Li didn’t read to Bella:
But you still gave them the maps, didn’t you?
Li raised her eyes from the page to find Bella staring at her. She closed the book, started to speak. Bella put a finger to her lips.
“Hush,” she murmured, leaning into Li, ducking her head so that her hair brushed Li’s mouth and tickled her nose.
“How I can help you, Bella? Tell me. What can I do?”
“Just hold me.”
So Li held her, her pulse racing at the smell and the feel of her, her stomach curling with shame at what she couldn’t help wanting.
They sat that way for so long that Li began to think Bella was asleep when she finally spoke again.
“How strong are you?” Bella asked.
Li frowned, caught off guard. “Strong.”
“Stronger than a man?” A warm hand slipped under Li’s T-shirt, slid over her flanks and stomach.
“A lot stronger,” Li said.
The hand paused in its exploration. Bella looked up at her intently. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
Li started. She thought of Korchow of all people, half-expecting a joke or an accusation. “Of course I have,” she whispered.
“What’s it like?”
“Not nice.”
“Do you ever feel guilty about it?”
“Sometimes.” She saw Gilead’s brilliant sunrise, its snowcapped mountains rushing up at her in the split second before her auxiliary chute popped open. “Some of them.”
“But then you jump to a new star, a new planet, and you forget all about it. That’s a gift. To be able to leave a place behind forever. To forget the person you became there. Some people would give anything for that.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Li protested, but Bella wasn’t listening anymore.
“Kiss me,” she said.
Li swallowed.
“Don’t you want to?”
“Listen,” Li began—but whatever she’d been about to say caught on an indrawn breath as Bella’s fingers circled her nipple.
“You look at me like you want to,” Bella whispered into her ear, a whisper that was itself a caress.
“Looking isn’t doing,” Li said with the last