giggling softly. “You know what I dreamed about?”
“What?” I ask. She’s slipping down my body a little, so I hike her up so her face is even with mine.
“You. And your space station.”
“What?”
“I think that’s what you called it. What’s a space station, Daddy?”
I blink at her for a moment. Now what the fuck? What does this mean?
“Do you know?”
“What?”
“What is a space station?”
I take a deep breath and carry her over to the adjoining room where there’s a couch. I sit down, because I need a minute. I need to figure this out. Why am I here? Is this just some random spin of the wheel? You walk in a spin node and it shoots you out into… what? Another timeline? Another universe?
“Is it like a train station?”
I look at Delphi and frown. She’s not my kid. She’s Christopher’s kid. “No.” I don’t know what a train station is, exactly. But I’m pretty sure it looks nothing like a space station. “It’s a big… spinning… top. Kind of. Out in space. People live inside it.”
She thinks about this, her mouth a serious, straight line. “Hmm.” Then she drags a hand across her nose. “I think I was there too.”
“Where?”
“Your station. But I was big.” She smiles. “Very big.”
“You think you were there, huh?”
She nods. “And you were there too. But you weren’t old.” She frowns. “If I’m big then you have to be old.”
“Yeah. That’s usually how it works.”
“Are we gonna go there? Because the people told me that I’m not supposed to be here and neither are you.”
“Who told you?”
“The people.”
“What people, Dellie?”
“The bright ones.”
“What?” I just stare at her.
“The bright ones. They light up. Like the sun.” She points to the window where a little bit of sunshine is just starting to appear through the trees. “I think we’re supposed to go back to your station. Is that where you live, Daddy?”
I nod yes without thinking. Just staring out the window at the sun. The bright ones. The Cygnians?
Dellie places a hand on my cheek and I turn towards her. “They told me you’re not from here.”
“What? When?”
“Just now. I can hear them in my head.”
“Fuck!”
She giggles. “Mommy hates that word.”
“Does she?” I laugh.
“She hates when you say it.” She pauses. “Is that where my twin lives?” Then her mouth makes a big O shape. Like she just figured something out. “That is where he lives. Are you gonna take me with you?”
This answer would’ve been a resounding no at almost any other moment in time. And it’s still a no now. She is not my Delphi. But there’s a part of me that wants to take her with me. And Carla too. We’re missing Tycho, but maybe he’s out there somewhere, waiting for me to find him? Maybe I could—
A whooshing noise fills my ears and that now familiar feeling of being sucked away vibrates through my body.
“No. No, not yet! I just got here—”
Dellie is holding on to me, her face filled with fear. “Don’t go, Daddy! Don’t leave me here!”
I hold her tighter, but even as I do so, her body dissipates into nothingness in my arms.
CHAPTER EIGHT - CRUX
“Dude,” Jimmy says. “I would so fuck her. I would fuck her sweet silver ass into next spin. I’m talking a full-on marathon of fucking, ya know what I mean?”
“Please,” I say, taking a sip of my whiskey. “She’s got more guards than my father. You don’t have a chance in hell.”
We’re sitting in the Wayward Station governor’s dining room getting drunk in the middle of the night. Still pretty wound up about the silver Cygnian princess who arrived this afternoon.
“Did you see her hair?” Jimmy asks. “Don’t you just want to run your fingers through it?”
“What?” I say, so annoyed by him. “No. It looks like strings of silver. And by that, I mean the actual fucking mineral. Who wants to fuck a girl with metal hair?”
“It’s not metal,” he says.
“How do you know?”
“I touched it,” he says, smiling into his drink.
“You did not. You can’t get within three meters of that girl.”
He crosses his heart with a finger. “Swear to the sun, I did. She was walking past me and I just reached out and…” He sighs. “It felt nice. I’d like to pull it.”
A laugh bursts out of my mouth, I can’t help it. “Sick freak.”
He shrugs, still smiling as he downs his drink. “You have your kinks, I have mine.”
“Yeah, I know yours. They all involve sex bots on X Level.”
Wait.