V.

They could have frozen it or given it a burial at space: Connie never found out what happened to the body. The director said he would keep it. The counselor, the closest thing they had to a chaplain, gave a brief and nondenominational prayer of goodbye, and then techs wheeled the casket away, and the Freelancers were left standing there in their dress uniforms.

Carolina headed back to the common room first, but it wasn't with any sense of completion. "Unacceptable," Connie heard her say as she followed with the others.

York mourned too, in a less internal way than Carolina. He actively moped. Everyone was quiet; York was missing Maryland. They hadn't been close but but he missed her like he would miss any of them. The Freelancers stood around in the common room, not knowing what to do with the free time that had, earlier, felt like a blessing. Connie sat down on the couch and felt it creak as Maine sat beside her and stared at the coffee table.

(That was pretty normal behavior for Maine.)

Connie heard Carolina and York talking near the door to her own room. She could have turned to see who else was with them - from the footsteps it was more - but it didn't really matter.

"It didn't have to happen that way," Carolina was saying, her voice straining like she knew the words didn't really have any meaning. They were too trite to express what she felt, but they were the only ones she could dig up. You found out in war sooner than in school that the cliches became cliches because they were true. "I should have been watching her. Someone should have been covering her. We could have slid the box up the ramp."

"You're making it sound like it was your fault, Carolina. It wasn't." That was York.

Carolina said, "It wasn't anybody's fault."

Connie was glad Carolina wasn't blaming her.

"That doesn't mean I'm happy about it," Carolina said.

"No one expects you to be happy about it..." Connie could hear York circling Carolina, could picture the expression on his face as he tried to comfort her. If they ended up in her room Connie would rather find somewhere else to sleep. Wash's or the couch. Maybe whichever Maine wasn't in.

"I know," Carolina said. "I know exactly what people expect."

York didn't ask her what she meant. He hugged her - Connie could hear the clothes rustling and shushing together, and she turned further away. She stared at the green stitches in the couch as if they were fascinating, as if they were a jungle with infinite kinds of life-forms inside. (Don't look when mommy and daddy are fighting. Find something to do. Read about outer space or the circle of shadowy men who decides the next President of the United States.)

"Hey," said Wash, and sat down next to her. She looked up, startled but unwilling to show it. North and South passed by behind him, talking loudly to one another. They sounded friendly. They didn't sound like they were mourning.

Wash had a folded map with him. He set it on the table, and she looked at the paper with a sort of hunger. She hadn't touched anything with pages in a while.

He looked at her, and the brightness of his blue eyes forced her gaze away from the table. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. I think I'm just..." she looked down at her hands, folded them in her lap so she could feel the heat of her own skin. "Sad. I'm just sad."

"I didn't know her very well," said Wash.

"I didn't either. I don't know how South is taking it."

"North helps."

Connie thought, and York helps Carolina, and you help me. Wyoming and Florida still hadn't come out into the common room this evening, ever since they weren't sent on the mission. Maybe they had had their own. She had briefly seen the girls from the other rooms huddled together, talking over Maryland in their own way.

She thought, maybe South's glad she has her own room now.

Wash said, "She did good. She helped us get out."

"What happened in there?"

He sighed. "They just had the thing in a box, a crate, like they were going to take it somewhere. There weren't a lot of guards. The sniper and the other one only showed up after we found the door. What about you?"

"We just waited. Then we saw you come out. You did a good job."

"They mostly used me as support. South wasn't as good with her gun." He said this casually, without arrogance. "And Carolina wanted to be the leader. That was fine. She picked up the box first. I was worried..." His voice went higher-pitched. "That it might be irradiated."

"MAC cannons can run on iron cores as well as uranium cores. It might not have been. And our suits might take care of that." She rotated her arm, imagining the armor cuff.

He shook his head, leaned back against the couch, exposing his neck. "I didn't sign up to get irradiated!"

"It's fine." She smiled. "I'm sure the director would have told us about that."

Wash relaxed, looked down."We completed the objective." He said it like he meant 'at least we survived.'

Connie didn't want to have to keep staring at the threads in the couch to calm her thoughts. There had to be something else she could think about here, something she could grab on to. The mission. The objective. She thought out loud, growing more and more comfortable with telling Wash whatever was on her mind. (Later she would not so much regret this as remember it like the half-forgotten words to a song. The beginning was there but the rest of the feeling just trailed off.) "So we've got a MAC cannon for the ship now. What are we going to use it for? Does he expect us to be fighting capital ships?"

"Maybe he does. The Insurrection has been getting strong."

It helped her to try to figure things out instead of dwelling on Maryland's death, so she unknotted her hands and gripped his forearm to show him that. "Why would the Insurrection be working at a facility that produces MAC cores?"

"I thought they weren't. They were just guarding it. The facility was abandoned."

"Oh. Right. That makes sense. He should have been clearer. You said it was in a crate."

Wash did not disagree.

Connie already looked back on her statement about the director giving them all of the information and re-examined it, wondering if she had enough proof to back it up. He hadn't told them much about the mission.

