31. Never Tear Us Apart #2
She called for the number-four line and Reyna had it open before Charlie finished the sentence.
She reached down without looking for the spanner, and suddenly it was in her hand, Reyna's fingers already withdrawing.
Charlie called pressure readings from the manifold, and Reyna fed them back adjusted for the console's half-second lag, correcting for the gap between them without being asked.
They were not two people doing a job in the same room.
They were one process running on two bodies, and somewhere under the fear and the alarms, Charlie felt how terrifyingly right it was, a hum in the water between them impossible to ignore.
"Tertiary four through nine," Charlie called, seating the last coupling by feel while the coolant continued to rush over her. "All of them at once. On my mark."
"Ready," Reyna called from below.
"Mark!"
Charlie watched as Reyna's hands moved across the panel and every remaining line in the system opened at the same instant. The sound was enormous, a roar of fluid finding every channel. The lower deck flooded exactly the way Maren had promised: ankle-deep, becoming knee-deep, becoming waist-deep.
Tavi arrived at the height of it and threw himself onto a tertiary console from a tool crate, calling readings while standing on the crate to keep his head above the rising line.
Charlie watched the pressure on Reyna's console spike, but then it plateaued.
And then, evenly, beautifully, all pressure readings began to drop.
"It's falling," Reyna said, and her voice wasn't quite steady, rough at the edges with a relief Charlie had never heard before.
The team counted ninety-two seconds before the manifold equalized. The cascade stopped and the alarms cut out, one by one, until the only sound in the bay was the drip of coolant off the overhead lines.
"Holding," Maren said with a steadying breath. "Secondary systems stabilizing."
"Confirmed," Tavi called from his crate, drenched to the chest and grinning like a man who'd never been happier to be standing on top of a box. "Pressure nominal across all junctions."
Charlie hung on the ladder in the falling light and laughed, completely helpless by it.
Below her, Reyna looked up. And Charlie took a second longer to study her face.
She knew Reyna's careful face. The one she held as Captain, kept during moments that pushed her to her limits, and displayed when she was taking care of her crew.
Charlie had been seeing that face for months, closer than she probably should have been.
But this was something entirely different. This face was just Reyna, wet through, lit blue-gold by the coolant, looking up at Charlie like she'd never seen anything like her.
"That," Reyna said, "was fucking extraordinary," she said with an exasperated laugh.
Charlie watched her turn to the bay. "All of you were fucking extraordinary.
Maren!" Charlie wished she could have seen Maren's face when the captain shouted her name.
"The containment held because of you. And Tavi, your readings were the only part that kept us up-to-date with the timing.
" Then Reyna returned her gaze to Charlie.
"And you," She stopped. "I have served on ships my entire adult life, and I have never watched anyone solve a cascade like that.
With that kind of precision, that kind of instinct.
" A beat. "I could have watched you do it all night. "
Charlie could take being told the work was good, especially when her friends received their due praise as well.
But what Charlie couldn't take was the way Reyna was looking at her while she said those words. And Charlie couldn't because, for one dangerous second, it looked like something Charlie had no business hoping it was.
She looked at Maren and Tavi before she could talk herself into believing it.
"You two were unbelievable," Charlie said. "Maren, I imagine you didn’t blink the whole time, which is super impressive. And Tavi, you know I'd take you into a disaster any day."
"Naturally," Tavi said, making Charlie laugh softly.
"I couldn't have done any of this without either of you," Charlie finished.
They grinned at her.
Then she looked at Reyna.
"And I couldn't have done it without you, honestly. You were—" She paused. "You were the best second I've ever had. You read me before I finished talking. Every time. I never once had to check what you gave me." She shook her head, coolant flying. "And you're the captain. That's not even your job."
"It was tonight," Reyna said softly.
Charlie couldn't help but hold her gaze, no matter how much it pressed on her chest to see Reyna look at her that way.
And as she hung there, that hum, that rightness came flooding back, and Charlie realized she needed to get off this ladder and onto solid ground before she said something she could not take back.
Reyna seemed to give her the out without knowing it. She turned away from Charlie, embracing the captain again, to start ordering people around.
"Good work, all of you," Reyna started. "It's over, but it's not clean yet." Her voice filled the bay, steady, certain, the voice that made people move. "Maren, I want a full systems report, from every junction, before you rest, if I can please."
"Absolutely, Captain," Maren responded.
Reyna nodded, then turned to Tavi. "Tavi, get the pump-down started and pull the burst lines out of service."
"Aye aye, Cap," Tavi said, climbing down the crate.
Reyna then turned to the assistants. "You two, cut power to the forward conduits and start the containment protocol."
"Yes, Captain," said an assistant, as they both ran off to the power grid.
Everyone went their separate ways because there was still work to be done. The bay emptied of people in under a minute.
But then, Charlie realized it was just the two of them in the flooded bay. She’d been swept into listening to Reyna’s order that she was still on the ladder with Reyna below her. The thirty inches of space in the shaft was filled with glowing water and a charged air between them.
Charlie's mouth went dry.
Get down. Get on the ground. Get out of this shaft before you do something incredibly stupid.
She came down the ladder fast. And that was the mistake.
The unspoken engineer's plan inside Charlie's brain was orderly. It would go like this:
Step one: Reyna clears the console end. Step two: Charlie comes down and Charlie clears the shaft.
And that's how it would have been done. Each step, just one at a time, because that was how you managed thirty inches of space between two people.
But Charlie was already moving before Reyna had stepped clear.
She needed off this ladder. She needed her boots on the deck and some distance between herself and that look, and she needed it now. She needed it before the part of her that had stopped listening to reason did something idiotic.
Three rungs from the bottom, her wet boot found the wet rung at exactly the wrong angle, and she slipped.
“Charlie!” Reyna shouted.
She didn’t fall. Instead, Charlie’s hand slapped down hard against the roof of the console, her arm locking and her body swinging until her back crashed against the ladder. Then Reyna’s hands were on her waist, catching her, holding her up.
And that made Charlie’s limbs tremble.
For what was probably nothing more than a single second but felt like time stood still, Reyna’s hands held her up.
Both of them breathing hard, both of them soaked clean through, the coolant making the shaft glow faintly, dripping off her nose, eyelashes, and hair as she stayed where she was, afraid to move again.
There was nowhere for her to go. The ladder was behind Charlie, the console was behind Reyna, and thirty inches of the shaft space between them. There was no version of down that didn’t go through the space Reyna was currently standing in, occupying completely.
Oh my god.
So Reyna lowered her. Her body slid down the length of Reyna’s, the slick fabric of their clothes between them, chest against chest until her hip passed Reyna’s waist. Reyna’s hands rode up Charlie’s sides to keep her steady as she lowered her because, like it or not, Charlie was in a position requiring assistance.
Charlie couldn’t say a word. It was pure logistics, lowering someone back to safety, and yet it was the least logistical thing that had ever happened to her.
Then she was standing on the ground, facing Reyna, in a space built for one.
The adrenaline let go all at once, and everything went still. The alarms, the rushing, the surrounding roar, all of it vanished at once.
In that stillness, Charlie noticed she had nothing left to hide behind. No console to work from, no problem to fix, no crisis to run. She only had herself, soaked to the skin, three inches from Reyna, with everything she had been feeling right there on display for Reyna to see.
And she did nothing about it.