Every Almost (Emberkind #1)

Prologue Day One

? PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES ?

Charlie Wickett had a theory about holidays, that they were designed by people who had someone to spend them with and had never stopped to consider what they'd built for everyone else.

New Year's Day, for instance.

Pasadena, California was home to the annual Rose Parade hosted every New Year's Day.

The city shut down as the streets around town filled with people in lawn chairs and blankets, some having staked out their spots along Colorado Boulevard, some having even camped out along the route the night before.

The city was alive and celebratory and loud.

But this was the first year Charlie wanted nothing to do with it.

An entire city shut down to watch flowers on trucks drive by in the sunshine, while Charlie sat alone in a lab at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in a dead man's coat, talking to fragments of space metal that wasn't in any database NASA had ever compiled.

She liked the fragments better than the parade. The fragments didn't expect her to be happy.

Pushing through her lab door when she arrived on campus, she was welcomed by the frigid cold that was permanent in her workspace.

Hence why she was wearing her father's aquamarine coat over her Fleetwood Mac Rumours tee, using the coat as her preferred choice of warmth during her workdays since his passing.

She dropped her bag beside her chair and pulled her lab coat off its hook, shrugging it on over her coat and buttoning it from the bottom up.

She tied her hair back into a low knot and slid her safety goggles down over her eyes, snapping a fresh pair of nitrile gloves over her hands before flexing her fingers once, twice. Good and tight and secure.

She sat down at her workstation and looked at the project in front of her.

Strange debris that had been recovered months ago from a storage room, made up of fragments of something that didn't match any known material in NASA's database.

She'd found out that it had been passed around, assigned to engineer after engineer to catalog it, but it none followed through.

Her boss had finally brought it to her only a few days ago, apparently desperate for someone with enough curiosity and enough time to figure out what it was before the big wigs of JPL gave him any more issue over how it had been months since it was placed in the work queue.

Charlie had both. Especially today.

She pulled the tray toward her and studied the fragments under the lamp.

Before setting to work, she opened her bag, pulled out her Walkman, pressed play, and then placed her bag in her lap.

As she continued to speak in low murmurs to the fragments, the way she'd always talked to broken things, she started working.

"Alright, little buddy," she murmured at the largest piece, tilting it under the lamp. "Let's see why the managers are making such a fuss over you."

She said this in complete sincerity, with warmth, direction, and with more patience than she'd ever managed to give a human being. Machines made sense to Charlie. They broke in ways you could understand and were fixed in ways you could trust.

People did neither.

Outside, the city was drowning in confetti and roses. Inside Lab 7, Charlie was the only person on the floor, possibly the only person in the building, and she preferred it that way.

She preferred a lot of things that way lately.

She took it slow. She photographed each piece from multiple angles before she handled them.

She measured and logged, she used tweezers and a non-conductive probe to turn the smaller fragments over, examining the seams where one piece met another.

She ran the infrared sensor across the tray and noted that one of the larger fragments was running two degrees warmer than the others.

Small and easy to dismiss, but Charlie knew it was worth noting, as she had been trained. So into the log it went.

After three hours, she put down her tools, pushed back from her station, took off her gloves and pushed up her goggles, and rubbed her eyes.

She reached down and stopped the Walkman, cutting off "Call Me" by Blondie about halfway through.

Charlie remembered the first time she and Katie heard it on the radio back in her Plymouth the first summer she was back visiting her hometown on break from Caltech and, for some reason, they both fell in love with it.

That gave her an idea.

Charlie swiveled around, picked up her desk phone, and called Katie.

Katie answered on the second ring. "Happy New Year, Charlie."

"Happy New Year, Kit-Kat. How'd you know it was me?"

"It's only going to be you calling me at Mom's house at this time of day on a Tuesday," Katie said. Charlie could hear the smirk on her face coming through the phone.

"I guess that's fair," Charlie replied. "How's things?"

"Things are fine. Same as yesterday. Same as the day before."

"Did the lawyer call back about the property assessment?"

"Yes, Charlie. The lawyer called back."

"And?"

