"Mama." Sorjen stood in the doorway of Dejana's quarters, both hands on the frame as though he could keep her from leaving. "Mama, don't go. My father could find you a position in the enclaves. Something." He was so tall now, so slender, and his hair had turned as dark as his eyes; it suited his serious nature.
Dejana sat down on the narrow bunk that took up a third of the gray quarters where she'd lived since Sorjen was weaned. "Come." She patted the bed beside her. "Have I ever told you things would be different?" Around them, Surama, their home for all of Sorjen's life, shuddered as she entered docking maneuvers. Soon, their lives here would be over.
"No." Sorjen stepped in and took a seat beside her. He was still slim enough that Dejana could easily wrap her arms around his shoulders. "How can you do this?" He put his head on Dejana's shoulder. "After all these years."
Dejana kissed his hair and stroked his cheek. "Because it's good for you, that's how I can do it."
"It's not good for me that you leave." Sorjen picked at the edge of a patch on the skirt of Dejana's gray robes. His own clothing was luminous orange and gold silk tucked and folded into the intricately tailored robes of a businessman's heir.
"You're almost a man," Dejana reminded him. "Your father is waiting for you. He went to great trouble to have his own kin-blood brought out here to be his heir. This is what you were born to, my Jen. You are siejn. I am indatze."
"I won't see you again." Sorjen pulled away and pushed his long hair back. "I know he would let you stay."
"Stay as indatze?" Dejana asked him, keeping her voice gentle. She had been declared clean when she'd been selected to carry and raise Djoren Langroen's heir, but not even the dead escaped their caste on Junoi. "Even if I do, I'll be told never speak to you again, nor ever touch you."
"There's not even anything wrong with you, you're clean. You're going to be poor, Mama. You'll have nothing." Sorjen twisted his long, beautiful hands together in his lap and Dejana covered them with hers, soothing.
"I was indatze when I was chosen to make this trip and be your mama." Dejana stroked Sorjen's hands with her fingertips until they fell still. "I survived in worse places than Xuran. I will have everything I learned, everything I was given in order to be a good mama to you. Out here, I have a chance at a future."
"So, that's all this was." Sorjen stood up, his mood turning cold as he paced the small room. "A job. And a free ride."
"I loved you," Dejana said. It was better for him to be angry than sad. "And I always will." When she had signed on for this job, she had never expected to love this person who had no part of her, on whom she had no claim, but she had been unable to stop it.
"Now you get the life you really wanted." Sorjen laughed, short and harsh. He turned on her, his bright robes swinging out in an arc too large for Dejana's little room. "Washing dishes. Doing laundry. Shoveling trash. Was that your big dream, to come out to the frontier and grub for your survival here?"
"It was better than going blind and cancerous picking flecks of silicon and copper out of the trash heaps on Junoi," Dejana said. Even when he was angry at her, all she felt was a rush of pride at how fierce he could be. "Better than being too low to even sleep in the gutter. Here, once I leave Surama, I have my own life."
"Your own life? You'll be lucky if you get a berth tending drives on some ore-scraper." Sorjen put his hands on his hips and looked down at her, his mouth twisting bitterly. He looked so much like his father that way, cruel and strong and lovely. "Where you can get irradiated and die young. Some life. I hope you get what you want."
Dejana watched the last of his childhood crumbling away and she had to draw on her own training to stay calm. "I already have more than I ever could have hoped for," she told him. She got to her feet and gave Sorjen a respectful bow, her eyes on the floor. "I hope you are happy in life, that your life is long, and that you are loved beyond measure, Sorjen."
"Don't do that." Sorjen's voice broke and he grabbed Dejana in a fierce hug, clinging to her. "Mama, don't bow like that to me."
"It is how it is." Dejana wrapped her arms around her son for the last time and hung onto him, breathing in his smell and trying to remember every detail of him. "This is who we are. I love you always, my baby." No love changed that it was over now.
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