Chapter 15
The Starlit Salon was packed for brunch—and the voices were all pitched with an odd fervor.
As Mariah beelined for the coffee bar, she caught snippets of conversations:
“I was wandering in a garden but every bloom was a star…”
“…a cupcake the size of a castle!”
“…not falling or flying but…I don’t know, I felt…”
“…buck-ass naked!”
“Mariah!” Felicity bustled up, her feelings button flashing all the colors. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here.”
Mariah smiled distractedly, the cruise director’s words echoing painfully with what she’d said to Suvan the night before. She’d told him she was happy to have him back…and then she’d run away, too afraid he’d never remember her.
Or that he would and…then what?
She swiped a mug from the bar. “Where else would I be?”
Felicity waved away the wry question. “You’re the expert on dreams. So tell us, what could this all mean?”
As one, every face swiveled toward them. Mariah gulped. Like she was being tested on stage and she didn’t know her lines.
“Uh, is this a nightmare?” Sometimes acknowledging the strangeness could trigger control of a lucid dream.
Felicity frowned. “What? No, they were all good dreams, I think.” She glanced around at all the gestures of assent.
On the other side of the bar, Remy said, “Mine was a symphony with a chorus. So many voices, I couldn’t hear where one ended and another began. It sounded like…” She glanced down toward the other end of the bar where Ikaryo was concocting a bright pink brunch cocktail. “Like heaven.”
Those words from the sometimes sarcastic redhead made Mariah blink. Everyone else went back to their conversations again, recounting their dreams and possible interpretations.
Mariah shrugged. “Not every dream has meaning.”
Felicity twisted her lips to one side. “But it must mean something that everyone had such vivid experiences last night.”
“I didn’t.” Mariah gulped her coffee while the other two stared at her in disbelief. “Hey, just because I meditate and have a few crystals—”
Remy arched her eyebrows. “When we were stuck in the life pod while an energy monster ran amok, you told me you once drank psychedelic mushroom tea and a llama told you the secrets of the universe.”
Oh, there was the sarcastic redhead. Mariah huddled defensively behind her mug. “First off, it was an alpaca. And secondly, the secrets of an alpaca’s universe probably aren’t really relevant here.”
“Aren’t they?” Felicity hooked a thumb at the resonark. “We have our very own mystery hanging in your knotwork.”
The three of them swiveled to stare at the anomaly, pulsing innocently.
“Evens believes the resonark is a connecting force,” Remy mused. “Why wouldn’t it be connecting our dreams?”
“Connecting us to our dreams but in the waking world.” Felicity touched the button shining gold on her silvery uniform.
Though she longed to join in, Mariah couldn’t force any words past the lump in her throat. Probably the terrible coffee.
A sudden silence descended over the brunch.
Following the focus of the crowd, Mariah angled to look around Felicity.
Suvan stood in the salon doorway.
Her heart thudded hard when his gaze swept the room to land on her.
Knowing now how hard it had been for him to leave the ship, she understood why he stayed in the protected engine module. That he’d come to the salon while everyone was there must challenge all his reclusive instincts, grating on every quill-scale.
In the full Earther-favoring illumination of the salon, his pale quartz eyes were narrowed, giving him an especially menacing look. He had his sleeveless uniform on again, hiding the bandage she’d left on his chest, and the dark green quill-scales down his arms were spiked hard.
Maybe those spines were a bit more menacing than his squint.
And yet her fingers tingled with the memory of touching him. She longed to soothe the prickling thorns, to reach past the threat to feel the tiny scales like satin.
He stalked toward them, boots ringing on the deck. Or just in her ears.
He paused at the end of the bar, next to the monitor he’d installed there the night he’d found her knitting alone.
“I dreamed of you,” he said in his low rasp.
Then he looked up at the resonark, and she wasn’t sure who he was talking to—her or the anomaly.
She desperately wanted to believe it was her, but…
Sometimes dreams didn’t come true.
He had a compact datpad in his hand that he connected to the resonark monitor. “Captain,” he said as a small hologram of the Kufzasin blinked on above the device. “The interface I told you about is in place. Powering connection now.”
So Suvan hadn’t come looking for her.
Instead, he glanced over at Felicity. “May I borrow your button?” He tapped a port on the side of the datpad. “Right here, please.”
Remy slid down the bar toward them, Ikaryo right behind her. “Help us out here, Chief, and pretend we aren’t all rocket scientists. What’s this machine?”
Suvan’s gaze flicked to Mariah before returning to the resonark. “A way to finally observe the anomaly’s quantum bond.”
