"You were afraid of me."
His eyes lowered as his mind mulled over all the ways he could have gotten it wrong. Not to take accountability, but to see that was broken and perhaps ...
He thought he'd been doing good, but he'd failed. She didn't have to say it, he saw that look now ... and if he thought about it, if he remembered he could see it'd been there for a while now. In various forms, but it'd still been there. Now opened, now naked.
She was afraid ... of him.
Naomi Nagata didn't need protection, no. She did better. She earned devotion.
Better than some tall-for-an-earther, genetically modified, more parents than he knew that to do with, acting XO, pretty boy.
Naomi was an engineer; a hard worker. A fixer. She'd take things apart, figure them out, put them back together better than before. Maybe kinda like him because he was a work in progress. Something that needed to be fixed.
She didn't start off his boss. It sorta came that way when everyone else figured out she was the only one he would actually listen to. She had a way of explaining things that made it easy for him to follow and not just the mechanical stuff. It was like the way water fell down on earth, she set him on a course and it was natural. Do what she said and things got fixed fast and good, even when she lacked the resources - which was pretty much always the case. When she was around things got better. And so Amos drew closer to her, because around her he wanted to be better.
They used to joke about Holden, the second officer, about his uncanny knack for failing upward. Amos knew most of that was because of how good Naomi made him look. Something got broke, he asked her to fix it and she did. The best thing that ever happened to the James Holden, to Canterbury, was Naomi Nagata.
And now Amos discovered the worst thing to happen to it was James Holden. Promoted to XO and in a few hours time, made the call that killed the Cant.
Naomi knew and didn't tell him.
I always back your play, he'd told her, because it had been true. But now something was broken between them ... and he couldn't even fathom figuring it out without her.
She was the one who fixed things.
So now what did that mean for them?
