yanks a tool from her hand, takes a slurp of his prepackaged meal, and gets to work on his suit again without another word. After a glance at Ty, Scarlett rises from beside me, settles down beside Fin.
“If you get Just Like Real TacosTM in your circuits, that stuff’s never coming out,” she informs him softly.
“I need to fix this,” he insists around his mouthful.
“Give it a moment, Fin.” Scarlett puts her hand over his. “Eat. Breathe.”
He meets her eyes for a second, somehow chewing and pouting at the same time. But a hint of tension goes out of his shoulders as he swallows, as if he’s conceding something other than the possibility of frying his suit.
“Yeah, okay,” he sighs.
We all fall quiet for a little, finishing our meals. I’m concentrating on getting food into my mouth, and leaning against Kal’s shoulder where he sits against the headboard with me. Sore as I am, I’m aware of every tiny shift, of each of his breaths. He spent so much time avoiding touching me after we first met, restraining any hint of the Pull he’s feeling, that when he allows himself the luxury now, it sends sparks through me. That he gives me this, when he’s still so careful around everyone else … I know it’s not the place for it.
But I find myself wanting more.
“All right, we need to take stock,” Tyler says once dinner is over. “Kal, see if you can find any mentions of us on the local feeds. We need to know how deep we’re in it. Zila, Scar, take inventory. Fin, find out what happened to the Longbow.”
“It was not looking its best,” Kal says, glancing at me with something like awe. “Once Aurora was done with it.”
“I know,” Ty nods. “But if there’s no way to salvage it, we’re gonna need another way out of this hole.”
Fin wipes his hands, pulls out his uniglass, and begins hacking the station net. Kal switches on the holoscreen, flicking through newscast channels to see if we’re making any guest appearances. Zila and Scarlett methodically begin going through our bags, categorizing everything we got out of the Longbow into personal property, group property, and stuff we can sell. I see Zila has salvaged the two GIA uniforms we stole aboard Sempiternity, and I catch a glimpse of myself in one of those blank, reflective masks. White streak in my bangs, white iris in my right eye. The girl who looks back at me in the mirror still sometimes feels like a stranger.
I see the exact moment Scarlett pulls Cat’s stuffed dragon, Shamrock, out of Fin’s satchel. She glances over her shoulder at Tyler, eyes shining with tears, then leans across to hand him the toy. He gently wraps his hands around it as if it’s infinitely precious, pressing it against his chest. Then he looks across at Fin, who’s watching him. Fin, who must have hurried up to the pilot’s chair when he should have been leaving the Longbow to grab this last piece of Cat.
The Betraskan just nods, and turns back to his uniglass.
Though this squad is the closest thing to a family I have now, I still feel like a fish out of water around them. It’s moments like these that I’m reminded how far from home I am, how far out of time. Two hundred years passed in the blink of an eye while I was lost in cryo. For me, it’s only been a couple of weeks since I boarded the Hadfield, setting out for a new life on Octavia. But now everything I know is gone, and everyone I love is gone right along with it.
I don’t know how I should be feeling. But looking at Cat’s old toy, at those faceless gray uniforms, I can’t help but think about our confrontation with the Ra’haam on Octavia III. The colonists it absorbed into its hive mind along with her. My father’s face beneath the mask of a GIA agent, silver flowers in his eyes.
Jie-Lin, I need you.
And though a part of me wants to curl up and scream at the memory, most of me is just furious. Knowing how it consumed him, used him, wore him like a suit. I can feel midnight blue tingling at my fingertips. The gifts the Eshvaren gave me crackling just beneath my skin. The Ra’haam’s ancient enemy, somehow alive in me.
I can learn to control this. I know it. I can be the Trigger they made me to