Chapter 2
brOOKLYN
The centrifuge was doing the thing again.
Brooklyn crouched in front of it with a wrench in one hand and a screwdriver in the other.
Behind her, her coffee was going cold. She listened to the shimmy in the bearing that told her exactly which part of exactly which drum was a half-degree out of true.
She could have submitted a maintenance ticket. She could have waited three days for someone to show up, sigh at it, and submit the exact same ticket back to her.
Or she could fix it herself in six minutes and get on with her morning.
“Six minutes,” she told the centrifuge. “Don’t make it weird.”
It made it weird. It always made it weird.
She got the panel off, found the shim she’d known she’d find, and seated it. The drum was spinning true again in nine minutes. She checked. Close enough to six that she was calling it six.
She wiped her hands on the rag that lived clipped to her belt and looked around the lab. It was hers in every way that mattered, even if the station technically owned it.
Half of it was Jenny’s protocols and Jenny’s sample racks, still labeled in Jenny’s blocky handwriting. Nine months after Jenny had gone and gotten herself an alien and a whole new planet.
The other half was Brooklyn’s, which meant it was cluttered and warm and covered in sticky notes. A chili-pepper string of little solar lights was strung along the shelf above the sequencer. Staring at grey walls for ten hours made a person feel like a sample themselves.
Nobody made her take the lights down.
Nobody had ever noticed them at all.
Her comm chimed the bright three-note tone that meant Jenny. Brooklyn was across the room and dropping into her chair before the second note finished.
“Please tell me the M-series held,” she said, before the window even resolved. “I ran it four times. If it didn’t hold, I’m going to lie down on the floor.”
Jenny’s face bloomed on the screen mid-laugh. Behind her was a wash of purple that Brooklyn still wasn’t used to. Mountains the color of a bruise. A window full of sky that was the wrong shade of everything. “Hello to you too.”
“Hi. Love you. Did it hold?”
“It held.” Jenny’s grin went wide and a little disbelieving, the way it always did when the science worked. “Brooke, it more than held. The stabilization curve is—I’m sending you the plots, but it flattened out and stayed flat. Fourteen days. No degradation.”
Brooklyn sat back. “Fourteen.”
“Fourteen.”
“With the Earth compound in the medium.”
“With the Earth compound in the medium.” Something crossed Jenny’s face. Not quite worry, but adjacent to it. “And only with the Earth compound. We tried the synthetic analog again. Nothing. Karuk’s people ran it three ways. It has to be the real thing, Brooke. It has to be from down there.”
A blur of black and white crossed the frame and Jenny reached up absently to move it. “Mr. F, off the desk. He says hi. He does not actually say hi, he says the small racks smell of the cold place, which is his opinion about the sample fridge, but I’m translating it as hi.”
“Hi, Mr. Fluffikins.” Brooklyn was already pulling the plots onto her second screen, already seeing the beautiful flat line of it.
This was the part she loved.
Not the politics, whatever the politics were. She left those to people who liked meetings.
This. The line staying flat because she’d collected the right dirt from the right river and packed it right and it had worked. “Okay. So, this is huge. This is—Jenny, this is the whole thing, right? This works?”
“This works.” Jenny said it quietly, and for a second neither of them said anything.
Brooklyn understood without being told that she was only seeing the edge of how big it actually was.
Then Jenny straightened, and the moment passed, and she got brisk. “Which is why I’m calling with a heads-up. You’re getting company.”
“I hate company.”
“You’re getting it anyway. Vorjan House is sending a delegation up to the station.
Advance team, preliminary talks—they want to formalize the arrangement, sample access, the whole thing.
Karuk knows the one they’re sending first.” A flicker of something warm.
“You’ll be fine. They’re… they’re good, mostly. Their guard, especially.”
“Do I have to do anything?”
“Probably brief someone at some point. You know the research better than anyone but me, and I’m a galaxy away.”
“Great,” Brooklyn said. “Perfect. I’ll wear the shirt without the acid burn.”