Maybe Wash saw the wheels turning in her head. He looked at her like he was examining the exact changes in her face when she was angry. (She knew them: furrowed brow, but the skin didn't get wrinkled there: she got furrows on her cheeks too, like an old woman, when she was angry, and she hated them.) He said, "I know you're angry about her."

Her was Maryland, of course. Connie said, "Aren't you?"

He paused for a moment, "What do you need?"

She tipped over to lean her forehead against his shoulder. The gray t-shirt was thick and soft but she could feel that his arms were muscular underneath it, and not particularly comfortable. "I just need to be alive for a while."

He shifted around uncomfortably and she sat up. He took ahold of the map and unfolded it on the table while she propped her chin on her hands.

She asked, "Where'd you get that?"

"It was North's," he said. "He said he used to take it on road trips and he'd always carry it around."

"So why do you have it?"

"He said I could bring it out here. We thought it might be nice to, you know, look at our states. And look at her."

The map was yellowed slightly, the colors pastel red, blue, oranges and yellows and siennas with a tiny key in the bottom corner. Town names in black, different kinds of roads in different widths of line. Connie liked how organized and simple maps were. They marked things that were - or that people thought were - permanent.

He moved his fingertip across Maryland, picking out towns. Columbia, Silver Spring. Connie noticed one called Burnie and took a second look. Glen Burnie. Wash's thumb in the sepia Atlantic.

And D.C., she noticed, snugged against the bottom of Maryland. Wash ignored his name.

"Alive, Wash. I said be alive." She took his hand and moved it north, pressed it down across the colored mess of lines and counties that was Connecticut, then picked his hand up and with some cooperation pressed it to her cheek. When she let go he stayed there, looking into her eyes with his head tipped, and then pressed his lips together.

"Sorry," he said.

It wasn't something he said often. If it had been, she would have heard it a lot over the next few weeks. She would have heard it so many times that she would have started to hate it, using one small quirk to mean everything about him that she was trying to get herself to leave.

But he didn't say it often. He did not regret or internalize his actions. He simply did them, and there was not a lot there to be sorry for.

"It's okay," she said, and smiled, and he shifted his palm to cup her cheek more comfortably (covering, caressing the wrinkles she hated).

She never found out where York and Carolina ended up. She went to Wash's room with him and just curled up there, Maine snoring quietly in the next bunk over. Both Connie and Wash in t-shirts and sweatpants they figured out how to make the small blanket cover both of them, just barely, his knees pressed up against and angled around hers, her wondering whether her weight bothered him or her breath smelled or her breathing was too loud, and at least she wasn't worrying about Maryland maybe floating out in space somewhere. She grabbed the collar of Wash's shirt and he snugged his arms around her shoulders, pressing his face against the pillow above her head so that his chin touched her forehead, not squished or compacted against her but just laying there, his hair falling flat and spiky over his forehead, comfortable, just being himself, like Connie wasn't there.

The next evening North and York strung a white blanket up (who knows where they got it; it wasn't one of theirs) and used someone's hand-held game system (North and York had both brought theirs to play the latest Sergeant Mayhem expansion pack) and they watched an old movie with talking animals.

All of them curled up in blue blankets stolen off their own beds, the movie screen rippling as someone's shoulder hit the bottom, and Connie pressed the bottom of her chin into her prickly blanket and looked at Wash. He was posed a lot like her, his face in his arms against the floor, and his eyes shut. When he opened one the blue was all gone, washed away in the darkness of the room, with brighter colors from the movie moving across his cheek.

He looked at her and she smiled because he made her feel like every moment in her life was a moment to look forward to, and she crept forward under her blanket. He put a blanket-wrapped arm over her shoulders and she tucked her knees under her stomach and turtled next to him, pressed against the unexpected softness of his side. Across the room, North and South resettled with their backs against one another. The older Freelancers had gone to bed hours ago. That left Maine as a mountainous lump in the middle of the room, one tree-truck leg stretched out under the card table, and York and Carolina already tangled together closest to the door.

"I love you," Wash whispered in her ear, and Connie turned to press her cheek against his in an instinct for warmth. The heat spread to her stomach and settled naturally there like a new season.

Then she felt the fear start sickening that season. The enormity of the meaning of what he had said dizzied her, and tears welled and pooled in her eyes before she could stop them. Involuntary, they seemed completely disconnected from the rest of her feelings. Wash noticed this tectonic change and looked at her with concern, his eyes momentarily tracking the tears. Instead of ignoring them or chasing them like prey he kept instead looking at her, not at the product of her rush of emotion, and she loved him for that.

He pushed one foot against hers. She hadn't thought before now that he was wearing socks, but she could feel the fabric under the blanket. His toes curled around the side of her foot and she lowered shoulders that she had subconsciously hunched. He was still looking at her, so innocent that she did not know how he had captured her so easily -

But love was not captivity, was not surveillance, and his grip loosened as he waited, and his eyes looked gray.

She kissed him on the cheek and burrowed her head against his blanket.

"I love you too," Connie said, and wondered what she meant.

No thunder clapped. Someone shifted in the darkness. Wash nodded against hers, and she could feel his smile.

The scoreboard went up the next morning.