Chapter 11
ELEVEN
ELAINA
Cyan’s promised chime hadn’t come that night, nor the sol after that or the one after. Elaina chastised herself for being as disappointed as she was. She barely knew the man. Usually she wasn’t the constant comms type, but if you tell someone you’re going to chime them, isn’t it just common decency to do it?
It was just the conversation. That was what she enjoyed so much. Not the sharp eyes or the smile that looked so pure as to be almost childlike, or the hands that weren’t really her type at all.
Lance’s hands were objectively finer. Long fingers on broad palms. A little less stubby.
Elaina rolled her eyes at herself in bed, setting her dataslate aside. Cyan was here for work. It had only been a couple of sols. People forget.
But they don’t forget me.
Maybe he just didn’t feel the same things she had. Maybe he clicked with everyone like that, and their time together was nothing special. Besides, he was surely still processing the loss of his past. Elaina was being selfish— something brought him here at the cost of his life back on Gaia, so it had to be important. He had bigger things to worry about than keeping a promise to a stranger.
It didn’t matter. People were flakes sometimes. Maybe she’d just latched on too quickly after a lifetime of holding back. Cyan was just a passerby anyway. No point getting excited.
She grabbed her dataslate again and read the message that Lance had sent her two sols ago.
I had a lot of fun the other night. Want to do it again this spanend?
Yes, she dictated the reply subvocally through the bone-conducting mic and earpiece behind her ear.
But she hesitated, fingers hovering over the screen. She should say yes. She should keep her options open. Cyan had been a nothing but a brief moment in a life that had always been full of people coming and going. But part of her didn’t want to hit send. Part of her wanted to wait just a little longer, to see if this thing she felt had any chance of being real—or if it was just another fleeting moment, like all the ones before.
Elaina sent the ping.
I had a lot of fun too, she added for good measure.
Elaina had resolved to busy herself with work and social activities over the next few sols, only that didn’t happen.
“I need you to go back up,” Tuskin told her when she showed up at garage two sols later.
She paused with her coffee halfway to her lips.
“So soon?”
“Yeah.”
“It’ s… I just recovered, Tusk.” She sighed. That disorienting feeling of imbalanced gravity had only just begun to subside, as had her fixation on the tech issues she’d noticed. But then, he knew this wasn’t to protocol and yet he was asking anyway. Her curiosity got the better of her. “What’s up?”
Tuskin gave her a defeated look. “Things are really haywire up there. Got the comms this morning. They need someone stat. Someone good.”
Pride welled within her at the implication. It took her many cycles to feel like she was actually good at her job, though others had always recognized it. Validation was always nice. Besides… now she was curious. Elaina’s hunch that something was off here was getting more real by the sol, and maybe now it’d finally be vindicated. And she’d be the one to solve it.
“I can go now.”
Tuskin tsk ed his tongue, eyeing her through those fishbowl glasses like he knew exactly what she was thinking.
“Shuttle don’t leave for another sol. Go pack, I’ll have a sled here for you at thirty hundred tomorrow.”