Chapter 14
brOOKLYN
She called Jenny before she called anyone else.
Which was saying something.
She had half the station to update and a station admin who’d asked three times for a check-in.
“The samples cleared,” Brooklyn said, the second the screen bloomed purple and Jenny’s face swam into it mid-bite of something.
“Station cryo, off Earth jurisdiction, viable and legal. Hargrove’s injunction can suspend collection all it wants—the proof-of-concept is up here now, and the counsel came back to the table an hour ago. ”
She stopped. Breathed. “We didn’t lose it. Jen. We didn’t lose the work.”
Jenny put down the something.
“Okay,” she said, slowly, in the voice she used when she was recalculating a person in real time. “That’s eight months, that’s the—Brooke, that’s enormous, and you’re saying it like you’re reading me a spoilage report. What aren’t you—” Her eyes narrowed.
Mr. Fluffikins wandered into frame and sat, tail curling. He fixed the camera with the ancient telepathic judgment of a cat who already knew.
“Wait. What happened on that deck. You said Hargrove’s injunction and then you got shifty. You have a face. Brooke. You have a face.”
“Hargrove sent people,” Brooklyn said. “To stop me rerouting the freight. Two of them. Physically. And Falkin was there—he read the room before I did, put himself between me and them, and handled both of them in about a second. Didn’t hurt them, didn’t make a mess.
So I could finish. Then let them go and gave the calmest statement to security I’ve ever heard a living being give. ”
Jenny was very quiet.
“And yesterday, with the cameras,” Brooklyn went on, because she’d started and couldn’t find the door to stop, “he did the opposite. Sat on his hands. Let me have the floor, because being rescued in front of the cameras would’ve been worse than the attack.
He knew the difference. When to sit still, when to move—which one I needed. ”
She swallowed. “Who does that, Jenny? Who reads a person that well and then does the version that costs them something instead of the version that feels good to do?”
“A guy who turned his own head off so he couldn’t cheat,” Jenny said softly, “and sat on your floor being no help at all.”
For no reason. Brooklyn’s throat closed.
“So you told him yes,” Jenny said. It wasn’t a question. “You went and found him. You reached back.”
“I gave him a very badly organized yes.”
“Brooke.” And Jenny’s whole face lit, radiant and full and complete. It was the same face she’d turned on Brooklyn over a centrifuge years ago.
Right before Brooklyn had noticed she’d let this small loud human woman all the way in without deciding to.
“You reached back. You actually—okay. Okay, I’m not going to cry, Karuk hates it when I cry, he feels it from the next room and comes running like the building’s on fire—” She was absolutely going to cry. “Mr. F. Mr. F, she reached back.”
The cat blinked, slow, sovereign.
“He says,” Jenny reported, listening, wet-eyed, “the sad-warm smell went out of the far one. The far one is you, a galaxy away, and he’s saying the sad went out of you. Cat’s never wrong about people.”
“I know. You’ve told me.” Brooklyn was laughing now. Or crying? The two things had stopped being separate. “Jenny. Thank you. For all of it. The money thing with Danny, which I still don’t—”
“Off the pile. Done. Told you.” Jenny wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, brisk. “And I did nothing on the reaching-back thing, for the record. That was all you. I just yelled at you while a cat judged you. Extent of my contribution, and I want it noted.”
“Noted.”
“Now hang up,” Jenny said, soft, full circle. Pushing, and pretending she wasn’t. “You already reached back. So go be with him. Don’t run the numbers. Go.”
The screen went dark.
Brooklyn sat in the quiet a moment. Then she messaged Danny.
She’d made him a promise on a floor last night, wet and wrecked. She was going to be a person who kept the promises she made when the wall was down, not just the ones she made when it was up.
Account’s fully handled. Jenny and Karuk’s people covered it, all four years, and I let them. Off your shoulders for good.
Also I found the samples a legal loophole today and won, so nobody’s stealing the planet either.
Big day. How are you?
She sent it before she could run the numbers on it. Watched it turn green.
The reply came faster than she expected.
Danny, who never used to message, who forgot the time difference, was awake and typing.
proud of you. obviously. but you didnt answer the question and you know it
. . .
im gonna keep asking. are YOU ok. thats the only one that matters
And she sat there on her too-expensive rug and felt her throat close. Last night that same question had knocked the door clean off its frame. Here he was asking it again, gently, on purpose. Like a person who had decided her fine was no longer going to be accepted as an answer.
