Six months later, Ern awoke in his bed. Celine was beside him, sprawled in a tangle of hair and curves and skin. She was already developing little burn blemishes, unavoidable for those who lived above ground in the Nast Cluster.
He had to work early today, and he had a promise to keep before that. Celine was tired of living in a home halfway-packed up, so Ern had been sorting, bit by bit, through all his mother’s things, deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and he needed to finish the job before he left to to work so that the house would be ready for Celine’s things, which were finally due in today from her mother’s place in North.
He slipped out of bed and padded naked to the main room, where he made himself some coffee and sat down in the heap of memories.
He finished sorting out the dishes. He boxed the last of his mother’s clothing. He packed her forbidden books in with his own, to keep once he had a proper set of shelves up.
There were only few pictures that still survived. Personal vanity had been discouraged during Council Regime, so it had not been easy for her to get ahold of film, or cameras, or printers, but somehow his mother had done it. Most of the pictures were of him as a baby. There were only two of her, both of them holding him, both when he was too young to remember.
Even then, she had looked like a shell of a woman trying desperately to feel alive. But in both of them, she was at least smiling. And they were real smiles. As if she really had loved him.
Of course, he knew now that she had, otherwise they couldn’t have used him against her like they did.
He’d found her file in the archives as they were destroying CARE’s secret records. He’d gotten to know her through it, after she was dead. She’d spent the last year of her life wearing his helmet and prowling the night like a wolf on Old Home Terra, only instead of wild animals, she hunted CARE agents. She’d killed thirty-five of them before they caught her. The way they killed her wasn’t something he liked to think about.