She woke up. She didn’t know how much later it was, but there were no more voices from the main room. Jim was curled on his side, his back against her. His breath was deep and slow. She stretched slowly, careful not to disturb him. The aches in her muscles and skin and joints felt a little better, and there was a warmth in her chest. A looseness.

For years, she’d kept her secrets. Held them like she was keeping the pin in a hand grenade. The fear and the shame and the guilt had built up without her even noticing. The things she had done wrong – and there were so many – had grown in power. Not having them gnawing at her ribs from the inside felt strange. Empty, in a way, but a peaceful kind of empty.

Not that she was suddenly made of light and happiness. Cyn was still dead because of her. Filip was still abandoned. Abandoned again. Marco was still as much a pool of anger and hatred. Nothing about that had changed, and everything had. An old picture made into something new by replacing the frame. Jim shifted in his sleep. The thin, dark hairs on the back of his neck had a couple paler ones among them. The first touches of gray.

Something had changed between them. Not just during her sabbatical in hell, but now that she was back from her own personal underworld. She wasn’t sure exactly who they were to each other, she and Jim, except that things would be different now. Because she was different, and her changing wasn’t going to break him. He wouldn’t try to make her stay the Naomi he’d imagined.

Things changed, and they didn’t change back. But sometimes they got better.

She got out of bed slowly, shuffling to the little desk in the corner of the room. Their hand terminals were there, and the little bottle of Jim’s anticancer drugs, since he wasn’t on the Roci. She reached for her terminal, paused, and picked up his. She should ask first, but he was asleep, and she didn’t want to wake him, and she didn’t think he’d mind.

Monica Stuart’s footage of the Rabia Balkhi passing through the ring gate was unexceptional. Nothing in it seemed at all strange, except for the story around it. What had Marco done with it, she wondered. Why had he started his piracy so long before the actual coup that would permit it to go large-scale? Just the effort of doctoring all the logs from Medina would be a risk he didn’t need to take. Maybe it was something to do with the system the Balkhi was heading into…?