Nineteen years old and buried in whatever novel was open face-down on his bed, and he’d learned in one week to do the thing nobody in her life had ever done. Ask, and mean it, and not let her set it aside.
Getting there.
There’s a person, actually. It’s new. I’ll tell you about him when it’s not the middle of my night. Read your book.
a PERSON
ok now i HAVE to stay up.
love you. told you you didnt have to fix everything alone. some of it you can just tell me.
She read it twice. Then a third time.
One more chime.
oh and the bank finally said what flagged the account. some oversight committee records request. thats about your work isnt it
Brooklyn read that one four times.
Hargrove had said as much on camera, with her name in his mouth. He’d gone looking through her family for a lever, and what he’d shaken loose was the one thing that had let Danny in.
Was she supposed to be furious, or grateful? She decided she didn’t have to pick tonight.
Then she set the comm down, gently, and sat in the quiet of the one warm room in her life.
The rug.
The plants under the grow-strip.
The wall of mismatched frames.
Her grandmother’s blanket over the chair.
The negotiations weren’t fixed. She knew that with the clean cold part of her that never turned off.
The counsel was back at the table.
But Hargrove still had a committee and a folder and a whole planet’s worth of frightened people to point at. The injunction was a fight that would go on long past tonight… probably, honestly, past this whole chapter of her life.
A problem the size of a planet, and it would still be there in the morning.
Which meant it could wait until the morning. Couldn’t it?
She looked at the door for a second. Then she picked up her nerve, and left the door where it was.
She went to find him.
He opened on the first chime, still in the under-layer of his armor.
When he saw her his whole face did the careful thing, the trained-not-to-hope-out-loud thing.
Then he read her, and told her so, because he’d promised he always would.
“You’re happy,” he said. “You’re also still shaking.”
And it dissolved into something warmer.
“Brooklyn.”
“My quarters,” she said. “Not yours. Yours are grey and depressing and I’ve seen them and we’re not doing this in a grey room.” She reached up and hooked two fingers in the edge of his collar.
Bolder than she usually did anything.
She felt her own nerve wobble and hold. “I want you in the warm one. It… matters. I don’t have the whole sentence for why it matters. But it does.”
Something moved behind his eyes.
“It matters,” he agreed, low, “that I’m in the room you made.”
He got it.
Of course he got it.
He was the one with the white walls.
She led him back to her quarters by two fingers in his collar, and the door sealed, and the good part of her life closed around them both.
This time it wasn’t a lie the room was telling. This time there was someone in it.
He looked around like he was reading a manifest.
The frames.
The chili-string lights, twin to the ones in the lab, that she’d tacked along the shelf because they made her think of a porch she’d never had.
The blanket.
She watched him take the whole of it in and go quiet, nothing tactical in it.
“You have a lot of things on your walls,” he said.
“I put everything on the walls.” She reached up and pressed the cuff.
His cuff, her fingers finding the notched gold at his ear, bold as anything.
She felt him go still. “Open,” she said.
“All the way. I’ve been on the receiving end of that loop once and I’ve thought about it a truly unprofessional amount and tonight I want it from the start. So.” She looked up at him. “May I?”
“You’re asking to turn off the one thing that keeps me from feeling everything you feel,” Falkin said, gravel already in it. “In your quarters. In the warm room. With enthusiastic—”
“Yes or no, guard.”
“Yes,” he said. “Gods. Yes.”
She thumbed the cuff open.
And the room changed. But it wasn’t the slow blooming climb of the first time, the tentative reach and the wonder.
Tonight it landed like the aftermath still humming in her had been waiting for a place to go.
All day her hands had been shaking in that discreet controlled way and she’d made them behave.
All day the adrenaline of the freight deck had had nowhere to burn, held under the statements and the security and the being correct one more time.
It found the loop now and it poured in, her own want with a jagged bright edge of everything-almost-went-wrong-and-didn’t riding it, doubled and returned.
So when she grabbed his face and kissed him it wasn’t three careful kisses.
It was one collision with the brakes off.
“Okay,” she said against his mouth, breathless, already fisting his collar. “No wonder tonight. No findings. I have been vibrating since noon and I am done being calm about it.”
“You’re still shaking,” he said, low, hands closing over her arms—reading it, or feeling it through the loop, the leftover tremor she’d hidden from a room full of security.
“I know. Make it stop the fun way.” She got her hands under the under-layer and dragged it up and off him.