Day 6
Day Six
(age twenty-four)
The moons were always in motion, changing position; as a result, the trip back to Io would be shorter than the trip out.
This was a small mercy, because it meant Kelli only had a day and a half to sit on the spaceship and stew.
But it didn’t make her feel much better—and it didn’t stop her from having to deal with the rest of the team.
“Celebratory dinner,” said Zhaleh, gathering everyone together once they’d launched. “Come on. A mission’s worth nothing if we can’t celebrate our achievements.”
The three of them looked genuinely happy, which was strange.
Or at least, Ting did, and Zhaleh—unreadable as always—looked like she might as well be.
Rowan had a little more caution in his motions, like he was still thinking over that weird conversation they’d had on the hyperloop, but when Zhaleh offered celebratory wine, he brightened up quickly.
She ceremoniously drew out a bottle full of large burgundy tablets and shook a few out into her hand.
“That doesn’t look like wine,” Kelli said.
“They’re dehydrated wine tablets,” Zhaleh said. “Watch.”
She took one of the drinking baggies and pushed a tablet in carefully through a valve. As soon as it hit the water, the tablet popped and fizzed and started to dissolve into a dark red cloud. Zhaleh shook the bag around until it stopped fizzing, then handed it to Rowan.
“Cheers,” she said, “to a successful commander, who deserves to be pleased.”
“Cheers,” said Rowan. He squeezed a red bubble of wine out of the baggie and drank deep.
“Would you like one?” Zhaleh asked Kelli, who shook her head. Orlando might be friendly enough to drink; or, stung from all the recent revelations, he might refuse the drink, suspecting it was poison. Kelli was getting worse and worse at knowing what Orlando would do.
Zhaleh didn’t push, but she encouraged Kelli to stay in the galley anyway.
She and Ting each took a bag of wine for themselves.
Kelli watched, uneasily fascinated, as the three of them got looser and more expansive in their gestures; as Rowan, in particular, lost his pensiveness and grew cheerful.
Zhaleh praised and flattered all of them, even Kelli, while Ting bounced around in genuine enthusiasm; playing off the two of them, Rowan got into a spirit of back-patting, joking and boasting.
He didn’t pat Kelli’s back, of course. He remembered the rule.
“This was easy,” said Ting; after one drink, they no longer looked bothered by the lack of hitches.
“You guys super under-use my talents, that’s all I’m saying.
We need more things like on television. We need two-hundred-foot elevator shafts and laser traps and shit.
I could so get past one of those laser traps. ”
“Oh, you think you’re hot shit?” said Rowan, cheerful and jocular.
“I’m the real boss of this mission. I can make a computer do anything.
I could make it think up was down, gray was purple, the sun was a candy bar wrapper.
I could make any of you do anything, too.
It’s just prompting. It’s just knowing how to frame it right. ”
Ting raised their wine in a mock, half-challenging toast. “Then how come you haven’t prompt injected Zhaleh into taking you back?”
“Ooh. Ouch.” Rowan put a hand over his heart. Zhaleh didn’t seem to have reacted to the question at all. “You can’t prompt a girl like Zhaleh. She’s, like, the opposite of a computer. She’s hyper-organic. Mega-organic?”
“This wine is not organic,” Zhaleh complained. “Organic vintners simply do not make tablets like these.”
Rowan waved a lazy hand at Kelli. “Anyway, I prompted you. I was like, ooh, let’s be pirates who like doing heists, and then you liked the heist. That was me. I made you do it.”
At this, Kelli—who was not drunk at all—rose up very straight and balled her fists.
It was one thing to confess to Rowan, in the privacy of the hyperloop, that she’d liked it. It was another to have him say so, baldly, mockingly, in front of Ting and Zhaleh. Like a . . . like a conquest.
“You take that back,” she said.
“Oh,” said Rowan. He looked surprised that it had bothered her, but he backpedaled fast. “No, okay, I was joking, bad joke, sorry, I retract it from the record.”
She knew it was a joke. She wasn’t that stupid.
She didn’t think that he literally thought she was a robot.
But the joke still stung, and Kelli had been wanting to get out of here anyway.
Kunckles pale, jaw tight, she fled the short distance back to the study, and even Zhaleh didn’t try to stop her.