“Huh.” Remy leaned forward to peer at the port where Felicity plugged the feelings button. “I thought you weren’t able to get good readings on it.”
Mariah winced internally, knowing Suvan’s deep aversion to fallibility would pain him more than half-healed bones.
“Now I can,” he said. “The method came to me…last night.”
Again his eyes shifted her way. Last night, meaning when he’d dreamed? Had everyone experienced some sort of vision?
Except her.
The little button had gone dark when Felicity took it off, and Mariah felt the collective holding of breath as Suvan adjusted something on the monitor box.
Nothing happened.
A faint sigh of disappointment drifted around the salon like a poison fog.
But Suvan seemed undeterred. He poked at both machines a few more times.
“Ms. McCoy,” he said. “If you’d please.” He gestured from his mouth outward with a flick of his fingers, and Mariah remembered that long tongue… “A few notes should be enough.”
Remy’s eyebrows shot up. “You want me to sing, Chief?”
“Anything to spark the resonant harmonics,” he said. “Although since we’ve established repeatedly that the anomaly reacts most strongly to emotional energy, you should…go big.”
Or go home. Mariah wondered if he knew the Earther saying. They’d all chosen to not go home.
With a glance at Ikaryo, who inclined his head in answer, Remy took a belly breath. She held it a moment, reaching out to her lover. Silver-blue glitter raced upward along the augments of his arm, sparkling all the way to his jaw.
“Done with silence, I’m singing of
my heart entwined with yours, my love.
When the stars come out to shine
they’ll light our way ‘cross all of time,
our promise blazing bright as suns.”
Remy held the last word, the melody one note off of resolving, until Ikaryo completed the harmony with a flowing arpeggio like a synth harp. Then her voice and his accompaniment blended into a perfect balance, each with their own sound but beautifully woven together.
Ikaryo held the final chord far past a human voice, the vibrations attenuating but never weakening, like a fractal made music.
When it finally faded past hearing, Mariah swallowed, tasting tears in the back of her throat.
The feelings button stayed dark, and though Mariah strained her senses, the only sound she heard was the shush of blood in her ears.
“Link me to the salon music system,” Suvan said, his low voice breaking the silence. Ikaryo turned to the console behind the bar.
For a heartbeat, nothing.
“Louder,” Suvan ordered.
And then, so distantly, a lone note.
The whisper of indrawn breaths through the salon, as delicate as spider silk, was like a yearning descant to that pure tone.
The button light shivered almost imperceptibly.
Mariah stared up at the pulsing prismatic light above them. “That isn’t the resonark.”
“It’s what’s at the other end of the quantum entanglement,” Suvan said. “Something in the null cloud is echoing the resonark.”
On the bridge, the captain was pacing, and the tight focus of the hologram made him look like an alien lion in a cage. “The resonark has…a mate?”
Felicity put her hand next to the projection, as if she could soothe his restlessness from across the ship. “During the recital, we felt its longing and displacement, how it had lost…itself? Is this echo what it needs to find?”
“But it’s so quiet,” said someone in the crowd, which responded with fretful murmurs.
“Because the link is fading,” Suvan said.
Mariah stiffened. “I thought quantum entanglements can’t be broken.”
“Not by distance,” he said, “but by decoherence.”
“Still not rocket scientists here,” Remy reminded him.
“Various forms of interference—temperature, chemicals, other particles—can break the bond. Quantum entanglement is fragile.”
Like any dream.
Mariah glanced around the room at the somber faces. They’d come all this way on the belief that love was a power in the universe.
What if they’d been wrong?
Though she feared the answer, she had to ask, “What happens if they detangle?”
“Nothing.” The word was flat. “The bond is gone, as if it never existed.”
From the stone-cold silence in the salon, she thought that simple answer must’ve devastated everyone equally.
“Or,” came a harsh retort from the back of the room, “it could be the end of love in the universe.”
Evens pushed through the brunch crowd, his cane and his anger clearing a wider path than his dapper size warranted. “If I’m right, and the resonark isn’t merely a random wave-particle but a power source of love itself, this loss could sever the bonds of all such connections everywhere.”
He swiped a shaking hand across his brow. “That is what woke me like a scream in the night. Not a dream, but a nightmare.”
Suvan squared off to the ship’s owner as the captain growled, “Save the spectacle for your next brochure, Evens. Everyone here has already voted to follow the resonark’s course.”
Mariah cleared her throat. “Can we get there before the echo fades out?”