Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
CYAN
The shuttle to the station technically took three hours, but the time disappeared and Cyan did not believe it was the distortion of the sword this time. He and Elaina were the only passengers on the shuttle, strapped into seats across from each other. The pilot had tried to put Priad in the cargo hold, which Cyan aggressively refused. He strapped the warg into the seat next to him. Or rather, the three seats. Priad was not a small warg.
“This is related to the hunch you had?” Cyan asked once they were through the ear-splitting roar of the launch and outside the atmosphere. “About the devices?”
Elaina looked up and to the side, hazel eyes rimmed by dark rings catching the light from the holos overhead. She knew the answer—she was just considering whether she wanted to tell him.
“It might be,” she said finally. When she looked back at him, he wasn’t prepared, and he turned away from her rapt attention. “But now I get to find out. And you get to do… whatever it is you do. That is not blowing anything up. ”
He laughed. Now that he was here, with nothing else to do, perhaps he could just indulge a little and let himself learn more about the girl in front of him.
“Were you born on Earendel?” Cyan asked.
“No. I was always a station kid. Born on Kora one-ninety-two, then we moved around a lot.”
“What’s a lot?”
“Two moves with my family, and the last one—to Earendel—on my own.”
“Is it home?”
Elaina’s smile was wistful as she thought about it. “It’s a place. But home, I think, is a person.”
Cyan considered that, and how true he wanted it to be.
“He’s very calm.” Elaina smiled at Priad.
“Yeah, he’s a very good boy.” The warg was used to sleeping on shuttles.
“Are you calm?”
He very much wanted to be. He wanted to just relax and stop thinking… stop doing … sometimes. Sometimes it worked. “I’m getting there. But it’s hard to turn off sometimes.”
“When you speak, you seem calm,” Elaina mused.
If only she knew.
“Thank you. I’m calmer around people. Some people. They help me slow down.”
Elaina nodded. “Some people help me slow down too.”
Cyan considered her. “Tell me about your family.”
Elaina’s hands went to her knees, palms smoothing the fabric of her trousers as she studied her lap.
“Both my parents were engineers. Different kinds. We were never really close.”
“In what way?”
She shrugged. “Physically, emotionally. Let’s just say we weren’t the hugging type.”
“Are you the hugging type? ”
Elaina broke into a grin, finally looking back up at him. “Very much. But I don’t need them,” she hastened to add. “I can take care of myself.”
“I like that about you.”
Self-sufficiency was important. He’d been with people who clung more than he could accommodate. A certain amount of distance was good, he thought.
He told himself this even as something chewed at him—a contradiction he would need to reconcile, but not one he was interested in entertaining now.
“How long are you here for?” Elaina asked the question he’d been wondering himself.
“On Earendel?”
“On Earendel, in the quadrant… what’s after your mysterious mission?”
Cyan watched her, understanding exactly what she wanted to know. Why couldn’t he just say it?
“I don’t know how long my work here will take. But eventually I want to find home too.”
“And your home? Is it a place or a person?”
Cyan wished he could tell her what she might want to hear, but… “I think it’s both. Home is somewhere on Gaia. But it’s incomplete without a person—a family—to share it with.”
“Makes sense.” Elaina looked out the viewport. “We’re almost there.”
Cyan followed her gaze. The stars glowed distant and unmoving, but something was stirring out there. It was as heavy as the weight on his back. Whatever they were heading toward, it wouldn’t be quiet for long.