Prologue Day One #2
The answering machine clicked on. Her mom's voice, still on the machine because neither she nor Katie had been able to change it, said, "You've reached the Beckman household.
No one is able to come to the phone right now as we're probably out in the garden or working in the garage, but go ahead and leave a message and we'll try to call you back. Have a lovely day."
The beep sounded.
Charlie took a breath.
"Hey, Kit. It's me."
She leaned back in her chair, the receiver tucked against her shoulder, and let her eyes close.
"I know you're busy with Mr. Henderson. I just... I wanted to say something while it's fresh in my mind. While I don't have you around to interrupt me." Charlie laughed quietly.
"You were right. On the phone just now. You were completely right, and I'm sorry.
I know you said not to be sorry, but I am.
I know you're handling things. I've known you can handle things.
Hell, probably better than me. I just...
I think I keep calling because if I'm managing the details, I don't have to think about the fact that Mom's gone.
" A deep breath. "And if I'm worrying about you, I don't have to sit with how much I miss you, Kit-Kat.
But that's my thing, not yours, and that's not fair to you.
" She took a big breath. "That's why I'm sorry. "
She dragged a hand down her face.
"Here's what I should have said on the phone, and what I should have been saying all along, and all these years since I noticed you growing up and becoming an adult and living life as this incredible person.
" Charlie took a deep, cleansing breath.
"You are the strongest, smartest person I know.
You have been since you were seven years old and you sat next to me on the back porch with popsicles and didn't ask a single question about why I was upset.
You moved to California with nothing just to stick by me when Ed and Diane kicked me out.
You walked away from them without looking back.
You got into UCLA all on your own, following your own dreams, and then you got into the graduate program.
Now, you're handling Mom's entire estate by yourself, and you're doing it better than I ever could. "
Her voice softened.
"I trust you, Kit. I trust you implicitly. I trust the woman you've become. And I am so, so proud of you. I should say that more. I should say it every time I call instead of asking about lawyers and insurance paperwork."
She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling.
"I love you, Kit-Kat. More than the sky, the stars, and the universe." Charlie let the tape run. "You know that right? There is nothing in the entire vastness of space and stars that matters more to me than you do. And I don't think there ever will be."
She smiled to herself, knowing how Katie would react to that one with the eye roll, the "you're so cheesy," the smile she'd try to hide.
She was about to say goodbye when something on the workbench pulled her attention.
One of the larger fragment, one she'd logged that morning that had been running two degrees warmer than the others, was glowing.
Charlie sat up straight, her chair creaking under her.
The fragment pulsed with an iridescence rising in it that threw wrong colors against the inside of her goggles.
She leaned forward because something was happening right in front of her that her brain couldn't explain, and every instinct kicked in at the same time.
She reached out with her bare hand and her palm closed around the fragment.
It was warm. No, it was hot.
Geez, it must really be hot if I can feel it through my gloves—
Wait. Gloves! I took them off to call—
"Well, shit—"
The fragment erupted in light.
A sharp, electric, wrong sound tore through the lab.
All the debris on the workbench rattled.
The fluorescent lights flickered and then surged.
Then the fragment blazed with new light, light that shouldn't exist, light that had no color and every color all at once, and suddenly, Charlie's body locked stiff.
Then the light swallowed her.
The phone receiver dropped to the floor of the lab with a crash, swinging from its cord and spinning in the empty space. Her office chair swiveled in rapid circles, eventually slowing to a stop a foot away from where Charlie had just been. She never got the chance to hang up.
Two thousand miles away, in a house in Shelbyville, Indiana, Katie Wickett stood in the hallway outside the kitchen of her Mom's house.
She'd heard the phone ring while Mr. Henderson was explaining something about the gutters, heard the answering machine pick up, heard her Mom's voice on the recording, causing her heart to clench.
Then she'd heard Charlie.
She stood in the hallway and listened, because Charlie's voice on the machine sounded different from Charlie's voice on the phone. It sounded honest.
She heard the apology. She heard "strongest, smartest person I know." She heard "I trust the woman you've become." She pressed her back against the hallway wall and slid down to the floor, her hand over her mouth, her eyes watering through her smile.
