Aetherbound - E.K. Johnston Page 0,48

use his library if I wanted. I don’t touch anything else in the room.”

“It’s all right,” Fisher said. “We both live here. Maybe I should start acting like it.”

He looked at the mess of datapads and half-empty cups on the table in the dining area. He could use the office. Maybe leave the door open, but still.

“It would be nice to have that table available,” Pendt said. “Not that I plan to have any parties, but it’s the perfect size for the control group of the plants I’m experimenting on right now.”

“I’d hate to get in the way of science,” Fisher said. “Will you help me move tomorrow?”

“Of course,” Pendt said. “But you have to wash the dishes.”

“Done,” Fisher said.

It was a new system, and they were still figuring it out, but they were going to make it work.

18.

THE BEST THING ABOUT Brannick Station, after being treated like a human being and having the availability of food, was time. The station clock ran the same number of hours as the Harland did, so there was literally no more time in the day, but Pendt felt every minute like it was new. She had places to be and she went to them, but there was none of the malaise that had dogged her in the galley or inertia that kept her from resting in the brig. Even her boredom was her own.

Not that Pendt was bored. She followed Dr. Morunt’s advice and took to daily walks around the station. She learned the patterns of the ore processors and the dockhands. She watched the shop owners and food-service workers. They seemed happy enough, which was new for her, but she supposed that it might be because they were both paid a good wage and protected by a guild. While in no hurry to return to food service herself, Pendt could understand the joy in watching other people eat if you weren’t hungry yourself. She liked cooking—Fisher told her that she was really “assembling,” but she ignored him—and she was coming to understand the artistry of it.

Pendt imagined that the doctor intended her to stick to the colonnade and operations, but she ranged farther than that in an effort to get to know her new home. Parts of the Harland had been shut to her, and parts of Brannick were too, but they were mostly other families’ apartments and private spaces. There was no public area that she was barred from.

So she walked. She covered every inch of the original station cylinder, the colonnade, and the docking ports. From that original construction, Brannick Station grew like two branches of a tree. One arm of the station housed her beloved hydroponics and other systems that kept the station livable, as well as all of the ore processing. Ships brought ore to Brannick from other places besides Alterra. The Harland’s run was the longest and slowest, and there were newer ships to make the other runs. Here, it was refined into solid burning fuel or smelted down for the raw materials that could make metal parts. The slag was dumped, which Pendt found absolutely enthralling. She was unaccustomed to waste.

After hydroponics, Pendt found herself drawn to the second arm of the station: the habitations.

The Brannick family lived in the “lowest” part of that branch, which is to say, closest to the colonnade and operations. Pendt was glad of this when she was summoned to the Net at all hours of the day, but she enjoyed exploring further. As the apartments got further from the colonnade, they got smaller, but there was no truly bad section to live in. It was merely assumed that those families with children would want to be closer to the schools and other amenities offered on the station proper.

Pendt loved the corridors the most. Families decorated their doors to differentiate their apartments from their neighbours’. Names and family sigils, along with flowers or legendary animals twined along the edges of each door, painted in bright colours. Some sections of the corridors were decorated completely to a single theme, and the themes changed depending on the days.

The corridors were divided by ladders and lifts for freight, and Pendt preferred to climb. It occurred to her on more than one occasion that the station’s sense of direction was outdated. It would make much more sense if down was on the wall. But she appreciated the impracticality of it even more. Like a plant in her greenhouse, Brannick Station had grown and adapted, and