Current Drift / Part IV
Chapter Twenty — Yaz
The light in La Paz at six in the evening was nothing like the light at six in the morning — flatter, more tired, the rust and honey traded out for something closer to brass — and Yaz had the camera up anyway, walking the dock backward the way she had three weeks before, because some habits didn't ask permission before they became the shape of how you did a thing.
"Homecoming," she told the lens. "Ninety-one feet of steel, considerably more diesel smell than we left with, and a crew list that came back a different personality test than the one it left as. Let's see who's still standing."
Bram came down the gangway first, same as always, except this time it was the lander housing he carried like something breakable rather than the usual armful of Pelican cases, and he didn't drop anything, not once, the whole way down.
"You didn't drop it," Yaz said.
"I've had practice."
"You've had accidents. There's a difference and I feel like you'd want that on the record."
Bram considered this with the specific gravity he considered everything, and then, for the first time in three weeks that she could recall, didn't argue with her about it. "Yeah," he said. "I would."
William came up behind him with his duffel over one shoulder, the brass buckle catching the flat evening light, and Yaz didn't even have to try this time — it simply arrived, the way the good ones always did, uninvited.
"Bon voyage, Bill," she said, entirely for the pleasure of watching the whole sequence run one more time.
"It's William." He stopped dead, the duffel swinging forward off his shoulder before the strap caught it, exactly the way it had three weeks and a hundred years ago. "Do I look like a—"
"—like a bill, I know, I've seen the bit, I helped write half of it." She kept the camera on him a beat longer than she needed to. "You gonna tell me the middle name yet?"
"No."
"Gonna ask the captain for a hint one more time before we lose the chance?"
William's jaw did something complicated. "I have," he admitted, with real dignity, "made my peace with not knowing."
"You have not."
"I have made considerable progress toward peace with not knowing."
She let him have that one. It was, all things considered, the most growth she'd watched anybody manage in three weeks, Wolfgang included.
Solá she caught near the rail, doing his own last pass before the harbor authority came aboard, Chief at his heel the way Chief had been at his heel every single day of this voyage without once needing to be asked twice.
"Last chance, Captain," she said, camera low, not pushing it into his face the way she might have on day one, because some things you learned to ask for gently or you didn't get them at all. "Why was he really aboard?"
Solá looked at her for a long moment, and something in his face — not quite a smile, closer to the memory of one — moved and settled again before he answered.
"Not my story to tell," he said. "It's a good one, though."
"You said that on day five."
"It was true on day five." He scratched behind Chief's ear, unhurried. "Some things don't need updating just because a lot's happened since."
She let the camera catch that too, because it felt, somehow, like the truest sentence anybody had said to her all voyage, captain or otherwise.
She found Amaleto and Heath at the far rail a little before the gangway crew called last call, standing close enough to be having a conversation and far enough apart that neither of them looked like they needed the other one to have it. Yaz drifted close enough to catch it without quite meaning to, the way the camera always somehow ended up exactly where the thing worth catching was about to happen.
"You saw it before any of us had a reason to look," Amaleto was saying, not loud, not performing it for anyone, least of all him. "I still don't know how. I've decided I'm not going to spend the rest of my life trying to find out, because I don't think there's a test for it, and I've made my peace with there not being one." She paused. "I'm glad someone could. I don't think I could have. I don't think I'm supposed to be able to."
Heath didn't reach for an analogy. He didn't reach for anything at all, which Yaz was coming to understand was the highest compliment the man was capable of paying anybody.
"You made it hold," he said, finally. "That's the part I was never going to be able to do myself."
Neither of them said anything else. Yaz lowered the camera before the moment could ask anything more of either of them than it had already been given, and walked away without either of them noticing she'd been there at all.
Later, after the gangway crew had called last call and the harbor authority had begun their final walk-through, Yaz went back to the wardroom to collect her gear.
The table was cleared, except for two pieces of paper Heath had left laying there, weighted down by an empty coffee mug.
Yaz paused, the camera hanging heavy at her side, and looked down.
The first was a standard printout of GPS coordinates. Four distinct sets of numbers, corresponding exactly to the Caribbean, Argentina, Noto, and Mindanao. Scrawled in the margin in Heath’s tight, hurried handwriting were the words: south pole locked.
The second was a printed topological model of the Earth, rendered with all the water removed, leaving only the raw, brutal elevation of the continents. A thick, vertical ellipse had been drawn in black marker, encircling the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, tracing the spine of the cordillera from north to south.
Beneath the oval, scrawled in the same hand, were two phrases: the new equator ring of fire
Fainter, off to one side — pencil, not marker, four small marks pressed so lightly into the paper they were nearly texture rather than ink, scattered across points on the map that meant nothing to her and, she suspected, everything to him. Beside them, in the same faint hand: NAA.
She looked at it longer than she looked at anything else on the page. It was the kind of mark an eye with no reason to care would read as a shrug and keep moving — three letters standing in for a thought not worth finishing. She was fairly sure it wasn't that. She just wasn't sure yet what it was instead.
Yaz stared at it for a long moment. She didn't take a picture. Some things didn't need to be on tape to be true. She left the papers exactly as they were, turned, and walked out into the flat, brass-colored light of the La Paz evening.
Curiosity went down the gangway on her own terms, the way she'd come up it three weeks before, pausing halfway to survey the dock with an expression that suggested the whole of La Paz existed largely to be tolerated, and then continued on, unhurried, uninterested, toward whatever warm surface the harbor was going to offer her next. Nobody chased her. Nobody needed to. She had never once, in three weeks, been lost — only exactly where she'd meant to be, every single time, for reasons that had never once had anything to do with any of the rest of it.
Yaz watched her go and didn't call after her either. Some things you just let walk off the edge of the frame.
[Cordero, personal log, day twenty, 21:40 — final entry, this voyage]
Home. Or the version of home that's a dock and a dry bed and a shower that isn't rationed, which after three weeks amounts to more or less the same thing.
Bram didn't drop anything on the way down. William has made "considerable progress" toward peace with not knowing, which is the most honest sentence I've ever heard him say. The captain's still not telling. Amaleto said something to Heath at the rail that I don't think either of them will ever repeat to anyone else, and I'm not going to be the one who does it for them.
Haven't had the chase dream since the storm. Might be nothing. Might just mean I finally caught the thing, or stopped needing to. Haven't decided which version I like better, and for once I'm in no hurry to test it.
The cat left without saying goodbye. Never once said hello either, if I'm honest. I don't think either gesture was ever really her department.
Cordero, out.