Chapter 23
With the addition of eighteen extra hands, progress on Moon Dancer goes from one thing at a time to everything all at once.
Besides Toph and Lament, no one has any idea what they’re doing, but as it turns out, you can repair a spacecraft body without much technical skill.
Just a lot of patience and time and manpower.
There are ways to do this faster—the Legion has an entire department dedicated to ship maintenance—but since the Legion doesn’t know about Moon Dancer, we do what we can with what we have.
I like working on Moon Dancer. A lot, actually.
It’s all of it: the way the task fills my hands and empties my mind, the clink of tools around the workshop, the camaraderie of doing it together.
Toph takes the lead, assigning our duties based on his estimation of our ability, and over the course of the next two weeks we start to make real progress.
Daytime remains dedicated to Legion missions (surveillance runs, investigations into illegal spaceflights, and one rather awkward seizure of hallucinogens, which—after we intercept the runner and confiscate the cargo—turns out to be a vat of cherry pudding), but at night, we take shifts in the workshop.
Jester installs a monitor on the wall and sets it to NewsNet so we can listen to the latest airings while we sand down broken screws and re-form sheets of zurillium.
He turns up the volume whenever the topic moves to Venthros.
Which it often does these days. Despite the train wreck that was our post-Venthros debrief, Sergeant Forst does in fact bring our concerns about the voroxide to her higher-ups, and they send another fleet (the Ninth—lots of biohazard and chemical weapons specialties on that team) to investigate.
The Ninth takes samples of the gas around Mount Kilmon and confirms its murderous nature, which is at once gratifying and frustrating.
We’ve learned so much, yet solved nothing.
There’s a lot of speculation in the news about why Mount Kilmon has suddenly become so deadly.
An independent geology report concludes that the voroxide may have always existed inside Venthros’s crust, and years of eruptions finally created a deep enough fissure to set it free.
The Ninth does a full analysis, but after several trials, they’re unable to conceive of a neutralizer that can work against the gas.
Apparently, Ran Doc Min has a monopoly on that front.
He’s featured in the news almost daily now.
It seems like NewsNet is just a rotating carousel of Doc Min, the Determinists, and Mount Kilmon’s upcoming eruption, which is due to take place in a mere five weeks.
The Legion finally—and after much interagency debate—puts out a public appeal to the Determinist leader, asking him to share his neutralizer so that we can test it for safety and help distribute it more widely, but the man continues to ignore us.
His message to the public remains the same: Pledge yourself to me, and I’ll deliver you salvation myself.
A lot of people—fearing for their lives—are choosing that option.
Without a better plan, the Legion has begun organizing a mass evacuation of Venthros.
I don’t blame them for the attempt—at least they’re doing something—but everyone knows it’ll be impossible to clear the entire planet in time.
Even if it was possible, the Venthrothians are (unsurprisingly) voicing resistance.
They don’t want to evacuate their planet.
It’s the only home most of them have ever known. If they leave, where will they go?
It hurts (nagging, thorny, a briar in my chest) seeing the Venthrothians struggle with the same battle I once did. Forced from home. Out of options.
If one thing can be said for all the constant news coverage, it’s that it’s made the Sixth more determined than ever to take matters into our own hands.
If this was an official Legion mission, we’d have to obtain a dozen approval signatures, submit a bid for funding, file enough paperwork to fill a hot-air balloon.
But it’s not an official mission. It’s nine people (and one Lorian) working to solve the problem on our own.
If we get Moon Dancer flying, if we figure out a way to speak to Ran Doc Min face-to-face, maybe we can actually find a solution to this disaster—one that’ll nullify the voroxide, answer our questions, and save the people of Venthros before the eruption, without a forced pledge of loyalty to a man who already has too much power.
As the days slip by, we keep our heads down, running missions by day and taking turns in Moon Dancer’s workshop by night.
Sergeant Forst must notice the exhausted circles under our eyes, but she’s got a lot on her own plate right now, what with the impending eruption and the Legion’s evacuation efforts and Professor Morton’s near-constant presence in her office, watching her, watching us.
The mood is tense. We tiptoe around the detachment like kids whose parents are fighting again.