Jenny laughed, and Mr. Fluffikins reasserted himself across the entire lower third of the frame.
For eleven more minutes it was easy, the way it was always easy with Jenny. The only person Brooklyn had ever let all the way in. She’d let her in mostly by accident, over centrifuges, before she’d noticed it was happening.
“So, really, though, will you tell me something?” Brooklyn asked.
“Sure, what?” Jenny said. In the background, Mr. Fluffikins was floating around like a shark about to strike, his tail the fin that kept popping up.
“Are you happy?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m thrilled the work is—”
“Not about that. I mean, with him. With being there.”
“Yes. That I’m very happy with,” Jenny said. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t know. It’s just…”
“Quiet in the lab?”
Brooklyn shrugged. “The centrifuge tries to keep me on my toes.”
“If you’re talking to equipment, then maybe you need to go enter yourself in Re-lee’s database.”
“Obviously, it doesn’t work, because we all had to enter it, remember?”
“You never know,” Jenny said.
“You sound almost hopeful.”
“Call it the honeymoon stage. Isn’t that when I’m supposed to want everyone to be so lucky to be as happy as I am?”
“Whatever.”
They said their goodbyes, and Brooklyn looked around the lab.
It was very quiet.
So, she looked at the numbers.
Numbers didn’t have to make noise to speak.
Brooklyn looked at the flat line on her screen a while longer.
You did that, she let herself think, just for a second. That’s yours.
She missed Jenny. That was the plain unhelpful truth of it.
Jenny had been the one person on this whole spinning ring who’d known the difference between Brooklyn-fine and Brooklyn-no-I’m-fine. And Jenny had gone and fallen in love with a purple-mountained planet and a man who talked through a cat.
Brooklyn was genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy for her. And also, the lab was very quiet now. Both of those things were true at once.
Then she got up to check the sample fridge, because Mr. Fluffikins was right, one of the racks was sitting proud of its slot. She reseated it. She lined up the labels so they all faced the same way, which nobody would ever see and which made her feel better anyway.
Small fixable things. She was so good at the small fixable things.
She almost didn’t answer the second call.
She saw the name on the screen.
HOME
Flat grey letters she’d never gotten around to changing to anything softer.
She stood in the middle of her quarters with a container of leftover noodles in one hand. The joyful and exciting afternoon went out of her like heat off a plate.
Her quarters were the good part of her life on Libra Station. Yeah. They’d finally named it something, and Libra Station was it. She didn’t love it, but hey, she wasn’t consulted.
So, she made the best of Libra Station.
She couldn’t complain about the view, anyway. Seeing the Earth spinning underneath her, that was always worth watching. But when she wasn’t looking out a window, she polished up her apartment on the station to something worth living in.
A rug she’d hauled up from Earth-side that had cost more to ship than to buy. A wall of photographs in mismatched frames. Plants under a grow-strip, thriving, defiant. A blanket her grandmother had made before Brooklyn’s family had gotten around to making itself unbearable.
Color everywhere, deliberately to look homey. Personalized.
A person walked into Brooklyn’s quarters and thought that, yeah, this person is fine, this person is more than fine, and that was the idea.
Looks were what mattered, right?
She answered on the fourth ring. She always answered by the fourth ring. Not answering cost more than answering.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Well, there she is. I was about to give up.” Her mother’s voice arrived a little too bright, a little too loose around the vowels.
Brooklyn checked the station clock without wanting to and did the math on the time difference and the day of the week.
She came up with an answer she set down without looking at, the way she set down anything sharp. “I keep forgetting you’re on the moon.”
“It’s a station. It’s not the moon.”
“Same difference. How’s space. Is it fun up there?”
“It’s work, mostly.” Brooklyn set the noodles down. She wasn’t going to eat them now. “How are you? How’s Danny?”
“Oh, he’s fine, he’s—you know Danny, head in a book.” A pause that Brooklyn could have timed. Here it came. “Which is actually—that’s kind of why I’m calling, honey. The tuition thing. For the spring.”
