Chapter 39
THIRTY-NINE
CYAN
There was a charge in the air, a static hum vibrating between Cyan’s shoulder blades. He watched the hazy orange sky from his window. Storm clouds brewed on the horizon, though no one in the street below seemed to care. The people of Earendel were used to storms, to broken tech, to things falling apart. But Cyan knew better. What was coming wasn’t part of the usual chaos of living on a frontier planet.
Priad padded silently up to him, nose twitching as he sniffed the air. Cyan sank his fingers into the warg’s thick fur, grounding himself in the touch. He hadn’t wanted to come back, not to Earendel and especially not to her. But fate had a way of pulling you back in.
The knock at the door shattered the quiet.
Cyan knew who it was.
Elaina clutched a box in her arms. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, and her shoulders sagged under a weight he couldn’t see but knew all too well.
“People need these,” she said flatly. “I can’t patch them on my own.”
Cyan stepped aside, resisting the urge to reach out and touch her as she moved past him. He clenched his jaw, trying to ignore the way his heart stuttered in her wake.
Elaina set the box on his table and turned, waiting.
“All right,” he said quietly. “Let’s fix this.”
The silence between them was thick and awkward as they began. Cyan focused on the task at hand, guiding wires back into place, re-soldering connections as Elaina rattled off instructions. She worked across from him, watching his hands work under her guidance. His fingers moved as though of their own accord. He barely needed to hear her instructions to know what she wanted him to do. In their flow state, everything disappeared around the synchronicity of minds and movements.
When their fingers brushed as she handed him a tool, she glanced up, and her eyes lost some of that sharp glint of professional concentration.
As the pile of tech to repair grew smaller, Cyan found himself lingering on her face. He didn’t want this to be over. There wasn’t much time.
“I’m moving to Zeta Prime,” she said matter-of-factly as they got started on the final component.
Cyan couldn’t hold back the sigh of relief, first at the fact that she finally spoke to him and then at learning that she’d come to the same conclusion he had. He had honestly expected her to stay on Earendel, continuing to try to do her work and save it as it fell apart. He thought he’d have to convince her—or worse—to get off-planet.
“What made you decide to do that?” he asked.
Elaina shrugged, picking at a loose bolt in a dataslate carapace. “Just a feeling.”
A feeling.
Elaina hadn’t seemed like the kind to move to the other edge of the quadrant based on a feeling.
“You really fucked me up, Cyan,” she finally said, and there was nothing casual about it this time. “I can’t patch a thing anymore, as you can see. I think I’m just stuck. Plus I’m sick of the sandstone, and the… Just everything.”
A pang of regret filled his chest. If it were that easy for her to just decide to up and move, how open would she have been to leaving Earendel with him? Would she have agreed to settle on Gaia, if the sword ever released him? The logistical issues between them seemed so vast this whole time, but now here she was—moving on a whim. Not for him, but because of him.
“So what happened to you?” she asked quietly, handing him another magnetic positizer.
“I failed,” Cyan said curtly. He didn’t need to go into details; there was nothing any of them could do now. He thought his life’s path—the sword’s path—was to keep order. To be guided by the hand of fate to maintain the balance of this world. How was he supposed to admit that he’d abandoned her for a delusion?
But she kept watching him, waiting for more. Deserving more.
“I fell for you earlier than I wanted to admit.” The words were out, but they were incomplete. The one thing he wanted to admit was the hardest to verbalize. But it was the closest he could get just then. “I wish I’d told you sooner.”
Elaina leaned back in her seat, fingers white-knuckling the edge of the table.
“I wish you had too. Told me.” Her voice was thick when she finally spoke. “I think I…” Was she thinking the same thing? “I needed more than a feeling. This had to be based on something real. And you were never really there, were you?”
“I don’t know where I was,” he admitted. “I just couldn’t let go and really do this with you. I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why. I want… I wanted a family. A home. Not on Earendel, and you have a life here. The facts of it all, they just?—”
The knowing look in her eyes made him trail off, as if she saw through all kinds of bullshit.
“I’m sorry.” He felt it setting into place, this rising urge to create space between him and the thing he yearned for. It was the weight at his back, and the charge in the air. He had missed his chance. No… he had rejected it. If he asked her for another now, she would surely reject him too, and for good reason.
Besides, Cyan didn’t even know how long they’d have before the Architect finished its work. Earendel was already falling apart.
Elaina cleared her throat and held out the next positizer.
“This goes into that marked A24 memslot,” she said.
“Right.” Cyan swallowed hard, the ache spreading in his chest. He’d known this was coming, but it still felt like the ground was slipping out from under him.
“So you failed,” she said matter-of-factly. “But what actually happened on that ship? Where did it take you? You came back different. What did you see?”
Cyan looked down at his hands, his fingers tracing the edge of the insulin controller they had just repaired. The Architect. The shard. The warping of fate. How could he explain all of that?
“It’s complicated, Elaina,” he said, his voice rough. “More than you know, and more than I can explain right now.”
Her quiet scoff was answer enough. He had disappointed her again. But she nodded slowly, accepting yet another nonanswer .
Cyan wanted to reach out, to pull her close, to explain everything. But the gap between them was too wide.
For now all he could do was help her piece together what was broken here, in the real world.
But the clock was ticking, and fate was closing in around them both.
The old Gaian saying came to mind unbidden, and in that moment it was all he could offer her: “We are made of star stuff, Elaina. A way for the universe to know itself.”