Chapter 8
EIGHT
CYAN
Chevron’s “council chamber” was a modest space sharing premises with a distributor of solderglue, whose warehouse was on the lower floor.
Cyan sat in a small office, his attention drawn to the window behind the councilwoman across from him, where plumes of sandstone dust swirled patterns in the orange-tinted sky.
“Your world is beautiful,” Cyan said.
“I know.” Mari Saban finally looked up from the holographic projections hovering atop her desk. She leaned forward in her seat, stippling bony fingers on the table before her, and looked at him expectantly. “How can I aid you?”
“I am a newcomer to your planet, and—” Cyan began.
“I know you are,” the councilwoman interrupted. “And I have questions about that, though usually we try not to ask many around here.” She paused. “Stand by a tick.”
This quadrant’s terminology was taking Cyan some time to get used to, but he got the idea. Mari Saban’s attention drifted back to her projection, quickly tapping the control pad on her desk. Her eyes flicked to him briefly before returning to the data streams.“This dock situation’s been a scrapheap for sols.”
Cyan tried to follow the data on the projection, but it was hard to decipher the rapid stream of Universal.
“Oh.” The councilwoman sat up and pressed a finger to the back of her ear. “Bless the winds.”
She pushed herself up from the desk and proceeded to pace, clipped steps tapping on the concrete floor. Her beige wraparound shawl flowed heavily behind her, the straw-like material it was woven from whispering as she moved. Its seamless hood draped heavy and thick around her neck, reminding Cyan of a fat brown python wrapped around its mistress’s shoulders.
“Yes, I’ve seen the latest update,” Mari snapped. “No, I don’t care how long it’s been down. We need to be able to charge tolls before the next fleet lands.”
Cyan pretended to gaze out the window. Perhaps this visit would be more valuable than he had thought. Whatever the source of universal chaos was, it was not the councilwoman. Tuskin, however, the old man from the repair shop, kept coming up. Could he be involved?
This was irregular. It had been rare to be drawn to a universal imbalance in which the root cause was not obvious. There was a time, once—early—that Cyan had made a mistake. It had happened on the Martian colony, when he thought the perpetrator threatening Mars’s orbit was the colony chieftain himself. It was not until Cyan completed the execution that he realized it was the chieftain’s wife who was pulling the strings to siphon orbital energy for the creation of another wormhole.
His sword had struck down the wrong man that day, its weight doubling overnight. A price Cyan would continue to pay. But he had corrected the situation swiftly. The sword always found its mark, in the end .
The councilwoman sighed. “Fine. Tonight is fine. Fleet arrives in three.” Mari gave a sharp nod to the wall. “Good. She’s the only one I trust with this at this point. Those toll machines are ancient.”
Her tone lightened with palpable relief. “At least we’ll have someone competent on it soon. The contract mechs are… well, they are what they are.”
Mari Saban turned back to Cyan, rubbing her temples, and he quickly cleared the small smile from his expression. “Apologies. Planetary dock’s been chaos. Toll machines are the latest casualty. So.” Her brown eyes settled heavily on him. “Cyan Orlogsson. Let’s talk about you.”
Cyan rose. “Thank you for your time. I’ll let you get back to your reports.”
The sun dipped low over the arid plains, casting long shadows across the sand. The day’s winds had died down, leaving only a gentle breeze in their wake. He and Elaina walked side by side, their footsteps crunching in rhythm in the sandy grass. Priad padded ahead, nose twitching as he explored the foreign terrain. He was a dark blob against the pale ground as he wandered into the distance against the setting sun.
“Do you ever get tired of all this sand?” Cyan asked, watching a thin plume dislodge from Elaina’s hair in a breeze.
She glanced over at him with a little smirk. “You mean the endless desert wasteland? No, can’t say I do.”
Her laughter rang out into the empty space around them when he gave her a playful shove. Her dialect was blunt, the edges of words cut sharply, the consonants weighted like stones. It gave her voice a kind of rawness, unrefined but genuine, and he found himself liking it.
“It’s not that bad,” she said. “At least we’ve got some view. Could be stuck on one of the interior worlds, where the only thing you can see are the stratus towers.”
“Stratus towers?”
“Really tall buildings. Like… thousands of levels tall.”
