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“Hey, Mrs. Beach.”
For a second Sophie wasn’t sure she got the number right, as the shaky video stream swept across an ambiguously beige wall, but then a familiar face came into view. Or, most of her face and a lot of wall above it. It was endearingly old-person.
“Captain Green, is that you?” she said.
“It sure is,” Sophie said. “I just wanted to let you know that I wired you your credits for the ticket you bought me a few months ago, so—”
“How did it go? I haven’t heard about any war with aliens, but there’s a lot I don’t hear.”
“No war with the Others,” Sophie promised. “It went—it worked out. Things are going to be okay.”
“And what about your finger?”
Oh, God. Sophie lifted her hand into view: the last inch of her pinky, past the second knuckle, was gone. Mrs. Beach clicked her tongue and shook her head. It didn’t look too bad anymore—the skin hadn’t fully smoothed over, but the bleeding and scabbing was gone, and the pain was gone but for the occasional twinge. “Good. It’s harder to grab things now sometimes? I hadn’t expected that, like, this hand doesn’t have quite the same grip strength. But it’s healed, I don’t have any problems with it.”
“Good, good,” said Mrs. Beach. “I don’t know what possessed you—”
“Mrs. Beach, you were pointing a rifle at me!” Sophie laughed. The incident felt dreamlike now. “You know, the first thing Jane did when I got to Medea was cut off a piece of my hair to make sure I wasn’t an Other and I was standing there with my finger chopped off, bleeding, feeling like an idiot.”
“Oh…” Mrs. Beach said, like she had never considered that possibility—well, of course she hadn’t—and then her eyes narrowed shrewdly. “The first thing she did?”
“Not the first thing,” Sophie conceded.
“How is she?”
Sophie grinned and stretched back in her chair. Mrs. Beach had been over-invested in her relationship with Jane even when Sophie tried to rob her so it was unsurprising that she wanted to know. But she couldn’t resist answering. “Jane is doing well,” she said. “Um, we’re living together. It’s—crazy. It’s good. I didn’t think—it’s really good.”
Mrs. Beach’s eyebrows rose, in a way that promised more questions that were maybe more personal than Sophie wanted to answer from an old woman on another planet that she had met twice, no matter how much she owed her for the way things turned out. Which reminded Sophie of something else she wanted to say.
Cutting Mrs. Beach off at the pass of whatever she wanted to ask about Jane, she said, “When we talked about Cassandra joining the PSA—you mentioned that the PSA ended the language programs in your school. Did you grow up speaking Adamarian?”
“Mostly standard,” said Mrs. Beach, “But I knew some. My parents spoke it to each other.”
“Well, um, I wanted to say. Moitas grazas.”
This was the reason she’d called instead of just sending a message with the wire transfer. She didn’t trust her pronunciation to be even comprehensible, but to her relief, Mrs. Beach gasped.
“Fala vostede adamara?” she asked.
“Um!” Sophie laughed. “Sorry, wait, I know this. Uh, estou aprendo adamara.” A few phrases, at least. She couldn’t quite articulate the urge. Cullen thought that the spread of PSA control was inevitable, and probably he was right. He ended up being right about most things. But there were things, that you could do, to hold a little ground.
“Aprendendo,” Mrs. Beach corrected, then clapped her hands decisively. “Oh, you’re so sweet. When are you coming back to visit?”
“Visit Adamar?” Sophie said, surprised but flattered. “I don’t know, Mrs. Beach, when are you coming to visit Medea?”
“You can’t practice Adamara on Medea, now, can you?”
“No,” Sophie said, “but…” Oh, humiliating, now she had to come up with reasons for someone to come to Medea. Wasn’t it bad enough that she was living here and liked it? “There’s… a ton of really square houses,” she said, “which is. Fun. And the university campus where my, a friend, I guess, works is actually pretty nice. You get your money’s worth at every sports match because I swear they’re always tied until the last fucking minute. And Jane’s here.”
“How lovely,” Mrs. Beach said knowingly. “Well. Maybe I will visit someday. You don’t know how happy I am you called, Captain Green. And not just because I’ve been waiting for that money back.”
“I’ve really just been Sophie these days,” Sophie said.
“Well, I hope you’ll call again, Sophie. It would be nice to have someone to talk to in Adamara.”
“I will,” Sophie said, and meant it.