Chapter 237: Work
Ashcombe listened in silence, arms crossed, expression unreadable until he finished.
"Corven’s reckless," she said finally, "but he’s not stupid, and he’s not cruel about who he takes advantage of. Could be worse company for this particular job. Could be considerably worse."
"You’re not staying to see me off?"
"My circuit doesn’t wait for anyone, kid, yours included." Something in her weathered expression softened, just slightly. "But I’ll tell you what I told Renna before I left the Anchorage — whatever you’re chasing, I hope it’s worth what it’s already cost you. Not many people arrive on my ship the way you did and still manage to sound this certain, this many weeks and this many close calls later."
"I meant to ask," Rohan said. "Why did you actually agree to bring me this far? You could have said no back at the Anchorage. Renna’s vouching only carries so much weight."
Ashcombe considered the question for a long moment, gaze fixed on the darkening sky beyond the settlement’s domes.
"Because thirty years ago, somebody took a chance on me when I had considerably less to offer than you do," she said finally. "No credit, no skills worth mentioning, nothing but stubbornness and a story I couldn’t fully explain even to myself. She didn’t have to help me either. I’ve spent every year since trying to be the kind of captain who occasionally pays that forward, when the circumstances feel right." She glanced back at him, something almost fond flickering behind her usual careful sharpness. "Yours felt right. Don’t make me regret it."
"What happened to her?" Rohan asked. "The captain who took the chance on you."
"Retired, eventually. Settled on a quiet world further in toward the Cradle Reach, last I heard from her." A faint, private smile touched Ashcombe’s weathered features. "I still send word when the circuit brings me anywhere close enough to route a message through. She’d probably tell you the same thing I’m about to — that the debt you owe someone who helps you when they didn’t have to isn’t the kind you pay back to them directly. It’s the kind you pay forward, to whoever crosses your path afterward needing exactly what you once needed yourself."
Rohan thought of Veyrhold, of Maerin’s cold competence and Bryan’s careful ledgers, of Renna’s standing account and Ashcombe’s own hard-won generosity, and understood, with a clarity that settled somewhere deep and certain in his chest, exactly what kind of debt he was already carrying, and exactly what he intended to do with it once he’d earned the means to.
"I won’t forget that," he said.
"I won’t," Rohan said, and meant it as fully as he’d ever meant anything.
He watched the Ember Drift lift off from Kestrel’s Hollow’s landing field the following morning, engines kicking up a fresh billowing cloud of orange dust as she rose into the pale, thin sky and slowly shrank toward the vanishing point where atmosphere gave way to the black beyond. Dessa had clasped his forearm in a brief, firm farewell before boarding, telling him gruffly that he’d fought better than most people twice his experience, and that she hoped whatever he found out there was worth the trouble he’d clearly gone to chasing it. Pike had simply wished him luck, young enough still to mean it without complication, and had pressed a small, folded scrap of paper into his hand at the last moment — a hand-drawn sketch of the Ember Drift herself, scrawled underneath with a short note wishing him a safe journey home, wherever home actually turned out to be. Torvin hadn’t said much of anything, which Rohan had come to understand, over three weeks of shared watch shifts, was simply how the engineer expressed anything resembling genuine sentiment.
Ashcombe’s parting had been the briefest of all — a short nod, a murmured safe travels, kid, and then she’d turned back toward her bridge without waiting to watch him grow smaller behind her, the same brisk, practical economy she seemed to apply to everything.
Rohan found he missed them almost immediately, in the quiet, aching way he still missed Veyrhold most mornings when he first woke — not because anything about the parting had felt wrong, but because every farewell in this universe seemed to carry the same uncertain weight, the same unspoken question of whether he’d ever see these particular faces again. He wondered, not for the first time, how many more such farewells this search would demand of him before it finally ended — how many more names he’d learn only to leave behind, how many more people he’d owe a debt he might never get the chance to properly repay.
’That’s the cost of this whole search, I suppose. Every person who helps me along the way becomes someone I might never get the chance to properly thank, once I’m finally through whatever door is waiting at the end of this.’
’Worth it. Still worth it. I have to believe that, or none of the rest of this makes sense either.’
He turned from the landing field, sketch tucked carefully alongside Liora’s charm and Jorren’s shield token, and made his way toward the small lodging Halden had arranged for him near the settlement’s central dome — modest, functional, considerably more comfortable than the alcove behind the Anchorage’s shuttered market stall had been, though nowhere close to the quiet, hard-won warmth of Veyrhold’s buried common room.
The northern platform, when Corven’s small salvage shuttle finally delivered him there at dawn the following day, proved to be exactly the kind of decades-worn, patched-together machinery Rohan had expected — automated mining equipment sprawled across a rocky, airless expanse, kept minimally functional by a settlement that couldn’t afford to properly replace it, couldn’t afford to lose it either.
"Most of it just needs cleaning and recalibration," Corven explained, leading him through the platform’s cramped access corridors with the ease of long familiarity. "Dust gets into everything out here, gums up sensors, throws off the automated sorting arrays. Not glamorous work. Not particularly dangerous either, provided you don’t do anything stupid with the airlock seals. Should suit someone who’s apparently survived considerably worse than a little manual labour."