"And it's handled."

"What about the insurance paperwork? Because I was thinking, if you need me to look over the—"

"Charlie."

"Also, did the donation center say when they'd come for Mom's things? Have they given you a date, yet? Because you need to make sure they come on a day when you can be there to—"

"Charlie."

"Oh, also, Mr. Jones called me and said he would be interested in looking at the Cutlass. He knew Dad took such good care of it that he'd be interested in offering you top dollar—"

"Charlie."

Charlie stopped, her momentum stalled.

"What?"

"I've got it."

Charlie took a deep breath.

"I know you do, I'm just—"

"You're just checking. For the fourteenth time this week." Katie's voice wasn't unkind, but Charlie realized it had an edge pushing through. A weariness that wasn't about their parents' estate.

"I'm worried about you being there alone, handling everything alone," Charlie said.

"But Charlie, I'm really not alone. Mrs. Patterson checks on me.

The pastor came by with some food made by the parishioners.

I have the entire town practically looking out for me.

" A pause. "Charlie, I love you. But you call me every day, sometimes twice, and every time you ask me the same questions about the same things, and every time I tell you they're handled, you still ask again the next day. "

Charlie opened her mouth and then closed it.

"I know you want to help," Katie continued, her voice softer now.

"I know it's killing you not to be here, I do.

" Katie took a deep breath. "But I need you to trust me.

I'm not twelve anymore. I'm handling this, and I'm handling it well.

The lawyer is up-to-date, the insurance is filed, the donation center is scheduled, and the house is being maintained.

I am eating three meals a day and I am sleeping and I am okay.

" The last part of Katie's sentence was delivered with deliberate, staccato beats.

"I just—"

"You just want to fix it. I know. That's what you do.

" Katie's voice got quiet. "That's what you've always done, and you've always been so god damn good at it.

" Then her tone returned to what it was before.

"But there's nothing broken here, Charlie.

There's just work; good, honest work, and I'm doing it. I've got this."

Charlie leaned back in her chair and pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. She could hear it in Katie's voice. It wasn't anger, or resentment, but the firm, quiet insistence of a woman who needed her sister to see her clearly. The way Katie had always seen Charlie clearly.

"I'm sorry, Kit-Kat."

"Don't be sorry. I know you're just trying to be helpful. And a bit bossy." Charlie scoffed. "I know you love me and you loved Mom. But just... trust me. Okay?"

Charlie took a deep breath.

"Okay."

There was a moment of silence on the line, a beat of something shifting, and Charlie was about to say something more, something real that she'd been wanting to tell Katie for some time now. She felt a twinge of guilt at the mere fact that she hadn't said something so important to her sister yet.

But before she could even begin, she heard a voice calling from outside on Katie's end.

"Hold on," Katie said. "That's Mr. Henderson. He's been helping me with stuff around the house." A rustle, the phone being set down. Then Katie's voice, farther away: "Be right there!"

A few moments later, Katie came back to the phone. "Charlie, I have to go. He's here about the gutters. Can I call you back?"

"Yeah," Charlie said. "Yeah, of course. Go."

"I love you."

"I love you too, Kit."

"Talk later?"

"Talk later."

The line went dead. Charlie set the phone down and stared at it.

Moments passed before she put on new gloves, went back to the tray, and began studying the pieces of debris again.

But her mind was wandering and she wasn't able to focus.

She kept thinking back to what her sister had just told her.

She pushed too hard, hovered too close, tried to fix something that didn't need fixing, and the person she loved most had finally, gently, firmly asked her to stop.

She stopped, sat there for five minutes, maybe ten. The lab was quiet around her. The debris fragments on the workbench caught the fluorescent light from overhead in a way that was almost iridescent, throwing colors of the rainbow against the inside walls.

Charlie's hands were restless. Her chest was tight, the thoughts stampeding through her mind, the particular ache beating against her of knowing she'd done the thing she could sometimes do.

She peeled the gloves off her hands and dropped them on the workbench beside the tray. Then she picked up the phone and dialed her mom's number.

It rang once. Twice. Three times. Four.