Jeremy didn’t get his lungs looked at. Jeremy just watched, cheerful again.

“So what was that with Vince?” He sprang the question on Jeremy as they walked toward the mess hall. And Jeremy’s good mood evaporated.

“Oh, Vince is Vince,” Jeremy said.

“If he gives you a hard time about me, you know,—let me know.”

Jeremy looked at him, a dark eye under a shelf of hair that was usually shading his eyes. “Yeah,” Jeremy said as if he hadn’t quite expected that. “Yeah, thanks.”

He’d felt obliged to offer. He guessed Jeremy hadn’t expected much out of him and he knew Jeremy hadn’t been completely happy to give up his (he now knew) single room to be the only junior-junior with a roommate. But Jeremy had been cheerful all the same, and stood up for him and tried to make the best of it, and that was fairly unusual in the string of people he’d lived with. In this kid, in this twelve-year-old body and combat-nerves mind, he had something ironically like the guys he’d used to hang out with when he was a little younger than Jeremy, guys well aside from what the sober adults in his life had wanted him to associate with. He’d been into a major bit of mischief until he’d wised up and gotten out of it

But, along with the mischief he hadn’t gotten into any longer, had gone the fellowship he hadn’t had in the competitive Honors program. He’d invested in no friendly companionship since he’d gotten involved so deeply in his goals, except, well, Bianca, which had started out with a rush of something electric. But no guys, no one to play a round of cards with or hang about rec with. He’d evaded females in the crew. He’d let himself fall back into an earlier time when girls were something the guys all viewed from a distance, when guys were mostly occupied with looking good, not yet obsessed with hoping their inadequacies didn’t show… he’d been through all of it, and he could look back with, oh, two whole years’ perspective on the really paranoid stage of his life.

And maybe—he decided—maybe dealing with small-sized Jeremy in that sense felt like a drop back into innocence and omnipotence.

Like revisiting his own brat-kid phase, when vid-games and running the tunnels had been his total obsession. Getting away with it. Telling your friends how wonderful you were. Yes, he grew tired of hearing blow-by-blow accounts of maze-monsters and flying devils while Jeremy was beating him at cards, and the words wild and dead-on and decadent were beginning to make his nerves twitch; but there was something genuine and real in Jeremy that made him put up with the rough edges and almost regret that he’d lose Jeremy when his year of slavery was up. A few years ago, bitter and sullen with changes in his living arrangements, he’d have declined to give a damn—or to invest in a quasi-brother he’d lose. But he’d grown up past that; he’d had his experience with the Wilsons, and finally the Program; and somewhere in the mix he’d learned there was something you gained from the people that chance and the courts flung you up against, never a big gain, but something.

So, for all those tentative reasons, walking back to mess, he decided he liked his designated almost-brother, this round, among all the foster-brothers they’d tried to foist off on him. And if Vince leaned on Jeremy again tomorrow, he’d rattle Vince’s teeth with no real effort and damn the consequences.

They played cards in the rec hall after supper this first evening in Mariner system, and he won his time back from Jeremy plus six hours. Jeremy blew a hand. That was something. Or he was getting suddenly, measurably better.

“Want to play a round?” It was one of the senior-juniors coming up behind his shoulder as he collected the cards. He’d forgotten the name, but the convenient patch on the jumpsuit said, Chad .

Jeremy scrambled up from the chair when Chad asked, dead-serious and looking worried. The room was mixed company, seniors out of engineering watching a vid, a couple of other card games, the senior-juniors over in the corner shooting vid-games, and this guy, one of their group, wanted to play.

It wasn’t right, Jeremy’s behavior said it wasn’t right.

“Maybe you’d better play Jeremy,” Fletcher said, “He’s better.”

Chad settled into the chair anyway, determined to have his way. Chad looked maybe a little younger than JR, not much, big, for the body-age. Chad picked up the cards and dealt them. The stakes were already laid: get up and walk off from this guy, or pick up the cards. Jeremy’s distress advised him this was somebody to worry about. He picked up the cards, hoping he could score that way.

Chad won the hand, a lapse of his concentration, his own fault. The guy didn’t talk, didn’t ask anything, just played a hand and won it. They’d bet an hour.

“My hour,” Chad said. “You clean my room tomorrow, junior-junior.”

“I guess I do,” he said. He’d lost, fair and square. He didn’t like it, but he’d played the game. He’d satisfied Chad’s little power-play, didn’t want another hand, in any foolish notion he could win it back against a good, a very good card player. He got up and left, and Jeremy caught him up in the corridor, not saying anything.

He felt he’d been played for the fool, though he was grateful for Jeremy’s cues, and didn’t want to talk about the bloody details of the encounter. More than embarrassed, he was angry. Chad was one of JR’s hangers-on, crew, cronies, whatever that assortment amounted to, and JR hadn’t been there; but at the distance of the corridor, he saw the game beneath the game, and he knew winning against Chad wouldn’t have been a sign of peace.

“Did he cheat?” he asked Jeremy. He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure he’d have caught it, and he wanted to know that, bottom-level.

“No,” Jeremy said, “but he’s pretty good.”

It was better than his suspicion, but it didn’t much improve his mood “Why don’t you go on back?” he said. “There’s no point. I’m going to bed.”

“Me, too,” Jeremy said, for whatever reason, maybe that things weren’t entirely comfortable for a roommate of his in the rec hall right now. There’d been a pissing-match going on. My skull’s thicker than yours head-butting. And why Chad had chosen to come over to their table and pick on him was a question, but it wasn’t a pleasant question.

They got to the cabin, undressed.

“When we get to Mariner, you know,” Jeremy said, awkwardly enthusiastic, “there’s supposed to be this sort of aquarium place. It’s wild. Really worth seeing, what I hear. ”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we could kind of go, you know.”

He let his surly mood spill over on Jeremy and Jeremy was trying to make the best of it. Least of anybody on the ship was Jeremy responsible for Chad’s unprovoked attack on him.

He sat down on the bed; he thought about aquariums and Old River and how the fish had used to come up in the shallows, odd flat creatures with long noses. Melody had told him the name, but like no few hisa words, it was hisses and spits. They had an aquarium on Pell, too.

But it was an offer. It was something to do. Mostly he wanted to send his letters home. He didn’t want Chad or anybody else setting him up for something. And the coming liberty was a time when they might be out from under officers’ observation.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m kind of in a mood.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said.

“You know I didn’t want to be here. It’s not my fault.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “But you’re all right, you know. I wish you’d been here all along.”

He didn’t. Especially tonight. But he couldn’t say it to Jeremy’s earnest, offering face. There was the kid, the twelve-year-old man, the—whatever Jeremy was—who wanted to go with Mallory and fight against the Fleet, the kid who got so hyped on vid-games he shook and jerked with nerves, and who wanted to tour an aquarium on Mariner—probably, Fletcher thought, a whole lot more exotic to Jeremy than it was to him. Jeremy shared what he wanted to do. Shared a bit of himself.