She heard "More than the sky, the stars, and the universe," and she almost laughed, because it was so perfectly, impossibly Charlie, an engineer who measured love in astronomical units.
At that, she was reaching for the phone on the wall, smiling, ready to pick up and tell Charlie she was a sentimental idiot and she loved her too, when she heard it.
A sound. Strange, electric. Something Katie couldn't identify.
Then Charlie's voice, sharp: "Well, shit—"
Then nothing.
Katie grabbed the phone. "Charlie? Charlie!"
Silence. The line was dead.
She hung up and dialed Charlie's lab number. It rang. And rang. And rang. Nobody answered.
She called and called, every number she could think of.
Katie stood in her parent's hallway with the phone in her hand and the last thing she'd heard from her sister echoing in her ears.
She knew that something had happened. Something that had nothing to do with lawyers or gutters or insurance paperwork. Something she wouldn't be able to change.
She dialed the number one more time and pressed the phone so hard against her ear that she'd later discover it left an indent.
It did nothing but echo that infernal ring.
Meanwhile, on an interstellar spaceship called the Emberkind CV-0417, out exploring among the stars in an area of Coalition space, a Kaelari captain named Reyna Solas was having a very bad day.
? EMBERKIND CV-0417, SECTOR AUREL, REGION 12 ?
"What do you mean, I need to take on three Aetherfin?"
Captain Reyna Solas of the Emberkind spoke slowly and deliberately, trying her best not to let her voice climb to higher decibels.
"You're the only vessel able to transport these creatures safely," Admiral Vondra said through the wall display in Reyna's office.
Vondra, a Lithyn from the ocean world of Abyssar, sat in her pressurized aquatic chamber utterly still, a rough-hewn stone figure in dark water, her geode eyes catching what little light the ocean around her hadn't already swallowed.
When Vondra spoke, micro-vibrations rippled across her mineral surface, and Reyna's Voxlink translation system rendered them into a voice that was calm and immovable and deeply, personally inconvenient.
"No other ship has a zero-G containment field to support their needs, Reyna. "
Did she just call it a 'containment field?' Please tell me my little translation implant isn't broken. I don't want to add a minor surgical procedure to my day today. "I understand that, Admiral," Reyna said.
"Then what seems to be the problem, Captain?"
Crap. Well, seems like she did just call it a 'containment field.
' "With all due respect, sir, my 'containment field' is right in the middle of my ship, spanning multiple floors and taking up quite a large area.
It's part of the structure of the Emberkind, yes, but its purpose is purely for entertainment.
" Vondra's surface didn't shift. Not a vibration or a ripple as the water around her sat heavy and dark and patient.
"It's... I mean, sir. It's..." What the hell was it?
"... it's space art. A gift from a community where we saved their endangered species. But it's certainly not intended to hold animals."
Reyna was doing her best to find a way to not have to transport these three creatures, beautiful as they were, that couldn't survive within any environment except the one specifically made for their kind.
Aetherfin were among the most breathtaking creatures in Coalition space.
Massive, translucent ray-like beings with wingspans averaging three meters, they moved through zero-gravity environments the way sea creatures moved through deep ocean currents.
They were slow and silent, with a grace that made you forget they weighed anything at all.
Their bodies were luminescent, shifting through pale blues, purples, and silvers as they drifted, and they were utterly, completely helpless in gravity.
Even a few seconds of gravitational exposure could crush their delicate skeletal structure.
They were beautiful. They were enormous. And Vondra wanted three of them on her ship.
"I understand your... hesitations, Captain," Vondra said.
The slight pause before hesitations carried a resonance that the Voxlink rendered as amusement but was probably closer to I'm going to let you finish even though my command hasn't changed.
"But, Reyna, the mission of the Emberkind is to rescue animals, is it not? "
Reyna closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then nodded.
"Yes, Admiral."
"And you do have the zero-G field...'space art?' Is that what you called it?"
Reyna's jaw tightened.
"Yes, Admiral."
"Then I fail to see the problem."