“I paid the spring one. In November. It’s paid.”
“No, I know, I know you did, you’re so good about it, you really are.
It’s just there’s the—they added a fee. An enrollment fee, or a—I don’t totally understand it, you know how they are, but it’s due, and things are just a little tight right now with—” and here her mother’s voice did the small graceful sidestep it always did, away from wherever the money had actually gone, “—with everything, so I thought, before it’s late and they charge Danny more, you know how they pile it on—”
“How much.”
“—I hate even asking, you know I hate asking—”
“Mom. How much.”
Her mother named a number. It was not a small number.
It was, Brooklyn happened to know, almost exactly the number she’d noticed missing from a certain account eight weeks ago.
Which meant the fee was real. And the reason the fee couldn’t be covered was standing in a kitchen back on Earth holding a phone.
Brooklyn closed her eyes.
She thought of Danny, who was nineteen and gentle and had never once asked her for anything. Who read too much and worried too quietly and was the only person in that house she’d walk through fire for.
Then the flat stabilization curve on her screen down in the lab. The thing that was hers, the thing no one could take or spend or misplace.
And she recognized that she was thirty-one years old and lived a whole atmosphere away from the nearest bad decision.
It still reached her.
Still found her on the fourth ring.
Still cost exactly as much as it had always cost.
It all flew through her mind in about two seconds, because she’d had a lot of practice. And she knew where it was going, whether she liked it or not.
“I’ll send it tonight,” she said.
“Oh—honey. You’re a lifesaver. You really are, you’re the good one, I always say that, I tell everyone—”
“Straight to the school, right? I’ll route it to their portal, so it’s—so it goes to the right place.
” So it can’t go anywhere else, she did not say, in the pleasant efficient voice she used for exactly this.
The voice that fixed centrifuges and packed samples and closed doors without slamming them. “It’ll be there by morning.”
“You don’t have to do that, you can just—”
“It’s easier this way. Really. I’ve got a system.” She did have a system. She’d built the system the way she built everything, out of the wreckage, one careful workaround at a time. “Tell Danny I said hi. Tell him to call me.”
“I will. I will. You’re such a good—”
“I have to go, Mom, I’ve got a thing. Love you. Bye.”
She ended the call before the next sentence could start, gently, the way you set something down that would break if you let it drop.
Then she stood in the middle of her warm colorful quarters, under her defiant plants, on her too-expensive rug. She let herself feel it for exactly as long as she could afford to.
Which was not long. It never was.
She routed the money before she could think about the money. Locked it to the school portal.
Watched the confirmation come back green.
And knew, the way she knew the shimmy in a bad bearing, that there would be another call, and another fee, and another number.
For as long as Danny was in school and probably long after.
That she would answer every one.
Sometimes, in some versions of this scenario, she got angry about it.
She could feel it off to the side, a bruise she’d decided not to press in her heart and soul. So she didn’t.
Instead, she pressed the heel of her hand flat against the bench until the edge of it bit back into her, and let go.
Anger didn’t lead anywhere.
It sat in a drawer and rotted and cost you a night’s sleep.
And in the morning the account was still short and Danny still needed the room, so what was the point?
Better to be efficient. That was a path to follow.
Fine, she told herself. You’re fine. You’ve got the lights and the rug and the flat line and Danny’s got his book. You’re fine.
She almost believed it. She was very, very good at almost believing it.
Her comm chimed. Station-wide, the neutral chord that meant an announcement, not a person. She looked up.
ARRIVAL. VORJAN HOUSE DELEGATION NOW BERTHING, RECEPTION LEVEL.
Brooklyn wiped under her eyes with the heel of her hand, once, businesslike. She looked at the noodles she wasn’t going to eat and the money she’d already sent and the flat beautiful line still glowing on her lab screen two decks down.
“Great,” she said, to no one, in the voice she used when she meant okay, then, and went to find the shirt without the acid burn.