Beyond the Dying Light

Chapter 7: The Man in the Room

It was Aria's turn.

She'd done it twice before without incident, and the route was mapped in her memory now — service passage to the third junction, left toward the galley, avoid the main corridor until after the patrol rotation. She moved quietly, the way the three of them had all learned to move in the past several days: deliberately, close to the wall, no sudden stops.

The galley was empty. She gathered what she could fit — four ration packs, a sealed water container — and tucked them inside her jacket.

On the way back she passed the room.

She didn't mean to look. She'd passed it before without stopping, the same way Ben had described doing. But something made her slow — a sound, maybe, or just the quality of the light through the narrow window in the door. She stopped without deciding to and looked through the glass.

Four guards, seated. Cards on the table between them. One asleep in the corner.

And one man sitting apart from all of them.

He was older. Thinner than he should have been, from the look of it — the kind of thin that came from stress rather than design. His hands were resting on his knees and they were trembling slightly, even still. He was looking at the floor, and there was something in the slope of his shoulders, the specific way he was holding himself, that pulled at something in Aria's memory before she'd consciously identified why.

She looked closer.

The shape of his jaw. The scar near the left temple, thin and old. The way he held his hands.

She'd seen those hands before. Seen them fixing things on a workbench, seen them ruffling hair, seen them in photographs in a house she'd visited a hundred times growing up.

Her breath caught.

She stepped back from the door, back pressed against the corridor wall, heart suddenly loud.

Natan's father.

Alive. On this ship. In that room.

She stood in the corridor for a long moment, the ration packs pressed to her chest, trying to decide what her face was going to do by the time she got back.

— End of Chapter 7 —