Romeo grins at me, a smile that would be charming if there weren’t something darker behind it. “All that effort to find me, and you say you don’t like me?” He winks, holding the canteen up to my lips like it’s a peace offering. I could kick at his knees—he didn’t tie my feet, and he’s within reach now. I could knock him from his seat, have him in the swamp before he knew what was going on.
But then what?
I give in to my thirst and lean forward to take a pull from the canteen. I watched him drink from the same flask, so it’s not going to be poisoned or drugged. Avon’s muddy-flavored water never tasted so good.
Romeo sighs, setting the canteen back down when I’m finished. “Look, Captain.” He regards me with keen, thoughtful green eyes, as casual as if he were chatting with a friend and not interrogating his enemy. “I want a way out of this war for all of us. But first I want to know why Avon is generations behind where it should be on its terraforming schedule. You say that facility out there isn’t military; if that’s true, then it belongs to Terra Dynamics. I’m tired of them keeping secrets from us. The planetary review’s coming up, and if someone’s deliberately slowing down Avon’s progress, our side wants to know how.”
Surprise robs me of any clever retort. “You think there’s a secret facility in the middle of the swamp where we’re controlling the climate.”
His eyes cloud over, and without further warning he gets back to his feet, bracing them against the ribs and reaching for the pole once more. “I wouldn’t expect one of their hired guns to care anyway.”
Hired gun? I swallow down the impulse to lash back at him. If all I wanted was money, there are about a thousand careers I could have chosen instead of volunteering to get tossed onto this mudball and paid next to nothing to keep the peace. I grit my teeth. “Why would we want to stop Avon from developing, even if we could? What could the military or TerraDyn possibly stand to gain from that?”
“If Avon stays like this, too unstable to support a bigger population, we’ll never have enough leverage to pass the planetary review and be declared independent. We should be farmers by now, not fighters. We should be leading our own lives, earning wages, trading, able to come and go from Avon as we please. Instead we’re stuck here. No voice in the Galactic Council, no leverage, no rights.”
He’s got a surprising grasp of the politics of the situation, for someone who probably stopped going to school before he was ten years old. “You really think TerraDyn’s goal is to sit here and oppress a bunch of backwater terra-trash? They paid good money to create this part of the world. I don’t see how they start making that money back until Avon starts producing enough goods to export.”
Romeo’s jaw tightens. “They must. Otherwise, you tell me why nobody’s trying to find out why we’re all still algae farmers and water testers.”
“Not all of you are,” I point out dryly. “Some of you are thieves and murderers and anarchists living underground.”
“Why, Jubilee,” he says, grinning when the use of my full name makes my cheek twitch with irritation. “I had no idea you admired me so.”
I refuse to dignify that with a response, and fall silent. I have no answer to his question. Terraforming experts come and go, but Avon never changes. And it’s true that while Avon’s lack of development prompts a new investigation every few years, the results are always the same: cause unknown. If Romeo would stop asking so many questions, he and his so-called Fianna would be a lot better off.
Dawn has well and truly broken now, as much as dawn ever comes on Avon. In the thick, cold fog, the edges of the world slip away, leaving only our little boat and the sloshing of the water as the pole dips in and out. Romeo’s breath catches with each effort, hitching and stopping as he strains against the pole, then exhaling the rest of the way as he eases back and lifts it for another stroke.
He’s not using a compass. Compasses are useless on Avon anyway, which doesn’t have the right kind of magnetic field, and Avon’s weather patterns make satellite signals as unreliable as our broadcasts on the base. Even when they do work, with the way the canals shift and vanish due to floating islands of vegetation, the SatNav can get us into as much trouble as a compass would.
But Romeo seems to have an innate understanding of the world he lives in. Like he’s got a receiver hardwired into his brain, getting signals directly from Avon. We never run aground, we never get stuck on the floating islands. As far as I can tell, we never have to double back or change course.
I keep watching him, trying to understand how he does it. If I can learn the trick of it, maybe I can find my way back to base if I get free. He turns to navigate around a denser clump of vegetation and I lower my eyes, studying the way he shifts his weight to compensate. I lift my eyes only to realize he’s turned back around and is watching me watch him with one eyebrow raised.
I’m not sure which would be worse, him thinking I’m eyeing the gun at his hip, or him assuming I’m staring at his ass. I jerk my gaze away and give up on trying to study my captor. We move through the waterways in silence for the next half hour or more, my head pounding and his expression grim.
Abruptly, the bottom of the boat scrapes along mud and reeds and gravel, splitting the quiet with a screech.
“Ah,” says Romeo, bracing one foot against the bench and leaning down to clip the pole back to the side of the boat. “We’re here.”