And it’s not just us. It feels like the entire space station is collectively holding its breath.
The Legion begins scheduling weekly strategy meetings to discuss Venthros’s evacuation plan. We often attend these with other fleets like the Tenth and the Eighty-First, and—unfortunately—the Fifty-Seventh. Sometimes we go to their detachments, sometimes they come to ours.
Beckly arrives to one of these briefings looking as haughty and self-regarding as usual. When he chooses a seat next to Lament, jealousy boils inside me, but Lament does nothing to stop him, and I have no right to say anything. I find a seat somewhere else.
Vera sets our nighttime Moon Dancer shifts, covertly handing out the schedule each morning. It’s not lost on me that she always assigns me to work with Lament. Partners with partners, she says, though I can’t help but notice the other Sixers aren’t necessarily assigned to work with their partners.
I wish, desperately, that Vera would stop meddling.
Because ever since we got back from Venthros, things between Lament and I have been strained. The difference is that for once, I’m the one pushing him away.
It’s not that I want to build a wall back between us, not after everything I went through to tear the last one down.
It’s just … I’m still angry. At Lament, the situation, the universe in general.
I can’t stop replaying what happened in that forest, how Lament almost died, how I opened up to him, and he held me and listened to my story and turned away again.
I just wish it didn’t hurt like this. I have this pestering ache in my chest that makes me want to do something foolish, like reach out and take Lament’s wrist in my fingers, pull him close, shake him until he’s as dazed by me as I am by him.
I want to yell in his face and make him beg for my approval, share some of this need to earn his trust, his professional respect, his loyalty on and off missions.
And it’s stupid. It’s stupid. Why can’t I stop trying to make Lament want me? Why doesn’t he want me?
The question digs into the softest part of my heart.
It holds a mirror up to my face, shakes its head and calls me hopeless.
This is Lament we’re talking about. Someone who very recently lost their old partner, someone who still needs space to grieve and heal.
I need space. I might be angry at Lament for all his baggage, but it’s not like I don’t have baggage of my own.
I’m terrified of abandonment. I’m needy at the wrong moments, read too much into things, hide behind humor to avoid rejection.
I’m a damned hypocrite, and it’s making me feel trapped in myself, trapped in this situation.
The additional forced proximity in Moon Dancer’s workshop isn’t helping matters.
Because working with Lament means I have to see him at his most focused, his tongue poking between his teeth, lost in this project that means everything to him.
I have to think impossible things, like how beautiful he is, how sweet and sharp, how good it feels just to be near him.
It’s torture. I’m tortured. I don’t want to notice how nice Lament smells or how blue his eyes get when the light is low or how my body reacts to every single little way he moves.
Sometimes, he tries to catch my eye. I always make sure to avoid him.
As three weeks slides into four, the Legion starts sending evacuation spacebuses to Venthros. Each spacebus holds maybe a hundred people, which is nowhere near the scale needed to save the planet. We all know it’s a losing strategy. Like trying to empty an ocean with a wineglass.
Vera continues putting Lament and me together on Moon Dancer night shifts.
I debate asking her to assign me with someone else, but I worry that’ll only draw more attention to a problem I’m not even supposed to be having, so instead I survive by focusing on Moon Dancer and not Lament. And that works.
Sort of.
Except then comes a night when it’s just the two of us in the workshop.
I’m sitting on the floor near Moon Dancer’s tail, Lament standing up by her nose.
NewsNet plays on a nearby monitor, Rudy Rivon gesturing wildly over the scrolling caption: RAN DOC MIN DEPLOYS FIRST NEUTRALIZER SHIP TO VENTHROS.
Lament abruptly drops the rag he was holding, mutes the volume, and stalks over to me. “We need to talk.”
I keep my eyes on the screws I’m organizing into little piles on the floor. “Is that your mantra or something?”
He makes an irritated sound. “Can you be serious for one second?”
“I am.” Hex screw to one pile, pin screw to another. “I’m asking, seriously, if we need to talk is your mantra.”
“No.”
“Is it your catchphrase?”
“No.”
“Then why do you say it so much?”
“Because you always—” He cuts himself off.
I glance up. “Always what?”
“Nothing.”