Page 97 of Tethered

“Then our date shall be a picnic in the greenhouse,” I say with emphasis. “And Vee can be our chaperone.”

Tanisira and I end up in the galley preparing the picnic whilst Vee takes a ‘nap’ before accompanying us to the greenhouse.He’s not napping, he just doesn’t want to help, but I’m happy for the alone time. Devyaan and Julian have been inseparable since last night, and we don’t want to bother him for something we could pull together ourselves. With a lot less ease, sure, but it’s surprisingly nice to see Tanisira doing mundane things like making a sandwich. I’m only a little embarrassed to discover that a knife in her confident hands does something to me.

“I have ulterior motives,” I declare.

She gives me the side-eye. “You don’t say.”

“I do say.”

“Marlowe.” Tanisira raises her villain’s eyebrow, though her voice is soft. “You can just ask me whatever it is you want to know. You don’t have to couch it in jokes.”

Well then. She goes back to slicing vegetables, and I narrow my eyes at her. “Anything?”

The slightest tension creeps into the set of her shoulders, but she doesn’t miss a beat. “Anything. It’s not like you haven’t now seen me at my worst,” she replies mildly.

“The problem is I want to know everything.”

She pauses, looks pensive. “Why is that a problem?”

“I might not matter soon.”

Her inhale is so sharp I hear it over all the sounds of the galley. She whips her head around, knife poised mid-air.

“You really think that? With you, I feel like someone finally cares enough to want to understand me. You make me want to unearth parts of myself I buried a long time ago, and through your eyes, I don’t hate them as much as I thought I did. Everything about you is daybreak.” Tanisira turns away from me, before glancing over again. “You will always matter to me.”

For a long moment, I don’t know what to say; I just gape. She continues to chop, and I’m still staring so hard that I catch her cheeks slowly pinken. My heart already feels ripe off her words, but the sight of that blush sets it to bursting.

“Anything, Marlowe.” The lines of Tanisira’s body are soft and at ease again, as if nothing happened, as if she didn’t just hand me another piece of her—but she’s gone back to her task with excessive focus, and I take it to mean she’d rather not talk about her outburst. I couldn’t possibly build on what she just admitted to me with any grace, so I’m glad for the excuse to ignore it for now. Instead, I take some time to gather my thoughts as I assemble a salad.

“Why did you join the IAF?”

She grimaces but it seems like more of a reflex.

“MyBavahas been a gambler my whole life. The extended family would sometimes bail him out if he was being particularly pathetic, but mostly, it was just us. He dug us deeper and deeper into debt until the only correspondence we ever received was red-letter notices. I was the oldest. As soon as I turned eighteen, I signed up for the IAF and sent money back home to myNayya.”

“That’s a lot for a teenager to take on.”

She shrugs. “Not really. It was easy compared to what I’d dealt with before I left. He was a mean, mouthy drunk. He always drank when he gambled, and he was always gambling, so. He hated that I stood up for my mother, that I didn’t respect him, and he held it against me. I couldn’t wait to get out of there; both to stop my family from losing everything, and because the sight of him made me sick to my stomach.”

“What happened once you started sending money home?”

“He kept gambling.” She laughs humourlessly. “I begged myNayyato leave him, and she would always say that she was working on it. And then one day, she did. Just like that, it was over. I chose to re-enlist.”

“You left the IAF later, though.” I eye her. “Why?”

She waves a knife towards her reattached arm. “This happened, and I was medically discharged while it healed. Itwas temporary leave, and I intended to go right back into service once I was allowed to. But myNayyamanaged to wheedle a compromise out of me; if I wouldn’t leave the military, even though they didn’t need the money anymore, I would at least go home to heal.”

The Surya-Vaani word for mother is so sweet on her lips.

“Can’t say no to her, huh?” I chuckle.

Tanisira snorts. “You haven’t met myNayya.”

“But now you live on Telluria, don’t you? When you’re not working.”

“I live in Neo-London, in a little houseboat on the canal. I’m rarely home but when I am, it’s very peaceful.”

My mouth drops open. “You live on a boat?”