“Skyscrapers,” Cyan concluded.
“Sure. Those, I guess.”
“I’ve seen enough of both—deserts and concrete.” Cyan sighed, his gaze drifting out over the endless horizon. “I prefer the forests.”
“What are those like on Gaia?”
Cyan’s mind drifted back home, softening. “They’re dense. Wild. Alive. The trees grow so tall they blot out the sun, and there’s this deep green everywhere you look. The air is cool, and there’s always water somewhere close since the Rejuvenation—rivers, streams, even just the dew on the leaves.” He paused. “I grew up with the mountains just beyond the woods. Used to climb them as a boy, try to see how far I could get. The world felt endless back then.”
“The world is endless,” Elaina smiled, leaning in conspiratorially. And she was right. He supposed it was. “It sounds beautiful.”
Cyan nodded, brushing the hilt at his hip, a reminder of why he’d left that beauty behind. The sword had brought him to Earendel for a reason, and until he fulfilled his duty he couldn’t go back. But then, after…
“Would you ever move?” Cyan asked. Of course, “move” was a loaded term. People moved within a quadrant all the time. That was easy. Having to jump to the other end of the universe through a wormhole as everyone you love ages and dies in real time is another kind of move entirely. Not one he would ever ask of her .
She threw him a sly sideways grin. “Depends on the company.”
Would she ever actually consider it, going that far? She seemed so free, but freedom could be flighty. Would she be doing it for him, or for her own curious whims?
They walked a few more paces before Elaina gave him a sideways glance. “Do people on Gaia ever read palms?”
Cyan blinked, caught off-guard. “Why do you ask?”
She shrugged. “Some guy back at the port was from that quadrant. Said he’d had his fate read in his palm. I figured maybe it’s the same back where you’re from.”
Cyan chuckled. “It’s an old Gaian tradition. You read the lines on someone’s hand to predict their future. Readers would tell you the shape of your life just by looking at your palm.”
Elaina raised her brows, a playful glint in her eye. “You believe in all that?”
“No.” He met her gaze, his heart picking up just a bit. “But it’s a good excuse to take someone’s hand.”
Without thinking much about it, Cyan reached out, wrapping his fingers around hers gently. Her breath hitched subtly as he lifted her hand and turned it so he could see the faint lines etched in her palm.
“Here,” he said quietly, running his thumb along one of the lines, tracing it from her thumb toward her wrist. “This is your life line.”
Elaina’s long dark eyelashes brushed her cheeks as she looked down at her hand in his. She bit her lip, hiding a small smile.
“And what does it tell you?” When she looked up at him, that close, he found himself needing a moment to stumble for the words.
Cyan leaned in a little, pretending to study her palm intently. “It tells me… you’re stubborn. ”
Her laughter cut through the desert air. “You didn’t need to read my palm for that.”
“No.” He smirked, letting her hand go with a soft squeeze. “But now I have proof.”
They kept walking, the air between them now filled with an unspoken understanding, and Cyan found himself wanting to hold onto it.
“Anyway,” Elaina said, breaking the silence, “I don’t put much stock in that fate stuff. My life’s never been so neatly mapped out.”
“How so?”
She shrugged, but her tone was a little too casual. “My mom was big on superstition. Used to study neutrino oscillation patterns for some hint of the future. Didn’t seem to make her any happier, though.”
“Where do they live?” Cyan asked.
“My mom’s on Senta Station, and Dad is… I’m not sure. We’re not close. They were always off working, so I was mostly raised in the hive.”
“The hive?” Cyan tried to recall, but he hadn’t seen that term in his research.
“It’s like… community caretaking. Kind of a niche thing in this quadrant,” Elaina explained enthusiastically. “You end up with a lot of parents instead of just two!”
“And that never bothered you?”
“Not really.” She kicked a rock in their path, sending it skittering ahead. “You get used to it. They were busy, and I was fine. I didn’t really think about it.”
Her words were light, but maybe a bit too practiced. But before Cyan could respond, a faint howl rose up from the direction Priad had wandered.
Elaina stopped, scanning the horizon. “Is he okay?”
Another call—sharper, more urgent.
“Stay here where it’s safe,” Cyan told her, unsheathing his sword. “I’ll be right back.”