no doubt streaked her skin with grease yet again, she turned back to her work, determined to ignore both him and her stupidly thudding heart. When she turned around a few minutes later, Stefan was gone.
• • •
“I think you two would make a cute couple!” Allie nudged Andres as they sat at one of the tables in the dining room a few days later, the station’s complement small enough that a larger space wasn’t needed, especially given that only a third of them were on shift at any given time.
“Very funny.” Andres scowled, black eyebrows drawn ominously together over the rich hazel of his eyes. “Courtney would rip my nuts off—in fact, I think that’s what she tried to do today.” He rubbed at his face, his deep brown skin holding that too-long-without-actual-sunlight pallor. “All I said was that maybe she should double-check her results since they didn’t line up with current data, and boom! It was like I’d impugned her honor or something.”
“She has had a hair-trigger temper of late,” Allie murmured. “I’ll have a talk with her.” The counselor’s perceptive eyes shifted to Tazia, the vivid blue color of her irises something Tazia had never seen while living in the village.
It still took her by surprise at times, that brightness.
“Talking of talking,” Allie said, “you’ve been very quiet the past few weeks.”
Tazia took what Teta Aya would’ve told her was a rudely big bite of her pasta in order to give herself an excuse to delay replying. “Just tired, I guess,” she said after chewing and swallowing.
Allie let her get away with that, though it was obvious the counselor didn’t buy her answer. “You haven’t rotated upside for the maximum period—good thing it’s only going to be a couple more weeks.”
Tazia made a noncommittal noise, which Allie took as agreement. It wasn’t. Tazia’s stomach dropped at the idea of leaving the cocoon of Alaris and emerging back out into a world where no one wanted her, no one claimed her. Her closest friends were station folk, and those who were rotating out with her would go home to their families for the duration, leaving her to rock about alone until the month of mandatory shore leave had passed.
Still, there was no way to avoid it; two weeks after that conversation with Allie, she grabbed her duffel and walked over to the docked transport that would ferry her upside. The psych team had a firm rule about rotating people out every three to four months, no excuses accepted once you were at the end of the fourth month. Something to do with psychological stress and close quarters.
No one had ever asked Tazia’s opinion on that or she’d have told them that she was fine with close quarters and staying underwater with people she knew, the station’s comforting bulk around her. She had no need for the horrible nothingness that was the hell of shore leave.
“What do they expect us to do?” she muttered as she and Andres boarded the advanced submersible that would take them up to the surface along a specially designed “rail” that had been built with the help of Tks like Stefan. “Go loco and shoot up the place?”
Andres snorted, his scrubbed-clean skin gleaming in the lights inside the submersible and his shirt neatly pressed for once. “The first time I met you, you didn’t even know what ‘loco’ meant.”
Tazia laughed because he was right. The two of them had met three years earlier, when she came on board the Alaris construction and development team. She had been green, still was in so many ways, but she’d learned enough to fit into this world that was now the only one that would accept her.
“One thing you can say for close quarters,” she said, gut clenching against the fresh wave of pain, “you get to know your station mates very well.”
“Tell me about it.” Andres groaned. “Goddamn Trev snores loud enough to make the walls rattle.”
A step on the entryway before she could respond, a tall, rangy body with close-cut dark brown hair getting into the submersible. Stefan. She hadn’t realized he had an upside trip scheduled. As usual, he made no effort to engage in casual conversation; he was so remote and self-contained that she could barely connect this man to the flesh-and-blood one she’d seen that day in his room . . . and later in her dreams.
Even as her shoulders tensed at the memory, she had the strangest urge to poke at him,