Chapter 12
Day Three
(age twenty-four)
The daily routine aboard the Wildfire proceeded uncomfortably.
Rowan was still a mess the first morning, showing up for breakfast in his navy-blue pajamas with bleary eyes and tangled hair, so Zhaleh took over and organized everyone.
Kelli trusted Zhaleh even less than she trusted Rowan, but there was a tidiness and structure to Zhaleh’s schedule that soothed her a little.
Social breakfast; working lunch; a game after dinner; the rest of the time, people split up as they liked.
Kelli used that split-up time to observe and record information, the way Orlando would.
Ting was the easiest of the three to imagine in a character kernel.
They were a cheerful thief who stole because they liked to.
They had sticky fingers and would palm small objects when people weren’t looking.
“Just for practice,” they said, matter-of-fact and shameless, when Rowan or Zhaleh came after them asking what had happened to their earplugs or their favorite pen.
Ting could easily have been in Orlando’s pirate crew, stealing from whoever Orlando told them to steal from.
“How about the ventilation ducts?” Rowan asked at their lunchtime meeting.
“The construction records say they’re up to two feet across, but all the vents are in the ceiling, and I don’t know if the covers are bolted there or what; and the ceilings are fifteen feet up, minimum.
Ting, can you climb up there undetected? ”
“Hell yeah I can,” said Ting, fingers twitching, like they wanted to do it right now. “As long as you two are doing your jobs.”
But Ting didn’t steal anything of Kelli’s. They kept looking at Kelli covertly, guilty and conflicted, when they thought she wasn’t looking.
Then there was Rowan. His moods swung hard, from disheveled misery to glib confidence, which Kelli suspected was at least partly a front.
Kelli mostly knew Rowan already; the only question was how much he’d changed in the last ten years.
How far he’d fallen. It was hard to measure that amount for sure, but she studied his need-more-coffee scowl at breakfast, his jokes at lunch, the media—all queer, mostly with a lot of explosions and drama—that he watched in his off time.
She caught him looking at Zhaleh sometimes, when he thought Zhaleh wasn’t looking, with an expression like a kicked puppy.
Kelli didn’t like to think for too long about Rowan and Zhaleh’s relationship.
It was none of her business. They stayed civil in front of her, but it felt like they were the stars of one of those soap-opera shows where everyone was beautiful and passionate and constantly having stupid misunderstandings.
Kelli was just some blobby clay model of a person who’d been passed between them as a plot hook.
She didn’t want to think about the two of them at all.
She could think about Zhaleh, though, in isolation.
Zhaleh braided her blond hair into tight coils so that it didn’t float around.
Zhaleh always had makeup on and crystal earrings in her ears.
Zhaleh always looked immaculate, even after sweating for an hour on the exercise machine.
Zhaleh spoke easily if she needed to speak, but more often she kept a cool, thoughtful remoteness.
More than once Kelli peeked through a doorway trying to spy on her, only to find Zhaleh, calm and expressionless, watching her right back.
At dinner, Zhaleh was the one who brought out the game of Asteroids.
It was a game that folded up small into a carrying case the size of a tablet, but it ballooned up to fill half the galley when it was set up right.
There was a big magnetic checkerboard and some small magnetic pucks in different colors, plus a plastic tangle of hoops and angled surfaces that extended for several feet in front of the board.
The idea was to stand a ways back and toss the pucks so that they bounced off the surfaces, flew through the hoops, and stuck to the board.
There were special rules for if two pucks crashed into each other; sometimes the new puck displaced the old one and sometimes it didn’t.
The first person to get four of their pucks into a nice line won.
Kelli gave it a good try, but she couldn’t help but throw the pucks expecting there’d be gravity. That meant they clattered all over the place, sailing higher than she’d expected and much too fast to control. Most of them didn’t even make it onto the board.
“You need precision,” Rowan explained, holding one of his own pucks and showing her how it was done.
“Not speed. In zero-grav you can throw things as slow as you want—watch this.” He flicked his wrist and sent one of his own red pucks lazily sailing toward the edge of the tangle, bouncing off one angled surface and again off another.
It didn’t quite make it through the hoop he’d been aiming for, but bounced off the edge and ended up a few squares away, which was closer than Kelli had managed yet with any of hers.
“Okay,” Kelli said. She tried very hard to throw her own yellow puck slowly like his, which meant that she overcorrected and it just hung there in the air, not moving at all for a few seconds until a gentle air current swept it away.
She went back to throwing too fast and too hard after that, because at least the wild clatter of it kept people laughing.
She watched how they laughed. She watched them.
Ting was great at Asteroids. They liked to go for trick shots, bouncing the puck off six different surfaces and through three different hoops before it landed. But they rarely won, because they were more amused by setting up those shots than by countering anyone else’s moves.
Rowan made a show of not caring very much about the game.
He tossed his pucks in at the easiest angles, made obvious moves, laughed it off when they didn’t land correctly.
But his moves, though done casually, were aggressive.
He wanted to make a line as fast as he could; if someone else was making one, he broke it.
Zhaleh played Asteroids quietly, without any of Ting’s showy moves.
She let the game turn into a playful rivalry between them and Rowan, with Kelli’s ridiculous failures as a sideshow.
And then, just when Rowan was about to win, she calmly lobbed a green puck into the middle of his line and ruined the whole thing.
Two moves later, when everyone was still exclaiming about that, she dropped one neatly—with only a single bounce—right into a spot that no one had noticed, where it linked up with three other green pucks in a neat and tidy winning line.
Zhaleh, in other words, was a strategist.
By the end of her first day, Kelli believed she understood what this meant.
Characters like Zhaleh appeared in the AdventureVerse sometimes; they were some of the hardest to supervise.
If it wasn’t spelled out in the kernel itself, then even a script supervisor couldn’t know what they were after until the script said so.
With characters like Zhaleh, Kelli’s job was to mentally collate the scraps of information the script gave; to note anything that looked like a contradiction; to decide, on a gut level, if that contradiction was an error on ScriptGen’s part, or some kind of clever twist.
So Zhaleh was the one who would decide all this, and it was useless to try to predict what she would do. There would be a clever twist eventually, and nobody would know what it was until they were in the middle of it.